Given China’s enormous power, comprising roughly half of Asia’s total, any coalition in Asia to check Chinese pretensions for hegemony that did not include the United States would need to include the great bulk of the other important states: not only Japan and India but also South Korea, the major Southeast Asian states, Australia, and probably even Russia. No such purely Asian grouping exists today; links among the Asian states are relatively attenuated compared to those within Europe, and thinly tied multilateral institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are ill
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