Abstract How do regional institutions shape the terms on which external states gain access, even when those states possess considerable institutional knowledge? Drawing on previously underutilized Korean-language diplomatic archives, this article examines South Korea’s engagement with ASEAN between 1977 and 1991. It argues that South Korea’s difficulty in securing institutional access stemmed less from misperception or structural constraints than from misalignment with ASEAN’s procedural logic. ASEAN structured external access through three procedural mechanisms: issue decomposition, which fragmented political initiatives into technical domains; procedural transformation, which reformulated proposals into administrative requirements prior to deliberation; and institutional sequencing, which regulated the timing and scope of external participation. South Korea’s eventual incorporation emerged as the cumulative outcome of this procedural filtering process. These findings reconceptualize regional organizations as institutional actors capable of exercising procedural power, reinterpret the ASEAN Way as an institutionalized administrative practice, and reframe middle-power diplomacy as a problem of procedural alignment.
Do foreign publics respond more to who delivers US foreign policy or what the policy contains? Through a survey experiment across 10 Asia-Pacific countries in 2022, we examine how attributing identical policies to Trump, Biden, or Congress shapes foreign public opinion. Respondents evaluated either a confrontational China policy or cooperative Middle East policy randomly attributed to different sources. We find substantial but conditional source cue effects. Trump's association with China policy significantly reduced favorability and expected effectiveness compared to Biden or Congress, with particularly strong negative effects in US allied countries. However, these Trump effects disappeared entirely for Middle East policy, where evaluations remained consistent regardless of source. The findings demonstrate that source cue effects are domain-specific rather than uniform: Trump's hawkish reputation amplified skepticism toward confrontational policies but not cooperative ones. This suggests foreign publics engage in sophisticated processing that considers alignment between leader reputation and policy substance.
How is the ongoing climatic change shaping the trajectory of the US-China power shift? How does rapid climatic change intersect with great power transitions? Challenging the sociocentric bias of power transition theory, we argue that climatic shifts act as contingent but pervasive amplifiers of geopolitical instability by intensifying revisionist motivations and reshaping relative capabilities through differential sociopolitical adaptability. Through comparative historical analysis of three cases-the Mongol-Song transition during the Medieval Warming, the Spanish-Dutch transition, and the Ming-Qing transition during the Little Ice Age-we show that ecological pressures heightened revisionist motivations, conditioned differential adaptability, and introduced nonlinear dynamics into power shifts. Applying these insights to the US-China competition, we argue that Anthropocene climate change is rendering the transition more unstable and less amenable to prudent management. Lastly, we propose a reformed concept of prudence and institutional restraint under conditions of the climate-amplified power rivalry and their implications for US-China relations.
This paper examines how developmental states pursue nationalist objectives in strategic foreign asset takeovers while managing the operational demands of global markets. It advances a theory of strategic technocratic intervention, arguing that technocrats mediate between political mandates for national control and the technical and financial requirements needed to sustain production and investment. The argument is tested through a structured comparison of three foreign firms in Indonesia, Chevron, Freeport-McMoRan, and British Petroleum, whose contract renegotiations produced divergent outcomes under the same nationalist narrative. Chevron's Rokan block was transferred to a state-owned enterprise under domestic operational control; Freeport ceded majority ownership while retaining operatorship at Grasberg; and British Petroleum retained both ownership and operational control at Tangguh LNG through a long-term extension. Process tracing shows technocrats shaping these outcomes by translating nationalist goals into viable policy options, mediating among political leaders, state-owned enterprises, and foreign investors, and institutionalizing compromise through contracts and regulation. The findings demonstrate how technocrats can moderate the form and limits of resource nationalism while preserving its political symbolism. In this role, technocrats function as two-level game players, managing domestic nationalist pressures from political leaders and state-owned enterprises while simultaneously signaling institutional credibility to foreign investors and international capital markets.
