War on the RocksUntil recently, it seemed that the stories that defined East Asia were economic. China's rise perhaps the story of the century followed economic miracles in Japan and South Korea. The Asian financial crisis was painful, but the region bounced back. A major exception was North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, which brought the region to the brink. For the most part, however, East Asia appeared relatively immune from the geopolitics that bedeviled other key regions.
