Nicholas Khoo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Otago

Great power rivalry is a structural feature in Southeast Asia's international politics which three decades of post-Cold War academic analysis and diplomatic activity has sought and failed to transcend. The acknowledgement of its return to a central role in the analysis of Southeast Asia's international politics is both illuminating and instructive....

The longstanding post-1972 consensus supporting a US policy of engagement with China has been eroded by increasing dissatisfaction with developments in China’s domestic and foreign policies. As a consequence, a policy of near full-spectrum US engagement has been replaced by a more conditional posture where conflict increasingly outweighs cooperatio...

China’s policy toward North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme represents an empirical and theoretical puzzle. Contrary to political relationship theory, Beijing has opposed its ally North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. And contrary to power projection theory, a favourable asymmetry in material power has not resulted in Beijing being able to persu...

This volume in the Weapons of Mass Destruction series makes the case that the United States’ expansive missile defence policy has eroded both its own security and that of its allies. These findings are based on an examination of the response of a number of key states to U.S. policy, including Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Situating their arg...

This article analyzes the Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s (ASEAN) interactions with China over the South China Sea issue since the end of the Cold War. A neorealist understanding of ASEAN’s international relations is advanced. This approach highlights the degree of security maximizing interest convergence between key ASEAN actors and an ext...

Is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) a security community? To many theorists and Southeast Asian specialists, the answer is a resounding yes. This article interrogates this consensus. The author contends that a greater sensitivity to empirical evidence and theoretical rigour leads to the conclusion that the claims of security commu...

The author contends that prominent strands in the recent literature on Asia's international relations reflect a lack of appreciation for the actual policy of regional states, which is deeply realist in orientation.

One of the central debates in contemporary international relations scholarship concerns the issue of whether balancing has occurred in response to US-based unipolarity, and if it has, how this should be characterised. Existing research has seen analysts argue that major power responses to unipolarity can be placed in one of either three categories:...

Although the Obama Administration has differed from its predecessor in a number of respects, on the specific issue of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), there is a striking continuity. The Obama Administration has remained committed to the BMD project, even as it has modified the schedule of deployments and prioritized different systems from the Bush...

'Congratulations to the authors for a clearly argued and comprehensive treatment of China's post-Cold War rise and what it means for existing and future dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. Effectively employing realist theory in a fair-minded treatment of regional developments, the volume shows how and why power realities are more important than n...

In the face of China's seemingly inexorable rise, how fearful are the key actors in Northeast Asia? Relatedly, how fearful are they likely to be in the future? The academic debate on these questions is characterized by starkly contrasting answers. A typology of the literature is developed whereby analysts are categorized under the rubric of fear de...

This chapter explores China's response to Hanoi's support for the Soviet Union's encirclement policy against China. After Vietnam made the decision to align itself clearly with the Soviet Union in the first quarter of 1978, the Sino-Vietnamese conflict over bilateral issues escalated further until the Sino-Vietnam alliance was terminated, In Februa...

Although the Chinese and the Vietnamese were Cold War allies in wars against the French and the Americans, their alliance collapsed and they ultimately fought a war against each other in 1979. More than thirty years later the fundamental cause of the alliance's termination remains contested among historians, international relations theorists, and A...

This chapter discusses the response of the Chinese and Vietnamese to the Soviets' invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. It explains how the invasion further escalated the conflict between China and Vietnam. Beijing leaders condemned the invasion, claiming that the leadership of the Soviet Union had “degenerated into social-imperialism and soci...

This chapter discusses the Sino-Soviet conflict, examining how such a conflict affected the relationship between China and Vietnam. The Soviets sent a letter to Beijing requesting that a conference be convened with their North Vietnamese counterparts. The Soviets' purpose was to discuss trilateral cooperation between Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow. How...

This article argues that Vietnamese co-operation with China's principal enemy, the Soviet Union, was the necessary and sufficient cause for the termination of China's alliance with Vietnam in the second-half of the 1970's.

: The recent literature on China’s relations with North Vietnam has given insufficient attention to the impact of the Sino-Soviet conflict. This article underscores the centrality of the Soviet factor in Beijing’s relations with Hanoi and the importance of triangular relations during the 1964–1968 period. The article points to the Sino-Soviet...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2006. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 348-384). Department: Political Science.

International Security 30.1 (2005) 196-211 In his recent article in International Security, David Shambaugh provides a far-ranging and thought-provoking account of China's engagement policy with the wider Asian region, which he argues is "a principal catalyst in shaping a new order in Asia." Shambaugh posits that "the traditional underpinnings of i...

At the ninth summit of the Association of South‐East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in October 2003, the organisation's leaders declared their intention of transforming ASEAN into a security community. In making the case that ASEAN has functioned as a realist security institution since its inception in 1967, this article argues that the theoretical literatu...

Once viewed as a bastion of stability and economic growth, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is now beset with a variety of seemingly intractable problems ranging from terrorism to internal secessionist conflict and economic stagnation. The central and evolving role of ASEAN in the international relations of Southeast Asia since 19...

This article examines the debate about how to preserve order in the Asia-Pacific. In particular, we shall assess the validity of two contrasting arguments about how to address the sources of instability in the region. The first approach we analyse is the advocacy for a multilateral system based on a concert of major powers in Asia-Pacific, an idea...