The purpose of this study to examine the international Regime theory through the case review of the Trilateral Coordination and Oversight Group (TCOG), ROK-U.S.?Japan virtual alliance, and understanding the causes of formation and disintegration. South Korea is constantly facing very serious situation where North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats are fast becoming more real and advanced, and this nuclear issue is also threatening the peace of Northeast Asia. In spite of the three countries agreed to work together to resolve the nuclear issue in North Korea in order to maintain the peace and stability on the peninsula, the absence of trilateral security cooperation rose a doubt to examine through this study.
Over last 60 years, South Korea and Japan worked with each other as quasi-allies through alliances with the United States for security cooperation. Above all, TCOG was the only security cooperation between three nations, and a necessity like TCOG is has been expressed for years to strengthening the trilateral relationship. TCOG first occurred in 1993 hosted by the U.S. State Department to discuss North Korean nuclear issue between embassy of South Korea and Japan. In 1999, TCOG was officially established for trilateral coordination, but soon be dissolved by converting into the informal discussion after the last official meeting held in June, 2003.
Most of all, being aware of the absence of security cooperation like TCOG for last 14 years, it’s worth analyzing main frustrations caused from trilateral coordination in order to understand the breaking points and to consider improvement areas. Hereby, a study on Regime theory and its case reviews on international politics and securities, was able to generate four common factors to apply for the TCOG case. The four common factors were followed by the powers of influence, national interest, reliability of Regime, and standard principles. During the process, Regime theory is subject to be dissolved if cause of formation change or extinct.
According to Regime theory, TCOG was established under the strong leadership by the world power of the U.S. At that time, all three countries jointed efforts to accomplish common goals for the policy toward North Korea, and seek for the national interest by illustrating the depth of like-mindedness and share data with each other. But in a point of view that TCOG couldn’t contribute to the system for trust, standard principles, it can be evaluated as an unstable cooperation.
Since the inauguration of the new government by the president Bush, a conflict emerged between the functions, and this led to a declining interest on TCOG while implementing North Korea policy. Another reason was that the reliability of the regime decreased due to different opinions on North Korea policy between nations. In this assumption, the collapse of TCOG was inevitable since there were no principles or rules to follow. In other words, multiple factors including leadership change in the U.S., different directions on North Korea policy, poor reliability, lack of system lead to a gradual collapse of TCOG.
In conclusion, it clearly determines that the success of trilateral coordination highly depends on the U.S, and lack of South Korea’s global presence limits the correlation with neighboring countries. Nevertheless, it is important to push forward the trilateral coordination with common goals on resolving the nuclear issue in North Korea and the peace of Northeast Asia. To move forward with security regime, followings objectives should be in consideration including strong alliance with the U.S., relationship improvement with Japan, minimizing the diplomatic friction with China, setting the standard principles.