Тhere are at least two conflicting images of East Asia. One is that of turbulence featuring a clash of Chinese, Japanese and Korean nationalisms, a rising and assertive China jostling for power and influence with the US superpower bent on keeping its hegemony, and a landscape of hot spots in a nuclearising Korean peninsula, an unsettling Taiwan Strait and a tumultuous East and South China Seas. This is not to mention those bedeviled by internal ethnic conflict and armed violence in regions such as southern Thailand, Mindanao in southern Philippines and Myanmar. After the epoch of Western impe- rialism and colonialisation, some East Asian countries have struggled to build a national identity out of disparate ethnic groups with different access to economic, cultural and political resources. Regional institu- tional building also appears to have faltered. The trilateral summit among Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo appears to have stalled (at the time of writing), while the East Asian Summit looks like a talk shop with an ASEAN that is split over the South China Sea dispute. There is also the spectre of ISIS-related terrorism in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Economically, in a globalised world, East Asia is not immune to any economic slowdown or financial crisis in the United States and Europe.