How long will Asia’s ‘long peace’ last?

From Europe to the Middle East, wars have come back in a big way across much of the world. Will Asia, no stranger to chaos and conflict in its history, be able to hold the line against that resurgence?

The Conflict Trends report released in June by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) makes for grim reading. It counts 65 state-based conflicts worldwide in 2025 – the highest since records began in 1946 – with 245,000 battle-related deaths, making it the third-deadliest year since 1989, when the Soviet bloc started to unravel.

Eight of those conflicts were fought directly between states, twice as many as the year before and the highest since 1946.

This year has brought no respite: War between the United States and Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have transmitted one region’s conflict through energy markets to the entire global economy.

War has returned as a normalised instrument of statecraft, as the international order churns under a shifting balance of power, the revival of spheres of influence and great-power rivalry.

These events invite a harder look at East Asia, which has largely avoided a major interstate war for several decades. The region has seen extraordinary growth, deep integration and institutions that encourage dialogue and restraint.

The absence of a direct great-power war has led scholars and observers to refer to this period as a “long peace”. Peace, however, has always been more tenuous than the label suggests.

Unfinished history meets great-power rivalry

The maintenance of peace in East Asia depends in large part on how leaders manage the legacies of unfinished history.

The region’s first five decades after 1945 were shaped largely by decolonisation, partition, state formation, internal state failure and Cold War intervention. Much of that violence stemmed from the difficult birth and consolidation of modern states: Decolonisation created new states without always settling who should rule, where borders should lie, or how diverse populations would be represented.

From Korea and Vietnam to Cambodia, Kashmir and East Timor, Asia’s post-war order was born through conflict as much as diplomacy.

Partition left Kashmir unresolved. Japan’s defeat and Korea’s division left the Korean Peninsula without a final settlement. China’s civil war left Taiwan unresolved.

Across South-east Asia, new postcolonial states had to manage ethnic minorities, ideological movements, weak institutions and contested frontiers. Asia had peace at the top, but violence at the edges and within states.

This history reminds us that peace is not Asia’s natural condition, nor the automatic dividend of economic interdependence. It is a political achievement, sustained by restraint, deterrence, institutions, economic interest and rational choices of leaders.

One such consequential choice was China’s decision in 1979 to shift its strategic priority from exporting revolutionary struggle to pursuing economic development, becoming in time a constructive partner in ASEAN-led cooperative security mechanisms.

But what one generation of leaders has chosen, another can unwind. Peace, as an achievement, is contingent on various factors and must be continually “waged”. It can be eroded and reversed.

The present state of play should be read in that light. The older conflict drivers have not disappeared; they are now being pulled into a new strategic context: the return of great-power rivalry, with China as a near-peer competitor to the US.

Herein lies the most dangerous feature of East Asia today: Renewed great-power rivalry is not occurring on a blank slate. It overlays unresolved questions of sovereignty, civil war settlement, imperial frontiers and state consolidation, especially around China.

Taiwan is the most obvious case. It is an unresolved issue from the Chinese civil war, a question of national identity, and now a central test of US-China strategic rivalry.

The Korean Peninsula is another unfinished post-1945 settlement. The East China Sea and Sino-Japanese tensions combine territorial dispute with historical grievances.

The South China Sea is partly a modern maritime-order dispute, but it has also become part of the wider contest over regional order. That contest frames the central question: who sets the rules, who controls the seas, whose alliances matter, whose technology dominates and whose security preferences prevail. 

The new risks of escalation and the dangers of miscalculation

Grey-zone competition complicates these contested spaces further. Its utility lies in its appearance of low risk, but the cumulative effect of which is to normalise risk-taking.

In the South China Sea, for example, coast guard vessels deploy water cannon and engage in ramming and blockade tactics; maritime militia swarm disputed features; and unsafe intercepts at sea and in the air have become increasingly routine.

In the East China Sea, China has in recent years sent larger and more frequent coast guard deployments into the contiguous zones of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, prompting Japan to respond with its own coast guard and aerial surveillance operations.

In both theatres, each action is carefully calibrated to remain below the threshold of armed conflict, yet the cumulative effect is corrosive. Sustained grey-zone operations incentivise further risk-taking and raise the likelihood of miscalculation and a lurch up the escalation ladder that neither side fully controls.

This is why the current period feels like neither the Cold War proxy conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, nor a simple rerun of 1914 or the 1930s, but a return of great-power rivalry under 21st-century conditions.

The comparison with the pre-1914 period is sobering. The greater interdependence in today’s globalised world raises the cost of war, but it does not abolish war. We now have institutions that did not exist before World War I, offering channels for dialogue, but they are only as strong as the political will behind them. Deterrence can prevent conflict, but it can also fail through miscalculation.

This is where leadership matters. Wars are not produced by structures alone. They are decisions made by leaders with particular ambitions, fears, risk appetites, domestic pressures and readings of history. Recent conflicts remind us that leaders can convince themselves that force will produce quick results, that adversaries will fold, or that inaction is costlier than action. Those judgments can be and have been wrong. 

In East Asia, the price of getting them wrong would far exceed that of the limited wars of the post-1945 period.

There is a paradox here. War between great powers may be less likely today because there is so much more to lose. Nuclear weapons and advanced conventional arms make conflict a potentially existential exercise in mutual annihilation. Dense supply chains, finance, energy and cyber networks make it ruinous even short of that.

A conflict today would be fought across multiple domains all at once: on the battlefield, but also through cyberattacks on power grids and ports, strikes on satellites that degrade navigation and communications far beyond the theatre, missiles and drones against infrastructure, and blockades that choke sea lanes. The strategic and economic consequences would be immediate and global. 

According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the South China Sea alone carries around US$6 trillion (S$7.8 trillion) of trade annually; a conflict there would severely disrupt the flow of commerce, affecting the lifelines of US allies such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, as well as threatening China’s own trade routes through the Malacca and Taiwan straits.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted global energy supplies, as the strait accounts for 20 per cent of global oil and liquefied natural gas exports. A conflict in the South China Sea would be far more devastating in its impact as 45 per cent of global crude oil shipments pass through it.

 A conflict in the South China Sea would also disrupt the undersea cables that link Asia’s digital infrastructure to the world, and war-risk insurance premiums alone would raise global prices within days. If tension in the Taiwan Strait were to escalate into open clashes, it would threaten the production of most of the world’s advanced semiconductors, with dire crippling effects worldwide.

In an interconnected Asia, even a limited miscalculation would be rapidly priced into every market and household within the week.

Preserving the ‘Long Peace’

So what follows from this? First, we should guard against complacency and not mistake the absence of war for the presence of stable peace.

Second, economic interdependence and institutions remain essential, but they are not sufficient. ASEAN-led forums, military-to-military communication, crisis hotlines and diplomatic habits matter precisely because competition will not disappear.

Third, grey-zone competition needs to be carefully managed as it increases the risks of accidents, misreading and unintended escalation.

Asia’s post-1945 history has been a long peace only in the sense that it has avoided direct war between the major powers. Much of today’s calm is managed, deterred and frozen, not settled.

The danger is that East Asia is shifting from a pattern of contained, lower-level conflicts to one in which the interplay between great-power rivalry and unresolved historical legacies sits at the very centre of the contested regional order.

That does not make war inevitable. One can still remain hopeful despite the unsettling shifts. But it does make peace more demanding. It requires deterrence, dialogue, historical restraint, institutional patience and leaders who understand that in modern Asia, the first shot may be easy to fire but impossible to control.