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n East Asia a new kind of big country-small country relationship is taking shape. There are two big countries involved in this situation: a rising China and the long-established power that is the United States.

These two big countries need to find a way of accommodating each other'€™s aspirations and managing current tensions or there could be a disruption of the existing relative peace in the region.

If conflict does break out, there has to be robust diplomatic effort on the part of both sides to manage if not to resolve the conflict or else it could lead to a conflagration in which the smaller nations of the region could be engulfed. Since there has been an escalation of unfriendly rhetoric on both sides in recent times, it is reasonable to conclude that the Asia-Pacific region is in a state of peril.

Thus, the situation today calls upon all the regional countries to work together through dialogue and diplomacy in order to devise a road map to a regional arrangement that can guarantee long-term regional peace and stability.

This regional situation is at least partly the result of new global realities that are the consequences of two debacles: The first was the surge in international terrorism that reached its highest point with the 9/11 attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001, and the global financial and economic crisis that devastated Western economies and severely affected all others in 1998.

These two events combined to bring about a shift in the geopolitical center of gravity from the Western world to East Asia and from the global North to the global South. The new international political and economic architectures reflect this shift: for example, the Group of Twenty (G20) has supplanted the Group of Eight (G8) as the premier forum for international economic decision-making. The group known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) have also risen in influence, and so has a new tier of developing economies that go by various names. What we have today is a multipolar market landscape.

This is a landscape in which countries on the rise are also in a precarious situation '€” unless they can ensure the long-term availability of the resources needed to sustain the pace of their development. These resources are financing, food, raw materials and energy. It is often the case that to have access and control of such resources, one nation has to deprive another of at least some of that access and control. Hence, access to and control of resources '€” whether from the Arctic region or from the South China Sea and the East Sea continue to be a source of tension between and among nations.

In this kind of setting, rapid economic growth was achieved by the nations of East Asia, which include the People'€™s Republic of China, South Korea, the 10 ASEAN members and India. Japan is part of the region but is not an emerging power, having been an established global economic power for decades. The region as a whole has begun to change the global geopolitical strategic situation.

The region'€™s economic growth has been attended by a rise in the capacity of the regional countries to project their military power. This has altered the relationship of power not only among the countries within the region but also between East Asia and the West.

In the face of these global and regional shifts, Indonesia has to adjust. It used to be that its main concerns, in terms of geographical strategy, were the freedom and safety of navigation in the Malacca and Singapore straits, considering that 40 percent of world trade and 25 percent of the global trade in energy pass through these straits, and the fact that Indonesia is one of the littoral states.

But today, considering the altered situation in the region and the policy of rebalancing that the US recently adopted, Indonesia'€™s strategic concern about the Malacca and Singapore straits has been subsumed into a strategic concern for the situation in the entire South China Sea, with a concurrent concern for developments in the East Sea.

Although a non-claimant to any of the islands in the South China Sea, Indonesia, nevertheless, feels it has a large stake in the peace and stability of the area, where today overlapping claims to parts or the whole of the South China Sea has brought about escalating tensions. Indonesia'€™s concern about the East Sea has been occasioned by the territorial and sovereignty dispute between China and Japan over several islands in that area.

In this regard, it is a great relief that China has indicated commitment to opening all lines of communication regarding a recent rise in tension in the South China Sea and to exercising restraint on this sensitive issue. As to the apparent overlap of part of China'€™s nine-dashed lines that is the basis of its claim to most of the South China Sea and part of Indonesia'€™s exclusive economic zone, the official view in Indonesia is that there has been sufficient reassurance from China that there is no dispute between the two countries on the matter.

So long as China and the other South China Sea nations are committed to opening up lines of communication and to exercise restraint, there is hope that, eventually, the worrisome issues in the area will be resolved through peaceful means.

Right now, however, my own view is that more should be done by way of confidence building.

There is a need for more soft-power diplomacy that reflects mutual respect among the involved nations and their willingness to share responsibility as well as the benefits of cooperation.

One such confidence-building measure is the Indonesian-sponsored annual workshop on '€œManaging Potential Conflict in the South China Sea'€.

This workshop should be more strongly supported not only by the regional countries but also those in the international community interested in peace, considering that a rupture of peace anywhere will threaten peace everywhere. I remember that the advocacies first expressed in the workshop eventually led to the adoption of the Declaration on the Conduct of the Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).

Perhaps one of the most solid forms of confidence building is the establishment of a comprehensive and strategic partnership (CSP) between nations, such as the one that has been concluded between China and Indonesia.

The view held by Jusuf Wanandi, co-founder of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), is that both countries negotiated and concluded this CSP out of a common need to adjust to the major shifts taking place or expected to occur in the coming 10 years in China and Indonesia respectively, as well as in East Asia and the world at large.

The writer is former director general for political affairs at the Foreign Ministry. He has served as chief of mission at the Indonesian embassies in Paris and Canberra and deputy permanent representative of the Indonesian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. This article is based on a paper submitted at a recent conference in Shanghai hosted by the Taihu World Cultural Forum.