The China, Japan, Korea trilateral FTA

A single event to mark the accumulation of hundreds of separate decision points and less significant events towards exclusive East Asian regionalism.

It’s at this point of time in a Trump Administration that every foreign policy analyst, everyone schooled under the conventions of liberal democratic international relations, wonders wtf is going on.

It was the same last time round as Trump ramped up the North Korea crisis with threats, boasts about the size of nuclear forces, mistruths about aircraft carrier battlegroup deployments, and brain farts about moving(!) and evacuating Seoul.

This is disruption and it was needed, but certainly not in this way. One day, historians will look back and say it was from here that things started to change.

​In international relations, certain events stand out as pivotal moments. These single events are the accumulation of hundreds of separate decision points and less significant events.

Take the 30th September 1938 Munich Agreement and Chamberlain’s "peace for our time" speech. This single event is recorded in history as…