pacific rim

There is something fitting about bringing Aikido principles to the Asia-Pacific. The art itself originated in Japan. The concept of ki — the animating energy that flows through all Aikido practice — has its counterparts throughout the region: qi in China, prana in the Indian traditions that shaped Southeast Asian cultures. The Pacific world has its own long inheritance of thinking about energy, harmony, and the relationship between human beings and the larger forces they inhabit.

My connection to the Pacific Rim came primarily through the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability — a think tank focused on Asia-Pacific security, energy, and disarmament, working at the intersection of geopolitics and human wellbeing. I became a senior associate of the Institute, contributing to its network of scholars, practitioners, and diplomats engaged with the region's most consequential challenges.

a different kind of conflict

Cyprus and Bosnia were about ethnic and national division within shared geography — peoples who had lived together, then violently couldn't. The Asia-Pacific presents a different geometry of conflict: vast ocean distances, dozens of distinct national and cultural frameworks, colonial histories that cut in multiple directions, and geopolitical fault lines that have shifted dramatically since World War II.

The Pacific Rim is also the most consequential region on earth for the twenty-first century. The relationships between the United States, China, Japan, Korea, and the nations of Southeast Asia will shape more of what happens globally than almost any other factor. The quality of dialogue across those relationships — the degree to which genuine understanding is possible — matters enormously.

Track-two diplomacy in this context means something slightly different than in Cyprus or Bosnia. It isn't primarily about reconciling people who have been at war with each other. It's about creating genuine exchange across cultural frameworks so different that misunderstanding is the default — even when everyone is trying to communicate clearly.

the cultural dimension

One of the things that became clear in Pacific Rim work was how much of what we call "conflict" is actually miscommunication rooted in fundamentally different assumptions about what communication is for.

In many East Asian cultural contexts, directness — the kind of directness that Western negotiation frameworks treat as a virtue — can be understood as aggression. Indirectness is not evasion; it's respect. The relationship between what is said and what is meant operates on different conventions. The pace of dialogue, the role of silence, the significance of hierarchy in who speaks and when — all of this varies enormously across the Pacific.

Western conflict resolution frameworks were largely developed in Western cultural contexts, by people shaped by those contexts. They tend to assume a certain kind of directness, a certain relationship to individual expression, a certain model of what progress looks like. Applied cross-culturally without awareness of these assumptions, they can produce friction that the framework itself can't diagnose.

what Aikido offers across cultures

Here is where the Aikido framework proved unexpectedly useful — not as a Western import, but as a meeting point.

The principles of Aikido are not culturally alien in Asia-Pacific contexts. Quite the opposite. The concept of receiving and redirecting rather than blocking and striking — the idea that center and stability are more powerful than aggressive force — these resonate deeply with traditions throughout the region. A Korean practitioner, a Chinese scholar, a Japanese diplomat: these are people whose own cultures already contain sophisticated frameworks for thinking about harmony, energy, and the relationship between opposition and resolution.

What the Aikido frame offered in cross-Pacific dialogue was a shared vocabulary that neither imposed Western directness nor pretended cultural differences didn't exist. It created a kind of third space — physical, metaphorical, experiential — in which people from very different backgrounds could explore common principles through direct experience rather than abstract argument.

security and sustainability

The Nautilus Institute's work sits at the intersection of security and sustainability — two domains that Western discourse tends to treat as separate, even in tension. Security means defense, military capacity, deterrence. Sustainability means environment, energy, long-term wellbeing.

But in the Asia-Pacific context, these are not separate. Energy security and military security are intertwined. Environmental degradation creates population displacement that creates conflict. Resource competition over fish stocks, fresh water, rare earth minerals — these are security issues in the most direct sense. The communities of the Pacific Islands face existential threats from sea-level rise that no military posture can address.

This integration of domains — refusing the fragmentation of reality into separate administrative categories — is itself a form of WIGO. What is really going on? The conventional framing misses it. The real situation requires holding more at once.

That's a practice I recognize from the mat. In Aikido, you cannot attend only to the attack in front of you. You must maintain awareness of the whole field — what's behind you, what's to the side, the relationship between this moment and the next. Narrow your attention to a single threat and you become vulnerable to what you're not watching. The Pacific, at planetary scale, requires the same kind of open-field awareness.

the return home

There is an irony, or perhaps a symmetry, in the fact that Aikido — born in Japan, the eastern shore of the Pacific — became central to work across the Pacific Rim. O Sensei created an art explicitly designed to transcend the paradigm of martial arts as combat. He called it "the realization of love." He described it as a path toward the unification of the self with the universe — not as metaphor, but as lived practice.

In Japan, this philosophical dimension of Aikido is well understood, if not always practiced. The art carries its own cultural context. When you bring it back across the Pacific — back into the cultural environments that share its root vocabulary — something recognizes something. The principles resonate not as foreign imports but as familiar ground, articulated in a new form.

what it means now

The work I did with the Nautilus Institute in the Pacific Rim was part of a longer career of applying Aikido principles outside the dojo. Cyprus taught me these principles work across cultural divides when communities are frozen in conflict. Bosnia taught me they work in the presence of raw grief and recent violence. The Pacific Rim taught me something else: that the principles connect most easily where the cultural tradition already contains similar wisdom.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: what would it look like if the Pacific nations — with their deep traditions of thinking about harmony, energy, and collective wellbeing — led the way in developing new frameworks for regional and global security? Not frameworks borrowed from Western conflict resolution, but frameworks emerging from their own philosophical inheritance, updated for the twenty-first century?

That question is part of what the Nautilus Institute has always been exploring. It's a question that Aikido, properly understood, has always been asking too.

The ocean is large. The connections across it are older than any of our current conflicts. And the need for harmony — actual harmony, not managed tension — has never been more urgent.