KEDO) and a backer of the Four-Party Peace Talks and other multilateral confidence- and security-building efforts. It has also supported South Korea's "sunshine policy, "a strategy of patient engagement that resulted in the historic summit between President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and Chairman Kim Jong Il of North Korea. Furthermore, perhaps with greater long-term consequences, Japan has hedged those diplomatic moves by strengthening its long-standing bilateral alliance with the United States, seeking ways to cooperate with South Korea on security matters, and increasing its own military options in case things go wrong on the Korean peninsula. The flexibility and multidimensionality of Japan's post-cold war security policy toward Korea suggest that Japan's decades-old, self-imposed restriction on offensive military capabilities and avoidance of collective security arrangements may be undergoing changes not yet fully understood. Although it is unlikely that Japan will seek to become a "great power "again any time soon, its post-cold war security policy toward Korea indicates that