Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia, inaugurates the IISS Cartagena Dialogue with a keynote address on cooperation between the Pacific Alliance and the Asia-Pacific in Colombia on March 6, 2015.

In contemporary international relations, mutual understanding is of utter importance, and one of the best ways to strengthen mutual understanding is through dialogue.

It seems that the two big ponds, the Pacific and the Atlantic, have been dominating world affairs in the past five centuries or even longer. Over the past two or three decades, the Pacific basin has been rising on the world stage. No wonder many people, including Deng Xiaoping, believed that the 21st century would be a Pacific century. However, understanding the region, particularly of the trans-Pacific relationship, is not enough, not only from the outside, but also from within.

In order to promote the understanding of trans-Pacific ties, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) initiated the Trans-Pacific Summit on March 6-8, 2015, in Colombia. With the venue being set in Cartagena, a beautiful city on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean coast region, with a population of almost 900,000, the fifth largest city in this Pacific country, the summit has also been dubbed the IISS Cartagena Dialogue. Several hundred people attended the event. Presidents of Colombia and Panama, and many current and former ministers from across the Pacific nations spoke at the Summit. It was really a grand gathering.

Many people might not be familiar with the IISS, but they may know the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The IISS, founded in the United Kingdom in 1958 with a focus on nuclear deterrence and arms control, is renowned for its annual military balance assessment of countries' armed forces and for its high-powered security summits, including the Shangri-La Dialogue.

Initiated in 2002 in response to the clear need for a forum where the Asia-Pacific's defense ministers could engage in dialogue aimed at building confidence and fostering practical security cooperation, the Shangri-La Dialogue, or officially called the IISS Asia Security Summit, has established itself as a key element of the emerging regional security architecture.

At the 13th Shangri-La Dialogue from May 30 to June 1 in 2014, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, a country that has so far failed to recognize its war crimes, and also U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, were invited to speak. It was at this dialogue that Lieutenant-General Wang Guanzhong, deputy chief of general staff of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), hit back at the misguided remarks by Abe and Hagel, denouncing their criticism of China's handling of the territorial disputes in the region. It was also at this gathering that Major General Yao Yunzhu, director of the Center for China-America Defense Relations at the PLA's Academy of Military Science, questioned Hagel on whether the United States can claim to be taking no position on the China-Japan dispute of sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands while confirming its treaty obligation to defend Japan.

The Cartagena Dialogue was expected to attract world attention as with the Shangri-La Dialogue. To make it a great success, the IISS might have to think about the following two issues:

First, what is the greatest challenge for the trans-Pacific relationship? The first Cartagena Dialogue covers many topics, ranging from trade to investment, from financial cooperation to informal mining, and from security to organized crimes. From what was mentioned by the speakers and the Caracol TV Debate, as well as the appearance of many participants with military uniforms, it seems that security was a major issue of concern for the trans-Pacific relationship.

In the current world, security, traditional and non-traditional alike, is indeed a "hot topic." But in the trans-Pacific region, the issue of critical importance for the bilateral ties between the two continents is economic cooperation, not security.