January 13, 2017
Ties That Bind: Why Asian Alliances Will Survive Trump
On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump regularly denigrated America’s alliances, calling NATO obsolete and demanding that South Korea and Japan “pay up” or the United States would begin to draw down its troop commitment. Since the election, he has reportedly reaffirmed U.S. commitments to Tokyo and Seoul, but Trump’s Asia advisors have confirmed that he intends to press allies to increase their spending. Burden-sharing debates are as old as the security treaties themselves, but Trump’s alliance positions have created unprecedented angst in Asia. Partners worry that his transactional approach to international politics will transcend mere penny-pinching and lead him to abandon them altogether.
These worries have good theoretical grounding: Realist scholars of international relations have often characterized alliances as marriages of convenience, which form against shared threats and disperse when the foe is vanquished. U.S. alliances were, of course, designed in the early Cold War to contain the Soviet Union and to help rebuild postwar Europe and Asia. Both tasks were long ago accomplished, and yet, America’s treaty commitments have lived on and have been repurposed to contemporary challenges. Could the 2016 election be the beginning of the end for these longstanding pacts? As the incoming Trump administration considers a significant realignment in U.S. foreign policy, including an embrace of Russia and “deal-making” with China, perhaps the 70-year American experiment with security guarantee statecraft will also meet its demise — or so this narrative goes.
Read the full article at War on the Rocks.
More from CNAS
-
Hearing on “India, China, and the Balance of Power in the Indo-Pacific”
Congressional Testimony
Commissioners, thank you for the opportunity to testify at today’s hearing. There are few relationships that have the potential to be as consequential to the balance of power ...
By Lindsey Ford
-
Commentary
Defense / Indo-Pacific Security
Trump’s NATO DilemmaThis article was originally published in Foreign Affairs. Last November, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, startled a gathering of European officials at the Berl...
By Sara Moller
-
Video
Indo-Pacific Security / Transatlantic Security
Top Experts Decode India-U.S. Trade Deal | Questions Loom Over Russian Oil Imports, $500Bn InvestmentIn this episode of India Ascends, amid US President Donald Trump's claim that India has agreed to halt purchases of Russian oil, New Delhi has reiterated that ensuring energy ...
By Daniel Silverberg
-
"Modi-Trump Share a Very..." White House on India-U.S. Deal as BJP vs Congress at Home
Video
In the wake of a high-octane year of tariff wars and diplomatic friction, a massive breakthrough has finally been reached: the India-US Trade Deal is officially here. But as t...
By Lisa Curtis
