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
-
Reports
Defense / Indo-Pacific Security
U.S.-Japan-Philippines Trilateral CooperationExecutive Summary Growing challenges from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) massive military modernization, rapid technological advancement, and coercive military activ...
By Lisa Curtis & Ryan Claffey
-
In Brief: Increasing Tensions Between China and Japan Create Risks for the Region
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks. China’s latest pressure campaign targeting Japan serves multiple purposes for Beijing. One is to redirect domestic p...
By Jacob Stokes
-
China May Grab a Lead in the Race for Military Fusion
Commentary
This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal. America’s top diplomat for nuclear-weapons issues, Undersecretary of State Thomas DiNanno, revealed this mont...
By David Feith
-
Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule Makes the World Less Safe
Commentary
This article was originally published in The Diplomat. The Taliban regime is expanding its provision of national sanctuary to terrorist groups with regional and international ...
By Annie Pforzheimer
