Security Commitments and Post-Authoritarian Politics: Revising U.S. Defence Ties in Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines after Democratization

• In Event: Global History of Democracy in East Asia

Abstract

Why do longstanding U.S. security partners in Asia experience crises in relations with Washington soon after democratization? Soon after the end of authoritarian rule, states like Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines pursued foreign and security policies that the United States found highly antagonistic. This brought extended friction with Washington and tested bilateral relations in spite of serious, ongoing security concerns that required continued American assistance to adequately address. Taiwan faced a Chinese regime committed to unification, even by force,; South Korea contented with a hostile North Korea trying to acquiring nuclear weapons; the Philippines confronted simmering maritime disputes and local insurgencies. That these regimes risked unsettling relations with their primary security guarantor despite persistent security risks, decades of stable ties, greater political liberalization, and clear power asymmetries challenges common conception and empirical expectations.

This paper will propose a preliminary approach to studying how and why newly post-authoritarian U.S. partners in East Asia tend to experience crises in relations with Washington to varying degrees. One key objective is to establish a plausible range of variation for the severity of relationship crises between a major power security guarantor and its regional partners. Another is to develop a series of robust, competing hypotheses that purport to explain the phenomena, and which I can test against empirical data. In particular, I aim to examine the conditions under which concerns over domestic political mobilization in under-institutionalised settings can lead a state’s leaders to play down external security concerns and relations with major security partners.

Author

• Ja Ian Chong, National University of Singapore