The conventional wisdom on US alliances in Asia, at least in the West, Japan and Taiwan (but not necessarily in South Korea), is that they are broadly a good thing. Those alliances, we are told, provide stability. They keep China from dominating the region. They hem in North Korea and defend the powerfully symbolic South Korean experiment in liberal democracy and capitalism. They prevent the nuclearisation of South Korea and Japan and a spiralling regional arms race. In short, they reassure. They allow the US to project power into the region. They consolidate liberal democratic values in the Pacific. They help keep trade relationships open and act as a restraint on behaviour in an important, but potentially volatile region.
This view is not universal. The Chinese disagree quite strongly. For Beijing, US "reassurance" to allies is a challenge to Chinese freedom of manoeuvre. Others in Asia see the US using its alliances to draw a new line through Asia, while some in the US believe those alliances encourage irresponsible behaviour by allies, either through free- or cheap-riding or being unduly provocative.
It is time to challenge the conventional wisdom. Rather than assuming their benefits — perhaps out of widespread strategic distrust of China — and downplaying negatives and unintended consequences, we must better understand the true value of US alliances in Asia. To be blunt, do the costs outweigh the direct benefits?
Assumptions must be questioned. It is widely accepted that the US presence halts a spiralling nuclear arms race in East Asia, even though that has not happened between India and Pakistan after they both went nuclear in the 1990s. Neither India nor Pakistan has a strong US alliance, nor are they governed as competently as most East Asian states, but that has not led to a widely feared nuclear spiral. US reassurance might not be necessary for nuclear responsibility in Asia after all.
Stephen Walt and others have argued, for example, that the closeness of the US-Israel alliance has negative unintended consequences, like Muslim anger at the US in turn feeding sympathy for radicalism, and so on. Similar negatives and false positives could exist in Asia. Post-Iraq, it should no longer be taken as self-evident that a heavy US forward presence is a good thing. US restraint does not equal "decline", appeasement, or abandonment of allies.
Consider four possible negative consequences that challenge the conventional narrative for US alliances in Asia.
First, US Forces in Korea (USFK) could be perpetuating the division of Korea. This is because they serve as a critical prop in North Korean post-communist ideology and rhetoric, without which the regime would struggle to explain privation to its people. In addition, USFK's presence could keep China from cutting North Korea loose, as Chinese scholars in my experience routinely say, and quite bluntly. The US could agree to leave South Korea permanently in exchange for China cutting North Korea loose, a step that could accelerate unification. A cut-off of Chinese aid would trigger a crisis in the North and might well precipitate collapse and unification. A unified Korea could then "Finlandise" between competing powers of its neighbourhood, perhaps even maintaining its nuclear weapons to insure that it becomes the Switzerland or Austria of East Asia. This may be a suboptimal solution from a US perspective, but it is a pretty good outcome for the Koreans, especially long-suffering North Koreans.
Second, the reassurance provided by USFK and USFJ (US Forces in Japan) freezes the Japanese-Korean conflict and encourages maximalists and zealots on both sides not to compromise. A lighter regional US footprint or vaguer alliance commitment would oblige these two governments to deal directly with each other and reach their own modus vivendi.
Third, there is a risk that the rebalance, with an emphasis on strengthening the US military presence and its alliances, will push the US and China into a new Cold War. There is a contentious historical debate on whether the US hardline position on the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and '50s consolidated the nascent superpower standoff and that the action-reaction cycle hardened the conflict. US alliances operated in a simple conceptual frame — communist or non-communist — to prevent nuanced understandings of state behaviour. America's early Cold War insistence on reading any socialist/communist state as a tool of a Moscow-run "international communist conspiracy" prevented a basic modus vivendi with Mao Zedong for 20 years. The USSR might have collapsed earlier if the US had been able to recruit China into anti-Soviet containment earlier. In short, there is a fair amount of evidence/argument that forward, hawkish alliance building by the US helped worsen the Cold War. AirSea Battle, which so obviously directed at China, may make the same mistakes.
Finally, US alliances encourage allied free-riding, in both Asia and Nato, unnecessarily driving up defence costs for US taxpayers. South Korea spends only 2.7% of GDP on defence, despite bordering North Korea. Japan spends an astonishingly low 0.88% of GDP on defence despite Mr Abe's tough talk on China. The rebalance will almost certainly encourage Asian allies to continue to underspend on defence at US expense. But US defence spending is already competing with the country's ageing population's needs, massive infrastructure underinvestment, and the Tea Party's insistence on smaller government.
Weigh these possible costs and benefits, and it is not axiomatic that US alliances are net positives for the US and the region. Ultimately, benefits may outweigh cost, but that must be proven, not assumed.
Robert E Kelly is associate professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University. The article appeared in the Pacific Forum CSIS Pacnet series and The Diplomat.