The US-led alliances in the Asia-Pacific: hedge against potential threats or an undesirable multilateral security order?

Abstract

The ‘hub-and-spoke’ alliance structure led by the United States was – and remains – a major feature of security politics in the Asia-Pacific. This article links its ‘general interests’ with the larger issue of the Asia-Pacific's evolving multilateral regional order. After reviewing the concept of ‘hedging’, the first section problematises the literature that treats the US-led alliances which constitute the hub-and-spoke system mainly as instruments for the competitive side of a hedging strategy. The second section observes that they go beyond being instruments of threat response to becoming a more complicated network of regional multilateral order-maintenance and order-building. The third section claims that the United States and its regional allies have been utilising the hub-and-spoke alliance structure as a hedge against an undesirable multilateral order emerging in the region. The fourth section examines those arguments with reference to the East Asia Summit (EAS) and the Six Party Talks. The article concludes with some thoughts about what these findings mean for the future direction of the hub-and-spoke alliance structure in the Asia-Pacific.

Keywords:

• hub-and-spoke
• multilateral order
• East Asia summit
• Six Party talks
• alliances

Acknowledgments

Jae Jeok Park studied political science for his undergraduate degree, and international studies, political science and mathematical methods in the social sciences for his master's degrees. He obtained his PhD from the Australian National University in 2009. His research interests include alliance politics, US security policy in the Asia-Pacific, and crisis bargaining. He is currently Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU) in Seoul.

Notes

1. While acknowledging the idea of ‘order’ in international relations has been highly contested, in this study, I adopt Martin Griffiths and Terry O’Callaghan's definition of ‘order’: ‘a stable pattern of relations among international actors that sustains a set of common goals or purposes’ (Griffiths and O’Callaghan 2002: 223).

2. The United States is expected to join the EAS in October 2011.

3. Japan might be a willing partner with the United States, given Taiwan's central geographic position relative to East Asian Sea Lanes of Communications (SLOCs).

4. Interview with former US State Department's Korea country desk director David Straub on 8 May 2007.

5. It is worth noting that the United States has been providing a ‘nuclear umbrella’ to Israel even though the two countries are not formal allies.

6. Cha (1994: 41) defines ‘quasi-alliance’ as ‘the relationship between two states that remain non-allied but share a third party as a common ally.’