https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7133-0750
![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
We examine how a great power’s past behavior toward an informal security partner affects the broader credibility of its security commitments, focusing on the implications of America’s dramatic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 as perceived by the U.S., South Korean, and Chinese publics. Against conventional wisdom, we show that knowledge about a great power’s decision to abandon an informal partner in one region of the globe can help increase confidence about its alliance commitments elsewhere. Our survey experiments identify a striking disjuncture: Although Americans tend to believe that the abandonment decision in Afghanistan will hurt their country’s credibility in East Asia, no such effect is found in South Korea and China. In fact, East Asian respondents who are reminded of the Afghanistan withdrawal become more confident about American security commitments when alerted to the possibility that this decision will help Washington to concentrate additional military capabilities in their region.
Acknowledgements
For sharing insights that improved previous drafts, the authors thank Barbara Elias, Jessica Weeks, Yusaku Horiuchi, Eugene Gholz, Brandon Ives, and participants in the 2022 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, the 2022 annual conference of the Korean Political Science Association, and the 2022 joint conference of the International Studies Association (ISA)’s International Security Studies Section and the American Political Science Association (APSA)’s International Security Section.
Data availability statement
Replications materials available at doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LCXZWF.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Ethical approval
This research was approved under UC San Diego IRB #181796. The experiments were preregistered with the Open Science Framework on January 25, 2022 (doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/yurva).
Notes
1 As one review notes, recent studies drawing on survey experiments have significantly contributed to “probing the circumstances under which reputational inferences are most likely to matter.” See Jervis et al. (Citation2021, p. 172).
2 On the centrality of East Asia for US grand strategy in the 21st century, see Silove (Citation2016).
3 It is worth noting that even studies that find evidence for the importance of past actions on alliance credibility often acknowledge that this relationship may be strongly contingent on the extent to which the current strategic interaction resembles the past one (e.g., Weisiger & Yarhi-Milo, Citation2015).
4 Insights drawn from behavioral studies are arguably much more useful in explaining the attitudes of ordinary individuals—the focus of this article—rather than those of political decision-makers. On the problems associated with extrapolating findings about individuals to aggregate actors like states or foreign ministries, see Powell (Citation2017).
5 Recent studies confirm that domestic audiences generally care about reputation, fueling elite incentives to deploy reputational rhetoric when justifying foreign policy behavior. See Brutger and Kertzer (Citation2018); and Levin and Kobayashi (Citation2022).
6 See sources cited in the introduction.
7 In line with this intuition, scholars have found that both states and the public care about alliance treaties. States are more likely to intervene on behalf of allies with whom they have signed a formal defense pact (Johnson, 2016). Moreover, the public is much more likely to support going to war on behalf of another state when told about existing treaty obligations (Tomz & Weeks, Citation2013) or interests and values shared in formal alliances (Chu et al., Citation2021).
8 For a thoughtful discussion about the informativeness of null effects for hypothesis testing in IR, see Evers et al. (Citation2019).
9 We briefly discuss the implications of our findings for the ongoing war in Ukraine in our concluding section.
10 In the absence of strong theoretical reasons to suspect treatment effect heterogeneities and “large, well-powered empirical demonstrations of such theories[,]” readers are justified in believing that the individuals in our US survey are responding to our informational treatments in ways similar to how most other Americans would respond to them (Coppock, Citation2018, p. 624). Similar observations have been made for online-recruited samples in other national contexts as well. For example, previous research finds that point estimates generated by internet-based samples in the Chinese context approximate those of internet-user subsamples in nationally representative surveys, particularly when weighted by demographic covariates like ours is (Li et al., Citation2018).
11 Tellingly, many surveys of American public attitudes on foreign affairs ask respondents for their opinions on US alliances or foreign military involvement in broad-based terms—e.g., “Do you think it will be best for the future of the country if we take an active part in world affairs or if we stay out of world affairs?” (Friedhoff, Citation2021).
12 Future studies can examine the degree to which US observers themselves might be responsive to information about strategic contexts—we return to this point in our discussion of the findings.
13 See Tables A10-12 in Online Appendix C.
14 We chose a conflict scenario between South Korea and China to maintain consistency across the multi-country surveys and control for the identities of the disputant parties. Although the likelihood of a military clash in the South Korea-China dyad is usually considered relatively low compared to other regional flashpoints, it is non-negligible given that relations between the two countries have evinced increasing tensions in recent years, such as those observed during the so-called “THAAD crisis” of 2016-17. See Meick and Salidjanova (Citation2017).
15 The full regression results can be found in Table A5 in Online Appendix C.
16 This result is displayed on Table A12 in Online Appendix C.
17 On the role of college education in shaping individual attitudes toward key foreign policy issues like trade, see Hainmueller and Hiscox (Citation2006).
18 Each of these results is statistically significant, except when the South Korean respondents are asked about their faith in the US security commitment to their country in the event of a military conflict that takes place in the next 10 years. This may reflect the fact that our survey was fielded toward the end of President Moon Jae-in’s term, during which the South Korean government was perceived by many observers as pursuing policies that strained its traditional alliance relationship with the United States (e.g., Minegishi, Citation2021).
19 American estimates of Chinese perceptions become statistically significant as well when the analysis is restricted to individuals who passed the factual manipulation check (see Table A10 in Online Appendix C).
20 Further note that, although the treatment effect of the Afghanistan withdrawal message is insignificant for both publics, the direction of the effect on the confidence in US military support for South Korea was positive—another detail that fits uneasily with the logic of reputation.
21 To be sure, in such instances, it may be more difficult to determine whether observers are drawing on the logic of reputations or the logic of strategic contexts to make their credibility assessments. Moreover, defenses of the traditional reputation theory that depend on narrowing its applicability to very similar situations must grapple with Press (Citation2005, p. 140)’s critique that such arguments tend to vitiate the theory of any practical significance: “It will almost never be worth keeping commitments for the sake of credibility if the credibility gained will only apply in identical cases. Identical cases are far too rare, if they exist at all.”
22 On public diplomacy, see Goldsmith and Horiuchi (Citation2009).
23 This is consistent with Levin and Kobayashi (Citation2022)’s finding that the public is often willing to punish leaders for disengaging from long-standing security commitments.
24 Results from US public opinion surveys following the Afghanistan withdrawal are instructive. In the fall of 2021, over 40 percent of Americans agreed that US troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan even in response to a “directed-verdict” question posed by one media outlet: “Do you believe the US should still withdraw its military presence in Afghanistan if it means it creates an opening for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to establish operations in Afghanistan?” As one commentator observed, this was “taken … correctly, as an indicator of the degree to which the public is behind the withdrawal” (Newport, Citation2021).