Description
Since 2016, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands have all sent naval vessels to the South and East China Seas and these deployments are becoming more frequent. Yet, China is a distant threat, European powers have few alliance obligations in the region, and the United States and its Asian partners already have a robust naval presence. Why not focus on Russia and free-ride on American deterrence in the Pacific? This article seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of military statecraft by analyzing state motivations for deploying military force near their adversaries in peacetime. It focuses on the mechanisms by which states can influence other states with deployments and develops a theory to explain which states chose to use adversarial deployments. Challenging the conventional wisdom, I show that deterrence is an insufficient motivation, and deployments are instead motivated by influencing a patron, allies, and partners. This article evaluates the theory on cases of European naval deployments to the South and East China Seas from 2016 to 2022, using a novel dataset. The cases show European states used deployments to facilitate cooperation with Pacific partners, manage their relationship with the United States, and gain status in EU strategic dialogues. The article has important implications for scholarship on signaling, statecraft, and defense policy in an era of intensifying great power competition.
