Description
European states have expanded their security footprint in the Indo-Pacific region via military deployments, partnerships, strategic documents and military exports. Such proactive engagement intensified even as insecurity grew in Europe due to external threats and a waning US security commitment.
This paper addresses a key puzzle: Why do junior allies divert significant resources to distant regions, rather than using them to address more proximate sources of insecurity? Yet, the literature on secondary powers' activism in faraway regions is fragmented and only partially explains the causes of such costly engagement.
Drawing from theory on alliance politics, strategic signalling and foreign policy analysis, the paper argues that fear of patron abandonment is the best determinant of protégés' power projection. Thus, junior allies employ costly signals to demonstrate loyalty or pursue autonomy in distant regions.
The paper presents a comprehensive account of existing explanations of secondary states' power projection in faraway regions; then, it compiles them in a structured literature review and cross-references these explanations against a chronology of European strategic engagement in the Indo-Pacific. It thereby clarifies the mechanisms of power projection and highlights how alliance dependence and the growing salience of the Indo-Pacific will inform European security in the coming decades.
