Description
This paper unpacks the political process of how the U.S. created regional security order in the Asia-Pacific. The literature on international order and hegemony misses a crucial role and responsibility of order-makers: managing social relations between allies and partners, particularly when those states are not allied with each other. This dynamic between a leading state and two allies with a history of shared grievances creates discord within the allied coalition that threatens regional agenda-setting. The origins of the U.S. hub-and-spokes alliance system reveal how managing social relations between client states over war grievances fundamentally shaped the U.S.-led order in the Asia-Pacific and locked in disconnected U.S. alliance dynamics for decades to come. Without the buy-in of key regional clients, the U.S. could not achieve its principal goal: preventing the spread of communism by reinstating Japan as a powerful ally capable of defending itself from communist aggression. But still scarred from war with Japan, these U.S. clients would not agree to a lenient peace treaty. Standing between Japan and its neighbors, U.S. policymakers found themselves fundamentally altering and adjusting preferences to satisfy all parties, moving from a firm stance of no binding alliances to a multilateral security pact to finally bilateral alliances that created lasting U.S. obligations. Using the case of the hub-and-spokes alliance model, this paper seeks to argue three things: 1) that social management is a critical role and responsibility of the leading state in a regional order, 2) that it fundamentally impacts how orders are created and maintained by constraining optionality, and 3) that the leading state has a portfolio of strategies for addressing these prior grievances among supporters when they flare up and impact policy.
