Brian Blankenship's "The Burden-Sharing Dilemma"

Brian D. Blankenship is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics, and reported the following:

On page 99, I discuss how developments during the late 1960s and early 1970s shaped South Korea’s fear of being abandoned by the United States. These notably included the withdrawal of the U.S. Seventh Infantry Division from the country and antiwar sentiment in the United States in the wake of the Vietnam War. The end of the page begins discussing U.S. efforts to encourage South Korea to assume more responsibility for its own defense.

Page 99 offers a nice snapshot of the book, which develops a theory to explain the conditions under which the United States is willing and able to encourage allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense. The book argues that the United States is more likely to solicit allied defense contributions when the threat environment is more severe, when its resources are constrained, and from allies that are moderate-sized – large enough to meaningfully contribute, but not so large that they could afford to leave the alliance. Its efforts are more likely to succeed, in turn, when allies fear the possibility of being abandoned by the United States. South Korea represents a “sweet spot” case of an ally that by the mid-1970s was of moderate size and intensely feared abandonment. As a result, the United States was willing and able to solicit a great deal of defense contributions from South Korea over the course of the 1970s.

Elsewhere in the book, I extend this theory to explain the cases of West Germany, Japan, and Iceland during the Cold War. West Germany represents a case of a large, powerful ally that was also in a precarious security environment, while Japan represents a large, powerful ally that had a comparatively low perception of threat. As a result, U.S. policymakers were far more circumspect in seeking contributions from Japan than West Germany, and their efforts to do so were less successful. Iceland, meanwhile, was largely insulated from U.S. pressure owing to its small size and relatively benign threat environment.

Visit Brian Blankenship's website.

--Marshal Zeringue