Dividing U.S. Alliances in Taiwan Contingencies

Would China’s strategies of isolating the United States from its allies succeed during Taiwan contingencies? Military cooperation with its allies will be critical for the United States to counter China’s attempts to forcibly alter the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. Of course, it is likely that China would use several policy instruments to drive a wedge between Washington and its allies to prevent such cooperation. But whether Beijing’s wedge strategies would be effective for undermining U.S. efforts to build a coalition has not been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. Moreover, how U.S. allies would act in different contingencies—such as a full-scale invasion, a quarantine, or a bombardment—remains largely understudied. To fill these gaps, we develop hypotheses on the effect of wedge strategies Beijing could employ vis-à-vis U.S. allies during Taiwan scenarios. Specifically, we explore how China’s threats and inducement could influence public approval in U.S. allies regarding their governments’ support for U.S. military operations in the event of conflicts and crises over Taiwan. Most U.S. allies in Asia are democracies, where public opinion plays a crucial role in shaping foreign policy decisions. As such, understanding the extent to which Beijing’s wedge strategies shift public opinion in U.S. allies on providing support for U.S. military operations will help us predict the nature of support Washington can reasonably expect from its allies during disputes in the Taiwan Strait. We use cross-national survey experiments in South Korea and Japan, two key U.S. allies in the region, to test our hypotheses. Specifically, we administer two survey experiments with South Korean and Japanese adult citizens. Our survey experiments involve two types of hypothetical Taiwan contingencies: a full-scale invasion and a quarantine. These scenarios are paired with three types of China’s wedge strategies: threats of military attack, threats of economic sanctions, and promises of economic inducement.