Western Strategies in East Asia: Networked Security Postures in the “Pacific Century”

The core question that this paper tackles is how the three major Western military powers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France) have adapted their security policies to the shifting center of strategic gravity of international politics from the Euro-Atlantic area to the Asia-Pacific. In addressing this question, it conducts a comparative analysis of their evolving security policies in confronting the main “traditional” and “non-traditional” security challenges in East Asia, i.e. the rise of China, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and piracy. This paper makes two original contributions. Firstly, it offers an empirical contribution as the first work to provide a cross-national comparison of the security policies of the three major Western powers (1990-2016) – in their national, bilateral, and multilateral configurations – in what is deemed to be the world’s new center of strategic gravity. It therefore investigates a crucial yet under-explored dimension of contemporary international politics. The paper relies on a large body of interviews conducted in the US, Britain and France and on cables leaked by Wikileaks. Secondly, it provides an innovative conceptual and methodological framework that sheds light on the emerging networks of national, bilateral and multilateral security arrangements (what we label “networked security postures”) in international politics. It thereby contributes to the debates on the under-theorized relationships between bilateralism and multilateralism as venues for security cooperation. In so doing, it adopts a mixed-methods approach by employing qualitative and quantitative methods (including visual network analysis).