The Politics of Foreign Military Basing

<p>Foreign military bases are anomalies in a world of sovereign states. Why do major powers station their finite military forces to protect other countries and how does the distribution of these bases relate to a country’s grand strategy? Why do host-nations give up their sovereignty and allow foreign forces, capable of existential violence, to deploy within their borders? This dissertation takes a mixed method approach to each of these questions. For the first, I combine descriptive case studies relating the basing postures of five major powers and to their respective grand strategies with a quantitative analysis of the correlates of the US military basing network. To answer the second, I test the role of host-nation security conditions on US military access and then conduct an in-depth process tracing of US-Philippine basing relations. I find that foreign military bases are essential for super-power status and are an arena for great power competition. I conclude that the US foreign basing posture is strongly aligned with American trade relationships and against US enemies. For host-nation motivations, I conclude that security threats to the host-nation matter, but not uniformly. External threats have the greatest influence in increasing foreign military access, but low-intensity revolutionary threats actually tend to decrease a host-nation’s willingness to accommodate foreign forces.</p>

Author dc:creator

• Brown, Joseph W

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Feaver, Peter
• Beardsley, Kyle

• International relations
• Military studies
• Political science
• bases
• conflict
• military
• security
• strategy

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20927

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dukespace.lib.duke.edu:10161/20927