[Soodang Security Studies Colloquium #13] Deter Together or Deter Separately?: Time Horizons and Peace Time Alliance Cohesion of the US-Japan and US-ROK Alliances

• Date and Time: October 22, 2021 / 5PM

• Presenter: Do Young Lee (IGCC, UC San Diego)

• Discussant: Tongfi Kim (Brussels School of Governance)

• Organized by: Peace & Democracy Institute, Department of Political Science and International Relations

 

On October 22, 2021, Korea University’s Peace & Democracy Institute held the 13th Soodang Security Colloquium.

Dr. Do Young Lee of UC San Diego participated as a presenter and Professor Tongfi Kim of Brussels School of Governance participated as a debater.

At Colloquium, Dr. Lee released his first draft, “Deter Together or Data Separately?: Time Horizon and Peace Time Alliance Cohesion of the US-Japan and US-ROK Alliance.” There are times when allies respond closely to each other in peacetime, and there are often disagreements between allies. This study focused on the ‘peacetime alliance cohesion’ that reached an agreement between the allies on specific plans and goals for joint threats in peacetime. Alliance cohesion in peacetime determines deterrence against common threats in peacetime, improves war performance in actual wartime, and is deeply associated with the dissolution of the alliance. So with regard to this significant influence of cohesion in peacetime, the author attempted to explain the variation in cohesion in peacetime among alliances.

Accordingly, the author suggests an original theory that explains the variation of “peaceful interaligned cohesiveness” and argues that the alliance cohesiveness increases and decreases when the time horizon responds to common threats between alliances matches or not. Here, time horizon is the value that a country’s policymaker or state puts in the present as opposed to future rewards, or what is often called inter-temporal discounting. So countries with short time horizons focus on the immediate future in general state affairs, while countries with long time horizons focus on and act on the far future in general state affairs. It can explain that these clocks are determined by the country’s policymakers or countries’ perceptions of targets, time frames, and intents of threats, and they have short clocks when they perceive threats as close, and long watches when they perceive they will not face them immediately. To prove this, the author compared the cohesion between the U.S. and the U.S. and Japan against Chinese threats, showing that the U.S. and Japan had a short watch in common, while Korea had a long watch on Chinese threats, so the alliance was relatively less cohesive.