This more comprehensive definition of burden-sharing by allies should be documented by the administration through legislation like the Allied Burden Sharing Report Act and the NATO Burden Sharing Report Act.
Access, Basing and Overflight (ABO)
The United States will increasingly operate in a contested basing environment. Some of the challenges are internal in terms of our own resource constraints. Some of them relate to the strategy of the adversary (i.e., A2/AD). And some of the challenges are political and internal to those particular host countries. Yet securing these privileges are critical to giving the U.S. military resilience in terms of staying power, resupply/repair, and storage, not to mention the critical physical presence that undergirds credible deterrence.
Here I cannot offer recommendations that you have not already heard. In general, we need to push for U.S. use of allied bases in contingencies where the ally is not directly threatened. Given growing reach and capabilities of the adversary, the United States must do more to harden forward presence infrastructure as well as increase air and missile defense systems. There could be more burden-sharing of the latter with allies, including additional THAAD systems in the region.
In the case of Japan, major advances in defense spending and the creation of the joint operational command (JJOC) are commendable and have been supported by the public. There is an expectation that the United States would pre-consult with Japan on pre-positioning of additional capabilities, and that Tokyo would gain support of local communities. The Japanese government could build on this momentum to improve access arrangements for the alliance to make deterrence more credible and defenses more capable in a Taiwan contingency. This requires an initiative from the top to engage in a whole-of-government dialogue internally and with the United States (in the 2+2 ministerial talks) on revisions to SOFA which govern limited use access to JSDF and civilian facilities other than permanent U.S. bases in Japan. The purpose would be to streamline the national and local approval process for U.S. access to dispersed positions in the Southwest (Nansei) island chain (Miyako, Ishigaki, Yonaguni) in advance of an armed-attack situation. Tokyo must also work with local governments to enhance their understanding of the role they play in national defense (something better understood in Tokyo). Such reforms should not be seen as a favor or concession to the United States, but as necessary to enhance Japan’s national defense and security in the Nansei island chain closest to Taiwan.
In the case of South Korea, U.S. access to bases, the addition of new non-kinetic capabilities, and the addition of kinetic capabilities would be generally uncontroversial. The key is that they are framed as directed toward the North Korean threat. The framing of capabilities as directed to a Taiwan contingency, however, becomes more problematic given the traditional South Korean reluctance to become entrapped in a U.S.-China conflict. Domestic political factors matter here to a degree in that conservative governments in Seoul tend to be a shade more open to discussions about Taiwan contingencies. It is also noteworthy that both progressive and conservative governments have broken new ground with summit-level statements equating freedom of navigation and stability of the Taiwan straits with Korea’s security. Still, the resistance is real. The United States could engage the next Korean government in a broad reorientation of U.S. forces in Korea moving from a peninsular mission to a regional one. The range of options here could span removing troops from the peninsula to elsewhere or increasing the presence in Korea with a portion each committed to peninsular defense and regional defense.
However, I would like to draw your attention to one important strategy to optimize U.S. ABO options. If the strategy for maintaining access rests on complementing and/or reforming large, main legacy operating base infrastructures, which are put at risk by the adversary’s anti-access capabilities, with a network of smaller, dispersed, and concealed arrangements in the Indo-Pacific, then a major threat to this plan is not just China’s ability to locate and militarily target such arrangements, but the political and commercial pressure that it can put on the hosts to withhold cooperation with the United States. Indeed, commercial pressure is probably the ideal tool for China to use given the nature of these small and dispersed ABO arrangements – that is, a host nation is more likely to succumb to intense Chinese economic pressure to withhold cooperation with the United States over a discrete access arrangement than over a large military base. China’s use of economic coercion against U.S. allies is well-established. Since 2008, it has used economic coercion against 18 governments and over 500 companies (including U.S. primes). The purpose of the coercion is expressly political, not trade-related. The most well-known case related to access capabilities is probably the 2016-2017 commercial assault on Korean companies for the emplacement of a THAAD battery in Seongju, South Korea, which did at least $7.5 billion dollars of damage.
An important component of an ABO strategy must be to complement the military access arrangements with a counter-coercion strategy designed to deter Chinese economic coercion. This strategy, otherwise known as “collective resilience” would take the form of a multilateral economic deterrence mechanism that leverages the combined trade capabilities of like-minded partners to signal to China that they cannot economically coerce any one member of the group. Like-minded partners trade with China in 575 finished and intermediary goods valued at $59.61 billion upon which China is highly dependent, and for which China does not have alternative sources.1 A collective economic deterrence strategy has proven to work in Europe where the anti-coercion instrument (ACI) introduced in 2023 seems to have slowed China’s coercive practices against other individual states as it had done to Lithuania. The United States should encourage Indo-Pacific allies to do the same expressly with the understanding that there is an important security rationale related to ABO.
Opportunistic Aggression
The war in Ukraine has made Indo-Pacific allies realize that war is a real possibility in Asia and that the unthinkable is possible. There is more proactive thinking in the region about dual contingencies and opportunistic aggression than I have ever experienced before. For example, we have had inquiries in the last three years from both Taiwan and South Korea about gaming out dual contingencies at the Track II level. An updated alliance structure should capitalize on this new thinking to proactively consider new ways of deterring opportunistic aggression. These could include, but not be limited to:
- Reorienting of the U.S. military presence on the Korean peninsula to a regional deterrence and defense mission (either by drawdown or supplementing);
- Training of USFK both on and off the peninsula;
- Collective defense declaration among the U.S., Japan, and South Korea and a bilateral security declaration between Japan and South Korea (2025 marks the 60th anniversary of normalized relations);
- Increased South Korean defense spending and independent military capabilities to deter North Korean opportunistic aggression during a Taiwan contingency;
- Consideration of rear area support roles played by South Korea in a Taiwan contingency
- Use of the UNC contributing nations’ framework on the Korean peninsula to enhance peacetime deterrence
These are all politically sensitive issues in South Korea and would be topics to be taken up with the government once the political impeachment crisis in that country is resolved. Any reorientation of the U.S. presence on the peninsula, however, would require hard thinking about the retention of some ground troop presence to provide the traditional “tripwire” deterrent against North Korean adventurism; and would necessitate a planned, phased process that would minimize the negative political and economic externalities that would result from an abrupt change. Complete withdrawal of the troop presence would beg the question of cost (losing the South Korean subsidy), as well as alternative locations that would still be close enough to the fight to be effective. Increasing the troop presence (with a portion each trained for peninsular and regional defense) could mute potential South Korean self-help responses (e.g., proactive discussions of nuclearization), but would require a difficult Korean political choice to acknowledge its role in a Taiwan fight.
New Areas of Allied Cooperation
Updating of the alliances should include other new areas of cooperation outside of the military realm. A strong precedent has already been set by the previous two administrations for allied cooperation on economic security, export controls, and supply chains. Under the current administration, new opportunities have been unearthed in areas including shipbuilding and strategic energy cooperation with Japan and South Korea, in particular.
In Secretary Rubio’s confirmation hearing before this body, he observed that eight decades after the end of the second World War, America is being called upon again to create a free world out of chaos, but he also noted the voters elected President Trump because they want a strong America with a “prudent” foreign policy. In this regard, the State Department should encourage our allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe to play more active political roles in sustaining global governance as traditional institutions like the UN Security Council have underperformed and groupings like BRICS aim to disrupt the current rules-based order. I have two specific recommendations here. First, the United States should encourage more direct security dialogue and military planning among European and Asian allies that builds on the Trump and Biden administrations’ previous efforts to build multilateral coalitions on functional issues like export controls, sanctions, and pandemic preparedness. The war in Ukraine, China’s assertiveness, and North Korea’s supply of Russia have brought the two theaters together in unprecedented ways and I have been personally impressed by the level of interest and sophistication in the European discussions on security of the Indo-Pacific.
Finally, the State Department would do well to promote and formalize the “Indo-Pacific-4” framework’s (Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand) participation in global governance institutions. Regular participation in the NATO leader’s summits have led to greater cooperation across Europe and Asia in countering Chinese coercion. Moreover, the Group of Seven (G7) has become the de facto organization in which leading like-minded states coordinate policies, set sanctions, and define new rules and norms in the absence of functioning UN mandates. Indo-Pacific and European actors like Australia, South Korea and Spain are proven high performers in many of the pressing tasks identified in recent G7 leaders’ summits like economic resilience and security, digital competitiveness, food security, climate change, labor security, and development, and therefore could contribute much to burden-sharing and global governance.2
Please consult the PDF for references.