| How can we account for various changes in military alliances after the Cold War? In order to answer this question, I situate my research in Northeast Asia where there are two military alliances that have made puzzling moves after the Cold War: the US-Korea and the US-Japan alliances.;The US-Japan and the US-Korea alliances have been two security defenses in Northeast Asia against the communist bloc during the Cold War period. As the Soviet demise occurred in 1991, the realists predicted that the US-Japan alliance would not remain as strong as the Cold War period due to the disintegration of communism. But it has been enjoying its more cohesiveness than ever in its history. More anomalous than this is the frictional US-Korea alliance that was expected to remain strong due to North Korea's threats of nuclear weapons. For the past decade and a half, these realist projections did not fully come to pass: rather, they changed inversely. How can we account for these puzzles?;In explaining these counter-intuitive developments, I employ the critical juncture approach. I hypothesize that in South Korea and Japan, certain critical events readjusted domestic security cultures that worked interactively with political changes, which affected their alliance cohesion with the US.;With the end of the Cold War (first critical juncture), the South Korean democratic movement became stabilized which caused changes in security culture emphasizing more independence and autonomous state identity, thus increasing friction with the US. In Japan, the end of the Cold War has changed the way Japanese think about their security and made them emphasize more active participation in the international community, which contributed to accelerated cohesiveness of the US-Japan alliance. The 1998 Taepodong missile threat (second critical juncture) has produced escalated insecurity in Japan and caused the LDP to adopt more militarist security policies, which has strengthened the US-Japan alliance. In South Korea, the event was not perceived as threat by the Kim Dae Jung government with its Sunshine policy. A new security culture has developed in South Korea emphasizing one national identity between two Koreas, and the US-Korea alliance became less cohesive. |
