This paper explores how the United States adjusts its strategies in response to China’s growing global influence. I argue that the Global Financial Crisis was a turning point where US aid lost its effectiveness as a foreign policy tool. Aid recipients were willing to make policy concessions in exchange for aid because they believed in the US system, but the crisis changed that belief and made it harder for the US to pursue an aid-for-policy deal. In contrast, the GFS significantly boosted China’s posture as a viable aid donor with a stable economic model. This urges the US to shift effort into other instruments that are potentially more effective in gaining favor from developing countries, such as security assurance. Using UNGA voting records, I find that countries receiving higher levels of US aid are more likely to vote with the US pre-2008, but less so post-2008. I also find that US peacetime troop deployment is positively correlated with the amount of Chinese aid a country receives, but only after US aid has lost its effectiveness. The findings indicate that the US and China now “specialize” in what they provide to smaller countries to maintain global influence.
Draft available upon request.
How do domestic protests affect the foreign policy of target governments? Mass mobilization, especially pro-democracy protests, undermines the survival of an authoritarian incumbent and increases the need for support from foreign partners (for resources, security, etc.). Given the US agenda of promoting democracy and human rights, international and domestic audiences can urge the US to place pressure on the authoritarian regime. When the United States was dominating bilateral aid, it could leverage aid to extract policy concessions from vulnerable incumbents, either in the leader’s response to protests or in other issue areas. Regardless, recipient autocratic leaders are constrained by their dominant donors’ interests. Yet, China and its alternative aid regime could change this dynamic. Because Chinese aid is not conditional on regime type and governance, autocratic leaders can turn to China for more aid. In short, I argue that the emergence of China as a prominent bilateral aid donor presents an outside option for threatened autocrats. I expect that pro-democracy protests will increase the likelihood of requests for aid and cooperation sent by autocratic regimes to China and decrease those to the US. I develop a measure of request for cooperation using the International Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) event data and find support for the hypothesis. The findings have implications for alignment choice amid US-China competition – threats to incumbent security may tip the balance between the US and China. In addition, they shed light on the consequences of the US pro-democracy agenda in strategically important regions with many autocratic regimes such as Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific more broadly.
Draft available upon request.
with Songying Fang
Middle powers, historically overlooked in international relations literature due to their limited ability to independently shape the global order, are now receiving renewed attention with the emergence of great power competition between the U.S. and China. Conventional wisdom suggests that these countries face pressure to choose sides in this rivalry, weighing close security relations with the U.S. against close economic ties with China. This paper argues that middle powers’ alignment decisions extend beyond binary choices and are shaped by historical foreign policy legacies, significant third-country relationships, and regional identity. Using a survey experiment in Vietnam, we explore how these factors influence public views on U.S.-China alignment, revealing that the alignment strategies of middle powers are multidimensional, influenced by complex domestic and international considerations.