Commitment Issues? Assessing American Strategies & Indo-Pacific State Responses to Divergent Commitments Amidst Great Power Competition in the Indo-Pacific

The United States has a wide range of commitment structures with states in the Indo-Pacific, ranging from formal commitments to mutual defense to comprehensive strategic partnerships and other nebulous relationships. When it comes to these regional commitments, do U.S. policymakers follow what is written in official documents? Is there a substantive, and substantial, difference in how America treats its allies or partners based on its pledges? I argue that despite an obvious divergence in written guarantees, American policymakers view all commitments as critical to the broader American national interest, which is to respond to the primary regional challenger: China. Because of this strategic approach, American policymakers will try to make commitments as strategically similar as possible. They will incur disproportionate costs in order to engage in what I term "pushing the envelope" through official and unofficial gestures of support. These gestures include direct arms sales, military financing, and other officially – and unofficially – sanctioned actions. This is the crux of American policy "signaling" efforts to demonstrate the credibility of its commitments. I will study this recent uniformity of American strategic behavior across Indo-Pacific commitments by conducting a mixed methods analysis of U.S. policies and actions starting in 2000. Alas, things are not so simple. While the United States tries to make different Indo-Pacific alliance structures structurally similar, those allies and partners will still behave according to the stark differences in the security granted by their respective official commitments. Hence, some states in the Indo-Pacific are more likely to exhibit "hedging" through observable military and economic behavior. I will analyze this divergence in behavior and infer state perception by analyzing states' military expenditures and bilateral trade flows with the U.S. and China.