Between a Rock and a Hard Place: How Clients Evade Patrons’ Costly Strategic Demands

Abstract How do U.S. security clients cope with the United States’ strategic demands to take actions that conflict with their political or economic interests? Much of the literature on intra-alliance politics explains clients’ decisions to accept or reject their patron’s demands. This article theorizes demand evasion as an option for a U.S. security client confronted with costly strategic requests from its patron. Demand evasion occurs when the client avoids answering the security patron’s repeated demand on a strategic issue without provoking the patron’s punishment. There are three methods of demand evasion: stalling, deferring, and slow-rolling. To decide how to respond to their patron’s strategic demand, U.S. security clients assess the patron’s internal coherence regarding the demand and the type of risks involved in the issue at stake. I illustrate the theory of demand evasion by examining how three U.S. treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific (Australia, Japan, and South Korea) responded to demands from different U.S. administrations. For U.S. leaders who seek immediate support from foreign allies, the theory is useful because it highlights the full range of options available to U.S. clients (i.e., acceptance, rejection, and evasion). Understanding why allies sometimes deliberately avoid making decisions on strategic issues is important for the United States as it seeks to confront its adversaries and protect its security interests.