Shaken confidence: violation of norms as driver of expenditure increase

Abstract

The United States‘ alliances with Japan and the Philippines, built on the principle of mutual defense, stand in stark contrast to the United States‘ security cooperation with Taiwan which does not guarantee mutual defense in any capacity. Taiwan is thus quite vulnerable due its ongoing sovereignty dispute with China and its ambiguous international legal status. Yet curiously, since 2022 both Japan and the Philippines have increased their defense expenditure at a significantly faster rate than Taiwan, despite possessing much more solid security guarantees than Taiwan. Qualitative cross-case analysis of these three cases reveals two potential explanations. Firstly, within Japanese and Philippine negotiations with China, violation of confidence between leadership can be observed before the 2022 expenditure increase. This is not observable within Taiwanese-Chinese negotiations however, whose leaders largely refrained from formal contact and there was thus little trust to be broken in the first place. Secondly, as a de facto state, Taiwan‘s security situation does not benefit from international norms on non-aggression between states to the same extent as de jure states like Japan and the Philippines, and thus does not necessarily face the same pressure to respond to violation of said norms. The findings of this thesis contribute to understanding the strategic motivations of de facto states, as well as highlighting how dependency on international norms can affect diplomatic and strategic behavior.