"The United States Rebalancing Toward Asia": Implications for Europe

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine and discuss the historical and current pretexts of to what degree the United States is rebalancing toward Asia, and to discuss what implications it has for Europe. The aim is reached by analyzing a selected portion of political and military declaratory policies and implemented actions 1945 to 2014 by the President of The United States. Based on the findings, the thesis ends with the discussion of the implications it has for Europe The theoretical idea used is based on previous studies that analyzed declaratory polices and planned actions/operational policies. As previous scholars have focused on exploring differences between the declaratory policies and planned actions or on explaining the outcome of different levels actions within the administrations, a new model was developed analyzing the attention given by the same level within the administration. By using a mixed method of statistical and qualitative data, the attention could be measured and the degree of rebalancing concluded. During the time period studied, The United States has always paid attention to the Pacific Com-mand. Within the declaratory polices studied, no degree of rebalancing toward the Pacific Com-mand can be identified but within the implemented actions studied the degree of rebalancing was high from 1985 to 2005, and today just maintained. The conclusions are marred with the demar-cations made of only analyzing one actor within the political and military field. This method is possibly the wrong way of addressing the debate of rebalancing and what it really means—whether it is from the political and/or military fields to other power systems such as the econom-ic or technical. Or is it a type of war fatigue that occurs approximately every 20 years? If ad-dressed, the implications for Europe could be argued to be positive. The outcome of the study can be used within the general debate of the United States’ attention regarding the political and military power systems. However, it cannot be generalized to other power systems or other nations, except to possibly explain the behaviors of other nations, both friendly and potential adversaries. Regarding the method developed for this study, the results indicate that it can be of general use in further studies within this academic field, both in regard to the theoretical approach and in the usage of a mixed method with emphasis on statistical data.