Thursday, December 12, 2019

Withdrawls on different levels can have a deleterious impact.

ABSTRACT

"Does withdrawing forward-deployed U.S. troops increase instability? This question is at the heart of current grand strategy debates, yet endogeneity issues make this very difficult to answer. Put simply, stability may cause the United States to withdraw forces and lead one to incorrectly infer that withdrawals do not lead to greater instability. We suggest a research design to help alleviate this endogeneity problem. By utilizing exogenous crises that cause U.S. troops to "redeploy" out of South Korea, we are able to estimate the causal effect of a withdrawal of U.S. troops on the probability of instability. We examine several exogenous crises after the end of the Korean War that force U.S. policymakers to rapidly redeploy U.S. forces out of South Korea. We then examine the rate of conflict between South Korea and North Korea, and the United States and North Korea. We find that U.S. troop withdrawals do not cause greater conflict but withdrawals are at times associated with other behaviors, such as conventional arming, nuclear proliferation, and diplomatic initiatives that could affect the future likelihood of war."


https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/922/docs/Do_U.S_Troop_Withdrawls_Cause_Instability.pdf

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