Suchergebnisse

Current developments in Northeast Asia underscore the importance of recent efforts by Australia and South Korea to develop independent security ties. Understanding the rationales and selected benchmarks in Australian-ROK politico-security relations is important to reaching a meaningful assessment of how they could affect regional and international security. The "common wisdom" that the two countries' distance from each other, and that their disparate historical and cultural backgrounds complicate the development of bilateral politico-security ties is contested here. A major challenge that both these "middle powers" will face will be to reconcile their alliances with the United States with their growing economic and political relations with China, particularly in the context of responding to future strategic contingencies on the Korean peninsula.

Current developments in Northeast Asia underscore the importance of recent efforts by Australia and South Korea to develop independent security ties. Understanding the rationales and selected benchmarks in Australian-ROK politico-security relations is important to reaching a meaningful assessment of how they could affect regional and international security. The "common wisdom" that the two countries' distance from each other, and that their disparate historical and cultural backgrounds complicate the development of bilateral politico-security ties is contested here. A major challenge that both these "middle powers" will face will be to reconcile their alliances with the United States with their growing economic and political relations with China, particularly in the context of responding to future strategic contingencies on the Korean peninsula.

Despite many predictions to the contrary, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is currently one of the countries with most pro-American attitudes. We investigate what is behind the extraordinary resilience in US popular standing in an allegedly least likely setting. Using survey data from 2002 and 2007 and a novel methodology, Classification and Regression Tree models, we test whether US standing is: (1) a matter of interests, i.e. a reward that the USA receives because it either provides security or international public goods; or (2) whether it is a matter of image, i.e. the recognition that the USA is a role model to emulate. We find that across a large number of predictors, the Korean public mostly liked the USA because they liked American ways of doing business, which gives support to the image hypothesis. Security interests played a secondary role in shaping US standing, while the provision of international public goods had no impact in the popular assessment of the USA in the ROK. (Pac Rev/GIGA)