Activist Disconnect: Social Movements, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Bases in East Asia

Under what conditions are a country’s residents likely to express favorable or unfavorable attitudes toward the United States? I discuss this question using survey data from 38 countries, focusing on the possible impacts that the active approach by the United States toward security threats has on the psychology of countries’ residents. The results show that the larger the U.S. military presence in a country, the more likely that its residents are to express negative attitudes toward the United States. Meanwhile, citizens who feel threatened by specific types of global actors that the U.S. government actively confronts as security threats are less likely to express negative attitudes toward the United States, and particularly less likely to do so the larger the U.S. military presence in their country. These findings contribute significantly to understanding the shifts in the socio-political dynamics of regions such as the Asia-Pacific, where the United States has long implemented an active approach.

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Revisiting negative externalities of US military bases: the case of Okinawa

Hikotani

Horiuchi

Tago

2022

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific

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In a recently published article, Allen et al. (Outside the wire: U.S. military deployments and public opinion in host states’, American Political Science Review, 114(2), 326–341; 2020) argue that US military deployments nurture favorable attitudes toward the United States among foreign citizens. Their claim is based on social contact and economic compensation theories, applied to a large-scale cross-national survey project funded by the US government. However, their analysis disregards the geographical concentration of US military facilities within the host countries. To examine the relevance of geography and assess both positive and negative externalities, we focus on Japan – a notable case given its status as the country hosting the largest number of US military personnel in the world. We show that residents of Okinawa, a small prefecture hosting 70% of US military facilities within Japan have considerably unfavorable attitudes toward the US military presence in their prefecture. They hold this negative sentiment specifically toward the bases in Okinawa regardless of their contact with Americans and economic benefits and their general support for the US military presence within Japan. Our findings support an alternative theory of not-in-my-backyard. They also shed light on the importance of local foreign public opinion for foreign policy analysis and call for a more balanced scholarly debate on the externalities of the global US military presence.

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Activist Disconnect: Social Movements, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Bases in East Asia

Cited by 6 publications

References 37 publications

Discrepancies in the portrayal of Japan’s nuclear water release in Chinese and US media outlets: A corpus-based news values analysis of marine disputes

Discrepancies in the portrayal of Japan’s nuclear water release in Chinese and US media outlets: A corpus-based news values analysis of marine disputes

Deep engagement and public opinion toward the United States: U.S. military presence and threat perceptions

Revisiting negative externalities of US military bases: the case of Okinawa

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