Middle Power Security Cooperation: Australia-Korea Relations in the Post-Cold War Era

Abstract

One of the central assumptions in the international relations literature on middle powers is their tendency to work together. In responding to shared strategic challenges, middle powers can exert greater influence together than they would otherwise possess alone. Scholars thus expected closer security cooperation between the Asia-Pacific's middle powers since the end of the Cold War due to new common threats, alliance burden-sharing pressure, institutional interests, functional linkages, and shared identity. However, these five explanations have failed to predict and adequately explain the variation in security cooperation over the past three decades. This begs the puzzle of why has there been such limited security cooperation among the Asia-Pacific's middle powers despite the literature's widespread expectations and favourable international conditions?

To answer this puzzle, this study introduces the 'leadership role congruence' hypothesis. It argues that how individual leaders of middle powers define what role they want to play in security affairs determines when, and with whom, they are likely to pursue security cooperation. To test the hypothesis against existing explanations, the study first reviews middle power security cooperation in a comparative context before undertaking the first in-depth study of the contemporary Australia-South Korea security relationship as a most-likely case study. Australia and South Korea are widely recognised as middle powers and should have deepened their strategic ties based on their common adversaries, mutual alliance relations, regional activism, economic and military linkages, and shared identities. Using newly-declassified archival materials as well as extensive interviews, the study demonstrates how structural incentives for closer cooperation are mediated by leaders in the strategic domain. This explains why middle power security cooperation has been so difficult to sustain over the decades. The study's findings offer important insights for the literature on middle powers, Asian security, and international cooperation.