The Formation and Evolution of Alliance: A Comparative Analysis of the China’s Factor in the US-Japan and the US-ROK Alliances after the Cold War

After the Cold War, the rise of China and the power transition became the most important issues in the international relations. In this background, China factor thus became the most important variable on the evolution of the U.S. Alliances in the Northeast Asia. Therefore, in this thesis, I want to discuss and compare the influence of China rising on the US-Japan alliance and US-ROK alliance. I tried to analyze the China factor that influenced the evolution of alliances from the aspect of the geographic politics, military factor, economic factor, ideology and the public opinion. Based on the alliance theory, I found out some points to observe and evaluate the evolution of alliances. The key points are burden sharing, reliance and trust of the alliances, and the public opinion to the alliances. From those points, we could try to evaluate the strength of the alliances. After the analysis, we could find out that the U.S. still gave a strong promise to secure the existence of the alliances. The U.S. and Japan shared the closed perception of threat to China, so their goals tend to contain China’s rising. However, the ROK tends to cooperate with China to solve the crisis of North Korea. So we can understand that the US-ROK alliance is not like US-Japan alliance becoming so closing. However, the U.S., Japan and ROK share the same political system and value, so the alliances could keep going. They can’t imagine the collapse of the alliances. All in all, the US-Japan and US-ROK alliance will be indeed affected by the China Rising, however, the alliances will not collapse in the short run.