The U.S.-China Military and Defence Relationship during the First Obama Administration 2009-2013: Deteriorating Military Relations in the Asia Pacific, Washington’s Strategic and Military Responses and Security Dilemma Explanations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis applies the Security Dilemma concept to explain the deterioration in U.S.-China military and defence relations in the Asia Pacific region between 2009 and 2013. It builds upon the existing empirical base that has used the security dilemma to explain contemporary U.S-China security relations. The thesis concludes that this condition has in important ways influenced Washington’s strategic calculations and military responses vis-à-vis China, which in turn perceptibly worsened U.S.-China military and defence relations. The central contribution of this thesis is a much needed addition to the existing scholarly understanding of the presence of the security dilemma in Washington’s strategic thinking and military policy formulation vis-à-vis Beijing. It also proffers a compelling case for the continued relevance of this concept to elucidate contemporary U.S.-China security relations. The thesis develops a robust theoretical framework of analysis to validate the existence of a genuine U.S.-China security dilemma. The case study chapters apply this framework to highlight and explain incidences of Washington’s misunderstandings of Beijing’s strategic intentions, caused by misinterpretations and misperceptions - worsening U.S-China military and defence relations. The case studies also address several conceptual and analytical gaps in the existing literature that have used the security dilemma concept to explain contemporary U.S.-China security relations: the importance being able to clearly distinguish between states’ military capabilities and intentions; a more integrative approach in the application of the security dilemma to view military domains; elaborating on some of the issues related to the ‘ambiguity of weapons’ in IR and worsening security dilemma dynamics; and extending the under-theorised discourse related to the U.S.-China ‘asymmetric’ military balance of power in the Asia Pacific. While the primary purpose of this thesis is to extend the existing empirical literature, it also generates several conclusions and implications for security dilemma theorising itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".