Abstract
The election of Donald Trump as U.S. President augured a contraction of the country’s vast network of overseas military bases and forward-deployed troops. Yet, four years of Trump failed to change much: U.S. troops largely remained where they were. The question that this chapter poses, and that the book seeks to answer, is: why is it so difficult for a great power or a hegemon, such as the United States, to scale back its overseas military presence? I propose a theory of great-power persistence, which holds that the murkiness of the anarchic international system combines with specific psychological inclinations of individuals to produce “better-safe-than-sorry” policies. In the United States, troop deployment decisions are powerfully influenced by the broader foreign-policy community, whose members tend to be particularly sensitive to the possibility that adverse international events can set off harmful chain reactions, or tip over a row of “dominoes.” Preferring the status quo over any uncertain alternative, they want their country to continue to maximize its influence abroad in order to control and forestall potentially unruly events.
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Jakobsen, J. (2022). Introduction. In: The Geopolitics of U.S. Overseas Troops and Withdrawal. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94488-9_1
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