Alliance Politics and Missile Defense: Explaining US Missile Defense Deployments to Poland and the Republic of Korea

The relevant literature on missile defense is limited in that it primarily consists of policy-oriented prescriptive studies that support or oppose the deployment of missile defense in a host country. To address this deficiency, the current research compares two controversial cases of US missile defense deployment in Poland and the Republic of Korea. A theoretical framework is developed based on the alliance security dilemma to explain why certain allies accept US missile defense. The framework is used to evaluate two key aspects of missile defense deployment: whether a missile defense target is a shared adversary and the degree of reliance on the alliance. These variables are utilized as measures of entrapment and abandonment fears to explain why allies accept US missile defense systems.