This thesis examines how the United States reacted to changes in its external environment in the Asia Pacific after the Cold War; in particular, this paper examines the creation of the security trilaterals in what had been a traditionally bilateral alliance system and seeks to explain this through Washington’s complex relationship with the other great power in the region, China. American policy toward China has been marked by its policy complexity, in the sense that the US has seen China both as an important trade partner and a potential peer competitor. While many scholars have covered both alliance theory and US approaches toward China, this thesis seeks to explore both together, seeking to put American strategy in the region writ-large within an overarching neoclassical realist (NCR) framework. As a result, this thesis prioritizes power and the structure of the international system, while also maintaining that external variables alone are insufficient to explain the complex behavior exhibited by the United States at this time. It therefore draws from domestic variables introduced Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), and examines them through the NCR conceptions of ‘threat assessment’. This thesis identifies four intervening variables as crucial to understanding the evolution of US policy in the region from 1993 to 2015. These include policy-coalitions of foreign policy elites (FPEs), their perception of the structure of the international system, the domestic political conditions in which they labored, economic inter-dependency to China, and threat-assessment debates. Applying those five to the independent variable of China’s rise, this thesis argues that American foreign policy elites formed into two broad policy coalitions, who could not agree on whether to balance or to accommodate China’s rise. The quasi-nature of the trilateral, the failed attempt at a quadrilateral, and the off-and-on again nature of US-Japan-Australia alliance dynamics indicate that foreign policy elites inside all three states continue to debate China’s threat-assessmentstatus. Therefore, this thesis finds that at heart, hedging is the product of domestic variables, the inability of policy coalitions to triumph over their opposites.

Using the US-Japan alliance as its institutional setting and the political conflict over the relocation of Marines Air Base Futenma from Ginowan City to Nago, Okinawa as its case study, this research seeks to examine how alliances are discursively reproduced by analysing – through interviews, public speeches, and government publications – how they are publicly framed and deliberated not only by ‘elite’ actors (e.g. those in the US and Japanese governments) who seek to maintain the US-Japan alliance in its current form, but also by those within Okinawan local government and civil society who contest the alliance’s sustainability. This research sits in contrast to the prevailing arguments in the existing literature on alliance persistence, which tend to have a top-down focus and privilege the cooperative discourses of elite actors with direct access to the inner-workings of the alliance over the lived experience of ‘everyday’ actors excluded from the central policymaking process. Furthermore, these arguments tend to ignore the possibility of internal divisions amongst these 'elite' and 'everyday' actors, representing any debates within an alliance as taking place between the central governments of the member states rather than exploring the many divergences of opinion that exist within their central political parties, military bureaucracies, civil societies, and other groups concerned. By identifying a wide variety in the sites of discourse production both inside and outside of this institutionalised alliance, this research helps to bridge the disconnect between top-down and bottom-up analyses of alliance persistence, illustrate the processes by which discourses from seemingly irreconcilable sources may actually interact, influence, and shape each other in the realm of security policymaking, and broaden the conversation from one focused on 'persistence' to include an understanding of how an alliance is actively reproduced through discourse.

By the late 1930s, it became clear to informed Americans that the international system in East Asia had failed. The outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937 demonstrated that the current system could no longer provide stability in the region. Four years later, Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor ended American neutrality and united the regional conflict with the World War. Even as war raged, Japanese aggression raised questions for the future. If Imperial Japan, the most powerful country in Asia, were defeated, what might replace its regional dominance? What would become of its colonies? What had caused Japanese militarism, and how could its resurgence be prevented? If America were to emerge from the war powerful enough to reshape global politics, what future for Japan would best serve American interests? The story of how these questions were answered and why a particular set of responses became American policy is the subject of this dissertation. This work provides an account of the post-war planning process and the deliberative period which shaped American policy towards Japan after surrender in 1945. It will look at how these questions came to be answered, both in terms of the formulation of actual policies implemented after the war and the inputs and environment in which responses developed. Much has been written on the outcome of these choices, there have been many histories of the postwar occupation of Japan and postwar US-Japan relations. But very little attention has been given to where the eventual policy came from. By bringing the aims and intentions of the planners to light, this work provides a new perspective on the policy that the United States imposed on Japan during the occupation period and after.