Anticipating Allies’ Responses to U.S. Retrenchment: Lessons from Limited Military Withdrawals During the Cold War

The Trump administration has signaled the possibility of retrenchment (including through the reduction of U.S. military forces deployed on allies’ territory), but evaluating whether it serves U.S. interests involves considering a variety of effects. RAND researchers analyzed one aspect of this broader calculation: how retrenchment affects the behaviors of U.S. allies. To do so, they studied historical cases of U.S. retrenchment from West Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s.