Do Foreign Military Deployments Provide Assurance? Unpacking the Micro-Mechanisms of Burden Sharing in Alliances.

This article investigates how U.S. foreign military deployments affect the defense policies and threat perceptions of host states, focusing on micro-level citizen attitudes in NATO countries. Through two survey experiments—one on hypothetical U.S. troop and nuclear withdrawals in Germany, and another on potential deployments in the Czech Republic—the study finds little evidence that such deployments provide citizens with a sense of security (assurance). Instead, withdrawals in Germany tend to increase the perceived need for national defense, while deployments in the Czech Republic have minimal impact on threat perceptions or defense attitudes. These findings challenge the conventional theory that U.S. military presence leads to allied free-riding by assuring security, suggesting a more complex relationship between deployments, threat perception, and defense policy preferences among host populations.