Revisiting US Economic Statecraft: Three Essays on Nuclear Reversal, Anti-American Political Violence, and Social Policies in Target States

Abstract

This dissertation investigates whether and how U.S. economic statecraft influence policies and politics of targeted countries. Chapter 1 raises research questions about the role of U.S. economic statecraft in policies of targeted countries. The chapter summarizes my argument and empirical findings. Chapter 2 analyzes whether and to what extent U.S. economic statecraft extracts nuclear reversal commitments from target countries that have ever explored and pursued a nuclear weapons development. Using updated data on nuclear proliferation between 1970 and 2004, this study finds that U.S. economic sanctions with international organizations' involvement and U.S. foreign aid are likely to extract a suboptimal concession from a target country-reversing nuclear weapons development but keeping nuclear latent capacity. In Chapter 3, I examines how U.S. aid inadvertently produces political violence against Americans in a recipient country. I find that radical-opposition groups in a autocratic recipient state exercise violent attacks against Americans when U.S. assistance is used for authoritarian incumbents' political survival and political repression. But, autocracies have fewer incidence of anti-American violence when they are bounded to pseudo-democratic institutions. Chapter 4 investigates the role of U.S. sanction duration in affecting social policies of authoritarian countries. I argue that U.S. sanctions reduce autocrats' resources to buy off political support from ruling elite groups and so force them to reallocate government spending in such a way that favor the ruling coalition groups. So, autocratic leaders facing longer U.S. sanctions are likely to cut their spending on public goods and services. The empirical finding shows that authoritarian leaders under nominal democratic institutions, however, reduce their expenditure on public goods to much lesser degree than autocrats without such a institutions. I also find that autocrats under such institutions decrease government expenditure on social security/protection.