An International Game of Risk: Troop Placement and Major Power Competition

Abstract

What strategies are behind major powers’ decisions to deploy forces abroad? We argue that major powers use noninvasion troop deployments to create, consolidate, and expand their spheres of influence around the world, while at the same time trying to prevent their major power rivals from doing the same. This results in an action-reaction process, in which each additional major power troop placement happens as a strategic response to recent and anticipated placements by others. This theoretical framework leads us to expect temporal and regional clustering in troop deployments by allied and rival major powers. We test our expectations using data on troop deployments and a local structure graph model, a network estimator that allows for modeling each troop placement as a function of other deployments, weighted by ideological similarity. Our results provide evidence for our hypotheses.