Ensuring military access to the territory of allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific in the event of a future conflict with China is a critical concern for U.S. policymakers. The physical and political geography of the region sharply limits U.S. options to such an extent that some allied and partner decisions to provide or refuse access could determine the outcome of a conflict. A clearer understanding of how and why U.S. allies and partners are likely to make conflict-phase access decisions, and what U.S. policymakers can do to affect the decisions ahead of time, is therefore essential. In this report, the authors examine how U.S. allies and partners make conflict-phase access decisions and how the United States and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) might be able to influence decisions in advance. The authors developed a framework for assessing such decisionmaking, then applied it to five specific allies and partners in the region (Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, and India) to assess their strategic outlooks, internal politics, and economic incentives and to identify the peacetime policy levers that are most promising for affecting the states' decisionmaking.

Over the past decade, China has upended the world of development assistance, rapidly becoming the world's largest bilateral lender by channeling large sums of money into the developing world. As China's economic engagement in the developing world has grown, so too have U.S. and allied concerns that China is leveraging development assistance to assert Chinese influence, weaken the United States' relative position, and achieve Beijing's broader national security interests. In this report, the authors conduct a net assessment of U.S. and Chinese development assistance and cooperation. The authors describe each country's differing approaches to economic engagement with developing countries and conduct a data-driven comparison to identify strategic asymmetries that might present opportunities for the United States to better compete with China for relationships and influence in the developing world. The assessment reveals that Chinese economic engagement in the developing world should not be conceptualized as aid or assistance; this mischaracterization has potentially led to an overreliance on U.S. development tools as a primary response. Moreover, despite evidence of the short-term benefits that China might gain from its development financing, it is not clear whether these benefits are sustainable or effective over the long term when compared with the U.S. approach. Nevertheless, China's efforts — its heavy emphasis on energy and infrastructure projects, its approach to working through elite actors in developing countries, and its willing embrace of greater risk and reduced transparency — create challenges and opportunities for the United States as it looks to compete with China in the developing world.