About the event: This project presents the concept of wartime access—decisions by states to let other states fight wars from inside their borders—and establishes its centrality to U.S. power projection. Although permissive wartime access has been a defining feature of the post-1945 world, states do not always let the United States military in. States sometimes restrict access sharply or deny it altogether. This project asks, why do states sometimes grant, sometimes restrict, and sometimes deny wartime access? It argues that the general trend of permission is attributable to states’ expectations that they will derive security benefits from the United States in exchange for granting access, and that the United States will protect them from retaliation by the target and help them manage any spillover from the war. While security factors tend to point states towards granting access, states tend to deny or heavily restrict access when the domestic political costs of open alignment with the United States are prohibitively high. The study develops a new dataset of 85 partner access decisions across eleven U.S.-led wars since 1945 and conducts paired comparisons of wartime access decisions within each war. The project concludes with a discussion of policy implications, with particular attention to wartime access in the context of a hypothetical U.S. effort to defend Taiwan.

About the speaker: Rachel Metz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University. Metz’s research and teaching focus on international security, security assistance and security cooperation, military effectiveness, nuclear strategy, and methods for studying military operations. Her book project examines the United States’ approach to building militaries in partner states, and her research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, H-Diplo, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, The National Interest, and The Washington Post, among other outlets.

Metz received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a member of the Security Studies Program. Her work has received funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation, Defense Security Cooperation University, and the Carnegie Corporation. Previously, Metz was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, an adjunct researcher for the RAND Corporation, and a Eurasia Group Fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. Metz is a research affiliate at MIT.

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