Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation 9781503628571

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Following the Leader

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F OLLOW I N G TH E L EA DER International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation

Raymond C. Kuo

stanford universit y press Stanford, California

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Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kuo, Raymond C. (Raymond Cheng), author. Title: Following the leader : international order, alliance strategies, and emulation / Raymond C. Kuo. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2020048021 (print) | lccn 2020048022 (ebook) | i sb n 9781503628434 (cloth) | isbn 9781503628571 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Alliances. | International relations. | Alliances—Case studies. | World politics. Classification: lcc jz1314 .k865 2021 (print) | lcc j z 1314 (ebook) | d dc 355/.031—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048021 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048022

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Cover design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Newgen in 10/13.5 Adobe Garamond Pro

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For my dad

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Transhistorical Patterns in Alliance Strategy

1

2 The Theory of Strategic Alliance Diffusion

21

3 The Diffusion of Alliance Strategy: Systemic Patterns and Evidence

38

4 Great Powers and Strategic Constraints: The Bismarckian Era, 1873–1890

68

5 Cold War Credibility: NATO, SEATO, and CENTO, 1949–1965

91

6 Diffusion to the Periphery: Security Cooperation in Southern Africa, 1992–2004

118

7 The Dominant Strategy and Alliance Failure

134

8 The Dominant Alliance Strategy: Policy Implications and Theoretical Extensions

152

Appendix Notes

165

177

Bibliography Index

191

205

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Acknowledgments

g e o rg e l aw s o n , o n e o f m y professors at the London School of Economics, once said that good research has a high ratio of thought to writing. In that same vein, I hope that these brief words of thanks convey the depth of my gratitude to everyone who supported and helped me bring this book to fruition. To John Ikenberry: Thank you for being a tireless supporter of this project. I could always rely on your encouragement and enthusiasm, even when I harbored deep doubts myself. To my scholarly mentors: I am truly lucky to have benefited from your guidance. Andrew Moravcsik and Jacob Shapiro, thank you for pushing, for not letting complacency or superficial satisfaction set in when deeper thought and greater effort could be accomplished instead. Michaela Mattes and Paul Poast, your professional and personal advice made this book immeasurably stronger and myself a better political scientist. To Mark Crescenzi, Keren Yarhi-Milo, Ashley Leeds, and Jeremy Pressman: I could only have written this book by following the paths you set. And a special thanks to Robert Keohane: With one question, he unlocked this book’s puzzle. To my friends, inside and outside academia: Thank you for your guidance on this book and, even more importantly, for keeping me sane while writing it. I would particularly like to recognize the support of Brian Blankenship, Jaquilyn Waddell Boie, Luke Brown, Simon Collard-Wexler, Michael Hunzeker, Chris Kendall, Alexander Lanoszka, Danielle Lupton, Alexandre Su, and Meredith Wilf. To Stanford University Press: Thank you for shepherding this book so effectively and speedily. Alan Harvey, Caroline McKusick, and Jessica Ling, I have never had a

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better publishing experience than with you. Thank you to my incredible faculty and administrative colleagues at Fordham University, the University at Albany–SUNY, and Princeton University. Liu Bingwan, Zhu Lei, Mihalis Alisandratos, and Robert Gray provided outstanding research assistance. I am undeservedly lucky to be surrounded by strong, brilliant women. Thank you to my mom, for teaching me assertiveness; to my sister, who inspires me every day with her perseverance and patience; to Layla and Ariya, my two daughters, who are the joy of my life. And to Shanta, my incomparable wife. My life is unimaginable without you. Finally, this book is dedicated to my dad, Dr. Kuonan Kuo. While a doctorate in chemistry was a path to a better life, his first interests were always politics, history, and law. Had he had the freedom to pursue these intellectual passions, he would have made a great social scientist.

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Following the Leader

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1

Transhistorical Patterns in Alliance Strategy

1.1

Introduction

On June 17, 1950, the seven members of the Arab League signed the modern Middle East’s first collective security pact: the Treaty of Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation. The alliance was a failure. It never brought the Arab militaries together into an effective, combined force. It struggled to deter, let alone combat, threats. Israel decisively defeated its members in 1967, then again during the War of Attrition and the October War. Even worse, Egypt and then Jordan signed separate peace treaties with Jerusalem despite threats of alliance expulsion. The pact did little to temper the Arab Cold War, and, indeed, members regularly coerced or even attacked one another, as with the 1990 Iraqi conquest of Kuwait and opposing Saudi and Egyptian interventions during the North Yemen Civil War. In many ways, this treaty was designed to fail. Its strategy was wholly unsuited to its members. Composed of small and weak countries, none had advanced military capabilities, modern and diversified economies, nor even significant diplomatic influence. The league could not consolidate its diverse forces and national commands, and, even before signing, members recognized that they lacked the political cohesion required for combined military planning and operations. Yet they directly emulated NATO’s design. Despite internecine conflict, the league founded an integrated command structure—the United Arab Command— modeled on NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Despite limited trade and economic ties, the treaty established an Economic Council to coordinate member industry and agriculture, much like Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty

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encourages. Most importantly, the pact copied NATO’s Article 5 defense guarantee, stating that signatories “consider any [act of ] armed aggression made against any one or more of them or their armed forces, to be directed against them all.” Despite wide differences in member characteristics, geostrategic threats, and economic conditions, both Western Europe and the Arab League pursued identical alliance strategies. We see this same pattern of strategic convergence on infertile ground across history. In 1833, two small Italian city-states signed a defense pact modeled after the Quadruple Alliance (1815), the preeminent pact of its time. Similarly, in 1864, Colombia and Ecuador concluded a defense partnership. Like the Quadruple and Italian alliances, it stipulated the exact number of naval forces each party would provide in a conflict. But neither had a functioning navy at signing. Indeed, Colombia had decommissioned its naval school and abolished the Ministry of the Navy almost forty years before. Prior to World War 1, nearly all alliances were secret. Since then, secret pacts form a negligible, at times nonexistent, part of the global alliance network. Interstate military alliances are central to international security. They deter conflict, aggregate power to challenge adversaries, underpin regional and global order, and foster security communities that create durable, peaceful relations among countries. These pacts have also spread wars across continents and dragged states into conflicts they would have rather avoided, generating new bloodshed. Given these stakes, nations have powerful incentives to get their alliances right. Overcommitting risks entrapment, but institutionalized coordination can offer more robust and durable cooperation. Limited treaties offer diplomatic flexibility, but raise the risk of abandonment by partners at critical and inopportune moments. To make effective pacts, countries adopt specific alliance strategies: Means-ends beliefs about the guarantees, political promises, and organizational features that best allow their partnerships to overcome cooperation problems and generate military security. States deterring threats publicly announce defensive obligations. Allies hoping to conquer neighbors spell out the division of spoils, cost-sharing formulas, and troop contributions. States facing domestic or international resistance to their security cooperation keep their pacts secret. Nations “mix and match” these features to address the specific threats, domestic constraints, and military capabilities they face. Given the range of these factors, states should carefully tailor their military partnerships. We expect wide variation in alliance strategy, organizational design, and military guarantees. This expectation is wrong. The examples above are not isolated coincidences. In any given year, 75 percent of states pursue the same alliance security strategy. They provide similar guarantees, create similar internal coordinating mechanisms, and use alliances to achieve similar foreign policy goals. Countries converge on a single, legitimate approach to create security through military pacts: a dominant alliance strategy

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or form. Across periods divided by major wars, this form varies sharply. In some, it features a realpolitik approach to military cooperation emphasizing fluid realignment and alliance abandonment. In others, it fosters integrative, cohesive, and institutionalized security communities. Within those periods, however, the dominant strategy’s prevalence locks in a single conception of legitimate and credible alliance cooperation. It thus constitutes an integral component of international order, defining broad swaths of diplomatic history, as well as structuring and constraining military policy, strategic alignment, and the likelihood of war for decades. This book asks: What causes the dominant alliance strategy? What spreads it? And what effects does its variation have on international security and order? Its answer is grounded in major war. As Ikenberry (2001) notes, a single great power emerges victorious from these global conflicts. Its decisive, comprehensive victory grants a windfall of power and authority. This new hegemon then creates a core alliance gathering other great but lesser powers to meet its most important security challenge in the postwar strategic environment. This central pact forms the nucleus of the dominant strategy. The leading state does not impose this form on secondary and peripheral states. Indeed, it actively avoids doing so. But such countries draw their own lessons from the new global leader. They elevate the core alliance as the standard of credible and legitimate military cooperation. Emulation—the diffusion of a single alliance strategy—proceeds according to two paths. Secondary countries—those allied to a core alliance member—follow a credibility diffusion process. Because their partners have a guarantee from the hegemon, these states worry about “relative reliability”: the rank or prioritization of their pact within their partner’s broader alliance portfolio. In essence, they ask: “What are the limits of my ally’s commitment, and how can I ensure my pact stands above or at least equal to its competing obligations?” They push partners to emulate the core alliance’s strategy and features in their own separate pacts. Peripheral countries—allied nations not connected to either core or secondary states—emulate to gain status benefits. Mimicking the central alliance strategy reinforces the sovereign status of these states, demonstrating that they abide by the outward markers of effective alliances and pursue foreign policy goals validated by the hegemon. In so doing, peripheral nations hope to bolster their internal and external legitimacy, raising their standing within the international system. In total, the dominant form subverts theoretical expectations. Instead of tailored pacts designed according to means-ends utility maximization, states ignore their individuated conditions and coalesce on a single alliance strategy. This chapter establishes the phenomenon of interest. Using the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset, section 1.3 demonstrates that most alliances converge on a single design. Few states—and none of the great powers—defy

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this dominant alliance strategy in their formal military partnerships. Existing scholarship provides little analytical traction over the dominant form’s existence and variation, although section 1.4 outlines two possible explanations. If enough states face the same security challenges, these common threats could produce institutional isomorphism. Alternatively, hegemons could impose their preferred designs. Substantial empirical and theoretical problems confront both approaches. Consequently, the following chapter will introduce a new theory drawing upon network analysis and social theories of rank and status to explain the book’s puzzle, the dominant alliance strategy. Finally, section 1.5 will outline how the book is organized. Far more structure emerges from major wars than we suspect. Security regimes are not driven solely by hegemonic or great power actions but also by decisions from multiple strata in the interstate system. These decisions, moreover, follow their own, separate logics, with states responding to a mix of power, credibility, and status incentives depending on their network position. A complex, interactive process generates more uniform security behavior and international order than previously understood.

1.2

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Alliance Security Strategies

This project defines alliances as: “Written agreements, signed by official representatives of at least two independent states, that include promises to aid a partner in the event of military conflict, to remain neutral in the event of conflict, to refrain from military conflict with one another, or to consult/cooperate in the event of international crises that create a potential for military conflict.” Within this definition, states can choose from a wide variety of alliance design features and functional roles to facilitate cooperation, account for individual member vulnerabilities or liabilities, settle intra-allied disagreements, and more effectively deter threats. Together, these design choices create an alliance security strategy: A means-ends mapping or belief about how particular military guarantees, organizational features, and political commitments (i.e., means) can be applied in alliances (i.e., ways) to allow cooperation, bolster cohesion, and, ultimately, generate security (i.e., ends). The literature on alliances has grappled with many of these design elements, grouped into three broad categories: alliances’ functional roles or purposes, their management, and their cohesion. Prior studies generally adopt a functionalistrationalist approach: States select particular design features because they believe they will effectively resolve specific cooperation problems. For example, with respect to the functional purposes of alliances, defensive realists expect most countries to form defensive military agreements targeting specific threats. Weitsman (2004)’s seminal alliance typology argues that high external threats prompt states to have clearly defined military obligations and conditions for activation. By contrast, Benson (2012)

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and Kim (2011) argue that entrapment fears spur partners to adopt conditional or ambiguous security guarantees, the better for a state to constrain adventurous or risk-taking behavior by an ally. Pacts should therefore include clear limits on the casus foederis (i.e., events triggering the military commitment); be very little thinly institutionalized, if at all; and primarily commit states to mutual consultation and possibly defense. Abandonment should also be quite common. Although sharing many predictions with their defensive counterparts, offensive realists might expect somewhat more offensive and neutrality pacts, particularly as rising powers attempt to establish regional or even global hegemony. To seize strategic surprise, these pacts may be secret. To address distributive conflicts among partners, these alliances may agree to specific divisions of spoils and/or conquered territory in advance. In either case, both forms of realism anticipate a realpolitik approach to alliance strategy. As threats and capabilities increase, states create sharply delimited alliances to either defend or advance specific national interests, as well as fluidly rebalance against emerging adversaries (including former allies). Other studies follow Koremenos et al. (2001) in exploring how states use certain provisions to overcome management problems. Wallander and Keohane (1999) and Wallander (2000) claim that nonmilitary coordinating institutions, larger membership size, and longer expected duration are responses to high issue density and policy spillover. States establish coordinating mechanisms with broad delegated portfolios to develop comprehensive policies and avoid duplication of effort. Bearce et al. (2006) show how states use information-sharing provisions to mitigate crisis escalation, while Ikenberry (2001) and Schroeder (1976) highlight institutional binding as a way to manage imbalances of power and policy coordination among allies. Finally in this area, Bensahel (2007) and Moeller (2016) explore alliance warfighting performance, how elements like unified command structures, equipment interoperability, common doctrine, and joint training can act as force multipliers and contribute to battlefield success and military victory or defeat. Insofar as security partners face, say, high interdependence causing spillover or threats requiring significant multilateral coordination, they have a wide range of institutional strategies and options to address these concerns. The third category includes alliance strategies to handle cohesion and credibility problems. States can leverage reputations of resolve to facilitate alliance-making, while institutionalization can help countries that have previously reneged on their commitments find new partners. Gibler (1996) explores alliances that settle territorial disputes, which typically contain detailed provisions demarcating land to be exchanged and national borders. Lake (2009) and the small states literature examine asymmetric obligations in partnerships between powerful and peripheral countries. The latter can offer few security benefits to the former, and so instead

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exchange political acquiescence for military assistance. Even outside of patron-client relations, distributional conflicts over burden-sharing can prompt member-specific contributions. Under certain conditions, states may want to reduce their credibility and alliance cohesion. Domestic political costs and the strategic benefits of flexibility may lead states to limit institutionalization and other markers of commitment. Gibbs (1995) finds that those same incentives lead states to include secret provisions or enact completely hidden pacts. Democracies can rely on costly ratification procedures and securing the support of veto actors to demonstrate commitment, obviating institutionalization. The choice of alliance strategy has critical effects on interstate security and global stability. Ikenberry (2001) places institutionalized alliances at the heart of constitutional international orders. By contrast, fluid, “realist” pacts may spur and spread warfare, although others highlight the role of carefully worded guarantees to prevent this from happening. Military coordination should increase the likelihood of victory, while information-sharing provisions reduce intra-allied conflict and stabilize security relations. At the limit, certain alliance strategies can foster security communities where war is unthinkable between members. All these theories expect states to carefully tailor their pacts to specific threats, constraints, and capabilities. Partners should “mix and match” features to optimize the security their alliances produce. For example, a country facing a powerful threat but suffering reputational problems might ask for defensive commitments, coupled with explicit conditions on invocation, consultative fora, and clear decision-making procedures to address concerns about reliability. Those working with potentially untrustworthy counterparts to acquire territory may create offensive or neutrality pacts that commit partners to specific spheres of influence or areas of conquest in advance. Certain design choices might be more “popular” than others, but such “popularity” typically reflects a higher prevalence of underlying causes. For instance, advances in transportation and communications technology make it easier for alliances to establish management bodies. In addition, some features may correlate with others. Offensive realism might expect states to adopt a common set of designs in their alliance strategy: neutrality and offensive obligations, minimal institutionalization, perhaps also secrecy, provisions clearly dividing gains, and/or delineated contributions. But this would only apply to a select set of states embarking on aggressive expansion or regional hegemony. Their targets would likely adopt opposing features (e.g., defensive guarantees with robust institutionalization), preserving variation in partnership design. Given the range of individuated state challenges, threats, vulnerabilities, and capabilities, the literature would expect diversity in alliance security strategies.

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1.3

7

The Dominant Alliance Strategy

This expectation is wrong. Alliance characteristics move and disappear from the international security system as blocks. Design choices are strongly correlated, such that analyzing features individually misses broad, transhistorical patterns. Most importantly, rather than diversity, the majority of states and pacts ignore their individuated circumstances and converge on a unique, prevailing alliance strategy with a single set of cooperative functions, normative expectations, and organizational traits. This dominant alliance strategy or form is not a mixed bundle of what features happen to be widespread at a given time. These features conceptually—and as discussed in the next chapter—theoretically connected through normative beliefs about the optimal alliance strategy; that is, how states can best configure military cooperation to create security through these partnerships. The dominant strategy anchors and constrains alliance design choices, forming a standard of security cooperation that, this book argues, all states recognize and most states adopt. This dominant strategy alternates between two broad approaches. The first is a realpolitik approach marked by conditional commitments, limited institutionalization, narrow scope, and occasionally “predatory” features like the division of spoils. Alliances serve limited, short-term functions, with realignment and abandonment not merely expected but even valued to prevent concentrations of power and maintain stability. By contrast, the second is an integrative approach to security cooperation. Under this strategy, alliances define long-term, even indefinite, patterns of military relations among members. They feature coordinating mechanisms with wide policy scope, using tighter coordination—rather than realignment—to adapt the pact to emerging challenges. This coordination can be extensive, even intrusive, touching upon the states’ core security prerogatives, such as integrating military commands; delegating decision-making on troop training and deployment; harmonizing intra-allied production and financing of equipment; and encompassing broader economic, political, and social exchange. Under this approach, alliances constitute the institutional foundation for robust policy relationships and security communities. The dominant alliance form’s exact features vary by time period, but the Utrecht (1715–55), Bismarckian (1873–94), and Interwar (1919–38) eras followed the realpolitik approach. An integrative dominant strategy prevailed in the Concert (1815–66), Cold War (1946–91), and post–Cold War (1992+) periods. We can use the Alliance Treaty Observations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset to visualize and formalize these patterns from 1815–2003. The graphs below present the proportion of alliances featuring a particular characteristic. The alternation between realpolitik and integrative strategies is most pronounced with general coordinating bodies: alliance bodies

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with the delegated, decision-making authority to manage and coordinate intra-allied policy and military planning and operations, often through a permanently seconded bureaucracy. As seen in figure 1.1, 80.66 percent of alliances had a formal organization in the Concert period. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, no pacts possessed such bodies until 1907. After World War II, this feature’s prevalence suddenly spikes from 8.99 percent in 1946 to 90.64 percent in 1948 and is even higher today. Figure 1.1 displays proportions, so even as the number of states and alliances increase by orders of magnitude, few go against the dominant alliance strategy, whether realpolitik or integrative. This pattern applies to more than a dozen other institutional features. Integrative alliance strategies aim to create robust, overlapping intra-allied cooperation. Periods with an integrative dominant form should therefore see disproportionately higher levels of mediation/arbitration mechanisms to settle internal disputes, as well as cooperation on nonmilitary policy issues. Because of this, following Wallander and Keohane (1999), these pacts should often have more members and survive longer. Moreover, we should expect sharp drops in these features’ prevalence during realpolitik eras, which manage policy spillover and externalities differently. And that is what we see in figure 1.2. With alliance size, for example, most partnerships had a dozen members or more during the early 1800s and again after 1945. During the realpolitik eras, they had three on average. Cooperation on nonmilitary issues was similarly prevalent during eras with an integrative dominant form, but only 11.16 percent of alliances had them outside of those years. Provisions for internal mediation were far more common outside the Bismarckian and Interwar periods than within them. Similarly, collective security pacts—those alliances not directed at specific targets (at least nominally) but instead concerned with any disturbance of the peace—are much more frequent during the Concert period and following World War II. In addition, since 1947, a majority of alliances have not specified an end date. Members expect their pacts to structure their security relations indefinitely. Prior to that year, fewer than one percent of alliances made a similar pledge. In total, integrative features—coordinating organizations, mediation provisions, nonmilitary cooperation, etc.—prevailed and disappeared as a block, seemingly as part of a single, underlying alliance strategy defining the interstate security system. Similarly, the “predatory” features often found in realpolitik alliance strategies were disproportionately common during the Utrecht, Bismarckian, and Interwar years. Secrecy was common during the Utrecht period, and, as mentioned, nearly all pacts were covert during the Bismarckian era. However, this feature declined precipitously after World War I, as seen in figure 1.3. Asymmetric obligations (rather than mutual effort for collective security) and articles detailing the division of gains were similarly common in all three eras, with the Utrecht years in particular sanctioning territorial acquisition and changes to state boundaries. Moreover, as seen

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100%

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Percent of alliances

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f i g u re 1 . 1 . Frequency of Alliance Coordinating Bodies, 1815-2003. Source: ATOP.

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Average Alliance Size

Mediation Provisions 1815

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1945

1992

100% 30

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Percent

20

60% 50% 40% 30%

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Number of Members

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No Specified Threat Concert 1815

Cold War

post−Cold War

1945

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1992

100%

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Bismarckian Interwar Nonmilitary Cooperation 1871 1919

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f i g ure 1 . 2 . Alliance Features (1815–2003): Average Membership Size, Mediation Provisions, Non-Military Cooperation, and No Specified Threat. Bars on alliance size represent standard deviation. Vertical axes in the three time-series graphs track the proportion of alliance ties with that feature. Source: ATOP.

Secrecy 1815

1870

1914

1945

1992

100% 90% 80% 70%

Percent

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

18 08 18 14 18 20 18 26 18 32 18 38 18 44 18 50 18 56 18 62 18 68 18 74 18 80 18 86 18 92 18 98 19 04 19 10 19 16 19 22 19 28 19 34 19 40 19 46 19 52 19 58 19 64 19 70 19 76 19 82 19 88 19 94 20 00 20 06

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Asymmetric Obligations 1914

1945

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Percent

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

1 18 4 2 18 0 2 18 6 3 18 2 3 18 8 4 18 4 5 18 0 5 18 6 6 18 2 6 18 8 7 18 4 8 18 0 8 18 6 9 18 2 9 19 8 0 19 4 1 19 0 1 19 6 2 19 2 2 19 8 3 19 4 4 19 0 4 19 6 5 19 2 5 19 8 6 19 4 7 19 0 7 19 6 8 19 2 8 19 8 9 20 4 0 20 0 06

18

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1992

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Percent

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0% 1808 1818 1828 1838 1848 1858 1868 1878 1888 1898 1908 1918 1928 1938 1948 1958 1968 1978 1988 1998 2008 Year

f i g ure 1 . 3 . Alliance Features (1815–2003): Secrecy, Asymmetric Obligations, and Division of Gains. Source: ATOP. Secrecy graph originally printed in Kuo 2019.

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Neutrality Guarantee 1914

1870

1945

1992

100% 90% 80% 70%

Percent

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

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24

18

18

18

08

0%

Year 1815

Offensive Guarantee 1919

1871

1945

1992

100% 90% 80% 70%

Percent

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

08

98

20

19

78

68

88 19

19

58

19

48

19

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28 19

08

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19

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18

78

18

68

18

58

18

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18

28

38 18

18

18

18

18

08

0%

Year 1815

1870

Alliance Failure 1919

1946

1992

100% 90%

Percent of alliances that fall

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

32 18 40 18 48 18 56 18 64 18 72 18 80 18 88 18 96 19 04 19 12 19 20 19 28 19 36 19 44 19 52 19 60 20 68 19 76 19 84 19 92 20 00 20 08

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f i g ure 1 . 4. Alliance Features (1815–2003): Neutrality Guarantee, Offensive Guarantee, and Alliance Failure. Source: ATOP.

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ta b l e 1 . 1 . Summary of Alliance Features by Era Utrecht Concert Bismarckian Interwar Cold War Post–Cold War 1715–1755 1815–1866 1873–1894 1919–1938 1946–1991 1992+ Coordinating Body Nonmilitary Cooperation Large Membership Size Mediation/Arbitration No Specific Threat Indefinite Duration Neutrality Guarantee Territorial Acquisition Division of Spoils Asymmetric Obligations Alliance Failure Offensive Guarantee Secrecy Provision

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in figure 1.4, neutrality and offensive guarantees—typically used by partners to carve out separate spheres of influence and conquer territory, respectively—were found in just over half of alliances from 1871–1939. Notably, no pacts included a neutrality commitment prior to 1856, and only 1.46 percent have featured such a commitment after World War II. Finally, realpolitik strategies emphasize fluid rebalancing. Unsurprisingly, alliance failure and abandonment regularly occurred in periods following that dominant form, while only 3.89 percent of alliances collapsed outside of such periods. These and additional patterns are summarized in table 1.1, which marks whether an alliance feature disproportionately appears in a particular period. From the preceding analysis, we can make several claims about the dominant alliance form. First, to reiterate, it broadly alternates between a realpolitik approach and an integrative one. Military pacts during the Utrecht, Bismarckian, and Interwar periods generally had narrower and shallower provisions. They organized military—and only military— expectations among small groups of states, typically through individuated obligations and contributions. Pacts were loose, almost informal arrangements, possessing few management or coordination mechanisms. Alliance failure and abrogation was also significantly more likely during these years. Finally, the institutional features suggest a more “predatory” approach to foreign strategy, with secrecy, neutrality, territorial acquisition, and the division of spoils featured prominently in treaties. By contrast, an integrative dominant alliance strategy characterizes the Concert period and post–World War II global system. Alliances possessed broader and deeper features, deliberately incorporating diplomatic, political, economic, and even social

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coordination into their military discussions. NATO, for example, called for divisions of labor in military production as well as cooperation on democratic governance and development. The Rio Pact established permanent committees on human rights, international law, and economic development, ranging well beyond traditional defense concerns. Membership is significantly larger than during the realpolitik eras, and pacts committed their members to multiple, overlapping obligations through formal, robust deliberative mechanisms. Overall, the dominant alliance strategy during these years pursued a “stabilizing” or “institutional adaptation” approach to foreign strategy, managing threats, externalities, and spillover through increased coordination. We see much less alliance defection. Second, major wars clearly play a critical role in destroying the previous dominant form and fostering a new one. They demarcate sharp disjunctures in the prevalence of alliance obligations, producing noticeable “peaks” and “valleys” in the graphs. Integrative dominant strategies suddenly shift to realpolitik ones, and vice versa, around these conflicts. The winners often create wartime networks that carry into the peace, while the losers see their partnerships shattered. Consequently, any theory of the dominant strategy must account for these wars. Third, within the periods initiated and bracketed by major wars, the sheer prevalence of the dominant form’s features is striking. Most countries converge on their period’s prevailing alliance strategy. Just as important, very few adopt alternative designs. As mentioned, these strategies are beliefs connecting institutional means to security ends through alliances. Given the prevalence and pervasiveness of the dominant strategy despite geographic and historical variation, as well as the steadily increasing number of states, it is unlikely that this form is the product of “rational” means-ends calculation. Instead, judged by its systemic effects on alliance design, this strategy approaches an injunctive norm, attaining a “unique conceivability” that effective alliances must look and behave a certain way. We might ask, for example, why Bismarckian and Interwar alliances did not use institutional binding, costly signaling, organizational sunk costs, or other mechanisms to improve reliability, when so many pacts during these years failed and states repeatedly suffered abandonment. Why rely instead on continual realignment, sometimes to partners that had just reneged? Schroeder offers a clue, writing: “Alliance flexibility of this sort was not merely considered normal, so that statesmen, when concluding alliances, regularly tried to calculate at what point their ally was likely to defect, but was even considered to a degree necessary, as one means of maintaining an overall balance.” Indeed, the Utrecht treaties explicitly aimed “to settle and establish the peace and tranquility of Christendom by an equal balance of power (which is the best and most solid foundation of a mutual friendship, and of a concord which will be lasting on all sides).” Of course, the Arab League and NATO

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members aimed at similar objectives, seeking in the latter’s case to “reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.” Yet they approach these goals through markedly different alliance strategies. The previous graphs and analysis suggest a social process drives states toward institutional isomorphism and strategic emulation in their military pacts within periods, but divergence across them. Finally, the dominant alliance strategy is intimately connected to questions of international order, specifically on security. Ikenberry defines order as the “governing” arrangements among states: “The focus is on the explicit principles, rules, and institutions that define the core relationships between the states that are party to the order. This limits the concept of order to settled arrangements between states that define their relationship to each other and mutual expectations about their ongoing interaction.” Convergence on a single alliance strategy constitutes an integral part of this order, as all states can evaluate military relations against a common standard, even if they depart from the dominant form. This produces not only common expectations over security behavior, but even beliefs about what functions alliances serve and how they produce international stability. Further, as detailed in the next chapter, the dominant form emerges from major war and the hegemon’s subsequent alliance decisions, mirroring theories explaining the creation and character of international orders. Far more structure emerges from these conflicts than we have realized. But where those studies focus almost exclusively on great or rising powers, the dominant strategy’s prevalence suggests a different question: How does order spread? Something causes secondary and peripheral countries to ignore their individuated circumstances and to accept and enact a specific belief about how alliances can create security effectively. This belief potentially constrains the great powers, preventing them from adapting their pacts even as strategic conditions change. How can we explain the emergence, diffusion, and change of dominant alliance strategies?

1.4 Alternative Explanations for the Dominant Alliance Strategy The existing literature on alliances and international security offers two possible answers to this question: common threats and hegemonic imposition. It also provides a third approach, rational institutionalism, which serves as this book’s primary foil. Each rests on a functionalist approach to institutional design—that states select features based on means-ends calculations to maximize security generation and/or resolve problems preventing alliance cooperation. Unfortunately, they provide little analytical traction in explaining the dominant strategy. Both common threats and hegemonic imposition can explicitly incorporate a role for great power war. The former contends that alliance isomorphism stems from

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shared external security challenges across military pacts. Major wars could orient most countries against a common state or political threat, much as the Concert system gathered the European great powers against domestic democratic movements. Alliances adopt the same strategies to deal with the same challenges, producing a dominant form. We have strong reasons to question this approach. Holsti (1991) finds that the drivers of interstate conflict (1648–1989) have diversified over time. Whereas territorial disputes caused 34 percent of conflicts between 1648 and 1714, this issue appeared in only 15 percent during the Cold War. Issues like protecting citizens residing abroad or defending commercial interests have taken its place. If Holsti is correct, we should see increasing diversity in alliance strategy over time. But in fact, the dominant form is generally stable and prevalent within historical eras and sharply divergent across them. Even if most states faced a similar threat, they are likely to possess different internal constraints or vulnerabilities, leading to divergent preferences over alliance strategy. Even when broad shifts in members’ domestic characteristics occur, they do not lead to the expected patterns in pact design. The hierarchy and small states literatures, for example, expect asymmetric alliances. Decolonization and post–Cold War fragmentation have increased the number of small states, but asymmetry has actually declined. Similarly, the enhanced reliability of democracies might obviate organizational sunk costs. But military pacts have arguably increased their formalization and institutionalization following the second and third waves of democratization. A related, power-based approach draws from hegemonic stability theory. Keohane (1984) discusses the hegemon’s role in establishing and maintaining international economic regimes, while Ikenberry (2001) makes a similar argument with regard to security orders. Hegemons could produce a dominant form by imposing their preferred alliance strategy over much of the interstate system. But this approach also confronts multiple problems. Using ATOP, no state participates in more than 15.4 percent of alliances in any given period, making it unlikely that even the most powerful hegemons are directly proliferating the core alliance’s design. Furthermore, the dominant strategy gains similar prevalence regardless of system polarity. Indeed, we might expect multipolar systems especially to feature several dominant forms, as multiple powerful states impose their preferred designs on clients. But countries during the multipolar Concert and Bismarckian eras still converged on singular alliance strategies. Moreover, despite having some of the same great powers, regime types, and even in some cases leaders, those two periods produced different dominant forms, the integrative Congress system and Bismarckian realpolitik. In addition, peripheral states—those wholly unconnected to the great powers through alliance ties—also converge on the dominant strategy. The Arab League,

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the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and other regional security organizations deliberately excluded major countries from their local consolidation processes and security discussions. That they nevertheless adopt the same alliance features—without great power interest, despite significantly reduced capabilities, and often confronting different security challenges—only reinforces this book’s puzzle. Finally, to this point, the book has implicitly treated rational institutionalism as a theoretical foil. It now does so explicitly. Following Koremenos et al. (2001) and Koremenos (2016), states are functionalist utility maximizers, picking organizational features to solve specific cooperation problems and achieve goals. Formalization and reputation costs can overcome credibility deficits. Decision-making bodies can manage policy interdependence and spillover. Information sharing can constrain members and mitigate moral hazard, or the alliance can use conditional obligations and ambiguous promises to the same effect. This framework takes institutional design seriously, providing particularist explanations linking complex and diverse organizational features—flexibility, centralization, scope, control—to multiple system and state-level variables. Koremenos et al. (2001) includes sixteen separate conjectures on institutional design, while Koremenos (2016) and the studies above add even more. As such, rational institutionalism is constitutionally ill-suited to explain transhistorical uniformity, not variation. Even if major wars generate a widespread and common cooperation problem, countries should still adapt their alliance strategies to individual (e.g., bad reputations, regime type) and relational (e.g., asymmetric power, interdependence) conditions. We should still see some organizational variation, particularly as the number and diversity of states increase. Similarly, this approach has difficulty accounting for systemic “nonevents.” As noted, the Utrecht, Bismarckian, and Interwar systems saw frequent alliance defection. Major wars could have created pervasive credibility problems. But why did states fail to create institutional solutions—organizational sunk costs, arbitration mechanisms, management councils—to address widespread abrogation, as rational design would predict? Why did institutionalization not occur as a utility-maximizing response? Focused on diversity, institutionalism cannot provide a consistent or comprehensive explanation for the dominant strategy. But its logic remains inherently compelling. We expect states to tailor their strategies, especially given the complexity and interdependence of foreign policy. Indeed, rational institutionalism’s inability to explain the absence of diversity in alliance strategy animates the central puzzle. Consequently, institutionalism acts as this book’s foil. The following chapter’s theory claims that the dominant form emerges from a social process of legitimacy and standard setting. The empirical analysis will directly contrast this approach with institutionalism’s expectations regarding utility maximization and organizational tailoring.

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1.5 Plan of the Book

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The following chapter provides a social theory of strategic convergence. It draws upon network analysis, as well as sociological approaches to rank and status, to develop two causal mechanisms—credibility and status diffusion—to explain how the dominant form emerges from major wars and spreads throughout the interstate system, structuring alliance and security relations for decades. The chapter outlines testable hypotheses that distinguish these causal pathways from the alternative explanations and rational institutionalism. Chapters 3–7 evaluate those hypotheses using quantitative analysis, historical and archival case studies, and elite interviews. Chapter 3 uses statistical evidence to establish that states and alliances do indeed copy the core pact’s design. It presents seven separate tests verifying both mechanisms, as well as general implications from the theory. The central partnership drives the overall pattern of alliance strategy and design we see historically, with secondary and peripheral countries leading this process. With this general pattern set, the book uses qualitative analysis to test the theory’s microfoundations. A state’s position in the alliance network determines which mechanism it uses for emulation. Primary countries (i.e., core alliance members) and secondary ones worry about relative reliability and follow the credibility diffusion mechanism. Peripheral states emulate to seek status through the normative diffusion process. Chapters 4–6 examine each state type sequentially (i.e., primary, secondary, peripheral), ensuring that the theory holds at all network positions. The first case, in chapter 4, explores alliances between the three, late-nineteenth-century conservative empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1871), the newly declared German empire founded its central military pact with Austria-Hungary, the Dual Alliance (1879). It then used this body to launch further partnerships with Russia, creating a solid conservative political bloc in Europe and preventing Franco-Russian reconciliation. These three countries repeatedly concluded military agreements with one other, and the agreements repeatedly failed. Austria-Hungary—the weakest of these three great powers—refused to allow its partners to exceed the Dual Alliance’s terms in any subsequent pact. This case highlights how issues of credibility and standard-setting constrain even the most powerful states in the system. Next, chapter 5 examines NATO, an integrative core alliance, and its effect on two secondary, Cold War partnerships: the Manila Pact (aka the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization or SEATO, signed in 1954) and the Baghdad Pact (aka the Central Treaty Organization or CENTO, signed in 1955). The rising Soviet threat prompted the United States to establish a network of alliances containing Russia.

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While NATO anchored Europe, SEATO and CENTO managed Southeast Asia and the “northern tier” of Middle Eastern / Central Asian countries (stretching along the USSR’s southern border), respectively. During negotiations, regional SEATO and CENTO members consistently upheld NATO as the standard of political credibility, demanding that Washington upgrade its military and institutional commitments to match those found in the North Atlantic Alliance. The United States instead offered arms transfers, financial assistance, and training packages that in some cases exceeded what it provided to European partners. Nevertheless, secondary countries rejected these measures, doubting American commitment when Washington refused to close the institutional and strategic gap between NATO and their pacts. Chapter 6 presents a final case assessing peripheral countries in southern Africa. The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) established two security bodies after the Cold War: the Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security (OPDS or the Organ, launched in 1996) and the Mutual Defence Pact (2003). Unlike the two previous cases, status-seeking behavior drove emulation here. In particular, South Africa and Zimbabwe seized upon Western models of alliance strategy as they fought to legitimize their organizational leadership. Despite substantial differences in NATO and SADC’s military challenges, as well as SADC members’ limited ability to fund and staff their security organizations, these partners nevertheless settled upon a design emulating the North Atlantic Alliance. A final empirical chapter examines the dominant strategy’s effects. The theory implies that emulative partnerships should fail less often than nonemulative ones, as states converge on the dominant strategy for either credibility or status benefits. Chapter 7 returns to statistical modeling to find that dominant alliances are significantly less likely to collapse. The more pervasive the dominant form (whether integrative or realpolitik), the more stable and cohesive the interstate security system. This carries important policy implications, and the theory more generally contributes to several scholarly literatures. The concluding chapter examines how the dominant strategy and this book’s mechanisms enhance our understanding of international order. In particular, it discusses the challenges to adopting a more transactional approach to American foreign policy. The book’s transhistorical framework allows us to directly compare the effects of integrative versus realpolitik alliance strategies. The credibility diffusion mechanism especially demonstrates that transactional approaches are significantly more challenging to manage, less durable, and entail much wider network costs than proponents acknowledge. Finally, the book ends with a central policy recommendation. Asia is the locus of future strategic competition and global economic dynamism. A rising and more assertive China presents the United States with a complicated and multidimensional challenge. Yet the region possesses few institutions to manage this confrontation,

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and even fewer that can successfully coordinate military policy to escalating Chinese territorial claims and belligerence. Despite both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations reorienting America’s strategic focus toward Asia, local leaders still worry that they will be overshadowed by US interests in Europe and the Middle East. In short, they worry about relative reliability. The book’s theory suggests that only a completely emulative alliance—a true “NATO in Asia”—will demonstrate American prioritization of and commitment to this region.

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The Theory of Strategic Alliance Diffusion

2.1

Introduction

Major wars shatter the international system. The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II: In these totalizing conflicts, great powers throw the full range of their national resources into the fight. War spreads as states activate their alliances. The strain depletes large swaths of the globe’s economies, societies, and military might, and many states—including some great powers—collapse, are destroyed, or are conquered outright. But as Ikenberry (2001) notes, one country emerges victorious from these wars. Decisive, comprehensive victory and the consequent defeat of powerful rivals grant this new hegemon a windfall of power and authority. Into this breach, this leading state creates a core alliance, identifying and gathering other great but lesser powers to meet its most important foreign security challenge in the postwar strategic environment. The dominant strategy germinates from this pact. The leading state’s windfall of authority endows this partnership with unique prestige. Based on that, secondary and peripheral countries elevate this pact as the standard of credible and legitimate military cooperation between nations. Secondary states—those allied to a core alliance member—follow a credibility diffusion process. Because their partners have a guarantee from the hegemon, these countries must be concerned about “relative reliability”: The rank or prioritization of their pact within their partner’s broader alliance portfolio. In essence, they ask: “What are the limits of my ally’s commitment, and how can I ensure my pact stands above or at least equal to its competing obligations?” They push partners to emulate the core alliance’s

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strategy and features in their own separate pacts. This removes institutional discrepancies indicating that these partnerships are less valued than the central alliance. Peripheral countries—allied nations not connected to either core or secondary states—emulate to gain status benefits. Mimicking the central alliance strategy reinforces the sovereign status of these states, demonstrating that they abide by the outward markers of effective alliances and pursue foreign policy goals validated by the hegemon. In so doing, peripheral nations hope to bolster their internal and external legitimacy, raising their standing within the international system. In combination, the two mechanisms spread the core pact’s strategy and design at multiple strata of the interstate system. Together, they produce the dominant alliance form. Secondary and peripheral countries emulate the central pact not for the direct benefits that its design creates, as institutionalism would anticipate. They do not create general coordinating bodies to manage policy spillover, nor integrated commands to more effectively defeat enemies, nor even adopt secrecy to gain strategic surprise. They emulate instead for social and symbolic benefits, to determine partner reliability and seek status. The following section will discuss major war and the core alliance. The pact’s three central characteristics drive emulation: (1) It is the largest aggregation of power in the postwar system; (2) It contains the most credible and comprehensive military guarantee available; and (3) it embeds certain normative beliefs about international security, and these are endowed with the leading state’s prestige and authority. Which characteristic states seize upon for emulation depends on their position within the alliance network, which section 2.3 describes. Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 present the credibility and normative diffusion mechanisms in turn. Section 2.4 provides some theoretical clarifications distinguishing this emulation theory from the two alternative explanations presented in the previous chapter, hegemonic imposition and common threat. It then provides hypotheses that will be tested in the book’s empirical chapters. The final section concludes with a preliminary discussion of the theory’s contribution to scholarship and position in the literature.

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Major Wars and Core Alliances

Following Copeland (2001), this study defines major wars as those fought between the great powers, “at the highest level of intensity, and where there is a strong possibility that great powers may be eliminated as sovereign states.” The War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II: each of these was a global contest for hegemony. These wars activate most military pacts, as belligerents invoke casus foederis to bring maximum power to bear against their enemies. Alliances themselves may spread the conflict throughout the system. These wars rapidly deplete participants’ militaries and economies, prompting national mobilization efforts to continue the fighting. This leaves many

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participants exhausted by war’s end. Most are severely weakened, like Germany and France in World War I, having fed their troops, equipment, and industries to the contest. Other states and even great powers are destroyed outright, like the Ottoman Empire. And still others undergo fundamental changes in domestic politics and foreign policies, as Russia did. This systemic change “in the international distribution of power, the hierarchy of prestige, and the rules and rights embodied in the system” shatters the alliance network anchoring the previous international security order. While these rules are (sometimes frequently) violated, even a minimal structure serves to regularize security and military interactions in the prewar system. Alliances in particular play a key role in clarifying points of interstate conflict and the scope of any possible war. An alliance demarcates different states’ foreign policy priorities, how they want diplomacy and security affairs to be conducted in their region, and the type and conditionality of military response that violators of these declarations can expect. With this network gone, states face significant uncertainty about each other’s strategic priorities, their reactions to military activity, and how to interpret and evaluate the credibility of new alliance offers. But major wars are simultaneously clarifying. Such conflicts are driven by disagreement over relative power among the great states. Which country’s domestic political, economic, and social systems can better produce military and strategic might? Which one’s foreign, military, and alliance strategies best lead to victory? The major war decisively settles those questions, endowing its winner with a windfall of power. Britain after the War of Spanish Succession, Austria after the Napoleonic Wars, Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and the United States after World Wars I and II: These countries emerged from the crucible of conflict significantly stronger than the other great states. Critically, this victory also bestows legitimacy and prestige to this new hegemon’s political, economic, and military systems. Huntington (1991) discusses how major wars led to successive waves of democratization in their aftermath, as democratic systems proved to be more capable and resilient, as well as possessing deeper wells of public legitimacy. Gunitsky (2017) deepens this observation, describing how “hegemonic shocks” trigger emulation of the victor’s domestic political system. Similarly, Haas (2005) describes how differences in ideology generate great power conflict, as they present alternative visions of domestic state-society relations and foreign policy principles. Winning a major war is a clear demonstration of the (military) superiority of one side’s political and normative vision. Decisive and comprehensive victory grants the new leading state substantial international prestige. That prestige extends to a central strategic challenge facing the hegemon: identifying its largest, most important threat in the new postwar environment and developing an alliance strategy to successfully confront it. Failing to accomplish this task

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presages a return to great power war. This strategy is also critical to reestablishing international order by providing military guarantees to buttress peace settlements, as well as adding political “teeth” to international norms embodied by those agreements. The hegemon creates a core alliance to meet this task. It gathers some of the other great powers (often from its wartime network) under a specific alliance strategy to challenge, deter, and possibly defeat this new, central threat. The core alliance is the nucleus of the dominant alliance strategy. Three specific characteristics of this pact drive secondary countries’ concern about the rank or prioritization of their alliances within partners’ broader portfolios (i.e., credibility diffusion) and peripheral countries’ interest in emulation for its social benefits (i.e., status diffusion). First, the alliance is the largest aggregation of power within the interstate system. With both the hegemon and other great powers as members, alternative combinations of states cannot generate similar levels of military and coercive force. Second, the core pact represents the optimal alliance strategy to generate security in the postwar system. It is the most credible and comprehensive military guarantee available. The leading state with its windfall of power can devote the most resources of any country to security cooperation. Other members, as great powers themselves, have the most leverage with which to determine the credibility of promises and secure maximum concessions from the hegemon. With their lesser capabilities, all other states will not be able to obtain similarly robust or extensive military commitments from the leading state. The core military pact is thus the “gold standard” of credible alliance design in the interstate system. Finally, the core alliance embeds certain normative beliefs about international security, such as whether territorial conquest is desirable, if aggression is illegitimate and how it is defined, as well as an overall “vision” of geostrategic peace and security for which member states strive. Furthermore, the alliance’s strategy articulates how the hegemon believes these goals can best be achieved. As discussed in the previous chapter, this approach can range from integrative to realpolitik. Consequently, the partnership regularizes military and security relations among great power members by sanctioning or prohibiting certain foreign policy goals and/or rules of behavior. This can include the degree to which and the rules under which partners are expected to develop common policy stances, the ways in which potentially conflicting extraalliance goals are managed, and to what extent members should anticipate policy flexibility and even realignment by partners. In short, within the pact’s scope, these embedded norms delineate what the hegemon and its core alliance partners consider to be legitimate behavior and policy by members, enemies, and third parties. The leading state usually creates the core alliance soon after the major war’s end. But the timing is less important (for this study) than the pact’s alliance strategy, membership, and design. Further, the hegemon may form other partnerships prior

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to establishing the core pact. But so long as they do not include other great powers, these do not achieve the core alliance’s “gold standard” quality. Lower-tier nations are simply unable to press as effectively for demonstrations of credible commitment. Similarly, other countries—including the other great powers—may create pacts prior to the core alliance. The Arab League and the Western Union Defence Organization are prominent examples. But without the hegemon’s membership, these partnerships do not represent the maximal security guarantee within the system, nor are their foreign policy goals endowed with the victor’s halo of success. The core alliance alone possesses this combination of power, credibility, and prestige.

2.3

The Structure of Security Networks

States that are not part of the core alliance copy its strategy and features in their military pacts. This spreads the design throughout the interstate security networking, generating the dominant alliance form. Noncore states emulate this alliance strategy according to two distinct mechanisms depending on their position within the alliance network, which represents the arrangement of formal military partnerships that serve to connect states. Figure 2.1 presents an idealized version of this concept. (English letters indicate the type of state, while Greek letters indicate the class of alliance.) The core pact sits at its heart and is denoted by the Greek letter α. Its members (including the hegemon) are the A-type or “primary” countries in the alliance network, constituting the central military grouping. B-type or “secondary” countries participate in β-class alliances. Although they may not be the most powerful states in the international system, they occupy important geostrategic positions in military, political, and diplomatic networks. As such, they often receive alliance offers from the hegemon or other great powers. Although not members of the core pact, these countries are indirectly connected to it via A

A α

C γ

Leading State

C

β B

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f i g ure 2 . 1 . Stylized Alliance Network.

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separate partnerships to primary states. Japan is an archetypical B-type state: not a NATO member, but possessing its own US security guarantee. Finally, C-type countries are divorced from these α and β alliances. They are peripheral, lacking even indirect connections to the core partnership. These countries are often militarily weak, possessing little ability to influence global or regional systems, whether alone or in concert. They typically have fewer alliance offers or partners given their limited capabilities and face little foreign interest given their peripheral position. A state’s network position determines its incentives for emulating the core alliance’s design. For primary and secondary states, concerns about their partner’s reliability drive them to demand partnership forms institutionally similar to or “as good as” the central pact. They already possess a tangible marker of their importance within the interstate security network (i.e., an alliance with an A-type state), but they face a problem of “relative reliability.” To what extent does a state’s ally value their partnership, particularly if they are part of the core pact? When and under what conditions will allies renege on their commitments in favor of more important military ties? This is a problem of rank and prioritization. It prompts A-type states to guard their central status by preventing other military agreements from superseding or conflicting with the core pact’s terms and institutional features, which could displace that partnership from its foundational position in the alliance network. Similarly, B-type countries are connected to, but not fully a part of, the central security network. These states are particularly concerned that their A-type allies will abandon them in favor of the core alliance, if, for example, that pact’s enemy forces a tradeoff between the two alliances. As such, they push for institutional emulation to bolster the credibility of their β-class pacts and to reduce tangible indications of their partnership’s lower rank. Similarly, A-type states will prevent the hegemon from creating β-class alliances that exceed the core alliance’s provisions, obligations, and guarantees. This is a process of “credibility diffusion,” driven by the core pact’s quality as the most credible and extensive security guarantee available. By contrast, peripheral, C-type states emulate the core pact through a “normative diffusion” process, propelled by the core alliance’s prestige and symbolic value. In copying its design, a state engages in behavior that seeks to increase its international status, legitimate its foreign policy, and/or bolster internal sovereignty. Mimicking the leading state and its central alliance strategy demonstrates that C-type countries are also sovereign entities in the international system, abiding by the institutional markers of productive security cooperation and pursuing strategic goals validated by the hegemon and other great powers. As with Barnett and Wendt (1992)’s discussion of developing state approaches to militarization and military technology, winning is a marker of success and breeds its own followers.

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In sum, the dominant alliance strategy emerges and spreads as states copy the core partnership’s design in their own military pacts. Which mechanism they follow depends on their position in the alliance network. Although they each have distinct microfoundations and testable hypotheses, both the credibility and status diffusion mechanisms are founded on a common “motive for equality.” Primary and secondary states seek prioritization of their military pacts equivalent to what their partners give the system’s core alliance. Peripheral countries emulate to improve their sovereign standing. The following sections will elaborate each causal mechanism in turn, noting how a state’s alliance network position increases the relative importance of one emulation process versus the other.

2.3.1

The Credibility Diffusion Mechanism

All allied states face a problem of what I call “relative reliability.” Where does its alliance rank in its partner’s wider portfolio of security commitments? Secondary states should be especially concerned about this problem of prioritization. Their A-type partners are connected to the most powerful and prestigious alliance, giving them strong reasons to abandon their β-class partnerships if forced into a trade-off. Primary states are likely to devote more resources to the core pact, potentially failing to reserve sufficient forces for other commitments. In response, B-type states should ask for stronger commitments and greater devotion of resources. But this could lead to an escalating dynamic, whereby allies make increasing demands to ensure the primacy of their security relations within a partner’s portfolio, further exacerbating relative reliability. Without some common standard or hierarchy of credibility, each state would push for guarantees and commitments that supersede all of its ally’s other pacts. Although powerful states are generally less concerned about alliance credibility, they too may benefit from resolving this problem. Uncoordinated and escalating demands on limited resources by secondary states can quickly lead to overextension. Furthermore, states must worry about the implications for their own security of any signals their partners send to third parties. This fear of outside options could prevent states from forming even essential security relationships or scuttle existing ones. Political science has identified a wide variety of costly signals states use to demonstrate resolve, including audience costs (i.e., political penalties imposed by domestic constituencies), institutional sunk costs (i.e., investing in institution building or restricting policy flexibility through institutions), using secret communications, and even refraining from further escalation when escalating would provide political benefits. These theories focus on what we might call “local” or “dyadic” demonstrations of credibility. Signals are sent and received between two states, with no consideration of their impact on third parties.

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But interstate commitments exist in the shadow of other promises, particularly those made within the same issue area or implicating the same resources and capabilities. Relative reliability dominates in that zero-sum, trilateral framework between a promisor, a promisee/receiver, and a third party to which the promisor has made similar commitments. This form of credibility does not ask, Will you do what you say? Rather, this rank credibility asks: How much do you value our partnership versus other commitments you have made? If forced into a choice, will you pick me or them? What are the limits of your commitment, and how can I ensure my alliance stands above or at least equal to your competing obligations? In response, I contend that secondary states push for emulation of the core alliance’s strategy in their military pacts. In so doing, B-type states engage in “signal selection”: pursuing certain actions not for their direct benefits, but because they demonstrate a state’s resolve. The central pact’s strategy may be unsuited to a secondary state’s security challenges. It may even handicap alliance performance. But these countries emulate because the need for credible, socially validated signaling overrides the direct utility of the alliance’s features and commitments. The core alliance serves as a focal point around which secondary states can anchor their partnership strategies. It serves as the benchmark of military credibility against which these states evaluate their alliance’s relative reliability and a partner’s rank credibility. Secondary countries look to the central pact to perform this function for two reasons. First, it has “social proof ”: a clear, public demonstration of quality through the hegemon’s victory in war and current international leadership. According to this logic, the core pact is an effective—perhaps the optimal—alliance strategy in the postwar security environment. Its design signals the most credible commitment available. Consequently, B-type states emulate its features to demonstrate similar levels of reliability to their partners, likewise demanding emulation for the same reason. Second, the central pact’s commitments are the most extensive security guarantees available. Naturally, emulating such a guarantee is useful in its own right. But copying also enhances rank credibility. Among B-type states, obtaining a similar alliance strategy reassures countries that their security ties are approximately as credible and strong as those found among the great powers. This point is clearer and stronger in the inverse. If an A-type country offers a security guarantee different from that found in the core alliance, the recipient knows that this guarantee is less extensive, since the recipient lacks the material capabilities to extract a more comprehensive commitment, which the great powers in the α-class alliance are able to do. In addition, this offer is less rank credible, as the A-type country refuses to match the “gold standard” commitment found in the core pact. Even other outwardly costly signals like large transfers of financial assistance or military equipment may not mitigate this problem if they are not also endowed

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with the social and symbolic benefits of emulation. In short, B-type states consider discrepancies between the core alliance’s and their β-class partnership’s strategies as a negative signal of partner reliability. To be clear, this concern with strategic and institutional discrepancies holds regardless of whether the core alliance adopts an integrative or realpolitik approach to security. In the integrative case, secondary states will resist efforts by A-type partners to provide alternative alliance designs, even if these are arguably better tailored to the pact’s strategic challenges and conditions. The conditions under which allies institutionalize mark a clear difference between rational institutionalism and credibility diffusion. If following means-ends functionalism, B-type states should only select specific organizational features to resolve cooperation problems held in common with the core pact. If, by contrast, strategic and institutional discrepancies on their own drive credibility concerns, regardless of whether cooperation problems are shared across alliances, these relational anxieties would constitute evidence for the credibility diffusion mechanism. For realpolitik core alliances, their strategy forms an upper bound on military commitment. States can easily supersede the design. But doing so would sacrifice the credibility benefits of emulation. It would also undermine or reduce the ranking of all other partnerships in which the state participates. Consequently, secondary states push stronger allies not to surpass the core pact’s design. This last dynamic is an example of what I call “portfolio consistency.” Secondary states encourage partners to avoid adopting institutional features that would undercut the value and status of their own security ties. If this pressure is effective, then once a state establishes a pact emulating the core alliance, all its subsequent partnerships with lower-ranked countries will also copy that same design, resulting in a “consistent” portfolio of alliance designs. Portfolio consistency is a network effect. The credibility of any state’s commitment to any one alliance is a function of its participation in other, similarly designed pacts. The more alliances it is a member of and the more consistent its portfolio, the stronger are the social markers of a state’s resolve and credibility. If a state is embedded within multiple, overlapping dominant strategy alliances, it faces significant social pressure from multiple actors to maintain that form in subsequent partnerships. Moreover, this network effect is particularly clear with regard to alliance abandonment. A state may face only small political or reputational costs from reneging on a single partner under a unique alliance strategy. If, however, a state defects on a dominant form pact, members of its other alliances with similar designs should question this nation’s continuing reliability. If this country was willing to renege on a pact of equivalent rank and prioritization, how secure are its commitments to me? Granted, that state may now have more resources to devote to its other alliances. But

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that abandonment occurred at all could signify deeper problems in foreign policy strategy and capability. Consequently, “enforcement” of the dominant form is a matter of social weight and network constraint rather than the institutionalization of an individual pact. Credibility emulation occurs because of social recognition and proof. It is a firstorder belief about what constitutes effective alliance strategy, driven by the hegemon’s prestige. If that prestige erodes, emulation becomes a less informative marker of reliability. The leading state itself could turn away from the core pact, such that it no longer represents the most far-reaching and robust security guarantee. Were the United States, say, to abandon NATO, other countries with similarly designed and/or lower-ranked treaties should be concerned that Washington will defect on those commitments as well. The hegemon can blunder, costing it public perceptions of preeminent standing. Alternatively, challengers may be able to offer even better and more extensive guarantees, although this is less likely. Unless a challenger overtook the leading state in power (a situation often accompanied by major war), it is unlikely to possess the resources necessary to provide a stronger, more credible commitment to other great powers and strong secondary states. In addition, pulling major countries out of the core alliance to form an opposing pact will be difficult unless the challenger can provide solid guarantees of protection against retaliation by the leading state. Finally, the smaller and weaker the B-type state, the more it desires emulation. Relative reliability is less of a problem for more powerful countries, as they already possess significant military capabilities and therefore face fewer costs from partner defection. Weaker countries, however, suffer comparatively greater costs if their allies abandon them. In addition, those countries with a separate, noncore alliance with the leading state are perhaps especially concerned about this issue. They are demonstrably not the leading state’s top strategic priority, and the hegemon suffers the least from any alliance defection, given its commanding power position. Consequently, the theory would expect these countries to push especially hard for emulation. Overall, the core pact serves as the standard of alliance credibility and military commitment. Secondary states copy its activities, strategic goals, and purposive logic to resolve the relative reliability problem, providing their partners with an institutional demonstration of equal prioritization.

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Normative Emulation of the Core Alliance’s Design

C-type countries generally respond to a different set of incentives for emulation. Their peripheral status and limited military capabilities place them outside the security interests of the hegemon, primary states, and even some secondary countries.

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Their weakness makes them unattractive alliance partners, as they contribute little—if anything—to deterrence and warfighting operations. Indeed, they may even detract from such operations, embroiling partners in conflicts without providing offsetting benefits. More importantly, the small states literature details how these countries suffer from an “insecurity dilemma”: the inability to indigenously produce adequate military forces to deter or defeat foreign and especially domestic threats. These regimes lack internal and external legitimacy, threatening their sovereign participation in the international system. Questions of alliance reliability, though still important, are secondary to a more fundamental concern: How can such peripheral states bolster legitimacy and attract international attention and material support? How can they elevate their rank/status in a system over which they exert little, if any, influence? I argue that C-type states emulate the core alliance’s design not (necessarily) for instrumental purposes, but because it acts as a status symbol. Mimicking the central alliance strategy reinforces that these peripheral countries are sovereign entities, abiding by the institutional markers of productive security cooperation and pursuing strategic goals validated by the hegemon. Multiple studies have established that states seek status. Governments generally wish to be respected by their citizens, as well as by the leaders of other countries. Murray (2012) claims that states care as much about “social” survival as physical survival, and recognition and respect for their legitimacy by other countries is integral to this need. This echoes Veblen, who claims: “With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of . . . motives proper.” Indeed, social status and prestige are useful for states. Following socially approved behavior legitimates a regime’s policies and bolsters claims to sovereignty. This reduces external challenges to statehood. Acceptance by other states carries domestic political benefits as well. Ward (2017) highlights how secure international status increases a state’s “self-esteem” and enhances perceptions of domestic political authority. Conversely, inferior social status and a lack of respect are adverse conditions, and peripheral countries in particular use a variety of material and social means to increase their standing in response. At the limit, Renshon (2016) and Renshon (2017) describe how states will go to war to rectify dissatisfaction with their social position. Larson and Shevchenko (2003) and Larson and Shevchenko (2010) leverage Social Identity Theory to explain how states enhance their status by joining higher-tier groups, improving their relative standing, and/or redefining status indicators to bolster their position. Doing so requires upward comparison: Lower-status actors specifically look to more prominent and powerful ones as models, especially

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those at the highest rungs of the social ladder. They emulate their behaviors and qualities to increase social standing or others’ perception of their status. Adopting these markers is often an attempt to demonstrate modernity and avoid the “stigma of backwardness.” C-type states emulate the core alliance’s strategy because it enhances their status within the interstate system. The central pact is an iconic indicator of legitimate, sovereign statehood. With the leading state’s victory, this alliance is intimately connected to social perceptions of power and prestige. This makes it an ideal standard for normative and strategic aspiration, as it conveys hierarchical, social, and positional values. The core design separates and elevates a particular alliance strategy above alternatives (hierarchical). The core form gains strength from group validation (social), and it is positional in Veblen’s sense: Emulation is valuable because the highest-ranked actors follow this strategy. Locked out of alliances with primary and secondary states, peripheral countries create their own, adopting the partnership strategies of the highest-ranked nations. This can be done instrumentally. As discussed above, improved status generates a wide variety of benefits. C-type states therefore form emulative military pacts so that they too can obtain the legitimacy and sovereignty benefits gained from participating in a “high-tier” alliance. Alternatively, emulation can be intrinsic, with states acting out of a logic of appropriateness. Ikenberry and Kupchan (1990) note how countries are often socialized into policies consistent with the hegemon’s notion of international order. Rather than a deliberative search process matching present means to future goals, normative mimicry prompts peripheral states to adopt the core alliance’s strategy as the only “right” way to conduct interstate military cooperation. Normative diffusion flips the rationalist, means-ends logic. There, existing material conditions precede and create cooperation problems. Effective alliance strategy resolves these through tailored organizational features, conditions, and limitations. Here, by contrast, beliefs drive institutional design, which often precede material conditions. Indeed, peripheral states may form alliances to generate those very material conditions. For example, Wallander and Keohane (1999) contend that high interdependence prompts allies to create adaptable coordinating bodies with wide policy scope. However, interconnectedness could be seen as a marker of high social status. Peripheral countries therefore create military pacts with adaptable coordinating bodies to manufacture that interconnectedness. Note that this dynamic requires specific beliefs about what markers or organizations indicate social standing and prestige. The core alliance and its embedded norms provide that foundational impetus. Normative emulation, however, leads to strategic “misalignment.” We see this with credibility diffusion, but at least there, secondary states are evaluating their partners’ reliability. They want and expect allies to fulfill the alliance’s guarantees.

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Here, states may be less concerned with promise fulfillment and more with continued status enhancement. In a related argument, Gilady (2018) notes how great powers built large naval forces due to their intrinsic value. But “once large navies become a status symbol, actors may wish to procure a large navy in order to be perceived as a great power independent of its primary utility as an instrument of power projection.” Such status markers are coveted for their symbolic value or “secondary utility,” the degree to which simply having them denotes an actor’s social status or rank, as well as demonstrating that they are legitimate and trustworthy. But this process divorces alliance design from function. As Meyer and Rowan (1977) and Jetschke and Lenz (2013) highlight, states pursuing prestige emphasize the ceremonial elements of organizational procedure rather than implementing its cost-savings functions. They typically sacrifice efficiency, substituting in its place a “logic of confidence and good faith.” As misalignment increases, members will ignore or downplay problems to continue receiving status benefits. This is accomplished through limited oversight, goal ambiguity, the delegation of tasks to the organization (so principals can deny responsibility), simply ignoring problems (i.e., “looking the other way”), suppressing output metrics and data collection, and facesaving tactics that do not resolve the underlying issue, among other strategies. Overall, the ignoring or downplaying of problems diminishes alliance efficacy, leading to internal conflict and indecision. Misalignment therefore generates outwardly contradictory behavior. For example, lower-tier countries might create integrative security communities to handle what are in fact relatively tractable and limited challenges. They may adopt extensive coordinating and planning structures despite lacking the financial, manpower, and political resources to fund and operate those bodies, as well as implement their decisions. Normative emulation is therefore politically and perhaps financially costly for members. Allies reap only limited material rewards from coordination and possibly reduced military efficacy. In exchange, they gain symbolic benefits of social status and standing. Primary and secondary countries also engage in status-seeking behavior. However, peripheral countries are especially likely to emulate for normative and aspirational reasons. Alliances, this mechanism argues, are much like other “prestige goods”: Their value relies on social acclaim. The weakest and most isolated countries copy the most reputable military pact’s strategy to bolster their internal legitimacy and external standing.

2.4

Hypotheses on the Dominant Alliance Strategy

Taken together, the credibility and normative diffusion mechanisms spread the core pact’s form throughout the alliance network, creating the dominant alliance strategy. This theory generates several testable hypotheses that distinguish the two

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mechanisms from the alternative explanations presented in chapter 1. Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 have already identified many differences between this book’s theory and institutionalism. In the process of assessing the two alternative explanations, the empirical analysis will specifically highlight how states depart from rational design’s means-ends functionalism as well. Hegemonic imposition expects the leading state to actively proliferate the core alliance’s design, demanding other countries copy this strategy in their military pacts. However, under this book’s theory, the hegemon (inadvertently) creates a social and normative standard through its central partnership. It is secondary and peripheral countries’ desire to achieve equal credibility and status that drives the two emulation mechanisms. Indeed, in most cases, the hegemon has little reason to disseminate the core pact’s strategy. If it did so, it would extend uniform and maximal guarantees to all its military partners, raising costs and threatening overcommitment. This would also increase the risk of entrapment. Instead, the credibility diffusion mechanism expects secondary countries to push emulation. The theory also expects hegemons to have little interest in the strategy and design of γ-class alliances, given their peripheral network position. The theory also makes different empirical predictions from the common threat approach. If common threat is driving emulation, we should see members of different alliances making similar means-ends connections based on their mutual adversary. For example, both the Sino–North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty (1961) and the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance (1950) aimed at consolidating member military relations and resisting threats (especially American). The common threat approach would anticipate parallel discussion points and resolutions to such issues as the strength and disposition of US and proxy forces; what institutional configurations will best allow them to coordinate an evolving response to American power; and what military commitments they must provide given Washington’s guarantees to regional states. By contrast, this book’s theory emphasizes intra-allied credibility and the core alliance’s normative role. Concerns about partner reliability, not threat response, drive emulation under the credibility diffusion mechanism. The focus is internal: Members will ignore or downplay efforts to tailor the pact to specific external challenges, instead evaluating what an institutional feature says about their alliance’s relative reliability (i.e., whether a partner is willing to provide commitments matching those it provides to other states). Of course, internal credibility can be connected to deterrence against an external threat. But it need not be. Cesa (2010, chap. 3), discusses how Snyder’s conceptions of abandonment and entrapment make little sense when discussing offensive pacts, where states agree to attack a third party. If this third party is particularly weak, for example, the main consideration is not whether this country

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is a danger, but whether the parties will abide by the division of spoils. Similarly, Weitsman (2004) introduces the concept of a tethering alliance, where allies are each other’s principal threat. Here again, credibility against external challengers does not apply, with the focus instead on intra-allied policy coordination, moderation, and reliability. We can now develop clear, distinguishing hypotheses for the two causal mechanisms based on these clarifications. First, for credibility diffusion, states use the core pact’s design as a socially accepted focal point to evaluate the reliability of alliance offers. States will view security assurances that deviate from this standard as less credible. In addition, countries push for emulation of the central pact’s strategy as a demonstration of a partner’s commitment to and prioritization of their alliance, against other military agreements within the partner’s wider portfolio. Further, design decisions will be internally focused, as states evaluate deviation or fidelity to the core alliance’s features, rather than efficiently meeting the specific challenges posed by external threats. Also, when the core alliance pursues a realpolitik strategy of fluid realignment and limited institutionalization, secondary states will push core members to avoid exceeding these obligations and features in other partnerships. This leads to the following testable hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: States use the core pact and its design as a credible standard when designing their own security partnerships. Corollary 1.1: Concerns about one’s rank in a partner’s wider security portfolio (i.e., relative reliability) cause states to seek emulation of the core alliance’s design and question the reliability of alliances that do not emulate the core alliance’s design.

Second, for normative diffusion, emulating the core alliance’s strategy serves as a symbol of sovereign status and legitimacy for C-type states. Peripheral nations should copy its features through a logic of appropriateness, highlighting adherence to its embedded norms to legitimize their pacts’ strategies and their status as “good actors” within the international system. Members will ignore “mismatch” in the starting conditions of their partnership and the core alliance, focusing instead on emulation’s prestige and symbolic benefits. The approach is prospective—hoping to achieve specific status gains—rather than analytical—assessing whether the conditions necessary for a pact similar in design to the core alliance hold. We also expect to see significant evidence of mismatch. The more that partnership provisions and institutions are unsuited to a γ pact’s conditions, the more that members will ignore or explain away poor performance, persistent and deep disagreements over fundamental alliance goals, breakdowns in expected and mutually agreed coordination,

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and usurpation of delegated authority by members in order to maintain their partnership. Hypothesis 2: States reference the core alliance, its design, and its purposive logic as aspirational goals, symbolically important, or a uniquely appropriate and legitimate framework for military cooperation. Corollary 2.1: Members of γ-class alliances demonstrate misalignment practices and ignore incongruence between the core alliance’s founding conditions and approaches and those of their alliance.

Finally, diffusion is a process of social proof. The greater the dominant form’s prevalence in the system, the stronger the signal of credibility sent by emulation, as well as the stronger the normative pressure to adopt the “appropriate” alliance design. The credibility and symbolic benefits of emulation should be particularly attractive to weaker secondary and peripheral countries, who have fewer alliance and securitycreation options. In total, these points lead to a testable hypothesis regarding social prevalence and the dominant strategy: Hypothesis 3: The more prevalent the dominant form, the more likely it is that new alliances will emulate it. Corollary 3.1: Weaker and more peripheral states will disproportionately push for emulation of the core alliance’s design.

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Conclusion

These hypotheses will ground the quantitative and qualitative analysis in the book’s remaining chapters. In short, the dominant alliance strategy proliferates throughout the international system because secondary and peripheral countries elevate the core alliance as a standard of credible and legitimate military cooperation, copying its strategy and design in their own pacts. Moreover, deviating from this standard induces suspicion and undermines security coordination. For the credibility mechanism, secondary states will ask whether strategic and design discrepancies indicate that a partner will eventually renege on its commitments in favor of a more valued, higher-ranked alliance. For the normative mechanism, peripheral countries will be unable to gain status benefits if partners do not follow an alliance strategy validated by the hegemon and other states. In addition to the studies mentioned above, the two mechanisms contribute to the rich literature on strategic mimicry in International Relations, as well as

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explanations of institutional and normative diffusion. But perhaps their most important contribution is to the literature on security and order. The previous chapter discussed how the dominant alliance strategy is integral to international order, spreading a uniform approach to military cooperation throughout the state system. With their focus on secondary and peripheral countries, the two causal mechanisms suggest that order is a product of state decisions across multiple strata in the international system. These decisions, moreover, follow separate logics depending upon a country’s network position. Order therefore emerges from a more complex, interactive process than previously understood.

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3

The Diffusion of Alliance Strategy Systemic Patterns and Evidence

3.1

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Introduction

The book uses a two-pronged empirical approach to explain the dominant alliance strategy. This chapter provides macro-level evidence for the theory of core alliance diffusion. In effect, it answers whether the core pact systematically produces the dominant form, and whether the credibility and normative diffusion mechanisms hold across history and geography. This chapter demonstrates that the dominant strategy is not simply a coincidence or accident: It is an empirical regularity driven by social, and not functionalist, logic. The chapter presents seven statistical tests, grouped into three sets, on all alliances from 1815–2003. The first set asks whether emulation is actually occurring. Does the core alliance drive the design of other pacts? Do states engage in portfolio consistency such that, if they participate in a dominant pact, they continue emulating that design in future partnerships? Within this set, Test 1 finds that new alliances disproportionately adopt the core pact’s features. Test 2 uncovers evidence for portfolio consistency. The more a state participates in dominant pacts, the more likely its future alliances will continue emulating that design, even after controlling for factors such as military power, economic development, and democracy. The second set examines the two diffusion mechanisms directly. Under credibility diffusion, emulation signifies member credibility and commitment. In line with Mattes (2012), we might expect countries that recently defected from an alliance to be particularly interested in emulation and avoiding noncore forms, ameliorating concerns about their future reliability. Test 3 verifies this using five different measures of allied credibility.

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Tests 4 and 5 assess normative diffusion. Under that mechanism, states emulate to legitimize their alliance and military behavior. This leads to two testable implications. First, status-seeking states join international governmental organizations (IGOs) to similarly gain standing and prestige within the interstate system’s rules and regimes. We might therefore expect these IGO participants to be more likely to emulate the dominant strategy when they create alliances (Test 4). Further, these states should explicitly align their pacts with prevailing international norms and standards. During the Interwar period, for example, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania repeatedly declared that their Little Entente aligned with and even advanced great powers’ interests, as expressed in multiple post-WWI treaties and in the League of Nations. This came despite vehement opposition by France, Germany, and Russia to the alliance’s creation. “Saving provisions” declaring partnerships to be consistent with other international norms and institutions were crucial to this effort. Test 5 finds that dominant strategy alliances are disproportionately likely to include these statements. The third and final set of tests focuses on the social and symbolic functions of the core alliance. As a socially validated standard, the dominant strategy’s strength is a function of its prevalence within the interstate system. The more widespread the dominant form, the more likely emulation occurs in new pacts (Test 6), as states face increasing network pressure to match the core strategy. Test 7 focuses specifically on Corollary 3.1, that secondary and peripheral states drive the diffusion processes. The models there find that the less central a state is, the more likely it is to emulate the core strategy. Table 3.1 summarizes the contributions of these tests to the theory. Beginning the empirical strategy with quantitative analysis is important for several reasons. First, a careful explanation must account for the many different temporal, political, or military factors that could also produce such institutional isomorphism. This is particularly difficult since the dominant strategy manifests across broad swaths of history and geography. Statistical analysis allows us to assess the book’s theory and competing explanations while controlling for these other transhistorical and geographic factors. Indeed, across the tests, only state power possesses as strong an effect as the primary explanatory variables, and it actually reduces the likelihood of emulation, adding further support to this book’s theory. Second, the analysis connects the system-level patterns driving the puzzle in chapter 1 to the theory’s microfoundations. The core alliance systematically leads to the dominant strategy. The causal mechanisms systematically hold in all regions and across nearly two hundred years of data. Having established the theory’s systemic reach, Chapters 4–6 will use case evidence to explore how it operates on the “microlevel” of specific alliance negotiations. But this chapter ties these separate pieces of theory and multi-level evidence together. Finally, this chapter presents multiple converging tests supporting the theory of core alliance diffusion. Alternative explanations (including those this study may have

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ta b l e 3 . 1 . Summary of Quantitative Tests for Diffusion Hypotheses Set

General Question

Testable Implication

Test

1

Does Emulation Occur?

All Testable Implications

1. Do states adopt alliance features that match the core alliance’s features?

2

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Hypotheses 1 and 2

2. Are states that participate in dominant strategy alliances more likely to emulate the core alliance’s design in subsequent pacts?

Do Credibility Concerns Drive Emulation?

Corollary 1.1

3. Are states that recently abrogated a military pact more likely to emulate the core alliance?

Do Normative Concerns Drive Emulation?

Hypothesis 2

4. Does participation in international institutions increase emulation of the core alliance?

Hypothesis 2

5. Are dominant strategy alliances disproportionately likely to include saving provisions?

Hypothesis 3

6. Does the dominant strategy’s systemic prevalence increase the likelihood of emulation?

Corollary 3.1

7. Are peripheral countries more likely to emulate the core strategy?

Do Social Dynamics Drive Emulation?

omitted) may be able to explain away any single test’s results. But this book’s theory provides a coherent account for all of them together. The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. Section 3.2 describes the data sources and the key variables used throughout the models to capture the determinants of core alliance emulation. It also discusses the array of controls used to account for alternative explanations described in the previous chapters. Section 3.3 presents the results from the first set of tests—that social processes drive core alliance emulation. It also introduces the robustness checks used throughout the remaining models. Matching corrects for “unbalanced,” observational data, while spatial econometrics account for unit interdependence. Intuitively, allies are by definition related to one another. Actions affecting one partner are much more likely to spill over to others. Unless our models correct for this network effect, we could overinflate the importance of specific units or factors, misjudging their impact. Lastly, I employ the k-adic method developed by Poast (2010) to account for bias introduced by using dyadic data to model what are in fact multilateral processes.

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Section 3.4 uses these same methods and corrections to verify the second set of tests on credibility and normative diffusion. Section 3.5 presents the results for the last set of tests on the dominant strategy’s social prevalence and weight. Finally, section 3.6 briefly discusses omitted variable/selection bias, using a technique developed by Altonji et al. (2005) suggesting that this problem should not undermine the models. Section 3.7 summarizes the findings and their contribution to the theory.

3.2

Data and Variables

The theory of core alliance diffusion is relational: The causal mechanism a state follows depends on its network position. Proximity to the central pact determines the specific incentives faced by primary, secondary, and peripheral countries. Consequently, the unit of observation for the models below is the nondirected alliance dyad—that is, all pairs of states that participated in an alliance together from 1815–2003. Thus, a multilateral security partnership is broken up into every possible constituent pair, and each pair enters the dataset as a discrete observation. This project focuses on alliance dyads instead of just alliances for several reasons. First, Fordham and Poast (2014) argue that military pacts are the product of multilateral relationships and dynamics. Treating an alliance as a unified whole ignores how overlapping bilateral and multilateral dynamics converge in allowing states to create a security pact. For example, Poast (2010) points out how limited capabilities and geographic separation make Belgium and Turkey unlikely military partners. However, their alliance “arguably has more to do with their relations with the United States than with each other.” Moreover, certain members and relationships within a particular alliance have greater weight than others. The United States and the USGermany relationship are much more important to NATO’s functioning than, say, the Netherlands and its relationship to the US, particularly when it comes to deterrence and burden sharing. Consequently, understanding alliance formation, design, and effects therefore requires that scholars choose a unit of analysis that reflects these dynamics as closely as possible, which in this case would be the security dyad. Second, many alliances have asymmetric obligations. That is, members have different responsibilities, contribute varying types and amounts of support, and some may even have individuated security obligations. The US-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty, for example, pertains exclusively to threats in East Asia. Japan is under no formal obligation to assist the US in the event of an attack in the Western Hemisphere. Washington is granted the use of military facilities in Japan, but Tokyo does not receive a reciprocal obligation in the US. Dyads or k-ads allow us to directly model these asymmetric obligations for each unit. Third, and extending from the previous point, were alliances to serve as the unit of observation, there is a broader question of how to aggregate variables in a way that

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makes interpretive sense. Although democracies disproportionately ally with one another and are less likely to face military challenges, does the “average democracy” score of an alliance (or the aggregate, or the minimum, etc.) adequately capture those dynamics? What operationalization best fits the theory, and how much information do we lose as a result? Similarly, if a single alliance member is threatened with war, should its values for particular variables be used or that of the alliance overall? And what would it substantively mean to say that a high average democracy score makes an alliance (as opposed to a state) less likely to be challenged? Of course, dyads suffer from some of these considerations as well. But by using them as the unit of analysis, we can preserve greater amounts of information in available datasets, and we can leverage techniques like spatial econometrics to directly model how multilateral interdependence affects outcomes of interest. Fourth and finally, when the international system is characterized by large multinational pacts, using alliances as the unit of analysis will significantly undercount the system’s total number of security relationships. This overinflates the importance of smaller, bilateral ties. To take one example, in 2003 (the last year for the ATOP 3.0 dataset), 89.64 percent of alliances (173/193) were bilateral. But only 11.87 percent of security dyads (177/1499) were bilateral, because most countries now participate in large, multilateral partnerships like NATO. As important as such partnerships are, it would be odd if our choice of unit of analysis consistently gives the same weight to the US-Japan and China-DPRK pacts as it does to the OAS, SCO, and NATO. Moreover, if we want a comprehensive model of the interstate security network rather than the inter-alliance network, then dyads and k-ads better reflect the former. The baseline data comes from the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) 3.0 dataset, which covers all alliances globally from 1815–2003. I use two dependent variables for the tests below. For Test 1, the dependent variable is Institutionalization, an indicator of whether an alliance dyad possesses thinly institutionalized coordinating structures strictly focused on military issues or whether it has formal decision-making rules on a wide range of affairs (1 indicates the latter). Drawing upon the institutional indicators presented in chapter 1, the variable asks whether the partnership has general coordinating structures, is public, encompasses nonmilitary cooperation, and specifies member contributions. If the answer to these questions is yes, the pact receives a 1 (broad-deep). If not, it receives a 0 (narrowshallow). Test 1 will assess whether the core alliance’s degree of institutionalization is systematically correlated with that of another pact. The dependent variable for the remaining tests is Dominant, a dichotomous indicator of whether the dyad’s alliance matches the core design and, hence, belongs to the dominant form. The measure is constructed in part from the institutional indicators discussed in chapter 1, but consistent operationalization across the entire time

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frame considered here (1815–2003) is difficult. The signaling value of individual features varies dramatically not only because of the dynamics discussed in chapter 2 but also due to shifts in technology. During the Concert period, for example, the limits of transportation and communications systems meant that most statesmen could not easily travel for meetings at a centralized alliance location and simultaneously coordinate regularly with their home governments. Today, those issues are significantly reduced, if not eliminated. Similarly, prior to 1900, many alliances expressly defined the contributions of each member, down to the specific number and types of troops and under whose authority each unit would fall. Currently, relatively few treaties require such specificity because members can communicate more easily and fluidly respond to rapidly changing conditions. Coding rules in ATOP sometimes present problems, as specific features may be defined differently across eras. When modern alliances do mention individual contributions in their text, for example, it is often to delegate the task to a coordinating body and provide general guidelines (like equitable division). Consequently, to construct Dominant, I draw upon the most consistent indicators of depth and breadth across the two centuries studied here, then supplement them with period-specific indicators. Across the periods, I ask whether an alliance possesses defined coordinating bodies with terminal responsibility for the pact’s execution; whether it contains secret provisions; whether it encompasses nonmilitary cooperation; and the type of military guarantee to which the alliance commits its members. These are supplemented by period-specific measures of whether the pact defines contributions and if it possesses mediation and arbitration protocols, both more relevant and more often found in earlier eras. If these measures match those found in the core alliance, Dominant receives a 1, and a 0 otherwise. The components of this constructed measure are all drawn from ATOP. Although it is impossible to ensure that all security partnerships are counted in any individual dataset (particularly given the secrecy surrounding certain treaties), ATOP comprises the most comprehensive and systematically collected record of security agreements and their institutional provisions available. Because the dependent variable is dichotomous, I use logistic regression to test the effect of different explanatory variables on Dominant. Each section will detail its key explanatory variable, as these change across tests. All models include a host of variables controlling for alternative explanations for following the dominant form. Siverson and King (1980) and Leeds (2003) find that more powerful countries require less outside assistance to balance against threats, and they therefore prefer greater latitude to pursue independent policies in their alliances. Consequently, we might expect that state power is negatively associated with emulation of the core strategy, as strong countries worry less about credibility

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or status. To capture this effect, the Correlates of War’s Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) score is used. CINC is a composite score of state power drawn from six indicators of material capability. The models also include a count of major powers in a dyad, Major, for a similar reason. If the hegemonic imposition argument is correct, then those dyads in which one member is the leading state or perhaps another great power should be more likely to follow the dominant form. Common threat would expect alliance dyads facing the same enemies to be more likely to adopt the same institutional features. To capture this, Rival is a count of the mutual, long-term adversaries a dyad shares, drawn from Klein et al. (2006). Moreover, the common threat hypothesis is most likely to be correct when states establish alliances in the midst of fighting wars, as occurred among the Allied powers in World War II. They should be less concerned about both reliability and status, simply gathering sufficient material support to defeat their enemies. The models therefore include Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID), which captures the number of ongoing wars among the dyad when the alliance is established. Several scholars have examined the effects of military technology on alliance patterns, most notably Christensen and Snyder (1990). Shifts in the offense-defense balance, for example, can make certain alliances more or less credible, as states face different costs for upholding their commitments. Unfortunately, few quantitative measures exist that can proxy advances in weapons and logistics systems over the time period of this study. In addition, these measures may not be able to capture the discontinuous effect of certain technologies, like aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons, which revolutionized warfighting and should have some expected effect on alliance failure. That said, weapons systems have increasingly become more energy and production intensive, reflecting the shift from mass conscription, to industrialization, to a focus on information technology. As proxies, the Correlates of War’s primary energy consumption measure (Energy), and its industrial production measure (Production), are included to capture more capital- and labor-intensive military technology and capabilities. Siverson and King (1980), Siverson and Emmons (1991), Siverson and Starr (1994), and Leeds et al. (2002) find that democracies make for more reliable partners. I include the standard Polity2 score from the Polity IV dataset to account for these regime-type effects. Polity2 ranges from –10 to 10, where higher values indicate more open, liberal, and democratic regimes. Moreover, the models include IGO, a measure of the number of international governmental organizations in which the dyad participates. They also have Trade, defined as the logged total sum of dyadic exports and imports. As Wallander and Keohane (1999) discuss, partners facing greater “issue density” are more likely to formalize their security relations. In addition, greater economic ties should raise the costs of alliance failure and defection,

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ta b l e 3 . 2 . Descriptive Statistics for Primary Variables

Institutionalization Dominant CINC Major Energy Production Defect Polity2 MID Rival IGO Trade

Mean

SD

Min.

Max.

0.492 0.755 0.034 0.263 9.864 5.284 0.02 0.298 0.329 0.129 62.175 5.699

0.499 0.429 0.074 0.527 2.985 3.979 0.14 11.847 1.349 0.377 43.551 2.32

0 0 –0.031 0 0 0 0 –20 0 0 0 –2.303

1 1 0.502 2 15.547 12.402 1 20 19.5 4 207 12.508

affecting perceived reliability, as Gartzke and Gleditsch (2004) note. This variable is drawn from the Correlates of War measure of interstate economic activity. Descriptive statistics for these variables can be found in table 3.2.

3.3

The Presence of Emulation

The first set of models asks whether emulation of the core alliance is occurring. Is the spread of a single alliance design due to emulation, or is it due to random chance? Might an alternative explanation better explain strategic mimicry? This section presents two models providing baseline answers to these questions. Test 1 suggests that emulation does in fact occur, and that it is the strongest predictor of a dyad’s alliance strategy, in both significance and substance. In addition, in Test 2, portfolio consistency drives emulation. The more dominant alliances a dyad participates in, the more likely it will continue matching the central pact’s strategy in subsequent partnerships.

3.3.1 Test 1: Connecting the Dominant Strategy and the Core Alliance’s Features Test 1 assesses whether the core design predicts the institutionalization of a dyad’s alliance. As mentioned in the previous section, the dependent variable is Institutionalization, a dichotomous measure of whether a partnership follows a realpolitik strategy of shallow institutionalization with a narrow focus on military cooperation (“narrow-shallow”) or an integrative alliance strategy of extensive coordination on a wide range of policy areas (“broad-deep”). The explanatory variable in this test is Core Design, an indicator of whether the core alliance itself has narrow-shallow (0) or broad-deep (1) features. If emulation is occurring, we would expect a positive and

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statistically significant relationship between these two variables, as countries follow the leading state’s example. Table 3.3 presents the results of the statistical models for Test 1. The analysis begins with a relatively sparse model, following Ray (2005) and Achen (2005), to ensure that the estimated effects are not an outgrowth of overfitting. Column 1 presents a baseline, bivariate logistic model regressing Core Design on Institutionalization. The results are as theoretically expected: positive and significant. This effect holds when we add in the control variables listed in section 3.2, as seen in column 2. Overall, when broad-deep, the central pact increases the chance of institutionalization by 54.03 percent on average. Barring only CINC, it has the strongest substantive effect on partnership design of any variable. CINC also has a negative sign, meaning that it better explains why states do not follow the core form. By its very nature, however, observational data prevents random assignment to treatment and control categories. This leads to two methodological problems— unbalanced samples and unit interdependence—that violate critical statistical assumptions. With “unbalanced” samples, treated units (i.e., those observations following the dominant form) and control units (i.e., those that do not) may differ dramatically on specific variables. If the theory is correct, for example, weaker states will disproportionately adopt the dominant form, as they face higher defection costs than major powers or they have a greater incentive to obtain status benefits. Alternatively, those dyads with overlapping threats may be less inclined to adopt the core form’s characteristics, instead tailoring their pacts to their enemies’ specific characteristics. If correlated with the dependent variable, these extreme or “skewed” values may bias estimates of Core Design. By contrast, if correlated with Core Design, such a data structure may overinflate the latter’s coefficient and significance. Consequently, I use computational matching to “clean up” the data so that both samples—events and nonevents—possess similar values on the control variables presented above. Matching avoids parametric assumptions, ensuring that the data itself, and not statistical assumptions, drives the results. We can ideally obtain a clearer estimate of the main explanatory variable’s effects under common support through this process. Specifically, I employ nearest neighbor matching with replacement, using Core Design as the treatment variable. Figure 3.1 displays the extent to which dominant form dyads and nondominant form dyads share equivalent average values for the control variables described above. Prior to balancing, those states emulating the dominant strategy were more democratic and had a history of defection. Those dyads choosing not to emulate were militarily more powerful, technologically more advanced, and—strangely—had both more and less common security interests. The matching process shows general improvement across all the variables, with the standardized bias for the matched data moving closer to zero.

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ta b l e 3 . 3 . Test 1: Do states adopt alliance features that match the core alliance’s features? Regression of Core Design on Institutionalization Model 1: Bivariate Model

Model 2: Controls Added

Model 3: Matched Data

Model 4: Spatial Logit

(Intercept)

–2.26 * (0.09)

–2.76 * (0.20)

–2.93 * (0.25)

–2.49 * (0.28)

Core Design

3.03 * (0.10)

2.66 * (0.12)

2.91 * (0.18)

2.68 * (0.23)

CINC

–9.15 * (1.23)

–10.12 * (1.38)

–7.69 * (1.74)

Major

0.34 * (0.15)

–0.24 (0.18)

–0.05 (0.19)

Energy

0.04 (0.03)

0.20 * (0.05)

0.17 * (0.05)

Production

0.03 (0.02)

0.01 (0.02)

3.30 × 10– (0.02)

Defect

–1.18 * (0.39)

–0.62 (0.46)

–0.04 (0.61)

3.44 × 10– 4.60 × 10–

Polity2

–0.01 (0.01)

2.50 × 10– 7.70 × 10–

MID

0.22 * (0.03)

–0.06 (0.14)

–0.05 (0.16)

Rival

0.44 * (0.12)

0.29 (0.16)

0.26 (0.18)

IGO

1.35 × 10– (1.51 × 10–)

0.01 * (2.4 × 10–)

7.10 * (3.30 × 10–)

N AIC BIC log L

4389 4596.31 4647.41 –2290.16

3491 3670.51 3941.46 –1791.25

2843 3165.33 3451.05 –1534.66

2843 3165.33 3451.05 –1534.66

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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c ha pt er 3 Unmatched Matched

Rival MID Polity Defect Production Energy Major CINC

−40

−20

0

20

40

Standardized bias

f i g ure 3. 1 . Improvement in Standardized Bias from Matching Process. Standardized bias equals the difference between treated and untreated sample means divided by the standard deviation multiplied by 100.

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Using this new, balanced data, column 3 shows that Core Design weakens only slightly in substance, and not at all in significance. It is still positively and strongly associated with Institutionalization. I also include period fixed effects in a separate model (not reported), in case some unobserved quality of the Bismarckian, Cold War, or other eras is driving the results. These variables produce no substantive changes to the results. Consequently, the matching approach provides greater assurance that outliers are not driving Core Design’s effects. The next problem is unit interdependence. If units are connected to each other, then a change in one dyad will spill over to another, confounding a clear estimate. Our unit of observation—the alliance-dyad—is explicitly interdependent, in two ways. First, two dyads in the same alliance are directly connected through their partnership. Second, dyads in multiple alliances will appear several times in the dataset. A substantive example will clarify the problem this interdependence creates. Consider the Polity2 control variable. Siverson and King (1980) and Leeds et al. (2002) find that democracies are more likely to form alliances with each other, in part because they can leverage their domestic politics to demonstrate commitment. At the limit, these collections of democracies can create large, interconnected security communities with overlapping military agreements. Any foreign policy behavior within this network would have a large effect on other variables within the dataset.

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For example, if a single dyad entered a war, the value of MID for all associated dyads and alliances would change, magnifying the effect. Models that do not account for this issue may erroneously determine that MID and Polity2 are highly significant, but that is only because of ripple effects in the data due to unit interdependence, not because of the separate effect of democracy on war. I address this issue in two ways. First, using a conditional logit model, I add fixed effects for dyad and alliance, separately, clustering errors on those terms. Although these results are not reported, their inclusion again does not change the substantive effect of Core Design on Institutionalization. Second, while including fixed effects improves confidence in the overall findings, we can more directly account for unit interdependence and network dynamics through spatial econometrics. Specifically, Klier and McMillen (2005) present a spatial logit model, where the estimation equation is: y*  Wy*  X    ∼ MVN[0, 1] 1 if y*i  0; yi  0 if y*i  0.

{

where X is a matrix of covariates, β is a vector of coefficients, and ϵ is an error term, just as in a standard logit model. The key component is the spatial lag term, ρWy*, where ρ is the coefficient for this term and y* is the dependent variable. W is an NxN row-standardized square matrix, recording the relationship between the units of observation. In this case, I use dyads, such that any observation where one or both states are present in another observation will be marked as having a connection. Adding this W matrix addresses network interdependencies and spillover between observations, providing a more precise estimate of Core Design’s effects. This spatial logit model also supports the theory. Column 4 of table 3.3 again shows that Core Design is among the strongest substantive factors associated with Institutionalization, possessing the expected positive sign and statistical significance. Moreover, the coefficient on the spatial lag, ρ, is positive and significant as well, suggesting that there is active contagion and interdependence among units, as anticipated.

3.3.2 Test 2: Portfolio Consistency The dominant strategy operates through a mechanism of social proof and network constraint. One state-level prediction is that the more dominant form alliances a state participates in, the more likely it will continue to emulate the core design in its future partnerships. In effect, “participation begets more participation.” Test 2

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examines whether states that participate in dominant strategy alliances are more likely to emulate the core pact’s design in subsequent partnerships. This prediction is unique to the diffusion mechanisms discussed in chapter 2, supporting none of the alternatives. As such, the models below should provide a sharp test of the underlying social drivers of strategic isomorphism. I define a new explanatory variable—Count—tallying the number of dominant alliances a dyad was participating in when it formed its new pact. Count ranges from 0 to 58, with the average dyad participating in 12.11 dominant strategy pacts. The dependent variable for this and all subsequent models is Dominant, as delineated above. If the theory is correct, we would expect a positive and significant relationship between these variables: the more dominant strategy alliances a dyad shares (Count), the more likely their next pact will also emulate the core pact (Dominant). The method used is logistic regression. The shift to Dominant as the dependent variable presents an additional methodological problem. The previous section’s analysis was conditioned on countries participating in an alliance, as we probed how the core design’s standard affected the institutionalization of other pacts. But here, we must account for selection into an alliance. Military partnerships are rare events, with only 7.94 percent of all countries participating in at least one from 1815–2003. Allied states could be fundamentally different from nonallied ones, driving them to create pacts and also adopt the dominant form. This problem is one of selection bias, and I employ the k-adic data correction developed by Poast (2010) and Fordham and Poast (2014) to address it. Fordham and Poast argue that all alliances are multilateral: even bilateral pacts are made in the shadow of possible larger combinations. However, using dyadic data to examine these multinational events fundamentally misspecifies the data-generating process, introducing estimation bias. As the number of alliance members increases from a bilateral pact, to a three-party triadic one, to a 4-adic one, a 5-adic one, and so forth, using dyadic measures fails to capture the multilateral dependencies inherent in these larger partnerships. To solve this, Fordham and Poast follow King and Zeng (2001) in arguing that scholars should use choice-based sampling to compare multilateral events against a similarly sized groups of “nonevents.” Consequently, for every bilateral pact in ATOP, I sample three politically relevant, nonallied dyads. For every triad, I sample three nonallied triads; for every 4-ad, three nonallied 4-ads; on up to NATO, with its 28 members, where I sample three 28-ads. This creates a new dataset, on which I run a multinomial logit model. In total, this sampling strategy should account for both dyadic estimation bias and the interdependencies across observations, as with the spatial models. Table 3.4 presents this k-adic process’s results. Count, as expected, is positively and significantly correlated with Dominant. That is, compared to nonallied states,

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those participating in a dominant strategy pact are more likely to continue emulating the core alliance’s design in their subsequent partnerships. This effect increases as Count does. To visualize this, I conduct a 1000-trial simulation using the model’s results. Holding all other variables at their mean, figure 3.2 plots the effects of Count on the probability of adopting the dominant form as we increase Count from 0 to 40 (its full range). Participating in one dominant form alliance leads to a 17.26 percent increase in further emulation. That number quickly jumps above 50 percent once a dyad possesses 11 of these ties (recall that the average allied state has 12.11 dominant strategy partners). At its highest, participation in dominant alliances leads to a 90.5 increase in the likelihood of further emulation. Moreover, these effects do not hold for nondominant allies. Switching the baseline category of the multinomial

ta b l e 3 . 4 . Test 2: Are states that participate in dominant strategy alliances more likely to emulate the core alliance’s design in subsequent pacts? Regression of Count on Dominant using k-adic correction Coefficient (Intercept)

Standard Error

–4.51 *

(0.38)

Count

8.72 *

(3.38)

CINC

1.82

(3.84)

Major

1.54 *

(0.59)

Energy

3.13 × 10–

(4.14 × 10–)

Production

–1.21 × 10–

(9.67 × 10–)

Polity2

–0.19 *

(0.05)

MID

–0.29 *

(0.13)

Rival

0.32 *

(0.12)

IGO

1.24 *

(0.41)

N AIC BIC log L

3491 181.61 427.93 –328.86

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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c ha pt er 3

logit model reveals that nondominant forms do not have a statistically significant effect on the likelihood of emulation. Figure 3.3 plots this set of simulation runs, where the lower confidence bound never rises above 0. In total, this section presented two findings. First, states are emulating the core pact’s features in their alliance strategy decisions. The presence of a thinly institutionalized core alliance inhibits the creation of formal coordinating procedures, while a robustly institutionalized one spurs organizational depth for other states. This finding held even after we corrected for outlier observations and extreme values on relevant variables through the matching process. The results also survived correction for unit interdependence and spillover across security dyads using fixed effects and spatial logit checks. Second, the cumulative weight of participation in dominant form alliances—what the previous chapter called “portfolio consistency”—prompts states to further emulate the core design and also to avoid nonstandard features. This result held despite accounting for multilateral, k-adic interdependence. The following section will test hypotheses more directly associated with the credibility and normative diffusion mechanisms. However, the models presented here provide baseline evidence that emulation is occurring and for reasons outside of the standard functionalist accounts. The core pact is statistically and positively associated with the dominant form, and—both before and after the statistical corrections—it appears to have an independent and substantively large effect on alliance strategy.

Probability of emulation

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0 0

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10 20 30 Number of dominant form alliances

40

f i g ure 3. 2 . Predicted Effect of Participation in Dominant Form Alliances on the Likelihood of Emulation. The solid black line indicates the average predicted probability of emulation, while gray areas represent 95 percent confidence intervals. Plot made using spatial logit model results and 1000-trial bootstrap simulation.

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Probability of emulation

t he dif f u sio n o f alliance s t rat e gy

53

1.0

0.5

0.0

0

10 20 30 Number of nondominant form alliances

40

f i g ure 3 . 3 . Predicted Effect of Participation in Nondominant Alliances on the Likelihood of Emulation.

3.4

Tests of the Credibility and Normative Diffusion Mechanisms

The second set of tests assesses the two diffusion mechanisms. In Test 3, states that recently defected on security partners are disproportionately likely to adopt the dominant strategy, the better to signal their renewed commitment and reliability to new partners. Tests 4 and 5 examine normative diffusion. States often participate in IGOs for their status and prestige benefits, and this motivation drives alliance mimicry as well (Test 4). Test 5 discovers that dominant strategy alliances are much more likely to include saving provisions, declaring that a pact aligns with international norms and policy expectations.

3.4.1 Test 3: The Credibility Diffusion Mechanism— Member Reliability and Institutional Emulation According to credibility diffusion, emulation demonstrates state reliability. As a corollary, the theory predicts that countries avoid adopting nondominant features, as they signal a lack of rank commitment. We might expect that nations with a recent history of alliance defection are particularly keen to emulate the core alliance, as well as to avoid disreputable signals. Recent scholarship argues that countries judge each other’s credibility based on their prior record of fulfilling alliance obligations. Abrogators may face considerable skepticism about their intentions in subsequent military treaties. Crescenzi et al. (2012) find that states with poor reputations have a more difficult time securing new alliances, while Mattes (2012) and Miller (2003) separately argue that those countries typically face higher costs (in the form of greater

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institutionalization and other screening mechanisms) within those bodies. Indeed, states sometimes engage in wars they would otherwise prefer to avoid to preserve their reputations for resolve. All else equal, states that defected on their previous alliances should be more likely to adopt the dominant strategy. Doing so signals their adherence to social standards of credibility, assuaging commitment concerns. Scholars have used different specifications for state reputation and previous defections. Table 3.5 uses multiple versions of Defection to capture a state’s prospective credibility, the better to ensure that this test is not driven by a single operationalization. These include dichotomous indicators of defection within the past five or ten years (separately), the sum of defections in the past five or ten years (again separately), and the minimum of Crescenzi’s measure of alliance reputation. As before, the dependent variable is Dominant and the method is logistic regression. Because previously defecting states have more difficulty obtaining allies, the models below account for selection into alliances through the k-adic correction. With that adjustment, we would expect a positive and significant association between Defection and Dominant. For brevity, I only present the coefficients, standard deviations, and significance for each variant of Defection in table 3.5. Every version of Defection (but one, addressed shortly) obtains a positive and significant sign. States with poor reputations are statistically more likely to emulate dominant features when they create alliances. Using “any defection in the past 5 years,” Defection results in a 28.1 percent increase in likelihood of adopting dominant strategy. “Total defections in the past 10 years” can increase the likelihood of adoption by as much as 71.67 percent. This can be seen in figure 3.4, which plots these likelihoods against an increasing number of prior abrogations. The only outlier to these results is Crescenzi’s reputational score, as it just misses a common level of significance at the 0.11 level. His variable weights defections based on the “political relevance” of the relationship. That is, if country A were evaluating country B’s credibility, it would chiefly care about defections against nearby or similarly situated countries to itself. Abrogating on distant allies, by contrast, would have less effect on country B’s reputation, at least from A’s perspective. Table 3.5’s results ta b le 3 . 5 . Test 3: Are states that recently abrogated a military pact more likely to emulate the core alliance? Coefficient estimates for different versions of Defection regressed on Dominant

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Any Defection in Last 5 Years

Any Defection in Last 10 Years

Total Defections in Last 5 Years

Total Defections in Last 10 Years

Years since Last Defection

Crescenzi Reputation

1.91 * (0.19)

1.6 * (0.19)

0.94 * (0.12)

0.5 * (0.07)

1.53 * (0.22)

6.62 (4.22)

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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1.0

Probability of emulation

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0 0

5

10

15

20

Number of defections in past 10 years

f i g ure 3 . 4 . Predicted Effect of Defections on the Likelihood of Emulating Core Alliance.

suggest that states may actually be more concerned with diffuse “global” reputations. The dominant form is a systemic standard of credibility. Any deviation—whether against a close neighbor or not—raises questions about relative reliability and the rank of one’s pact in a partner’s portfolio. In sum, Test 3 confirms that states with a history of alliance defection are more likely to emulate the dominant strategy. This effect holds across five different operationalizations of alliance abrogation. Given the weight of evidence in favor of the hypothesis, it appears that states are concerned about global rather than local or “tailored” reputations. This dovetails with the theory presented in this book, as the core strategy acts as a systemic, fixed point of alliance credibility.

3.4.2 Test 4: The Normative Diffusion Mechanism— Participation in IGOs and the Dominant Strategy Under normative diffusion, the core pact serves as a standard of legitimate alliance strategy and military cooperation. It is an integral component of what Jepperson et al. (1996) call “world political culture”: the rules like sovereignty and diplomatic immunity that form shared expectations of appropriate (and inappropriate) interstate behavior. Consistent and scrupulous adherence to broadly recognized norms suggests that an actor shares that community’s goals; reinforces an actor’s position as a credible group member; prompts others to accord it certain standing, and/or to be recognized as of equal status and possibly protected on that basis. In so doing, such actors may be more likely to receive external support from like-minded states.

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c ha pt er 3

We can leverage the IGO variable to more clearly test this. Membership in international organizations is strongly correlated with adherence to global norms, such as human rights and democracy. States seeking status and legitimacy through IGOs should also be disproportionately likely to adopt the dominant strategy when they create alliances. Consequently, IGO and Dominant should be positive and significantly associated with one another. Model 1 in table 3.6 below uses the observed data. It disconfirms normative diffusion, with IGO having a negative sign and failing to achieve statistical significance. Greater participation in international governmental organizations appears to reduce emulation. However, this relationship quickly disappears once we apply the corrections detailed above. Model 2 uses matching to better isolate the effects of IGO, while Model 3 applies the k-adic correction. In both approaches, IGO has the expected positive and significant coefficient, in line with the normative diffusion mechanism. Moreover, in unreported analysis, IGO’s relationship holds even when we focus specifically on minor powers, increasing slightly in substantive effect.

3.4.3 Test 5: The Normative Diffusion Mechanism— Emulation and Alignment with Global Norms

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Normative diffusion should also influence alliance-level dynamics. Military pacts are often perceived as threatening and aggressive, potentially undermining member claims to follow the cooperative and peaceful norms embedded in bodies like the United Nations or the League of Nations. As a result, 73.9 percent of alliances (479/648) include “saving provisions.” These declare that the pact aligns with or does not contradict the purpose, procedures, or policy expectations of other international institutions. For example, the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article VIII states: “Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third State is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty.” The treaty’s preamble and Articles I, V, VII, and XII (out of 14) also reference the United Nations, providing a legal case that NATO abides by UN norms on legitimate self-defense, advances the UN’s interest in regional security arrangements, and does not interfere with member obligations to that body. Other security pacts—like the Organization of American States (1948) or the Little Entente (1921)—deposited or communicated their treaties to the UN or the League of Nations, further pledging to report alliance activation to these institutions. According to the normative diffusion mechanism, states emulate the core alliance’s design to demonstrate their adherence to interstate norms and gain prestige. We would therefore expect that dominant strategy alliances would be more likely to include saving provisions to better signal their acceptance of social rules. Critically, no alternative explanations (nor any studies in political science) have examined why

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ta b l e 3 . 6. Test 4: Does participation in international institutions increase emulation of the core alliance? Regression of IGO on Dominant Model 1: Observed Data Intercept

1.91 * (0.18)

IGO

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: K-Adic

–16.24 * (3.93)

–4.43 * (0.28)

–2.59 × 10– (1.40 × 10–)

0.03 * (0.01)

0.04 * (0.01)

CINC

–1.76 * (0.79)

6.64 * (2.51)

–0.28 (1.84)

Major

–0.35 * (0.12)

–0.67 * (0.28)

0.95 * (0.21)

Energy

–0.07 * (0.02)

–0.81 * (0.14)

1.64 × 10– * (4.59 × 10–)

Production

0.02 (0.02)

0.42 * (0.10)

–2.94 × 10– * (8.40 × 10–)

Defection

0.87 * (0.29)

1.28 (0.75)

1.19 * (0.21)

Polity2

0.04 * (4.46 × 10–)

0.01 (0.02)

2.49 × 10– (0.02)

MID

0.06 * (0.03)

–1.05 * (0.38)

0.04 (0.03)

Rivalry

–0.41 * (0.11)

–0.31 (0.24)

–0.03 (0.05)

N AIC BIC log L

3491 3949.06 4195.38 –1934.53

684 647.94 847.17 –279.97

1578 827.00 1041.56 –373.50

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

states include this language, making this a relatively clean test of the normative diffusion mechanism. I therefore define a new dependent variable, Saving, indicating whether an alliance-dyad’s pact possesses a saving provision. If the status diffusion mechanism is correct, we would expect Dominant—our explanatory variable—to be significantly and positively associated with this variable. I subject the model to the

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full battery of tests described in section 3.3.1, including matching, spatial interdependence, and k-adic correction. The models include the complete set of controls listed in section 3.2. Table 3.7 presents the results. Dominant is positive and significant in all the models, following theoretical expectations. In addition, even as successive robustness checks are added, the variable maintains its substantive significance and effect. Using Model 2, simulation results show that dominant strategy alliances are 7.48 percent more likely to include a saving provision. In addition, only Dominant, IGO, and Defect are consistently significant and possess the same signs in all the tests, further reinforcing the robustness of the first variable’s results. The finding on IGO is also consistent with our expectations of the normative diffusion mechanism, as discussed in Test 4. States that participate in a greater number of international organizations should be more concerned that their obligations do not conflict with one another. They should therefore be more likely to include saving provisions in their alliance treaties, as supported by IGO’s positive and significant coefficient. To obtain a clearer visualization of the dominant form’s effect on the inclusion of saving provisions, I replace Dominant with Count, the number of dominant strategy alliances a dyad jointly participates in. After rerunning Model 2, I again perform a simulation examining how increasing participation in a dominant alliance affects the likelihood of states adding these provisions. Figure 3.5 plots these results. At the maximum level, emulation increases the probability of including a saving provision by 20.2 percent. In total, this section demonstrates that a desire for prestige drives states both to emulate the core alliance’s strategy and to include language assuring other states of their adherence to international norms and the procedures of interstate institutions.

3.5

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The Social Function and Impact of the Core Alliance

This section presents a final set of tests assessing the theory’s social foundation and implications. For both credibility and normative diffusion, states will be more likely to adhere to the dominant strategy the greater its prevalence within the international system. When the norm is weak, emulation does not send much of a signal of positive intentions or willingness to follow broader rules. But when the dominant strategy characterizes most security relations, states face greater social pressure to comply, and their adherence more clearly demonstrates commitment to group expectations of credible and responsible behavior. Consequently, Test 6 examines the effect of Trend— the percentage of alliances that adhere to the dominant form in each year—on the likelihood that two states will copy the core alliance’s features in a new pact. In addition, the theory expects that secondary and peripheral countries will be disproportionately attracted to the core alliance’s design. B-type countries are

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ta b l e 3 . 7. Test 5: Are dominant strategy alliances disproportionately likely to include saving provisions? Regression of Dominant on Saving Model 1: Observed Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

Model 4: K-Adic

Intercept

–1.89 * (0.19)

–0.22 (0.29)

2.06 * (0.37)

Dominant

0.04 * (4.0 × 10–)

0.04 * (4.58 × 10–)

0.04 * (5.56 × 10–)

38.48 * (3.39 × 10–)

CINC

–0.55 (0.98)

–0.59 (1.17)

–1.87 (1.26)

–1.53 * (2.19 × 10–)

Major

–0.47 * (0.16)

–0.13 (0.24)

–1.20 * (0.29)

–2.39 * (1.24 × 10–)

Energy

–0.03 (0.02)

–0.07 * (0.03)

–3.22 × 10– (0.03)

–3.15 × 10– (9.41 × 10–)

Production

8.20 × 10– (0.02)

0.03 (0.03)

0.02 (0.03)

1.66 × 10– * (5.36 × 10–)

Polity2

–0.02 * (4.85 × 10–)

5.41 × 10– (6.33 × 10–)

–0.01 * (6.87 × 10–)

0.27 * (4.97 × 10–)

MID

–0.22 * (0.04)

–0.01 (0.06)

–0.36 * (0.09)

0.27 * (7.65 × 10–)

Rival

0.59 * (0.14)

0.04 (0.18)

1.04 * (0.23)

0.18 * (2.91 × 10–)

IGO

0.04 * (2.33 × 10–)

0.02 * (6.62 × 10–)

0.09 * (7.92 × 10–)

4.10 × 10– * (4.89 × 10–)

Defect

–2.22 * (0.36)

–2.08 * (0.36)

–2.38 * (0.43)

–0.62 * (3.70 × 10–)

–0.72 * (0.14)

ρ

N Residual deviance AIC

–18.96 * (5.14 × 10–)

3491 3257.5

2888 2499.3

2888 2964.7

1558 377.9

3279.5

2523.3

2558.8

421.9

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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Probability of saving provision

0.25

0.20

0.15

0.10

0.05

0.00 0

10

20 30 40 Number of dominant form alliance-dyads

50

60

f i g ure 3. 5. Predicted Effect of Count on the Likelihood of Including Saving Provisions.

concerned about possible abrogation by stronger allies, and they demand emulation as an assurance of their partners’ intentions. C-type states emulate the design as it provides a clear marker to assert statehood and sovereignty, as well as setting aspirational goals for their foreign policies. Test 7 leverages the concept of Centrality, a social network analysis measure of an actor’s standing within a social system. If these mechanisms are correct, those countries with fewer diplomatic ties to other states and less participation in international organizations should be more likely to participate in dominant form alliances.

3.5.1 Test 6: Social Weight and the Dominant Strategy

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Standards are socially constructed and, to some extent, socially enforced concepts, and we should expect that a standard’s strength is a function of its prevalence within a society. As discussed in Rogers (2003), innovations—as an example—diffuse through a social system, eventually gaining a critical mass of acceptance. Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) discuss how norms pass through three stages of emergence, cascade, and internalization. By the later second and third stages, norms reach a point of such saturation that states adopt them to enhance their legitimacy, obtain social esteem and status, and out of a simple need for conformity with accepted practice. If the normative mechanism is correct, then the more the dominant strategy characterizes security commitments, the more social pressure states should face to follow that form in future military agreements.

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We should therefore see a positive relationship between Dominant and Trend, a continuous measure that captures the degree to which the dominant strategy has diffused within the state system. If every alliance matched this form, Trend would equal 1, while if none did so, it would equal 0. In a typical year, however, Trend is 0.74, meaning that 74 percent of all security ties follow the dominant strategy. Figure 3.6 presents a histogram of Trend to further visualize the data. As seen in table 3.8, Trend possesses the expected positive and significant relationship with Dominant. Column 1 provides the baseline model using observed data, column 2 uses matched data to exclude extreme values and outlier observations, and column 3 uses a spatial logit model to correct for possible unit interdependence. In all three cases, Trend is the strongest positive predictor of Dominant. Even using the smallest of the model coefficients (Model 2), a shift from 0 to 1 on Trend increases the probability that a dyad will emulate the dominant strategy in its next alliance by 80.6 percent, as seen more fully in figure 3.7.

3.5.2 Test 7: State Centrality and Emulation Lastly, for Test 7, Corollary 3.1 argues that more peripheral states will disproportionately follow the dominant strategy. To measure the core/peripheral nature of a state, I use the variable Centrality. This was calculated by Dorussen and Ward (2008), drawing upon common concepts in social network analysis. In brief, it captures the sum of all direct diplomatic ties between a country A and a country B, as well as any indirect ties between those two nations through co-membership in international

1000

Frequency

800 600 400 200 0 0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Trend

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f i g ure 3 . 6. Distribution of Trend.

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ta b l e 3 . 8. Test 6: Does the dominant strategy’s systemic prevalence increase the likelihood of emulation? Regression of Trend on Dominant Model 1: Observational Data

Model 2: Matched Data

(Intercept)

–2.04 * (0.27)

–2.77 * (0.49)

–5.78 * (1.53)

Trend

6.18 * (0.28)

4.48 * (0.34)

5.79 * (0.3)

CINC

–6.33 * (0.94)

–11.32 * (1.52)

–16.93 * ( 4.41)

Major

–0.23 (0.13)

–0.08 (0.16)

0.23 (0.27)

Energy

–0.02 (0.03)

–0.02 (0.03)

0.03 (0.03)

Production

0.05 * (0.02)

0.17 * (0.03)

0.3 * (0.11)

Polity2

0.06 * (0.01)

0.12 * (0.02)

0.09 * (0.01)

MID

0.11 * (0.04)

–0.19 (0.14)

–0.18 (0.11)

Rival

–0.16 (0.12)

0.39 * (0.17)

1.44 * (0.59)

IGO

–0.01 * 1.66 × 10–

–0.04 * (0.01)

–0.04 * (0.01)

Defect

0.30 (0.33)

0.68 (0.46)

–1.13 (0.69) –0.11 (0.11)

ρ

N AIC BIC log L

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Model 3: Spatial Logit

3491 3109.34 3380.29 –1510.67

2199 2396.53 2669.93 –1150.27

2675 2613.98 2863.45 –1150.35

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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Probability of emulation

1.0

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0 0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Diffusion of dominant form

f i g ure 3 . 7 . Predicted Effect of Trend on the Likelihood of Emulation.

organizations. Dividing over all possible linkages within the system, this calculation measures the degree to which a state is connected to all other countries in the system through direct and indirect means. The theory would expect that the more peripheral a state is, the more it should want to emulate the dominant strategy in its security partnerships. Consequently, Centrality should have a negative and significant relationship with Dominant. Table 3.9 uses the observational data in column 1, the matched data in column 2, and the spatial logit model in column 3. All models possess the expected sign and significance, although the substantive effect is quite small. This is because Centrality ranges from 0 to 14006, so the individual impact of any single interstate linkage will have only a small impact on emulation. However, the average dyad has a Centrality score of 4169.6, an approximately 3 percent reduction in the likelihood of emulation. At maximum, a highly connected state is 13.3 percent less likely to adopt the dominant strategy, as seen in figure 3.8. In total, Tests 6 and 7 provide evidence suggesting that states emulate the core alliance’s strategy for the normative and status benefits mimicry provides. From Test 6, the stronger the norm, the more likely states will adopt the dominant strategy. From Test 7, the more peripheral the state, the more likely they are to emulate the core pact. These results are consistently significant and have the expected signs, even with the inclusion of control variables and corrections for the use of observational data and unit interdependence.

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ta b l e 3 . 9. Test 7: Are peripheral countries more likely to emulate the core strategy? Regression of Centrality on Dominant Model 1: Observational Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

(Intercept)

1.82 * (0.19)

7.27 * (2.90)

10.16 * (2.63)

Centrality

–2.22 × 10– * (2.39 × 10–)

–8.85 × 10– * (2.95 × 10–)

–4.76 × 10– * (1.93 × 10–)

CINC

–1.48 (0.80)

Major

–44.18 * (16.35)

–60.05 * (14.36)

–0.39 * (0.12)

0.40 * (0.20)

0.58 * (0.19)

Energy

–0.07 * (0.02)

–0.11 * (0.04)

–0.13 * (0.05)

Production

0.01 (0.02)

0.40 * (0.18)

0.57 * (0.16)

Defect

0.87 * (0.29)

–2.77 (1.47)

–4.03 * (1.36)

Polity2

0.04 * (0.01)

0.13 * (0.05)

0.18 * (0.04)

MID

0.07 * (0.03)

1.11 * (0.39)

1.45 * (0.36)

Rival

–0.39 * (0.11)

2.02 * (0.96)

2.99 * (0.84)

Trade

0.21 * (0.03)

0.69 * (0.22)

0.9 * (0.19)

ρ

N AIC BIC log L

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–0.18 (0.19) 3491 3944.26 4215.21 –1928.13

1712 2064.47 2325.85 –984.24

1711 2358.72 2468.61 –1248.75

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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Probability of emulation

0.00 −0.05 −0.10 −0.15 −0.20 −0.25 0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

4000

Total dyadic centrality

f i g ure 3 . 8 . Predicted Effect of Centrality on the Likelihood of Emulation.

3.6 Alternative Explanations and Omitted Variable Bias Of the alternative explanations, only power—as proxied by CINC—is as consistently significant as those variables testing this book’s theory. However, when statistically significant, the sign on the CINC coefficient is invariably negative: Material capabilities allow states to avoid emulation. As with Test 7, this aligns with the theory’s prediction that secondary and peripheral states are the primary drivers of emulation, as they possess greater relative reliability and status concerns. Similarly, MID and Rival have inconsistent and often opposing effects in individual statistical tests, suggesting that common threats or interests do not systematically lead to emulation. The k-adic approach helps to control for selection and omitted variable bias. But without randomized treatment, we cannot conclusively exclude this issue. However, I draw upon a calculation developed by Altonji et al. (2005) to determine how strong the unobserved factors must be to wipe out the effects of the main explanatory variable in each test. Formally, Altonji et al. state the following condition: E(|Predictor  ) E(|Predictor  ) E(X |Predictor  ) E(X |Predictor  )  Var() Var(X )

where X is the matrix of control variables for the outcome equation, γ is a vector of their coefficients, and ϵ is a vector of residuals. While this condition holds, the relationship between the main explanatory variable and unobserved confounders is identical to the relationship between that same variable and the observed covariates, once we adjust for the variance of those two sets of variables. Using this relationship,

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ta b l e 3 . 1 0. Omitted Variable Magnitude for Each Test Test 1

Test 2

Test 3

Test 4

Explanatory Variable

Core Design

Dominant Count

Sum of Defections 10YR

IGO

Magnitude

9.13

68.64

17.32

5.66

Test 5

Test 6

Test 7

Saving Trend Centrality Provisions 3190.59

8.62

27.09

we can ask how large the left hand ratio must be to nullify the main variable’s significance and effect. I run this procedure on representative models from each test, and the results are presented in table 3.10. Test numbers are listed in the top row, while the explanatory variable being examined is listed in row 2. Magnitude, listed in row 3, is the result of the Altonji et al. calculation—how large omitted variables must be to eliminate the significance of each explanatory variable. This value is smallest for Test 4, but omitted factors must still be 5.66 times as strong as IGO and the other controls to undermine the model’s results. Note that Altonji et al. (2005) felt a magnitude of 3.5 suggested that omitted variables were unlikely to disrupt the results, especially in models with strong control variables. The strongest results appear in Test 5, where omitted variables must be three orders of magnitude more powerful. This is surprising, but additional calculations on different models within each test produce substantively similar results.

3.7 Summary of Quantitative Evidence

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The theory of core alliance diffusion generated multiple testable hypotheses. This chapter produced extensive statistical support for all of them, providing overlapping evidence confirming the diffusion mechanisms. The estimated effects survived multiple robustness checks. In addition, the models did not find consistent support for the alternative explanations, nor for institutionalist approaches to alliance design. While not dispositive, section 3.6 suggests that omitted variables are unlikely to undermine these findings. Taken together, the quantitative evidence demonstrates a firm relationship between the dominant alliance strategy, credibility, and legitimacy. From the first set of tests, emulation consistently occurs when we examine all alliances from 1815–2003. States follow the logic of portfolio consistency: Participating in dominant strategy pacts makes them increasingly likely to emulate the core alliance. Set 2 provided three tests confirming the two diffusion mechanisms. Emulation is systematically associated with credibility and status-seeking behavior. Finally, Set 3 affirmed that secondary and peripheral states drive emulation, while the dominant strategy’s pervasiveness increases its social and normative effects.

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In total, the book’s theory can explain the transhistorical pattern of dominant alliance strategies. But do we see alliance-level evidence for the causal mechanisms? Chapters 4–6 will draw upon the systematic analysis identified here to probe the theory’s microfoundations. Using qualitative case studies, they will find relative reliability and normative concerns reflected in the dynamics of specific core, secondary, and peripheral pacts. These concerns motivate countries’ efforts at alliance emulation. Chapter 7 will once again leverage statistical models linking emulation to concrete reductions in alliance failure. Copying the dominant strategy not only affects the design of military pacts but also improves their cohesion and stabilizes the global security network.

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4

Great Powers and Strategic Constraints The Bismarckian Era, 1873–1890

4.1

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Introduction

Prussia upended the European security order with its victory over Austria in 1866 and France in 1871. In the first war, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck humbled Vienna and consolidated Berlin’s primacy over the German principalities dotting Central Europe. Four years later, the Franco-Prussian War marked the capstone of Bismarck’s early foreign policy. Prussia decisively defeated France, widely thought to be the preeminent Continental power. The loss at Sedan and concurrent capture of Emperor Napoleon III signaled Prussia’s military dominance of Central Europe. Berlin reorganized the Teutonic principalities into a new German empire, fulfilling the grandest of the chancellor’s strategic ambitions. These four years transformed the European geopolitical landscape. The wars activated and terminated all prewar Continental alliances. Germany and AustriaHungary absorbed the Central European buffer states that had mitigated great power conflict for the past fifty-six years. The other great powers blamed France for the conflict, isolating it diplomatically. Paris, for its part, nursed a revanchist foreign policy over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, which only ended with World War I. And Germany emerged as the dominant state on the Continent, decisively defeating another great power and with its military system (particularly the general staff structure) envied by other countries. The war altered the European balance of power and eliminated the prior alliance system, leaving the major states with significant questions about how to foster national and regional security in this new strategic context.

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Prior to these wars, Bismarck’s foreign and alliance strategies were decidedly revisionist, manipulating countries to create the diplomatic freedom for Prussia to consolidate power and upend the European balance. After 1871, the chancellor continued pursuing a realpolitik vision of interstate security relations, but he declared his country a “satisfied” power committed to a new European order, calming tensions among the major states. The goal now was to solidify German gains and anchor a lasting peace through the aggregation of Central European and Russian power. This chapter will examine the series of diplomatic and alliance initiatives Bismarck launched from 1872–92 among the three conservative empires—Germany, AustriaHungary, and Russia—to achieve that goal. At the heart of this system was the Dual Alliance (1879) between Germany and Austria-Hungary. These powers then brought Russia into the Three Emperors Alliance (1881). When that pact failed, Bismarck created a bilateral agreement with Russia in the Reinsurance Treaty (1887). The prior Concert system was founded on norms of security consultation and cooperation among the great powers. Bismarck’s prewar strategy of fluid diplomacy and alignment, as well as victory in the Franco-Prussian War, decisively discredited this framework. Instead, the Dual Alliance established a realpolitik approach to alliance strategy, including a sharply delimited set of military obligations with minimal institutionalization and formality. This case bears out the credibility diffusion mechanism. As the weakest of the three empires, Austria-Hungary worried constantly about rank—its position within Germany’s wider security network. This led its diplomats to prevent the Three Emperors Alliance and even the Reinsurance Treaty from superseding the Dual Alliance’s design. Moreover, as this strategy spread, it fostered a wide and fluid military and diplomatic environment where powerful states carved up spheres of influence through military agreements and ignored each other’s predations on weaker countries, like the fragmenting Ottoman Empire. This case explores how relative reliability constrains even great power alliance choices. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia could easily have rejected the standards they themselves created, adapting their pacts to changing military or diplomatic needs. Yet they were unable to exceed the Dual Alliance’s provisions. Their agreements consistently failed for the same reason: policy conflict between AustriaHungary and Russia in Eastern Europe. Moreover, their leaders all recognized and declared the need for more robust alliances to avoid such failure in the future. Problems of rank, however, prevented these countries from adopting an alliance strategy that would enable military cooperation for more than a few years. Section 4.2 discusses case selection and outlines the contribution of this chapter. This should be an easy test for the common threat argument, as Bismarck’s goal of creating a conservative military bloc to prevent Russian-French reconciliation, anchor a new European order, and secure the German empire drove all three alliances.

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The case therefore serves as a hard test of the credibility diffusion mechanism. In addition, the states, strategic challenges, and even many of the statesmen remained the same throughout this period, removing other confounding explanations. Section 4.3 details the Dual Alliance, the core pact for this period. It outlines the treaty’s strategic rationale, particularly how the diplomatic isolation of Germany following the “War Scare of 1874–75” and increasing Russian-Austrian tension over the “Eastern Question” prompted Bismarck to create a limited military alliance with Vienna to stabilize European security relations in Berlin’s favor. From there, the chapter directly examines the diffusion hypotheses. Anxiety over rank spurred AustriaHungary to prevent the Three Emperors Alliance from exceeding the Dual Alliance’s military obligations, strategy, and design. Section 4.4 reviews the tripartite alliance negotiations among Bismarck, Russian ambassador to Germany Peter Saburov, and Austrian foreign minister Baron Heinrich von Haymerle in 1880–81. Although all three statesmen recognized the need for more robust alliances given the failure of earlier treaties, the initial draft would have displaced Austria-Hungary from the center of Germany’s security network and elevated Russia to equal, if not higher, rank. This draft envisioned much greater institutionalization, as the alliance would be publicly declared, offer third-party mediation, and contractually settle Austrian-Russian disputes over the Eastern Question, which had scuttled previous cooperation. Despite Vienna’s relative weakness, Haymerle successfully watered down the provisions so that they did not contradict, conflict with, nor exceed the Dual Alliance’s strategy, preserving Austria-Hungary’s leading position in Germany’s portfolio. The Three Emperors Alliance lapsed in 1887, again over Austrian-Russian disagreements concerning Eastern European spheres of influence. Germany attempted to create a new security agreement with Russia alone, eliding these cooperation problems. But as section 4.5 discusses, Bismarck and Russian ambassador to Germany Count Pavel Shuvalov were unable to exceed the Dual Alliance’s design even with Austria-Hungary absent. Bismarck claimed this would be disloyal to the Austrians. The logic of relative reliability continued to set the Dual Alliance as the upper bound for military pacts in this era. Section 4.6 turns to the alternative explanations, assessing whether the evidence presented here might better support a common threat or hegemonic imposition approach to these alliances’ common strategy. None provide an adequate account of the historical record and negotiating dynamics. Instead, relative reliability by the weakest member drove emulation. Section 4.7 concludes with a review of the chapter’s contribution to the theory.

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Case Selection and Contribution to Hypotheses

The successive alliances among Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia are a hard test of the theory. Bismarck initiated each of these pacts to prevent Franco-Russian

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reconciliation and protect the new German empire. Common threat should therefore do quite well in explaining why all three pacts had similar designs. In addition, the case’s structure helps to remove some possible alternative explanations. The strategic challenges each country faced did not change significantly over this period. Their underlying interests remained consistent as well. All three alliances had overlapping sets of the same states, and some diplomats even negotiated all three. In addition, none of these countries suffered a coup or other radical change in government. In short, the three conservative monarchies faced similar political and military contexts throughout this period, helping to isolate any explanation of common alliance strategy. For hegemonic imposition, no monarchy held sufficient power to individually impose its preferred design on the other two great powers. According to the Correlates of War CINC score, all three had significantly more power than other states (barring France and Great Britain), and between them, Russia and Germany had similar power levels throughout 1873–94. However, Austria-Hungary’s CINC score was only half that of these two states. It is possible that Germany and Russia imposed their preferred designs on Vienna, but why they adopted the same features for the Reinsurance Treaty remains an open question. However, this case will demonstrate that Austria-Hungary, despite its relative weakness, made decisive interventions during alliance negotiations, lending greater support to the book’s theory. For empirical evidence, this case uses both primary and secondary sources. The former include the Documents Diplomatiques Français, diplomatic correspondence compiled in Medlicott and Coveney (1972), and German diplomatic documents translated in Dugdale (1928). It also uses memoirs and diaries from major political actors such as Bismarck, Saburov, and Austrian Count Gyula Andrássy the Younger. For secondary sources, I draw upon histories by William Langer, A. J. P. Taylor, Paul Schroeder, and W. N. Medlicott, which have been used in other studies of the same period. There is some concern in using memoirs as a historical source. Although alliance negotiators are directly providing their rationales, they have strong incentives to present their diplomatic actions in the best possible light. This is particularly because many national publics blamed the horror of World War I on the network of secret, prewar alliances. Indeed, in several of the sources, the statesmen deliberately justify their policy positions to deflect blame for the Great War. I collate across multiple sources to reduce this problem. I find consistent support for the theory within each, as the authors agree on the negotiation outcomes and the alliance provision details, which were subsequently made public anyway. In total, the variety of information sources bolsters the likelihood that the historical record supports my theory, reducing concerns about a convenient or incomplete presentation of alliance negotiations by self-interested actors.

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In addition, we must make a critical clarification. This book does not treat the Three Emperors League as the core alliance in the years following the FrancoPrussian War. It ran from 1873 until 1878, ending before the Dual Alliance was established. Yet it does meet the definition of a core alliance. Formed only two years after the Franco-Prussian War, it also gathered Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia together to settle mutual policy conflicts and create a conservative, monarchical bloc recalling the earlier Holy Alliance (1815). But its design never diffused to other states and security pacts for historical reasons that lie beyond the theory. Only three other alliances were created in the six years between the Three Emperors League’s founding and 1879. Two involved a great power and a weaker, peripheral country (France and the Southeast Asian kingdom of Annam, Britain and the Ottomans), situations where status-seeking rather than relative reliability may play a stronger role. The third was concluded between Russia and Austria-Hungary, lasted just over a year, and served primarily to shore up the Three Emperors League by settling territorial disputes between Vienna and Moscow over Ottoman holdings that were undermining tripartite military cooperation. But with so few alliances, the Three Emperors League had little opportunity to diffuse. States were not creating alliances during these years for a couple of reasons. Outside of Central and South America, most of the world was under direct imperial control. Only in Europe was there a collection of states with sufficient capabilities to serve as effective allies. Yet these imperial centers were focused on internal rather than external balancing, as states scrambled to colonize new territory and squeeze greater productivity from existing holdings. Within Europe, strategic conditions inhibited the creation of new alliances. The Three Emperors League tied the majority of the great powers into a consultative pact, while France was still recovering from its defeat. The UK was uninterested in Continental entanglements, preferring an offshore balancing role and focusing on its vast empire. In essence, there was little need for formal security partnerships among the great powers because two were unavailable, and the remaining three were already participating in the league. The smaller European states, and especially their imperial territories, were more likely to be targets of great power predation, which also foreclosed military cooperation. Consequently, European security relations were largely unsettled and undefined both before and after the Three Emperors League. Even when it was active, the league failed to prevent renewed conflict between France and Germany, with Russia and Austria-Hungary both standing against Berlin as tensions escalated. In addition, the treaty consistently failed to resolve policy disputes between Vienna and Moscow. After the league’s collapse, Europe still had no alliances to structure security relations among the great powers, Germany maintained the prestige it had gained from victory over France and Austria, and strategic conflict among major states

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ta b l e 4 . 1 . Contribution of Bismarckian Alliance Cases to Credibility Diffusion Mechanism Hypothesis

Evidence

Distinction from Alternative Explanations

The Three Emperors Alliance (1881) H1

Austria-Hungary prevented Germany and Russia from adding provisions on mediation, spheres of influence, and public declaration.

These provisions were proposed to address issues of intra-allied credibility, not enhance confrontation with an outside threat, as common threat would expect. Despite the allies having faced the same cooperation problems before, the proposals were rejected, contrary to the institutionalist model.

H3

The weakest state (AustriaHungary) succeeded in preventing the Three Emperors Alliance from exceeding the Dual Alliance.

Hegemonic imposition expects stronger states (Germany and Russia) to impose their preferred design.

Reinsurance Treaty (1887) C1.1

Bismarck denies Russia’s request for a defense guarantee from Austria-Hungary, as that would displace Austria-Hungary from the center of Germany’s alliance network.

Hegemonic imposition would expect Germany and Russia to accept the defensive guarantee and impose this decision on Austria-Hungary, particularly given Bismarck’s realpolitik approach to alliance strategy.

remained much as it was before 1873. Bismarck launched the Dual Alliance for many of the same reasons that motivated him to establish the Three Emperors League. But broader European conditions had shifted. France had recovered from war and was actively courting foreign allies. Italy had consolidated and was also asserting claims to Ottoman territory. Nationalist movements succeeded in establishing governments in Eastern Europe, and this trend looked to continue in Bulgaria and in the Balkans. In this environment, states had much more opportunity to establish military pacts, activating relative reliability and allowing for credibility diffusion. The Dual Alliance could serve as a standard of alliance strategy, and hence its choice as the core military pact for this period. Table 4.1 summarizes the case’s details and its contribution to the theory.

4.3

The Core Pact: The Dual Alliance of 1879

The Dual Alliance of 1879 is considered a decisive point in nineteenth-century great power relations. With that treaty, Germany formally aligned itself with

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Austria-Hungary, and, as other alliance options were gradually foreclosed, in opposition to Russia. The pact served as the central security agreement for both Berlin and Vienna until World War I, and its existence conditioned all other formal military agreements and proposals that Germany participated in and offered during this period. As a result, it had a widespread effect on interstate alignment and foreign policy. Since Germany’s victories over Austria and France, Bismarck searched for some formula by which his new empire could consolidate its gains in Europe. Germany had successfully isolated Paris in the run-up to the war, acquired enormous prestige from its victory over what many considered the preeminent Continental military force, and maneuvered the other great powers into blaming France for the conflict. However, translating that success into a lasting and stable security environment for Germany required Bismarck to jettison his revisionist foreign policy. Instead, the new German empire’s strategy was conservative: consolidating its position in Central Europe, avoiding antagonizing the other great powers, and stabilizing Continental security dynamics to preserve the current peace treaty and balance of power. France was the primary threat to these goals. Defeated by Germany and losing AlsaceLorraine, widespread revanchism generated strong and lasting public pressure to launch a new war against Berlin. While Germany was individually stronger than its neighbor, the Iron Chancellor worried that a rebuilt and antagonistic France could combine with one or even two other great powers to challenge the war settlement, regain its lost territory, and roll back the political, diplomatic, and military position that Germany had achieved in Europe’s center: [T]he idea of coalitions gave me nightmares. We had waged victorious wars against two of the European Great Powers; everything depended on inducing at least one of the two mighty foes whom we had beaten in the field to renounce the anticipated design of uniting with the other in a war of revenge.

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This led to his famous dictum on “the importance of being one of three of the European chessboard . . . All politics reduces itself to this formula–to try to be one of the three, so long as the world is governed by the unstable equilibrium of five Great Powers.” Bismarck attempted to align Russia and the reorganized Austro-Hungarian empire with Germany. However, Moscow and Vienna themselves conflicted over the Eastern Question: the disposition of territory and ethnic groups in Ottoman lands in the Balkans. Throughout this period, the Ottoman Empire was hemorrhaging, losing control of its far-flung territories to ethnic nationalist movements. AustriaHungary and Russia vied for influence over these new actors, driven by ethnic or

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religious solidarity and to secure favorable territorial positions against other states. The Dual Monarchy’s multinational empire encompassed many politically powerful subgroups with ties to either nationalist homelands or brethren under Ottoman control. Principal among these were Bulgarians, Bosnians, Croatians, and Romanians, all of whose movements the Austrians supported. Moscow led a pan-Slavic movement and offered protection for Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands. It also supported Serbian nationalism, which brought Russia into conflict with other ethnic groups in the Balkans and, by extension, Austria-Hungary. Fragmenting Ottoman control led to increased ethnic nationalist unrest and the emergence of new states in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. These developments had the potential to ignite great power competition and war, and the Eastern Question prevented meaningful and sustained security cooperation between Moscow and Vienna. Indeed, they very nearly went to war during the Great Eastern Crisis (1875– 78). In 1876, Serbia and Montenegro launched separate wars against the Ottomans. The Serbians in particular faced a series of military defeats, and Moscow intervened in 1877, launching the Russo-Turkish War. In the run-up, Russian czar Alexander II and chancellor Alexander Gorchakov secured Austrian neutrality by agreeing to divide influence in the region postbellum. Russia would regain territory lost during the Crimean War, obtain access to Black Sea ports, and take on the leadership of the pan-Slavic movement. In return, Moscow would support Vienna’s occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Bulgaria would be made into an autonomous state. Securing a formal neutrality agreement with Austria-Hungary in January 1877, Russia declared war in April, defeated the Ottomans by the following spring, and rescued its Serbian nationalist allies. In the Treaty of San Stefano, Russia reneged on many of its promises to Vienna. Austrian foreign minister Gyula Andrássy in particular favored war with Russia for this betrayal and personal embarrassment, but his voice was a minority within the Dual Monarchy. Moscow, having taken the risk of war while Vienna sat out, seized most of the spoils. This was a disaster for Bismarck’s security and foreign policy. The Treaty of San Stefano decisively split Vienna and Moscow and invited British intervention into the region. The German chancellor called it a “calamity” and asserted that all other foreign policy interests—including Turkey’s welfare—were subordinate to repairing that breach. The threat of war between Russia and Austria-Hungary (possibly backed by England) would disrupt the status quo that favored continued German stability. Trust among the three courts further deteriorated when Bismarck attempted to broker a deal at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where, according to Italian foreign minister Count Luigi Corti, “Everybody was telling everybody else to take something which belonged to somebody else.” The Austrians consistently doubted Bismarck’s sincerity, with Baron Josef Schwegel (a member of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign

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Ministry) stating, “he is strikingly, even demonstrably, friendly with [Austrian foreign minister] Andrássy; but I do not trust him and I am convinced that basically he is only working for the Russians.” Ironically, the Russians felt betrayed by Bismarck. They had hoped Germany would support Moscow in retaining most of its military and political gains. Instead, its Slavic nationalist allies saw their territories shrink, although they remained independent nations. Russia itself lost its position on the Bosporus and access to the Mediterranean with it. Great Britain was allowed to occupy Cyprus, further cementing its control of regional waterways. Russian leaders blamed Bismarck especially for this outcome. Count Pyotr Shuvalov claimed, “Bismarck, whose chief preoccupation is to avoid clashes, and to bring the Congress to an end, finds himself forced to tack between [Russia, Austria-Hungary, and England] and does not always exert an energetic goodwill towards us.” Czar Alexander viewed the congress as nothing more than “a European coalition against Russia under the leadership of Prince Bismarck.” The War Scare of 1874–75 revealed the limits of great power tolerance for Germany’s rise and France’s weakness. While blaming France for the 1870–71 war, England and Russia were unwilling to see that country’s position deteriorate further, thereby granting Berlin consolidated control of Western and Central Europe. Since the war, France had undertaken an ambitious rearmament campaign, not least in order to retake Alsace-Lorraine. In February 1875, Bismarck learned that France was purchasing ten thousand German cavalry mounts, expressing severe trepidation about this move: “Even if the measure is only the natural result of the agreed reorganization, nevertheless we have no reason to aid and abet a reorganization which bears the stamp of a preparation for war, by supplying German horses. It therefore seems imperative to take counter-measures.” Moreover, the French chamber voted on March 13 to add a fourth battalion to each of their regiments, potentially circumventing an Armistice provision. Langer suggests that these may have been intended only to be “skeleton battalions,” but the German general staff calculated that they would dramatically increase French army strength. The great powers were increasingly concerned about renewed conflict between Paris and Berlin, particularly after a Berlin Post editorial on April 8, 1875, suggested that highly placed Germans favored preventive war against France that would threaten Europe’s fragile stability. Later that month, the Gontaut report reinforced this alarm. The document contained the details of a conversation between the French ambassador to Berlin Viscount Élie Gontaut-Biron and Joseph von Radowitz, a former Prussian foreign minister and general. The latter expressed a German interest in preventive war: “If France’s inmost thoughts are bent on revenge—and it cannot be otherwise—why wait to attack her until she has gathered her forces and contracted alliances?”

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Consequently, all the other great powers lined up against Germany, which was forced to back down. Bismarck was particularly incensed by Russia’s position and Germany’s subsequent isolation. “It was not, I said, a friendly part to jump suddenly and unexpectedly on the back of a trustful and unsuspecting friend, and get up a circus performance at his cost; proceedings of this kind between us, who were the directing ministers, could only injure the two monarchies and states. If he was anxious to be applauded in Paris, he need not on that account injure our relations with Russia.” Even the Austrian government, though it did not join the other powers, was delighted by the turn of events. Upon hearing about the Russian plan to gather the great powers against Germany, Andrássy evidently jumped on his desk and exclaimed, “Bismarck will never forgive that!” As a result, Germany sought a narrower foundation for its security network, focusing on a bilateral pact with Austria-Hungary. In Bismarck’s estimation at the time, “Germany and Austria united would be the best guarantee of peace for Europe. . . . If Germany and Austria were united, they would be, together, a match for any enemy, France or Russia.” In June 1879, speaking to the French ambassador to Germany, he claimed that “there should be between us [Germany and AustriaHungary] not a single point of disagreement, and to this I attach so great a value that I am prepared to make real sacrifices to bring it about. . . . The existence and the integrity of the Austrian Empire are for us the first conditions of security.” Bismarck sought a limited, realpolitik strategy for the Dual Alliance. The pact focused strictly on military affairs and imposed sharp limits on the members’ military obligations, promising support only in the event of a Russian attack. There were persistent disagreements between Germany and Austria-Hungary about exactly how far these military obligations extended. Bismarck, for example, repeatedly misrepresented the alliance’s content to Moscow, suggesting that the text (and by extension Austria-Hungary) had at least considered the possibility of and allowed for eventual Russian inclusion in the pact. By contrast, Vienna thought the pact implied German support for its interests in the Balkans and against Moscow. After signing the alliance, Andrássy cabled Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph I: “Now the Road to the Balkans is open to the monarchy.” However, Bismarck very clearly stated: “We have intended the alliance to serve exclusively as a defensive means of safeguarding the peace and independence of both empires against Russian attacks, but positively not as an instrument of support for any policy in the Balkans.” Nevertheless, this ambiguity served Austria-Hungary’s interests, particularly as the pact’s secrecy kept other states uncertain as to the extent of Berlin’s commitment to Vienna. In addition, in subsequent alliances, Austria-Hungary vetoed any attempts to clarify or settle these issues in a manner that went beyond the Dual Alliance. It therefore preserved its central position in Germany’s security network.

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Given Austria-Hungary’s substantially weaker geostrategic position and military capabilities, the alliance foreclosed Vienna’s wider alignment options, limiting its freedom of action and tethering it to Berlin. For Germany, the Dual Alliance was an essential component in ensuring that France, Russia, and even Britain would have greater difficulty creating a balancing coalition against German interests. The Dual Monarchy would no longer join any anti-German initiatives, stabilizing great power relations and Continental order. In addition, Bismarck aimed to use this pact to foster a wider military network incorporating Russia and Italy, as well as excluding France. As one German diplomat put it, “Only when mounted were we as tall as the Russian giant. Austria was intended to be our mount.” But despite these broader aims, alliance with Austria-Hungary was foundational to German security at this time. Indeed, the German chancellor directly rejected security offers that superseded the Dual Alliance’s provision, as will be detailed later. Austria-Hungary did not share these regional designs, but the German guarantee against Russian attack was the sine qua non of its security. Until World War I, Vienna worked toward portfolio consistency or even superiority, preventing Berlin from concluding any military agreements that would contradict, supersede, or impinge on this pact. Compared to the security treaties binding Austria and Prussia earlier in the century, the Dual Alliance was only lightly institutionalized. The pact did not explicitly mention nor even envision allied coordination. Communication was generally ad hoc and occasionally depended on coincidental overlap in the foreign ministers’, chancellors’, or even emperors’ travel schedules. Nor did the pact establish any common decision-making rules. Instead, it served simply as a formal statement of each party’s interest in the other’s security, with that thought to be sufficient to guarantee cooperation. Indeed, the treaty was a sharp departure from alliances established before the two Prussian wars, reflecting Bismarck’s realpolitik preferences in alliance strategy. These earlier partnerships were organizations of self-restraint, grounded in shared religious and political values. Bismarck, by contrast, rejected such constraints, preferring pacts maximizing Germany foreign policy latitude and unilaterally pursued national interests. Moreover, the Dual Alliance was explicitly secret, ostensibly “in conformity with its peaceful character, and to avoid any misinterpretation” by outside parties. However, the diplomatic record suggests that the secret provision (Article 4) was adopted to avoid objections by the Austrian parliament, which contained a strong pro-Russian bloc. For his part, Bismarck preferred that the Dual Alliance be made public, as it simply formalized the existing pattern of German-Austrian cooperation. Germany even suggested parliamentary ratification to demonstrate Berlin’s commitment to Vienna. Indeed, after its signing, Bismarck regularly hinted at and later even publicized the treaty’s existence in newspapers. Yet Austrian concerns won out,

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and the final treaty was covert. Finally, the treaty was short in scope, lasting only five years, although it was repeatedly renewed. In total, the Dual Alliance was the central security treaty for Germany and Austria-Hungary until World War I, when it was finally dissolved with those states’ defeat. This pact conditioned other great powers’ alliance options, forcing them to engage both Berlin and Vienna as a block, whether in creating subsequent partnerships like the Triple Alliance or forming balancing coalitions against both countries. Most importantly for this analysis, the Dual Alliance created an upper bound for subsequent alliance strategies, even as its provisions remained hidden.

4.4

Diffusion: The Three Emperors Alliance (1881)

After concluding the Dual Alliance, Austria-Hungary vigilantly monitored and prevented Germany from providing superseding assurances to other countries. This is most clearly seen in negotiations over the Three Emperors Alliance. With the bilateral pact in hand, Bismarck turned to Russia, searching for a lasting settlement to Austrian-Russian territorial and ethnic policy conflicts in the Balkans and drawing the three countries into a tripartite security pact. It was, however, an inopportune moment politically for such a treaty. The Russian press vigorously opposed any policies that even hinted at tying their country’s fundamental interests to Bismarck’s arbitration or input following his “betrayal” at the Congress of Berlin. Bismarck complained, “They consider me an ungrateful individual in Russia.” The German media was no less hostile to Moscow. The German ambassador to the UK, Count Georg Münster, claimed that Moscow was turning on its former allies: “Russia is preparing to attack Austria; the peace of the world will be disturbed; it is in the nature of things that it will not be a localized war; it will be a great and general war.” Count Andrássy claimed that the Russians “are fraught with perfidy, and I must admit that not only as a minister, but also as a gentleman, I would have scruples in recommending . . . a renewal of an agreement with Russia with reference to the east.” Even Russian foreign minister Saburov, a perpetual Russo-German optimist, worried in 1879 that relations between the two empires had deteriorated to the point that Berlin faced “a critical moment” to either reset relations on a cooperative path or face a decisive rupture with Moscow. This trilateral hostility, however, only emphasized the need for an additional security agreement to prevent war in Central and Eastern Europe. For Germany, the Dual Alliance alone would not settle conflict between Vienna and Moscow. All three parties needed to be drawn directly into a single pact, with Germany mediating. In addition, the negotiators over the proposed Three Emperors Alliance recognized that their prior military discussions and agreements had been too fragile, relying as they did on interpersonal relations between the three emperors to maintain cooperation.

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(German emperor Wilhelm I was Russian czar Alexander II’s uncle.) But Bismarck himself came to realize the shakiness of international agreements founded upon personal friendship alone: Now the sole security for the permanence of Russian friendship is the personality of the ruling Czar, and whenever that security falls below the standard set by Alexander II . . . the Russian alliance cannot be counted upon to afford in the hour of need a resource adequate to every occasion. Even in the last century it was perilous to reckon on the constraining force of the text of a treaty of alliance when the conditions under which it had been written were changed; today it is hardly possible for the government of a Great Power to place its resources unreservedly at the disposal of a friendly state when the sentiment of the people disapproves it. No longer, therefore, does the text of a treaty afford the same securities as in the days of the “cabinet wars.”

For Moscow, in a letter to Baron Alexander Jomini in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Saburov argued that “in the given situation is it possible to find in it the stamp of sincerity? I do not think so. Under the appearance of agreement is concealed the lack of real alliances. For want of the reality, one clings to the shadow.” Andrássy the Younger summed up the diplomatic mood, claiming, To-day the “sacred egoism” of nations is so strong, and the service of their own country the only recognised duty and desire of statesmen, that the slogan of “Right and Justice” is often no more than a cloak to hide national selfishness and greed. Even where it is otherwise, some more alluring catch-phrase unconsciously and involuntarily comes under the influence of national interests, since the average mind can conceive as “right and just” only such things as are useful and profitable for itself.

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Despite the evident awareness that future military cooperation required a more robust foundation, the Dual Alliance’s position as the central German pact prevented the three parties from reaching a solution. Austria-Hungary’s fundamental interest was to preserve its special relationship with Germany. Vienna was concerned that the Three Emperors Alliance, even with Austrian participation, would undercut German prioritization of the Dual Alliance. Medlicott summarizes the Dual Monarchy’s strategy: “Haymerle had . . . to ensure that the new treaty, by its provision for mediation or otherwise, did not alter adversely the existing relations between Austria and Germany.” As a result, at least for Vienna, the Dual Alliance acted as an upper bound for any subsequent alliance strategy: Austria-Hungary would not participate in a Three Emperors Alliance exceeding the 1879 pact’s provisions. Haymerle consequently leveraged his (essential) agreement to stop this from happening.

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Indeed, Austria had some justification for its relative reliability concerns. Bismarck explicitly linked the Dual Alliance to changing Russia’s behavior, with the German chancellor relaying to Saburov: Austria would be much mistaken, if she thought herself completely protected by us. I can assure you that this is not the case. Our interest orders us not to let Austria be destroyed, but she is not guaranteed against an attack. A war between Russia and Austria would place us, it is true, in a most embarrassing position, but our attitude in such a circumstance will be dictated by our own interest and not by engagements which do not exist. Our interest demands that neither Russia nor Austria should be completely crippled. Their existence as Great Powers is equally necessary to us. That is what will guide our conduct in such an event.

Saburov certainly thought the Three Emperors Alliance obviated or even destroyed whatever guarantees he suspected Bismarck had given Austria-Hungary. As he later wrote, “Our action is working its way in, like a wedge, between these two Powers. Bismarck . . . gets visibly angry under Haymerle’s opposition.” The Austrians hoped that this pact would serve “not, however, instead of, but as a complement to, the Dual Alliance.” It did not help that Bismarck and Saburov first ironed out an agreement between them, and only then presented a draft treaty to Haymerle through a backdoor channel that hid its origins. This left the Austrian worried that Germany and Russian had developed a hidden understanding undermining Vienna’s position. As a result, Haymerle repeatedly asked for Bismarck’s understanding of the Dual Alliance’s casus foederis to ensure that this earlier pact remained Germany’s highest security priority. Toward the end of the negotiations, Bismarck accordingly signed a declaration that the Dual Alliance was in no way affected by the “prospective triple agreement.” Even then, the Austrians remained worried by the seeming closeness of German and Russian positions in the draft treaty text. Haymerle was particularly suspicious about alliance institutionalization. Bismarck included three proposals for more robust coordinating mechanisms in the initial Russo-German draft. First, the chancellor hoped for a public pact among the three powers to add further force to the agreement. Bismarck had only reluctantly accepted the secret provisions of the Dual Alliance, and he argued that few states could raise objections to the Three Emperors Alliance’s contents. A public commitment, moreover, would signal a stronger relationship among members. Second, Bismarck hoped to clearly demarcate in the alliance text respective spheres of influence for Vienna and Moscow over the Eastern Question. Saburov explained to Bismarck that Russian interests in this region “had more points of contact with Austria, since the last war, than was formerly the case,” thus requiring even

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greater care and management. The German chancellor proposed an explicit division of territorial influence, with Russia asserting political control over the eastern half of the region (up to the Bosporus), while Austria would dominate the western portion (at least to the Aegean Sea). This would allow both parties freer reign in their respective spheres and quell policy disagreements that could once again undermine alliance cooperation. As a final safeguard against Russian-Austrian squabbles, Bismarck offered a provision for third-party mediation. Specifically, the initial Russo-German draft of the alliance stated: “The three Courts of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary promise that if a dispute or grief has arisen between two of them, this dispute will be referred to the mediation of the third, to then be resolved by trilateral agreement.” Germany—as a generally satisfied power with few policy disagreements with either Russia or Austria-Hungary—was unlikely to invoke this provision. Instead, Berlin would mediate between Vienna and Moscow, defusing Austro-Russian conflicts to preserve military agreement. In this way, the Three Emperors Alliance would have a critical “safety valve”: Even if the explicit division of the Balkans failed, the partners would have a formal mechanism to resolve disputes, as well as a relatively impartial mediator in Germany. In total, the initial alliance draft followed institutionalist logic. The risk of policy conflict was met with a formal mediation mechanism that could manage unanticipated disputes. A public pact would demonstrate commitment and prevent misunderstanding with other great powers. And the division of spheres of influence in Eastern Europe would clarify Austria and Russia’s respective obligations and rights, bolstering cooperation over the long term. This would also exceed Germany’s commitments in the Dual Alliance. Haymerle rejected all three proposals as the price of Austrian agreement to the Three Emperors Alliance. He was especially concerned about the origin of the mediation provision, suspecting that Russia had inserted it. In fact, Bismarck had added it, and this admission, according to Saburov, indicated that, “in [Vienna’s] opinion, the friendship of Russia was more necessary to Germany than that of Austria.” If Russia and Germany were the closer pair, Haymerle worried that Berlin would stand with Moscow against Austria’s interests in the event of conflict in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, he proclaimed the draft mediation language far too broad and the wording on implementation too ambiguous. This clause, he worried, was ripe for Russian misuse: The terms (specifically, “grief ” and “dispute”) were vague enough that they could conceivably cover disagreements over Austria-Hungary’s internal administration, opening the way for Russian intervention. The Austrian diplomat was highly concerned that mediation—instead of addressing the very tangible policy disagreements among the three powers—was simply a cover for duplicitous action by Russia and even Germany. For the provision to be even minimally acceptable, Haymerle demanded clarification of these terms and proposed additional language

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limiting mediation only to the most recent policy conflicts. Despite the fact that he himself had introduced this provision, Bismarck dropped the entire mediation proposal from the final treaty. In addition, the first set of Austro-Hungarian revisions to the Russo-German draft added a secrecy clause and established a sharply delimited duration for the pact. Haymerle was concerned that a publicly affirmed Three Emperors Alliance would subvert the secret Dual Alliance. Moreover, a public tripartite pact would harm burgeoning relations with England, instead causing the Gladstone government to oppose Austrian interests. Vienna could not deter such British activity without revealing Germany’s support through the Dual Alliance, undermining that prior pact. Austria-Hungary was also concerned about the domestic reception of the Three Emperors Alliance’s negotiation and signing, given the ethnic fractionalization of Vienna’s empire. Saburov reports that “Haymerle insists particularly on the necessity of maintaining secrecy over this Treaty. He fears the Delegations; he fears the press; he fears the effect which the news of a Treaty signed by three will produce in Paris and London.” In addition, the shorter period of effect—three years as compared to the 1879 treaty’s five-year duration—ensured that the Three Emperors Alliance’s commitments would not exceed or violate the Dual Alliance’s obligations or institutional guarantees. The earlier pact would continue to provide Vienna with a more durable assurance of German cooperation than any other treaty Berlin possessed. Fortunately for Haymerle, Bismarck and Saburov changed their minds about secrecy, receptive to Austrian concerns about British reaction to a public pact. Haymerle’s amendments for secrecy and a three-year duration were accepted without reservation. The remaining negotiations focused on carving out spheres of influence in former or disintegrating Ottoman territory acceptable to both Russia and Austria-Hungary. Here again, Haymerle worked assiduously to prevent the Three Emperors Alliance from superseding Vienna’s understanding of the Dual Alliance. This he did through obstruction, persistently rejecting increasingly expansive and more precise Russian proposals and eventually watering down the tripartite pact’s provisions to simply sustain the status quo. Bismarck hoped that the two Courts could cleanly divide influence over Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, and Eastern Rumelia (now part of Bulgaria); agree on the political future of (the then smaller) Bulgaria; determine control of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (an Ottoman district spanning modern-day northeastern Montenegro and southwestern Serbia); and create a regular mechanism to manage lingering or emerging disputes. Saburov was particularly enthusiastic about this kind of agreement, and his initial proposal provided Austria with uncontested influence in the western portion of the Balkan peninsula in exchange for a reciprocal consideration in the eastern half. In addition, Russia agreed to postpone political decisions on Bulgaria, where Vienna wanted more time for its own influence to grow and its policies to take root.

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The Austrians, however, distrusted the Russians and worried that their proposals would weaken German support for Austria’s position in the region. They preferred to simply continue the status quo and quiet tensions for just a few years. In response, Saburov proposed an even broader and more generous agreement than in the initial draft. This plan included the establishment of a Balkan confederation with Austro-Hungarian membership, as well as a tariff union for the region, providing institutionalized influence for Vienna in the Balkans. In exchange, Saburov saw a chance for Russia to seize “the keys of her own house”: control of the Turkish Straits allowing it unfettered access to the Mediterranean and a viable year-round port. Vienna again rejected this proposal, and they were evidently correct to suspect the Russians. The proposal’s originator, Russian minister of war Dmitry Milyutin, was apparently insincere and actually preferred an informal division of frontiers due to his own mistrust of Austrian demands. Consequently, Russian foreign minister Nikolay Giers watered down the proposal further. Moscow offered Austria-Hungary something of a “truce” in diplomatic conflict: Both powers would maintain the status quo; they would instruct their agents in the region to refrain from competition with their counterparts; they would establish a “rational” although informal frontier; and they would affirm a promise to consult in case of any disputes, as was the case in the Three Emperors League. Defeated, Saburov’s new instructions omitted any mention of the Straits, a Balkans political or tariff union, and any greater institutionalization of the alliance. Most importantly, the Three Emperors Alliance was a neutrality pact. If a fourth party attacked a member, the other two signatories promised they would not work against the victim’s defense or interests, and they would work to prevent the conflict from spreading. The agreement did not call for military commitments among the members, and so did not supersede the Dual Alliance. If Russia attacked AustriaHungary, Germany would not violate the Three Emperors Alliance to fulfill its 1879 obligations. In addition, Haymerle made a critical revision to the military provision. The initial draft conditioned neutrality on “war with a fourth Power.” Haymerle substituted “Great Power” for “Power.” Russia had been interested in annexing Romania, and the original language would have forced Austria-Hungary to stand aside while Moscow acquired that territory. By substituting that language, the Three Emperors Alliance would not tread on Vienna’s understanding of the Dual Alliance, allowing Austria-Hungary to invoke the earlier pact in case of conflict with Russia over Eastern Europe. In total, Austria leveraged accession to the Three Emperors Alliance to prevent that pact from superseding the Dual Alliance’s strategy, military guarantees, and design. Haymerle was successful in watering down successive German and Russian proposals regarding mediation, spheres of influence, and public declaration of the pact, preserving—at least formally—the Dual Alliance’s central position in Germany’s

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security network. As one historian put it, “In truth, Haymerle had every right to be suspicious of Bismarck and the Russians. The best he could hope to do was to hold on to the Austro-German Treaty with as much grace as possible and to fight every concession insofar as practicable without assuming an attitude of hostility.” In that effort, Austrian concerns about rank, as well as its pivotal position in the negotiations, ensured that the Dual Alliance served as an upper bound on any subsequent agreement. This regularly angered both Bismarck and Saburov, who complained of Haymerle’s “timidity” and inability to grasp the wider objectives and benefits of tripartite comity. Yet, despite being the weakest of the three states, Austria-Hungary largely achieved its negotiating objectives, driven by concerns about alliance rank.

4.5

Diffusion: The Reinsurance Treaty (1887)

The Three Emperors Alliance was renewed in 1884, but ultimately, it too failed over the Eastern Question, lapsing in 1887. Bismarck was still motivated by his longstanding strategy of preventing a Franco-Russian coalition. Giving up on gathering Vienna and Moscow into a single treaty, he instead signed the Reinsurance Treaty just with Russia in 1887. Separate bilateral agreements—the Dual Alliance on the one hand, the Reinsurance Treaty on the other—would secure Germany against any nightmare coalition involving France. The negotiations over this pact reveal further evidence of the Dual Alliance’s limiting effects on subsequent alliance strategy and design. Given the importance of this security relationship, as well as their history of alliance failures, Giers and Shuvalov (the new Russian ambassador to Germany) desired stronger signals of Berlin’s commitment. Shuvalov’s instructions were “to surround the maintenance of peace with solid guarantees . . . and to guard Russia against the danger of European coalitions by sincere and firm alliance with the most powerful of the neighbouring states.” With Austria-Hungary (and Haymerle in particular) left out of the negotiations, Germany and Russia should easily have settled these issues, particularly given their close cooperation in drafting the Three Emperors Alliance. In addition, while the German-Russian negotiations were under way, Bismarck simultaneously pushed the Dual Monarchy to publish the 1879 agreement, hoping that clarifying German obligations would assure Moscow of Berlin’s intentions. Similarly, he felt there was little in the Reinsurance Treaty that Vienna would object to, such that the pact’s negotiation and final text should be made public. Germany and Russia were again unable to escape the Dual Alliance’s secretive and narrowly framed standard. During the initial discussion in May 1887, Shuvalov repeatedly asked Bismarck for a defense guarantee against Austria-Hungary. Russia would trade protection to Germany against France in exchange for German protection to Russia against Austria. This latter condition, however, would contradict the Dual Alliance, committing Germany to defend both sides. At this point in the

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negotiations, Bismarck drew out his copy of 1879 treaty and dictated it to Shuvalov. According to the latter, Bismarck remarked that “it would be disloyal toward us for him to accept the first article of our proposed convention, in view of the disclosure he had just made.” In other words, the Dual Alliance—and Austria-Hungary’s position at the center of Germany’s security network—prevented Berlin from joining any alliance that would contradict or exceed its provisions. Bismarck also did not share the treaty’s duration with Shuvalov, preventing the Russians from determining when they could strike against Austria without fear of German reprisal. Here again, rank considerations prevented even the leading state from compromising the core alliance. In subsequent discussions, Bismarck and Shuvalov searched for some language that would fulfill the original intent of trading mutual protection against different threats, but simultaneously allow Germany to fulfill the Dual Alliance. They ultimately failed. The final document—like the Three Emperors Alliance—only promised benevolent neutrality in case of war with a third party. More importantly, this obligation did not apply to France or Austria. Vienna remained Berlin’s highest security priority. Shuvalov records Bismarck as saying: I take no interest whatever in Bulgaria or in Constantinople. You can do what you please there; it is not I who will prevent you. It is only the integrity of the AustroHungarian territory that we have to defend. You know that. There, in my eyes, is a political necessity. Austria cannot be wiped off the map of Europe.

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Indeed, in the treaty’s other articles, Germany recognized Russian interests in the Balkans, as well as their desire for control of Constantinople and the Bosporus. However, such agreement potentially contradicted the Dual Alliance’s intent, having Germany support Russian claims over those of Austria-Hungary. Bismarck labored over the Reinsurance Treaty’s language to prevent this, but the potential for misunderstanding remained, especially as Vienna understood the Dual Alliance to indicate German support for its positions in Eastern Europe. As a result, both Shuvalov and Bismarck preferred that the pact be kept secret. Shuvalov worried that “any indiscretion respecting it might be fatal to us by disclosing too early our aspiration.” Revelation would hurt Russia’s position with the other great powers. Vienna in particular could cast such a declaration as upending the status quo over Ottoman territory, allowing it to unilaterally advance its own interests there. And it would do so under German protection against Russian retaliation. Revelation would hurt Germany too, undermining Austria’s position at the center of Berlin’s security network and potentially causing Vienna to align with other countries. Consequently, these concerns about rank within wider alliance portfolios limited what Bismarck and Shuvalov could achieve with the German-Russian pact.

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Like its predecessors, the Reinsurance Treaty failed in 1890. Several factors conspired against its continuation. Chief among these was the death of German emperor Wilhelm I, his son Frederick III’s sudden demise three months later, and his grandson Wilhelm II’s accession, all in 1888. The younger Wilhelm’s relationship with Bismarck was tenuous and fraught with personal and policy conflicts, and the new German emperor dismissed the venerable chancellor from service in 1890. He preferred a more independent German foreign policy relying on his personal relationship with the czar to maintain positive relations, much as Bismarck did in 1873. Moreover, factions within Berlin’s Foreign Ministry saw Bismarck’s ouster as their chance to consolidate and shift policy in their preferred direction. Even as Wilhelm II assured Shuvalov of his interest in seeing the Reinsurance Treaty continue, Friedrich von Holstein, head of the ministry’s political department, instructed the German ambassador in Moscow, General von Schweinitz, to inform the Russians that the treaty would not be renewed. This marked a decisive change in German foreign policy, and Russia was uncertain how to deal with it. Up to this point, Berlin’s strategy had been straightforward. Now, Moscow faced a German Foreign Ministry in flux. Giers attempted to entice Berlin into continuing the Reinsurance Treaty, not—as might be theoretically expected—by upgrading institutions to improve their robustness. Rather, Moscow proposed to reduce the alliance’s obligations, giving up direct German support for Russian policy in the Balkans. Giers also suggested they make the agreement public to further demonstrate its benign parameters. Instead of reassuring Germany of Russia’s commitment, this initiative raised renewed concerns in Berlin about the compatibility of the treaty with Germany’s other, secret commitments to AustriaHungary and Italy. Moreover, after this Russian proposal, the German Foreign Ministry worried that Moscow would strategically reveal even a renewed, secret Reinsurance Treaty in order to damage Berlin’s relations with these two other states (leaving aside that Moscow could already have done this any time in the previous three years). As a result, the Dual Alliance established the frame in which Berlin interpreted Moscow’s overtures, constraining partnership design options. This model laid the foundation for a wider network of interlocking security agreements, all of which would be threatened if Germany and Russia had adopted a different form of military cooperation in order to continue the Reinsurance Treaty.

4.6 Alternative Explanations for Alliance Design Diffusion In sum, the case highlights several pieces of evidence supporting the credibility diffusion mechanism. Following the Dual Alliance’s founding, Austria-Hungary’s alliance strategy was directed at maintaining its top rank among Germany’s security commitments. It consistently vetoed military guarantees and organizational features threatening this position, even as the allies recognized a clear and pressing need

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for more robust, cohesive cooperation. Relative reliability concerns even prevented Bismarck from superseding the 1879 pact during the secret Reinsurance Treaty negotiations. Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary had sufficiently mutual interests to sign eight separate pacts by 1894. But because the Dual Alliance served as an upper bound, they were never able to develop a partnership strategy resolving the Eastern Question and prevent repeated alliance failures. Alternative approaches have difficulty explaining this history. As mentioned in section 4.2, no partner was individually powerful enough to impose its preferred design on the others. Moreover, Germany and Russia preferred more open and integrative alliance designs, with publicly declared commitments and mediation mechanisms. But in fact, the treaties much more closely followed the weakest party’s preferences. Austria-Hungary leveraged its agreement to dilute the Three Emperors Alliance’s provisions. Haymerle’s obstructionism eliminated the mediation provision, shortened the duration, secured a promise of secrecy, and prevented settlement of Russo-Austrian conflict in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. With events in the mid-1880s prompting Germany to firmly choose Austria-Hungary as its paramount partner, Bismarck refused to exceed the Dual Alliance’s provisions—even under a guarantee of secrecy—during the Reinsurance Treaty negotiations. In theoretical terms, the weakest state’s position prevented a stronger one from subverting its commitments, even though the negotiations and agreement were hidden. Both common threat and rational design suffer from similar problems in this case. Germany’s fear of a French pact with another great power drove all three alliances. Yet the negotiations focused on intra-allied cohesion and coordination, not response to external threat. The proposals on mediation, secrecy, and territorial divisions were all attempts to resolve the Eastern Question and prevent Austrian-Russian conflict from once again collapsing security cooperation. Weitsman (2004) argues that the primary threat these three countries faced was each other, and the problems created by the Eastern Question support this interpretation. But if we accept this argument, we should ask why these states repeatedly failed to create intra-allied mechanisms to resolve this policy dispute. Statesmen proposed more robust agreements. Yet, contrary to rational design, the pacts remained of limited scope and obligation because Austria-Hungary guarded its primary position in Germany’s security network.

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Conclusion

In the end, Bismarck’s nightmare coalition—the prevention of which was the central focus of German foreign policy for almost two decades—arrived with the FrancoRussian Alliance of 1892. With the Reinsurance Treaty’s failure, Moscow feared diplomatic isolation and turned to Paris for security. Coupled with continuing policy

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conflict in the Balkans, this pact—along with the Dual Alliance; the Triple Alliance (1882) between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; and the Triple Entente (1907) between Russia, France, and Great Britain—ultimately led to the conflagration of World War I. For all of Bismarck’s diplomatic brilliance, he was unable to craft a security system anchored in a central defensive pact with Austria-Hungary, but that could simultaneously and sustainably manage policy disputes between Vienna and Russia. This alliance strategy’s limitations prevented the adaptation necessary to resolve increasingly dangerous disagreements. This chapter raises a few final points supporting the theory and specifically pertaining to how credibility problems drive strategic emulation and constrain institutional design. First, concerns about rank and relative reliability can prevent even the great powers from adjusting and thereby preserving their alliances. The German chancellor proposed a variety of organizational features—third-party mediation, respective spheres of influence, the public declaration of alliance—explicitly to resolve disputes and bolster cooperation among the three powers. That even these states, with their substantial capabilities, or Bismarck, with his personal prestige and standing, were unable to alter their alliance designs underscores the importance of portfolio consistency. The Dual Alliance acted as an upper bound on the form, purpose, and goals of security cooperation for Central and Eastern Europe during this time, supporting Hypothesis 2. Second, Austria-Hungary played a pivotal role in ensuring that the Dual Alliance served as the standard of alliance credibility, providing evidence for Hypothesis 1 and Corollary 1.1. As the weakest of the three (and all) great powers, it faced the highest costs and greatest likelihood of conquest if its security partners decided to abrogate their military agreements. Having placed Vienna at the heart of Germany’s security system, however, Bismarck found it difficult to dislodge Austria from that position during the Three Emperors Alliance negotiations, due principally to Haymerle’s obstruction. In those talks, Berlin was essentially forcing a choice onto Vienna, about whether they would accept Russia as an additional primary partner in the German network. Austria-Hungary declined, and Bismarck further cemented Vienna’s rank by accepting that decision. Afterward, Germany embraced Austria’s view that the Dual Alliance should be both countries’ highest strategic priority. This was seen during the Reinsurance Treaty negotiations when Bismarck refused to exceed the earlier treaty’s provisions, even in a secret alliance with Russia. The very ease with which partners could exceed the core pact prompted Austria-Hungary to jealously guard its position, preventing partnerships with third parties or of lower priority from displacing its rank. After the central pact has been established, alliance institutions are less important for the strategic problems they manage and more for their implications on a country’s priority in its ally’s portfolio.

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Finally, following Corollary 3.1, the three conservative monarchies viewed offers of institutionalization with suspicion. Rather than a sign of commitment or an effective dispute management tool, Haymerle suspected that Russia had inserted the third-party mediation provision into the initial Three Emperors Alliance draft in order to reduce Austria’s freedom of action in the Balkans. This would allow Moscow greater freedom to assert its claims to former Ottoman territory and more directly support its favored ethnic nationalist movements. In all, the three empires could not escape the Dual Alliance’s strategy, even when they recognized that robust coordinating and information-sharing procedures were needed to manage and mitigate intra-allied conflict. Vienna acted out of concerns of rank, and Germany acquiesced. As the core pact’s design spread, it prevented the creation of robustly institutionalized security networks. Perhaps nothing could have stopped Austro-Russian conflict over the Balkans from splitting Europe into mutually antagonistic blocks. But issues of rank and relative reliability actively prevented the establishment of management institutions that allies recognized were necessary to resolve these problems. Ironically, a realpolitik approach to core alliance strategy—designed to secure Germany and avert renewed conflict—obstructed flexible adaptation, ultimately leading to war.

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5

Cold War Credibility NATO, SEATO, and CENTO, 1949–1965

5.1

Introduction

As World War II drew to a close, the victorious great powers—the US, the UK, and the USSR—began jockeying over rival territorial claims and competing visions of the postwar order. Russia was tightening its political and military grip on Central and Eastern Europe, establishing a sphere of influence, obstructing American reconstruction efforts, and preventing development of a common German rehabilitation policy. Increasing uncertainty about Soviet military intentions spurred the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to sign the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949. This pact has anchored trans-Atlantic security relations ever since, surviving French withdrawal from the integrated military command in 1966, outlasting the Warsaw Pact, and finding continued relevance after the Cold War. NATO has become the standard by which military and political ties are judged, inspiring security architectures around the globe. Even the Warsaw Pact—created by a rival power with no intention of or need to make the same political, economic, military, and diplomatic sacrifices as the US—copied the American-led alliance’s strategy and design. NATO’s close policy coordination, interoperability, and centralized command structure serve as the gold standard for effective, credible, and legitimate military cooperation today. This chapter examines two cases of this standard’s diffusion to secondary, β-class alliances. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, also known as the Manila Pact) of 1954 and the Baghdad Pact (later called the Central Treaty Organization, CENTO) of 1955 were directly modeled on NATO’s structure and obligations.

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The United States was generally reluctant to offer identical agreements to its nonEuropean partners. While Washington did make substantial financial and material contributions to its allies, regional members continued to view the Eisenhower administration’s reluctance to match the NATO standard as a sign of uncertain commitment and weak resolve. In the end, local partners succeeded in gradually upgrading SEATO’s and CENTO’s institutions to match the North Atlantic Alliance’s design, albeit imperfectly. Lacking strategic symmetry, regional members questioned whether America was truly committed to its non-European agreements. SEATO and CENTO serve as hard tests of the credibility diffusion mechanism. Created under the Eisenhower administration (1953–60), both security partnerships attempted to contain the Soviet Union and block the spread of its political and military influence into Southeast Asia and the “Northern Tier” (i.e., the USSR’s southern flank), respectively. We might therefore expect that the common adversary prompted emulation of NATO’s features. Alternatively, unlike in the Bismarckian cases, the United States was significantly more powerful than any of its allies or indeed any other country. It could have imposed its preferred alliance strategy on partners. These cases should be the least likely conditions for credibility diffusion to hold. However, the diplomatic record suggests that emulation was driven not by concerns about Soviet capabilities but rather by US commitment. Substantial transfers of military equipment, extensive financial support, and multiple public position statements could not outweigh questions about whether Washington would bring its full military might to keep its promises. Moreover, the non-American partners— not the United States—pushed for emulation. Indeed, Washington actively avoided spreading NATO’s design. Evidence for both cases is drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources. These include the Foreign Relations of the United States archive, as well as material in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries and the British national archives. This chapter also draws from secondary sources, most notably Yeşilbursa (2005) and Fenton (2012). The chapter starts by evaluating NATO’s design and formation, outlining the core alliance’s key emulative features. It then analyzes diffusion of this strategy to SEATO and CENTO in turn. Each section begins by justifying the case’s selection, then discusses how the trans-Atlantic model influenced these alliances’ common strategy. The cases will examine how these countries succeeded in gaining strategic and design concessions by leveraging the core pact’s standard. However, Washington resisted transplanting the language of NATO’s defensive guarantee onto SEATO and CENTO, claiming that the differences were semantic and of little importance. Nevertheless, these semantic issues generated relative reliability concerns that Washington prioritized other foreign policy interests above these alliances. This chapter

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will conclude by summarizing the evidence and evaluating alternative explanations, finding that they do not adequately explain these cross-alliance dynamics.

5.2

NATO as the Core Alliance

The North Atlantic Treaty has anchored European security relations since World War II. NATO jettisoned the realpolitik alliance strategy of the Bismarckian and Interwar periods, similarly rejecting flexibility and fluid rebalancing as legitimate security policies. Instead, it established an iconic defense guarantee (Article 5), where members agreed that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” This was an expansive collective security commitment, directed against any threat to regional peace. The treaty promised regular consultations (Article 4) and directed its members to establish a governing council and any subsidiary bodies necessary to manage the alliance (Article 9). Although a military pact, it encouraged allied support of members’ democratic and economic development, at the suggestion of the Canadian delegation (Article 2). In total, the North Atlantic Treaty fostered a multilateral approach of “all for one, one for all,” committing members to common decision-making rules and collective security “to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.” While these provisions promised an integrative approach, NATO initially struggled to enact this alliance strategy. Indeed, there was significant American resistance to designing NATO as an integrative pact in the first place. Senator Robert Taft, the fourth-ranking Republican, preferred a unilateral American declaration guaranteeing European security, somewhat akin to the Monroe Doctrine. The Truman administration demanded that Western Europe first consolidate to develop a framework for and demonstrate their commitment to regional security. It applauded the Western Union in 1948, a defensive alliance among France, the UK, and the three Benelux countries that was later cannibalized by NATO. But even after the union’s establishment, Washington declared its preference for a looser relationship to any European security project. George Kennan argued: People in Europe should not bother themselves too much in the initial stage [of a trans-Atlantic security partnership] about our relationship to this concept. If they develop it and make it work, there will be no real question as to our long-term relationship to it, even with respect to the military guarantee. This will flow logically from the consequences.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg, widely considered the leading foreign policy authority in Congress, also demanded a thinly institutionalized alliance to avoid “a sense

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of false security which might result in their [the other allies] taking so firm an attitude as to become provocative and give the impression of having a chip on their shoulders.” It took the Korean War for the allies to seriously implement NATO’s military and organizational strategy. The members had assumed Moscow would restrain its Communist satellites, preventing military confrontation with Western countries and their allies. But North Korea’s invasion raised fears of a similar offensive in Europe. West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer remarked that “Stalin was planning the same procedure for Western Germany as had been used in Korea.” Moreover, NATO was generally thought to be unprepared for such a conflict. The American nuclear monopoly was lost when the Soviet Union detonated its own atomic device in 1949. At least on paper, each member took on and specialized in specific strategic and operational roles, due to the US desire to avoid overlap and wasted effort. Washington, for example, was to provide strategic bombing and supplies, while Continental members were to take responsibility for tactical airpower and the bulk of the initial ground forces. Members also agreed to unified production schedules, with an expectation of ninety divisions and eight thousand tactical aircraft fielded along the German border by 1951. The alliance never came close to accomplishing these goals. Individual countries sought exemptions from their force contributions, such that NATO could field only fifteen divisions and fewer than a thousand aircraft in Europe. Except for the Military Committee, no alliance organ met on a continuous and permanent basis, reducing NATO’s ability to respond quickly to crises and coordinate policy. The main deliberative committees were also spread throughout allied countries, further inhibiting internal cooperation. Finally, the Europeans generally balked at the idea that their troops would face the Russian advance while the Americans operated in the relative safety of the air and behind the front lines. As Dean Acheson, US secretary of state at the time of NATO’s creation, later noted, the early NATO “was a pre-integration organization, aimed to produce general plans for uncoordinated and separate action in the hope that in the event of trouble a plan and the forces to meet it would exist and would be adopted by a sort of spontaneous combustion.” The Korean War forced NATO to directly confront these problems. The alliance initiated the first of its Annual Review processes, a comprehensive and independent assessment of the pact’s health. Members increased defense spending and preparations, and the alliance made two key institutional changes: creating a unified military command and a management organization. First, five Regional Working Groups originally coordinated the alliance’s military planning. The division of NATO’s work by geography, however, led to fragmented strategic frameworks and uneven implementation. This was inadequate, with the Military Committee warning:

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Since the inception of NATO considerable military planning has been done, but the means of converting these plans into an effective and efficient defense of the NAT area have been lacking. Existing forces are not fitted to resist a Russian offensive. They are inadequate; they are not organized, equipped, or trained for the battle they may have to fight; they are not supported by the necessary infrastructure;—and they are not adequately backed by reserve formations. No means exist for welding even such national units as are now in being into a force which would provide the maximum defense capability, or for exercising unified command over any forces which might be available. In order to defend Western Europe to the maximum extent practicable, national forces which are to be contributed for this purpose must be formed into a unified whole, deployed to the best possible advantage in peace consistent with “cold war” strategy and organized, trained and commanded as necessary to effectively meet a Soviet attack without warning.

The North Atlantic Council gathered the existing military planning bodies under a permanent Standing Group. They also created the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), who would be an active-duty four-star American general, to take direct responsibility for developing, coordinating, and commanding NATO forces. Member governments delegated SACEUR substantial power to remake the alliance’s military structure and even negotiate with them on contributions and strategies. Within the first two years, the first SACEUR, General Dwight Eisenhower, undertook a comprehensive survey of Allied preparations and operations, ran a series of mobilization stress tests, and developed plans related to coordinated air defense, bomber command, and force mobilization. He was assisted by Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), a permanent bureaucracy carrying out force integration, strategic planning, and operations research. Staff were drawn from member militaries, and service within this body was often integrated into national promotion and rotation structures. Furthermore, SHAPE absorbed all the prior Regional Working Groups, consolidating operational and strategic planning under a single command. This had two effects on American credibility. First, it assured the Europeans, and particularly the French, that the United States would participate in all NATO operational areas, not simply the Atlantic and North American ones. Second, the US had never before established an institutional mechanism whereby it would permanently delegate a high-ranking general and associated support staff to an intergovernmental body. In all, SHAPE’s first fifteen months saw NATO enhance its military forces by approximately twenty divisions, two thousand aircraft, and seven hundred naval vessels, to say nothing of the increased capabilities these units gained from combined and joint operations, training, and planning.

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Second, Articles 2 and 4 promoted coordination on foreign, economic, and political issues, but NATO was similarly slow to develop these organs. Many Europeans took this as a sign of American lack of commitment. British foreign minister Bevin, for example, “confessed that the results [of organizational development] hitherto had been a great disappointment to him. There had been much discussion and a great deal of planning, but little or no real progress had been made towards an effective defence of Europe which it had been the purpose of these two Treaties to create.” Moreover, by 1951, the allies increasingly recognized that “political, military and financial problems could not, as in the past, be considered separately by different committees of Ministers, and that NATO, to be effective, must be further simplified and streamlined.” Eisenhower himself stated that military matters were “so closely interlocked with economic, financial and social matters that it was often impracticable, and indeed quite unrealistic, to consider one of these fields without giving due attention to the others.” Yet NATO’s civilian organization faced three critical problems prior to the Korean War. The first was an issue of decision-making authority. The North Atlantic Council (NAC) had terminal responsibility for the partnership’s strategies and operations. But its membership consisted only of foreign ministers or similarly ranked government representatives. These individuals were not authorized to commit their countries to specific alliance policies, and NATO decisions ultimately had to pass an additional bureaucratic hurdle for implementation. Each country’s head of state/government reached their conclusions outside of the alliance setting, leading to fragmented positions and uneven policy implementation. Second, the creation of NATO organs was haphazard, responding to immediate political or economic problems but without an overarching strategy. This resulted in a host of redundant bodies and little coordination among them, problems exacerbated by their distribution across Europe rather than in a single, centralized location. Finally, the Atlantic Alliance lacked a formal means of adjudicating between competing priorities. In both the military and civilian structures, the bureaucracy lacked central direction from a single source of authority and clear chains of responsibility. As with SHAPE, NATO consolidated its nonmilitary policy-making, administrative, and research architecture into a permanent, delegated bureaucracy, the International Staff. Member states delegated full decision-making authority to their council deputies, forcing themselves to develop coherent policy positions at home before the deputies met. Alliance procedures were therefore integrated into domestic decision-making processes and agendas, affecting even more mundane issues like hiring and staffing. NATO’s administrative organs were gathered together in a single headquarters, and a secretary-general was appointed to manage this body and speak for the alliance on policy matters.

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By 1952, NATO possessed four key features as a core alliance. The first was the defensive commitment, where an attack on one was an attack on all. Particularly given the traditional American desire to avoid European entanglement, Article 5 marked the furthest and clearest alliance commitment Washington had yet made. The second was SACEUR and SHAPE, a manifestation of direct American leadership in the organization and commitment to its security promises. The third was its wide-ranging coordinating structures, most notably the International Staff led by a secretary-general. The North Atlantic Council also created dedicated boards for Defence Production and Finance and Economics, as well as regular coordination among council deputies with fully delegated decision-making authority, which set a new standard for allied cooperation and policy integration. Finally and more relevant for the next chapter, all of this combined to establish a particular style of diplomacy and military cooperation. As opposed to Bismarckian and Interwar era alliances, NATO and the Continental security organizations that emerged in its wake—including the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the Council of Europe—fostered a multilateral and densely networked approach to security coordination. This approach became a normative standard to which other countries, particularly peripheral ones, would hope to emulate. The following sections will examine SEATO and CENTO in turn. The Manila Pact’s secondary states largely succeeded in pushing the United States to emulate NATO’s features, although Washington’s efforts to substitute alternative strategies and designs generated the expected relative reliability concerns. These concerns were even more acute in the Baghdad Pact, where emulation was unsuccessful. Regional allies rejected American attempts to create its own, unique relationship to the partnership, even questioning offers that exceeded CENTO’s guarantees.

5.3

The Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO)

SEATO was born of the French defeat in the First Indochina War in 1954. When the garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered, France lost one-tenth of its regional forces and opened armistice negotiations in Geneva the following day. The United States feared that a settlement would give Communist governments and guerrilla movements an important toehold from which to threaten the political stability of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, as well as exerting influence into South Asia and up the Pacific Rim. The Eisenhower administration searched for some vehicle to address the French power vacuum and bolster regional governments against Communist influence in line with the economic and military limitations imposed by the president’s “New Look” strategy. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles developed “united action,” a policy extending the ANZUS model—a collective defense organization signed by Australia, New Zealand, and the US in 1951—into Southeast Asia. If regional states affirmed their

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ta b l e 5 . 1 . Contribution of SEATO Case to Credibility Diffusion Mechanism Hypothesis

Evidence

Distinction from Alternative Explanations

H1

Regional members demanded that SEATO fully match NATO’s defense guarantee, integrated command, and organizational design.

Hegemonic imposition expects stronger states to proliferate strategies. Instead, the United States actively prevented proliferation. Regional states’ demands were not tied to specific cooperation problems, as institutionalism would expect, but rather used to measure American reliability.

C1.1

Regional members linked discrepancies in emulation to reduced American credibility, not to increased ability to confront the USSR or Communism.

Common threat and rational design would expect demands for institutional change to be linked to specific adversary capabilities.

desire for American support against Communism, then Washington could make alliance commitments to the region. To secure that support, the US and UK developed a draft treaty during the summer of 1954, inviting many of the Southeast Asian nations, as well as Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, and France, to discuss this proposal in Manila in September 1954. The Manila conference and the first three years of SEATO’s operations provide several key pieces of evidence supporting the credibility diffusion mechanism. But, given that the US was an alliance member and the pact, like NATO, confronted the Soviet Union, the case is also congruent with a common threat or hegemonic imposition approach as well. The evidence presented below makes two broad points distinguishing and validating this book’s theory above the alternatives. (These are summarized in table 5.1.) First, the weaker states pushed for strategic emulation of NATO’s defense guarantee, integrated military command, and management organization. In contrast to the hegemonic imposition argument, credibility diffusion expects this, as weaker countries suffer relatively more from partner defection. Second, in justifying these demands, regional states cited NATO’s strategy as the standard for credible military cooperation and highlighting concerns about relative reliability, supporting Hypothesis 1. Unlike with a common threat approach, neither US nor non-US members linked these rationales to confronting external threats. Instead, the focus lay with intra-allied credibility.

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The Manila Conference, September 6–8, 1954

The Manila conference started inauspiciously. Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam declined their invitations. Cambodian prime minister Norodom Sihanouk dismissed SEATO outright, insulted by the idea that his country would seek protection. This

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left Thailand as the only Southeast Asian participant, quickly leading to derision that the pact was “a South East Asian Alliance minus South East Asia.” Indonesian prime minister Ali Sastroamidjojo declared that “peace in our part of the world cannot be assured by military pacts such as recently concluded in Manila,” adding that “Asian problems cannot be solved without Asian nations.” The US convened the meeting anyway, joined by the UK, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The initial draft treaty already emulated the NATO design in most ways. The Manila Pact was a publicly affirmed, collective defense treaty encompassing military and nonmilitary cooperation. The latter included countersubversion measures, a graduate school of engineering, medical research fellowships, and cultural exchanges. These efforts fell under Article 3 of the treaty, which, like the North Atlantic Alliance, called for economic development assistance, collective efforts to enhance social well-being within member states, and support for “free institutions.” In total, the participants readily accepted seven of the eleven proposed articles. Of the remaining four, Article 4 (the defense obligation) and Article 5 (establishment of coordinating institution) proved significantly more controversial, despite the fact that their language was very similar—although not identical—to NATO’s. The Eisenhower administration worried about moral hazard issues, being pulled into preexisting confrontations in which the US had little interest. Dulles worried about “committing the prestige of the United States in an area where we had little control and where the situation was by no means promising. On the other hand, I said that failure to go ahead [with a Southeast Asian alliance] would mark a total abandonment of the area without a struggle.” The American delegation was consequently reluctant to completely mirror NATO’s strategy, and the debate over SEATO’s Articles 4 and 5 will highlight the importance of rank and relative reliability in secondary state’s assessments of alliance credibility. This section highlights three points from this negotiation. First, on Article 4, the original draft limited SEATO’s military response only to Communist aggression in the region. Washington was worried that a broader commitment would ensnare the United States in unnecessary conflicts, such as between Pakistan and India. Second, also on Article 4, the delegates debated whether the defensive commitment should use the ANZUS or the NATO language. Third, on Article 5, the United States did not want SEATO to possess an elaborate military coordination machinery, while the smaller states did. On the first negotiation point, Dulles argued that only the Communist threat engaged American interests: N L 99

The United States is the only one of the countries here which does not itself have a direct territorial concern in the area. Under those circumstances, it is not possible for

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c ha pt er 5 the United States to say that any aggression occurring anywhere in this area is something which would endanger the peace and safety of the United States. . . . We can honestly say that communist aggression in this area endangers the peace and safety of the United States because we believe that the clutches of communism are such that whenever they increase their power and strength, that is an increase of power and strength which may ultimately be used against the United States.

All the non-American delegates objected to this restriction based on relative reliability concerns. They argued that including this term was inconsistent with other American defensive treaties and had no precedent in international law. The US had few direct territorial concerns in many of the regions where it had already concluded collective security pacts. Yet those pacts—ANZUS, NATO, and the US-Philippine defense treaty, among others—were not similarly restricted to Communism, but instead would respond to any threat to regional security. Further, the participants stated that the term “Communism” did not have legal standing and therefore should not be included in the treaty. The British, Philippine, and Australian objections were particularly striking, since they already possessed separate alliances without this restriction. Yet even the UK delegation stated: “There is no precedent for the use in a treaty of the phrase ‘Communist subversion and infiltration.”’ They added later that a strict focus on Communism “is not desirable or in accordance with precedent and the usual rules of treaty-drafting.” In the face of united opposition from the other delegations, the US agreed to drop all mention of Communism in the Manila Pact. But it took up a Thai offer to reserve a special understanding that Washington would only commit to a military response in the case of Communist aggression and armed attack. The delegations split over the remaining issues. For the second negotiation point (again on Article 4), the members debated whether the ANZUS or NATO language would be used for SEATO’s defense guarantee. The US led the UK and France in adhering to the original draft, which favored the ANZUS language. Dulles, as the principal negotiator for the US, particularly wanted to prevent comparisons between the Manila Pact and NATO to reduce American obligations under the treaty. He even urged other participants to avoid calling the pact “SEATO,” worried that it simply sounded too much like NATO. The US proposed the following language for the Article 4 defense guarantee, closely mirroring the ANZUS language:

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Each Party recognizes that Communist aggression by means of armed attack in the treaty area . . . would endanger its own peace and safety, and agrees that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

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Thailand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Australia were dissatisfied with this wording. They felt it implied a much weaker commitment than NATO and preferred the North Atlantic Alliance’s “automatic” nature. In their view, the North Atlantic Treaty “pre-committed” Washington to Europe’s defense. By ratifying the NAT, Congress had already granted American administrations authorization for war, so the US would automatically be engaged in the North Atlantic in case of attack. With this view in mind, the Philippines proposed that SEATO adopt the NATO language verbatim, only changing the geographic location. The delegation noted that it was already protected under a separate, bilateral treaty with the US. Nevertheless, “the stand of the Philippines may well be epitomized with: ‘One for all and all for one.’ We feel that those of us who are, so to speak, or are likely to be, in the frontline in case of war, as shown in past experiences, must insist that when we are attacked, that attack shall be repelled by all and instantly.” Failing to use the NATO language would allow Washington to selectively protect allies, violating the principle of collective security and signaling reduced American commitment compared to the North Atlantic Treaty. The Philippine delegation had reason for this concern. Preparing for discussions with the British in 1951, the State Department clearly relegated Southeast Asia to a secondary position compared to the Middle East and Europe. The Pakistani and Thai delegations concurred with the “NATO formula,” and even the Australians sought to expand the American commitment beyond ANZUS to more closely mirror the North Atlantic Treaty’s wording. As part of this push, the Thai delegation gave the clearest statement on NATO’s value and perceived superiority to other commitment standards: The government and people of my country therefore insist to have as a strong pact as is possible. Now that applies primarily to the substance of the pact. But the question of wording is also very important from the psychological point of view insofar as the Republic and the people are concerned. It may be viewed to some understanding, some popular understanding, but to the people of my country NATO seems to be understood by them to be the model of a strong pact. . . . Our proposal is to try as possible our best to get the NATO type of treaty.

Dulles responded with two somewhat contradictory arguments in order to avoid committing the US to the NATO formula. On the one hand, he downplayed NATO’s features, first arguing that the North Atlantic Alliance was not an automatic obligation. Dulles pointed to treaty language subjecting implementation of the alliance to members’ “respective constitutional processes.” However, those words appeared in Article 11 dealing with ratification, not Article 5’s defense guarantee as it did in SEATO. Nevertheless, he claimed Congress would have a say in US

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policy toward the alliance through both its war-making powers and the power of the purse. ANZUS, and by extension SEATO, were not exempt from these processes and would in fact be no different from NATO. Further, Dulles contended that using the NATO language would reopen the Constitutional debate and require Senate approval, although Senate consent was necessary for the US to formally join the Manila Pact anyway. On the other hand, Dulles promoted the ANZUS formula as somehow equal to or even better than NATO. His statement is worth quoting at length: The United States . . . have used this [the ANZUS/SEATO] language which is derived from and is a quotation from the statement made by President Monroe when he announced some 138 years ago the so-called Monroe Doctrine, which was, that an attack or an invasion upon the Americas would be a threat to the peace and security of the United States, which we could not look upon with indifference. So that, Mr. Chairman, is the outstanding foreign policy declaration of the United States which has been carried and revered by our nation for 138 years, which has been effective, which has not been challenged. And today when we propose to repeat that language, we are proposing a formula which in the light of history is a formula which we believe is adapted to the needs of the situation and will effectively assure it insofar as it is compatible with our constitutional processes. To say that an attack elsewhere is a threat to the peace and security of the United States is to say that action is necessary. The consequences of that action under our constitutional processes are the responsibility of the President and the Congress. The formula proposed by the United States [ANZUS] is not a weak formula; it is a strong formula. I do not know where the illusion develops that the NATO formula was somewhat stronger. In view of certain developments going on in Europe at the present time, I think it may be quite possible that it may prove that this formula, which is a different formula, which we use, and which we derive from President Monroe, may be a formula certainly as effective as that we used in the North Atlantic Treaty where developments are occurring which may result in the North Atlantic Treaty formula seeming not superior as in some minds it seems to be. In fact, I believe this formula proposed here is a sound one; it is understood by the American people throughout the many years of their history; it is the revered, honored, and known formula.

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Dulles was making a social appeal. The ANZUS language is strong due to longstanding and consistent American social acceptance. In fact, NATO is the outlier. But this only emphasized how the North Atlantic Treaty contained a stronger commitment, as Washington was abandoning the Monroe tradition to directly support

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and protect powerful European states, including treating attacks against these countries outside its region as if they occurred against the United States. Confusingly, the American president, Dulles claimed, could act without Congress in case of immediate threat to the US, which would apply in the case of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. It is little wonder therefore that weaker states—even those that possessed an outside American guarantee—questioned the US commitment and the priority that Southeast Asia would receive. Finally, on the third negotiation point, Article 5 proposed institutions to manage and administer SEATO. Dulles did not want the pact to evolve into an elaborate military organization as NATO had, preferring to retain American freedom of action. The initial draft established a council with terminal responsibility for the treaty. Washington expected it to perform purely administrative and some limited research functions. Tellingly, the initial SEATO draft left out the NATO language empowering the council to form subsidiary organs tasked specifically with military coordination and defense. The regional delegations sought to include it. The Pakistani and Thai attendees proposed that the terms “military” or “defense” be included to clarify exactly what measures the signatories could enact under SEATO. The Australians went further, parroting NATO’s Article 9 language: “The council shall set up such subsidiary machinery as may be necessary to achieve the military and other objectives of the treaty.” The delegation justified this on the grounds that it would improve public belief that the Manila Pact was an effective alliance. Three days later, they went further still, directly tying perceptions of credibility to the use of identical language between NATO and SEATO: In my own country, and I would expect, possibly in others, there has been a demand for a treaty with the use of identical expressions, when we come to the use of identical expressions, a treaty with teeth in it, and this has been said in my country not without official tone. I think if we seek to avoid, and I don’t say this with offense to anybody, if we do not use the word “military,” I think we will lose an opportunity at least of assuring our countries that this treaty means business.

In other words, unless SEATO fully emulated NATO, at least the Australian public would not consider the Manila treaty a credible guarantee of security. The United States continued to resist this language, and the difference was papered over. Australia’s proposal was watered down to an agreement “for periodic consultation with regard to military and any other planning.” For the regional states, the words “periodic” and “military” suggested that the allies would create permanent coordinating institutions on security and economic affairs. The US, however, felt that the language did not necessarily direct members to create such bodies and did

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not mention specific military commitments. “Most countries wished the treaty to have a permanent organization, but this did not fit US policy, so we had avoided a commitment in the treaty to a permanent organization. The treaty only provides that the nations will consult from time to time. In fact, there is no agreement yet as to where the treaty powers will meet, and this might be in different locations at different times.” In total, the Manila conference reveals several dynamics expected by the credibility diffusion mechanism. The weakest participants anchored on NATO as the standard of credible security cooperation. Although SEATO’s initial draft included all of NATO’s formal elements, relatively small differences in language—the inclusion of “Communism” and “respective constitutional procedures” in Article 4, the exclusion of “military” in Article 5—took up the bulk of conference debate. Even states already protected by an American commitment pushed for closer language, with the Australians demanding identical terms. Moreover, these demands were linked to public perceptions of credibility, that what the US considered semantic discrepancies would produce an “ineffective” alliance according to local members. These regional efforts and justifications were partially successful in aligning SEATO’s language even more closely with that of the North Atlantic Treaty. Notably, none of the delegations (the US included) justified their positions based on a response to specific Soviet threats nor Southeast Asia’s geostrategic conditions. Instead, the rationales focused on intraallied reliability and interpretation.

5.3.2 Regional Pushes for Emulation during SEATO’s Implementation, 1954–1957

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The Manila Pact was signed on September 8, 1954. But the regional members’ efforts to align SEATO ever more closely with NATO’s model did not end there. They continued to view discrepancies between their pact and others in Washington’s alliance portfolio as indications of their foreign policy prioritization and rank. As organizational development progressed over the pact’s first three years, SEATO regional members continued to push the US and the UK to upgrade the alliance’s strategy to match NATO’s, both in its treaty language and in establishing its institutional structures. From the first council meeting onward, the weaker allies pushed for three institutional changes: upgrading SEATO’s defense guarantee, establishing a unified military command, and increasing the secretariat’s responsibilities and delegated authority on nonmilitary policy coordination. First, as during the treaty negotiations, the regional members hoped to upgrade SEATO’s Article 4 defense guarantee to match NATO’s Article 5. Pakistani foreign minister Firoz Khan Noon first proposed this in a meeting with Dulles in February 1957, just a day before the Philippines proposed the creation of a secretary-general position discussed later. Recognizing likely US congressional resistance to any

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change in formal terms, Noon went so far as to suggest that just the Asian SEATO members could upgrade their commitments, in hopes that the US would accept the new language as well over time. The Eisenhower administration demurred, claiming that Article 4 now matched the terms used in the other Pacific alliances of the United States. They were constrained by this precedent, which, they claimed, was also accepted by Congress and other regional countries. Changing the language might undermine this wider network of military pacts. Dulles stated, “If the present Treaty [SEATO] were to utilize the NATO language, the Congress might well raise questions as to the difference between this language and the language used in our other Pacific commitments.” He went on to suggest that the difference in wording was substantively immaterial. Second, SEATO members looked to the integrated command embodied by SHAPE as the hallmark of military cooperation and commitment. The Thai government strenuously pushed for a joint military command in the Manila Pact’s first council meeting in February 1955, and offered to base those forces on its territory. Dulles rejected the proposal, however, preferring the creation of a mobile strike group in the Western Pacific. Likewise, the Australians were particularly keen to foster and develop SEATO’s proposed military coordinating bodies, “putting flesh and blood on the military skeleton, to converting ‘an insurance policy and a deterrent’ . . . into an effective shield to protect northern Australia.” However, Washington and London were reticent about any attempt to fully match the Atlantic standard of institutionalization, particularly with regard to allied military integration. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff balked at any military actions where Washington did not determine operational priorities and command, and “the present Joint Chiefs are adamant in their determination not to be involved any more than absolutely necessary in planning with other countries, and they shy away from anything which might conceivably take the form of a Combined Chiefs of Staff.” Finally, this reticence extended even to cooperation on nonmilitary policy. By the start of 1956, no allied representatives were permanently and fully seconded to SEATO’s headquarters, with the exception of an American delegation. The pact’s primary coordinating bodies—the Permanent Working Groups (led by the regional members)—were limited to logistics and administrative tasks, with little delegated authority. Only fifteen months after the pact was signed, American foot-dragging on organizational development led to regional concerns about Washington’s commitment. State Department counselor Douglas MacArthur suggested that “our Asian partners feel that SEATO has bogged down and that it is not, and never was, the intention of the Western members to make it an effective organization.” SEATO members also worried that they were falling behind other, non-NATO American alliances. The Baghdad Pact, although founded five months later, seemed to have developed coordinating structures much more quickly. As stated in a State

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Department telegram to the Thai embassy: “Asian SEATO members would interpret this development as indication primary emphasis by Western powers on Middle East to neglect of SEA where SEATO in being for over a year has developed less rapidly.” While Washington continued to prefer limited institutionalization, the Working Groups added their voice to this issue, advocating for a secretary-general post to oversee the alliance’s work, advocate for joint policies, and coordinate implementation, just as in NATO. During a 1957 council meeting, the Philippine representative detailed the tasks a future secretary-general would manage, including the creation of a central defense college, the development of a counter-subversion command, and the establishment of a labor office with personnel and hiring powers. These powers were far wider than either the US or UK anticipated or preferred. New Zealand also articulated the need for better coordination between the alliance’s military and civilian branches. This pressure finally broke through American and European resistance to the concept, with a secretary-general position created at the December 1957 council meeting. A secretariat consolidated SEATO’s administrative organs, managing an array of technical assistance programs, joint training exercises, and countersubversion activities. The entire body was modeled after NATO’s International Staff. Overall, regional states saw strategic symmetry with NATO as a crucial indicator of American commitment to SEATO. They were generally successful in converting their credibility concerns into institutional emulation on nonmilitary affairs. But they failed to persuade the United States to change SEATO’s defense commitment to match NATO’s, nor to establish a joint command. This led to persistent concerns about American commitment to Southeast Asia.

5.4

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Turning to the Baghdad Pact, the UK had long considered the Middle East a region of core national interest. The Suez Canal linked England with India, while the Gulf ’s oil reserves were critical to the British navy and its position within international trade networks. World War II’s destruction forced a retrenchment of British power globally, and the rise of pan-Arabism, led by Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser, challenged colonial or mandate authority by demanding a unified, independent, and sovereign government for the Arab people. His cross-national appeal also threatened the stability and legitimacy of other Arab governments, many of whom were newly established and fragile. Iraq led a countercoalition of Arab monarchies against Nasser’s ambitions, with Saudi Arabia and its oil-driven boom eventually adding a third axis of economic competition and rivalry to the region. And of course, the 1948 establishment of Israel added an additional cleavage to the region. Leading the Arab region’s most populated and militarily powerful state, Nasser seized upon the issue to rally Arab support to his transnational cause.

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The USSR encouraged these divisions to weaken European influence on its southwestern border and build client relationships with Egypt, Syria, and further into the Maghreb. In response, London hoped to convert the Middle East command it established during World War II into a peacetime security agreement that would provide political support to regional governments and “see the whole Middle East area covered by a system of defence arrangements.” Such a network would help secure NATO’s southeastern flank, as well as Britain’s Indian and commercial interests. However, London would only commit its forces with the assurance that the United States would provide military and financial support. Similarly, some of the Arab states wanted a security arrangement with the UK and the US based on NATO. Prior to his overthrow in 1952, King Farouk of Egypt called the creation of a general security system against the USSR an “imperious necessity” and thought that Britain should take the lead in organizing such a pact. Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Saʿid proposed a regional pact explicitly modeled on NATO, a concept in which Syrian and Lebanese leaders also privately expressed interest. And as mentioned, the Arab League signed a Treaty of Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation in June 1950, modeled heavily on the North Atlantic Treaty. The UK favored creating a “Middle East Defence Organisation” (MEDO) drawing together the main Arab states under British leadership. This scheme would preserve Britain’s colonial interests, particularly access to India and oil through vital waterways. While receptive to a regional security system concept, the US State Department viewed MEDO and its goals as anachronistic. To tie ourselves to the tail of the British kite in the Middle East at the present juncture . . . would be to abandon all hope of a peaceful alignment of that area with the West. Unless there is a marked change in British policy the result would be either that both the British and ourselves would be driven out completely or that we would have to maintain ourselves in the area by force at heavy material cost and even greater cost in terms of moral standing throughout the non-European world.

As with SEATO, Washington was chiefly concerned with containing Communism. In place of MEDO, Dulles advanced a “Northern Tier” concept to seal the Soviet Union’s southwestern flank. Sensitive to colonial legacies, Dulles wanted to avoid having the Northern Tier seen as a foreign imposition. Instead, Washington wanted local partners to first establish a military and political framework, to which it could attach itself later. This mirrored the US approach to Western Europe, the Western Union, and eventually NATO. The US offered financial inducements and military aid to incentivize this process. Alliance building began with the Turko-Pakistani pact signed on April 2, 1954, providing the geographic bookends. This agreement gave Ankara the political

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momentum needed to conclude a defense agreement with the Iraqis just under a year later, the so-called “Baghdad Pact.” The UK, Pakistan, and Iran then all acceded to this agreement in April, September, and November, respectively, of 1955. (The group’s name was later changed to the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO, following Iraq’s withdraw after a military coup in 1958.)

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The Baghdad Pact fell far short of emulating NATO. It was a consultative and nonaggression agreement. In Article 1, members promised to “co-operate for their security and defence” and, in Article 3, “to refrain from any interference whatsoever in each other’s internal affairs” and settle intra-partnership disputes peacefully. The allies had no active defensive obligations, unlike in NATO or SEATO. Article 5 allowed accession to any Arab League state or any other country “actively concerned with the security and peace in this region.” Although Great Britain acceded and the US was integral to the alliance’s creation, Washington never joined as a full member. Lastly, Article 4 directed members to establish a permanent council once four countries had joined. Both the US and the UK expected this body and its subsidiary organs to operate informally, meet rarely, and be confined to administrative and logistical support. While hegemonic imposition and common threat have had difficulty explaining strategic mimicry by SEATO and during the Bismarckian era, perhaps these approaches are necessary to explain non-emulation. And indeed, hegemonic imposition finds significant support in the CENTO case. Neither the US nor the UK wanted the Baghdad Pact to copy NATO. In rejecting MEDO, Secretary Dulles complained about “the impracticality of the MEDO concept. It was too complicated, too much like NATO, and it obviously would not work. Something less formal and grandiose was needed as a substitute. . . . Accordingly, the Secretary summed up his view that separate bilateral arrangements with the states of this area were much preferable at the moment to arrangements modeled on NATO.” This resistance prevented CENTO from pursuing much of NATO’s strategy, producing a nondominant design. Similarly, Washington and London justified a nondominant form based on the Middle East’s strategic and geographic idiosyncrasies. They were simply not conducive to a more robust partnership. Indeed, the British view was that the Baghdad Pact would be even less binding than SEATO. This partially aligns with an institutionalist approach in that allies must tailor their alliance strategy to members’ military, political, and other constraints to create an effective pact. Taken together, these points suggest that secondary and peripheral states are not always able to use social standards to successfully achieve emulation. But the credibility diffusion mechanism suggests that primary countries in particular are likely to

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suffer from reliability concerns the more they obstruct these efforts. And indeed, we still see evidence for the theory even in this case. Weaker allies demand emulation, and, if that does not occur, the theory further predicts: •

• •

A (powerful) state’s inability to follow socially expectations of security cooperation should lead to concerns among other (weaker) countries about its reliability and commitment; These concerns are linked to questions about rank and prioritization within the stronger state’s alliance portfolio; and Secondary states will discount alternative strategies, even “tailored” or lucrative ones.

The Baghdad Pact’s formation and first five years support all these points. Regional members pushed for full US accession, an integrated military command structure, and dedicated staffing in line with the NATO model. Washington responded by offering alternative “association” schemes, as well as substantial economic, military, and technical assistance, in lieu of formal membership. Some—like the Eisenhower Doctrine—actually went beyond CENTO’s obligations, directly committing US military power to the defense of any Middle Eastern state confronting Communist attack. However, the form and social validation of American security guarantees mattered to regional states, who were not satisfied by this alternative strategy and continued to demand emulation. The credibility diffusion mechanism can therefore explain intra-allied behavior even in pacts that do not emulate the dominant form. These points are summarized in table 5.2. As a final point on alternative explanations and favoring this book’s theory, American and British resistance to emulation was itself driven by relative reliability concerns. NATO countries worried that American interest in the Baghdad Pact would undermine their alliance. In particular, would Turkish membership in CENTO extend NATO protections further east, entrapping them in conflicts beyond their national and geographic interests? Might the Baghdad Pact divert significant resources away from Europe’s defense, as SEATO threatened to do? Washington repeatedly assured European members that any Middle Eastern defense agreements would not undermine NATO’s top rank; that it did not intend to extend the North Atlantic Alliance to cover the Middle East; and that no new regional pact would be established in the same mold as NATO. In line with these concerns, the British turned down a Pakistani proposal to officially tie NATO, SEATO, and CENTO together. They contended that overlapping membership among the three organizations “should be sufficient to provide liaison between the . . . organizations,” preventing formal equality among all three US-led partnerships.

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ta b l e 5 . 2 . Contribution of CENTO Case to Credibility Diffusion Mechanism Hypothesis

Evidence

Distinction from Alternative Explanations

C1.1

The US avoided full accession to CENTO, which the regional states took as a sign not only of reduced commitment but also of greater interest in other foreign policy priorities.

A common threat approach would expect the US to provide a similar security guarantee to CENTO as provided in NATO, since both were aligned against the USSR.

C1.1

The US offered the Eisenhower Doctrine as an alternative and buttressing security guarantee to CENTO members. Despite having more extensive commitments than CENTO, local members continued to press for emulation of NATO, worried that the doctrine diverted resources away from the alliance and toward other commitments.

A common threat approach would not expect regional states to continue pushing for CENTO upgrades following the Eisenhower Doctrine, nor might it anticipate local member concerns about diversion of resources.

H3

Turkey and Pakistan led the push for institutional upgrades, particularly with regard to the security guarantee and alliance institutionalization.

Hegemonic imposition would expect emulation to come from the US, not weaker states.

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Iranian accession to the Iraqi-Turkish treaty in 1955 “completed” the Baghdad Pact. A line of allied countries stretched across Russia’s southwestern border, linking NATO to SEATO. Britain had joined, and Washington already provided substantial support to the pact members on a bilateral basis. Over the course the pact’s existence, the US provided military assistance equivalent to 91 percent of Iraq’s defense expenditures (when it was formally a member), 110 percent of Pakistan’s, 135 percent of Turkey’s, and 154 percent of Iran’s. In addition, Washington bankrolled the majority of the alliance’s joint projects, including US$12.5 million for infrastructure development connecting the member capitals and several allied training exercises. Similarly, if we remove France, the UK, and Turkey (which were members of multiple alliances), the US funded 22.4 percent of NATO members’ defense budgets over the same period. In addition, Washington provided US$1.4 billion more to these Baghdad Pact members than it did to European partners. In terms of institutional arrangements, the US signed complementary bilateral agreements with each Baghdad Pact member,

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while the British devoted ground forces and a crucial bomber wing based in Cyprus to the alliance. The aircraft, initially Canberra B2s and later Vulcan B1s, were to be used in both reconnaissance and strike missions, including the use of nuclear weapons. The UK also offered to equip a nuclear training center in Tehran. Nevertheless, the pact members awaited American membership to validate CENTO as a premier, anti-Communist entity, integral to the US security network. Despite signing onto the North Atlantic Treaty, Turkey particularly hoped for a robust alliance “consistent with NATO.” However, Washington demurred, citing several challenges. First, the United States still hoped to play an intermediating role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. American diplomats wanted to leverage the “good offices” of the US to reduce tensions and possibly even resolve hostilities entirely, simplifying geostrategic tradeoffs and policy spillover. Second, the British emphasized that accession “forces a choice between the rival parties Iraq and Egypt.” While London was willing to side with Baghdad, Washington hoped to avoid being pulled into intra-Arab leadership disputes. “It is doubtful if the U.S. can join without a complete upset of the Egyptians.” Third, the US already guaranteed Britain, Turkey, and Pakistan through NATO and SEATO, as well as providing Iraq with substantial transfers of military equipment through a separate bilateral agreement. Further, the Soviet Union was not making overt, aggressive moves against Iran. Consequently, the US felt it could wait for a more geopolitically convenient time, especially a future reduction in Arab-Israeli tensions. Fourth, several congressional representatives felt that accession would allow the USSR to act more aggressively, having been hemmed in by NATO, CENTO, and SEATO. In total, the United States evaluated full, formal membership in CENTO not as an isolated commitment to its individual members but through a broader lens of regional security and competing foreign policy priorities. “We would consider joining the Baghdad Pact if and when it seemed in doing so it would be a contribution to the general stability of the area. We do not consider it as an isolated act.” Washington attempted to balance a concern for Israel, support for friendly parties in the “Arab Cold War,” the likely Russian response, and domestic political pressures against full accession to the Baghdad Pact. It is unsurprising therefore that regional members wondered whether the other foreign policy priorities of the US undercut support for their treaty. Washington only exacerbated these concerns by attempting to pass off alternative structures for their relationship with CENTO. Rather than fully join, the US promised only that it would remain an active observer, tied to the organization through its informal assistance and coordination channels. Indeed, the Eisenhower administration felt it could do more good outside of the Baghdad Pact than in it. A Special National Intelligence Estimate argued that “by staying out of the pact the US would probably retain some extra room for maneuver in dealing

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with Arab-Asian nationalism and with the USSR.” Nevertheless, President Eisenhower claimed, “We are members of the Pact in all but name.” The pact’s regional members found neither the American rationale for failing to join CENTO nor Eisenhower’s claim about an alternative, “associated status” convincing. UK prime minister Anthony Eden remarked, “Nobody credited the involved pretexts produced by the United States Government for not joining the Baghdad Pact; they were members, when they wanted to be, of NATO and SEATO.” The 1956 Suez Crisis brought these concerns to a head. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, violating an agreement with Britain and threatening the latter’s access to India. Great Britain, France, and Israel used this opportunity to invade Egypt, attempting to reestablish control over the canal and remove the president. In response, the USSR warned of nuclear retaliation, while Eisenhower threatened to cause a run on the British pound. Facing this combined superpower pressure, the three countries withdrew. This put Washington in a difficult position, as its closest European allies and Israel precipitated a war that destroyed Western prestige and authority among the Arab states, failed to achieve its local objectives, and threatened wider conflict with Russia. The Suez Crisis also eliminated the American rationale for avoiding formal membership in the Baghdad Pact. The local partners effectively issued an ultimatum to the United States. They demanded early accession to the treaty, in light of the following: 1. Israel had violated American policy positions and norms by attacking Egypt and seeking territorial expansion, and the US was under no formal obligation to defend Jerusalem; 2. It should now be clear to the American public that the Pact was an “instrument for peace in Middle East area”; 3. Egypt and Syria had firmly aligned themselves with the Communist bloc, so the American desire for flexibility (by staying out of the Pact) to mediate intra-Arab disputes was no longer necessary or helpful; and in fact, 4. Welcoming friendly Arab states into the Pact would bolster regional security for the anti-Communist bloc.

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In a meeting with the Baghdad Pact heads of government, US ambassador to Iran Selden Chapin recounted that Turkish prime minister Menderes “could not understand why when US had been guiding genius for NATO and SEATO and foster father BP US had thus far deferred formal adherence although BP was essential link between those two pacts.” Menderes expanded upon this point by arguing: “If the United States remains unwilling to join the pact when previously-stated reasons appear no longer valid, members likely to conclude real reason for United States refusal

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is unreadiness commit itself in defense Middle East. This interpretation would have shattering effect on morale in Baghdad Pact countries.” The US ambassadors to Iran and Iraq agreed with these arguments, contending that the war had collapsed British prestige, a vacuum that the US now had to fill through accession. W. J. Gallman, the US ambassador to Iraq, claimed that “we get all the blame from criticcountries for supporting it, and none of the credit which our friends in the Pact accord only to fellow members.” Ultimately, “one thing should be crystal clear: any retreat from our well-known position supporting the Baghdad Pact would undermine U.S. interests in this part of the world by seriously weakening the security of the area, the political stability of countries friendly to the United States, and the confidence of the Middle Eastern countries in the sincerity of the United States.” If, even under these circumstances, the US did not join, it was a clear indication to the allies that Washington valued its relationship to Israel and role as an Arab mediator over the pact’s collective security interests. But Dulles in particular argued that the United States should remain outside of CENTO, instead offering an alternative structure for the US relationship to the Northern Tier states. This strategy eventually won out. Washington did join as a full member to each of the pact’s Military and Economic Committees. However, it resisted local efforts to convert the former into an effective planning and training mechanism, as well as preventing the creation of an integrated command, as discussed in the following section. But the centerpiece of Dulles’s new strategy was the Eisenhower Doctrine, announced in January 1957 to a joint session of Congress. In it, President Eisenhower promised that any Middle Eastern country threatened by Communist forces could receive economic and military assistance from the United States. This could include the deployment of US military forces to protect countries directly resisting armed, Communist aggression. He also asked Congress to increase financial and defense funding for these countries. The doctrine reached much further than the Baghdad Pact. Whereas CENTO provided no defensive obligations, the US here committed itself to direct military defense of Middle East governments against any Communist threat. This statement was backed by a congressional resolution, which passed overwhelmingly and was meant as a firm sign of American commitment. The Baghdad Pact members acknowledged and appreciated this US guarantee, as well as the increased financial and material support. However, they also worried that this policy would divert resources away from their organization and toward other countries, like Jordan and Israel, that had not formally joined the Western security project. Turkish prime minister Menderes complained: “The U.S. should look to its friends first, consider the uncommitted states second, and disregard the opposition states.” For alliance members, the Eisenhower Doctrine was not a substitute for full accession to CENTO.

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According to James Richards, Eisenhower’s special assistant for the Middle East, “US adherence [to the Baghdad Pact] would have great effect on other states in area, while failure to adhere would cause continuing doubt that US really supported pact.” In addition, Washington was already providing a substantial amount of military and economic assistance even without formal membership. Indeed, the Joint Chiefs claimed that accession might actually reduce these outlays, without the US incurring any additional security commitment: “Formal adherence to the Baghdad Pact will not increase the responsibilities that the United States has already assumed in the Middle East or materially increase the cost thereof. In fact, lack of adherence to the Pact might prove to be more costly in that Turkey, Iran and Pakistan might demand, justifiably, more aid.” In combination, had the regional states accepted the US formula, they would possess a security guarantee under the Eisenhower Doctrine, as well as greater outlays of US financial and materiel assistance. Yet they preferred American accession to the Baghdad Pact, which would not have provided a defense commitment and potentially reduced Washington’s direct support. Ultimately, the US did not join the Baghdad Pact as a full member, which led to persistent concerns about American reliability and Washington’s policy priorities. Even Dulles admitted that “we were in a position to go quite a long distance in the direction of giving assurances of armed support to Thailand, to Pakistan, and to Turkey, because we were bound to these nations by the NATO or SEATO Treaties. It was more difficult to give the necessary assurances in the case of Iran and Iraq, because we are not, like these two states, a member of the Baghdad Pact.” But Turkey and Pakistan worried about the American commitment to CENTO and whether they had taken on security obligations in the expectation of US support, only for Washington to concentrate on other priorities. A State Department official summed up this feeling, stating: We have a reputation . . . in the Middle East of lack of stability in our relations with that area. We are said to grow hot and cold, to be uncertain of ourselves, to take certain positions for a time only to abandon them, leaving those who are supporting us out on a limb. There is now a feeling among the supporters of the Baghdad Pact that we may be about to leave them out on such a limb.

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The Military Committee

The pact members’ concerns about American reliability extended to the partnership’s institutional features. The weaker CENTO members preferred robust coordinating structures in the NATO mold, but the US and to a more limited extent the UK preferred looser arrangements. These debates focused on the Military Committee, the primary body responsible for alliance security planning and coordination. The

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Western powers expected this organ to meet only twice a year, and it would serve mostly to facilitate security discussions between members’ defense ministers and their attaches. An associated secretariat would provide administrative and logistics support, with some limited research functions as well. However, neither of these bodies would have a dedicated staff, instead seconding personnel from each member’s embassy in Iraq. That, at least, was the initial view from Washington and London. The weaker members, however, demanded that the alliance possess the same structures as those found in NATO and SEATO. During the very first council meeting, the Turkish government proposed that the Military Committee be modeled after SHAPE. This enhanced body would prepare operational plans, assign units, determine force objectives, conduct strategic research, and facilitate interoperability through the standardization of arms and officer exchange programs. Turkey also hoped to upgrade the secretariat in line with NATO’s design. A secretary-general position would be supported by a permanent and dedicated staff, and the body would be authorized to execute the pact and employ powers delegated by signatories. The proposed secretariat would mirror many of NATO’s internal organs, including those on administration, economic development and coordination, political cooperation and policy planning, press/propaganda, and a counterpropaganda/subversion division. Washington blocked these ideas, leaving the pact with few formal rules and coordinating machinery. Nevertheless, the desire to upgrade the Military Committee to more fully resemble and operate like SHAPE became a persistent request by the weaker members. Following the Suez Crisis, the US sent Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining to the CENTO Council meeting, hoping that the presence of an American four-star general would impress upon the regional members Washington’s commitment to their security. Instead, the regional states took this as an opportunity to press the American delegation for an integrated command with a US commander, asking Twining to make a formal request to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Eisenhower administration declared that it was unwilling to establish such a command structure in the following Council meeting, prompting Pakistani prime minister Huseyn Suhrawardy to threaten to withdraw his country from CENTO. Regional states continued to press for this command in later Council sessions. Following the Iraqi withdrawal in 1959, Pakistani president Ayub Khan relayed to US president Eisenhower that the local CENTO members were pressing for this structure “since they felt the organization would be a ‘paper tiger’ without one” and because the body was needed to ensure that allied forces could adequately protect themselves and their countries. In particular, Khan again suggested that an American should serve as the commander-in-chief, and that CENTO could take concrete steps to unify its weapons systems under the American standard. The Turks

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likewise joined Pakistan in pushing for an “organization with teeth” to demonstrate American credibility, as well as full US participation in the body. Even the British, despite their desire not to emulate NATO, could find no concrete justifications against an integrated command. To forestall these efforts, Washington reorganized the Combined Military Planning Staff (CENTO’s primary military discussion body, which met on an ad hoc basis) into a permanent and more streamlined organ. However, it still operated as a dialogue forum rather than a military planning body. In addition, both the US and UK agreed to the creation of a secretariat with a secretary-general and dedicated staff. However, they stipulated that its operation and administration could not exceed the standard set by NATO. Despite these concessions, US ambassador to Turkey Fletcher Warren continued to note general disappointment among regional governments over CENTO’s structure and the lack of institutionalized security planning and commitment. This is perhaps unsurprising, as “the main aims of the present regional members who are not also members of NATO, namely Iran and Pakistan, are to make CENTO as like NATO.”

5.5

Conclusion

In evaluating whether NATO’s strategy could or should be extended to nonEuropean partnerships, W. Walton Butterworth, director of the State Department’s Office of Far Eastern Affairs, stated: The Atlantic Pact was the product of a specific set of circumstances which are peculiar to Europe and the Atlantic community and which are not even closely duplicated in the Pacific area. While granting the very real threat posed by Soviet intentions and capabilities in the Far East, I emphasized that conditions in that area do not at the present time lend themselves to the type of approach embodied in the Atlantic Pact.

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Reflecting this view, the hegemonic imposition approach finds no support in these critical cases. As Butterworth’s quote suggests, the United States actively avoided proliferating NATO’s design. Similarly, in 1950, Dulles claimed that “the strongest compulsion to defense springs from a feeling of common destiny. Sometimes after nations are intimate for many generations a mutual pact may be useful to reflect that association. Examples are the Rio Pact and the North Atlantic Pact but if there is not a long association among nations, it is better that they not place their relationships on a legalistic basis.” At that time, he felt that “a Pacific Pact is [not] necessary to secure world peace, no.” Three days later, the Korean War began. Four years later, SEATO countries largely succeeded in emulating all of NATO’s foundational provisions, although

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they failed to convince the US to match NATO’s exact language on the Article 5 defense guarantee. Relative reliability animated these secondary state initiatives. Washington acquiesced to upgraded organs not because these were necessary to successfully confront the Soviet Union, as a common threat approach would expect. Instead, “the U.S. realized that SEATO would fall apart unless something were done to provide a permanent structure. Admitting that the Asian countries were ‘losing faith’ in SEATO,” the US wanted to refute charges that the pact was simply a “paper tiger.” CENTO fell far short of emulating NATO. But regional states were arguably even more anxious about their rank in Washington’s broader portfolio of security commitments. Baghdad Pact members were not mollified by substantial American financial and material contributions, nor by the Eisenhower Doctrine, which exceeded their partnership’s obligations. Instead, following the credibility diffusion process, they worried that nonpact states—specifically Jordan and Israel—would siphon resources and commitment away from them. Speaking about CENTO, Admiral Arthur Radford, then a member of the American Joint Chiefs, stated, “Uncertainty as to U.S. action encourages the Communist bloc to continue its position of attrition and of subversion.” The prior chapter revealed how a primary state (Austria-Hungary) prevented the hegemon from providing security guarantees exceeding the core alliance’s standard. Here, we see the same dynamic in reverse. Secondary states prevented the hegemon from providing guarantees falling short of that same standard. Washington attempted alternative strategies for its non-European pacts, and it largely succeeded in CENTO’s case. But it faced significant credibility costs to do so, on top of concerns that these alternative strategies—involving substantial outlays of economic and military aid—would divert from, not complement, Washington’s ability to fulfill its entire portfolio of alliance commitments. This chapter’s cases already reveal instances of strategic misalignment. Secondary states latch onto a specific standard of credible alliance design, ignoring meansends calculations of efficacy and efficiency. NATO also served as the standard of legitimate security cooperation for peripheral states engaging in γ-class pacts. These countries’ strategies are even further removed from these functionalist calculations. We will see greater division between NATO’s form and the emulative pact’s function in the following chapter on southern African security cooperation.

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6

Diffusion to the Periphery Security Cooperation in Southern Africa, 1992–2004

6.1

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Introduction

The USSR’s collapse in 1991 transformed the geopolitical landscape for all countries: primary, secondary, and peripheral. Russia no longer possessed the will nor the resources to support many clients with financial aid, transfers of military equipment, or alliance guarantees. The United States reduced its overseas commitments as historic tensions diminished. The risk of superpower conflict receded rapidly, but the loss of patronage left many developing countries scrambling to find new sources of external support and renegotiating their diplomatic relations with neighbors and rivals. Drawn by success and the need to organize suddenly unmoored security relations, peripheral states copied NATO’s strategy, creating intertwined economic and security institutions with extensive coordinating mechanisms. This chapter examines the efforts of peripheral countries in southern Africa to create security institutions from 1994–2003. Nearly fifty years after its founding, NATO continued to serve as the standard for security cooperation. The USSR’s collapse further burnished NATO’s reputation as the premier military alliance. But southern Africa was far less politically, militarily, and economically interconnected than Western Europe in 1949. The region faced no common external threats, and the withdrawal of superpower interest left these C-type states struggling to support what institutions they already had. But Europe—its military security, its economic prosperity, and its social cohesion—was an aspirational goal for the southern African countries. This chapter will

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examine normative diffusion of the core alliance’s strategy to this region. In 1993, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) re-formed itself into the Southern African Development Community (SADC), in line with post–Cold War global norms favoring integrative interstate institutions linking military and nonmilitary affairs. Southern Africa, as mentioned, was remarkably infertile ground for this strategy, yet SADC pursued this approach as systemic standards overrode concerns about the suitability of local conditions. SADC first created the Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security (OPDS or the Organ) as a security consultation body mirroring NATO’s International Staff in an SADC Summit meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1996. OPDS would serve as the preeminent southern African body on military affairs and diplomacy, coordinating collective SADC responses to external and internal threats. Members were reluctant, however, to delegate the authority they had agreed to provide this body. This strategic misalignment enabled Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, as the OPDS’s first chair, to ignore SADC’s authority and carve out the Organ into a separate organization of equal stature. He then implemented a unilateral foreign policy while purporting to speak for the entire region. SADC papered over the deep policy disagreements between Zimbabwe and South Africa generated by Mugabe’s actions, motivated by the status and normative benefits of continued cooperation rather than OPDS’s actual functioning. Finally, the chapter examines the SADC Mutual Defence Pact (2003). Given the concurrent dissatisfaction with the Organ, as well as continuing reluctance to delegate military authority, we would expect SADC states to be reluctant to form a collective security pact modeled explicitly on NATO. Yet that is precisely what they did. In the end, southern Africa emulated NATO’s strategy of integrative military cooperation. However, it did so not because it faced similar strategic conditions, nor because of relative reliability concerns. Instead, SADC hoped to create political and security interdependence by following norms of effective alliance strategy. This reverses the rational institutionalist logic, where organizations are a response to preexisting cooperation problems. Instead, peripheral countries expected institutions to manufacture interdependence where there was none. Regional integration was a future aspiration for southern Africa, not a prior process generating a call for management institutions. The following section examines case selection, highlighting the incongruence between southern Africa’s post–Cold War conditions and those thought necessary for integrative alliance strategies. Section 6.3 will discuss the strategic choices confronting the region after the Soviet Union’s fall and the end of apartheid. SADC pursued an integrative security policy due to a logic of appropriateness, generating misalignment between OPDS’s goals and the actual resources and authority member states

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were willing and even able to provide. Section 6.4 explores how Mugabe seized upon this gap to implement his own unilateral regional security policy, while section 6.5 investigates why, despite all these problems, the Mutual Defence Pact (2003) nevertheless emulated NATO’s strategy and design. Section 6.6 concludes by highlighting three key contributions the case makes for the normative diffusion mechanism.

6.2 Case Selection and Alternative Explanations

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Southern Africa responded to the end of the Cold War and apartheid by creating security institutions sharing NATO’s features. This included a clear defense commitment (MDP Article 6) that “an armed attack . . . shall be considered a threat to regional peace and security and such an attack shall be met with immediate collective action.” OPDS listed an extensive set of diplomatic and military committees supporting a central ministerial body. The SADC Secretariat would provide the Organ with administrative and logistics support, with a chairman overseeing it, much like NATO’s secretary-general. The MDP directed members to coordinate on military training, intelligence sharing, and joint research, development, and production of military equipment through OPDS bodies. Both institutions also included articles on intra-allied dispute resolution, confidentiality, and respect for state sovereignty. The case’s structure allows us to dismiss the alternative explanations. No great power was a member of SADC, although several European countries did provide financial assistance. That said, members explicitly kept these funders out of security discussions. Recent histories of colonial rule and independence spurred a strong concern for sovereignty against both European states and regional competitors, and local governments strictly guarded their prerogatives on military and security affairs. According to OPDS’s principal drafter, “A number of donors wanted to get involved in the process but the SADC Heads of State were opposed to this.” The foundations for hegemonic imposition are not present in this case. Similarly, with the Cold War’s end, SADC cannot share NATO’s original focus on Soviet power. Rational institutionalism serves as the clearest alternative theory. Southern African states adopted robust, overlapping institutions because they faced a similar degree of interdependence and policy spillover as Europe did at NATO’s founding. Indeed, SADC documents regularly highlight the intertwined nature of economics and security, arguing that regional integration was necessary for development, and that collective military management was a prerequisite for integration. Observed measures of interdependence, however, suggest that security linkages and complexity were actually decreasing when southern Africa created OPDS and the MDP, both within the region and between the region and the rest of the globe. Already in 1990, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo warned that Africa “was drifting almost to the point of delinkage from the attention of the rest of the

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world.” The general loss of superpower patronage beginning in 1992 reduced the ability of southern African states to project military power and affect each other’s security, while the disintegration of apartheid in 1994 eliminated the primary point of conflict. Regional military spending had already decreased prior to the Cold War’s end, and remained at low levels until 2005, after the bulk of alliance development was completed. Furthermore, the SADC states are and historically have been among the least militarily cooperative countries. Taking one measure of military interdependence and interaction—arms transfers—southern Africa lags far behind in intra-regional weapons sales. From 1950–2012, intra-regional arms transfers accounted for only 0.27 percent of SADC weapons procurement, compared to 97.3 percent in the North Atlantic region and 47.4 percent in Asia (including the United States). SADC falls behind even other sub-Saharan states (0.64 percent of procurement). They also had little intra-regional trade and investment. Adebayo Adedeji, a founding leader of ECOWAS, contended that the continent overall had “moved from being at the periphery to the periphery of the periphery of the global economy—the permanent underdog, the world’s basket case for which there is little hope.” Altogether, this data suggests that the SADC states had little need for robust alliance institutions, given their limited power projection capabilities, difficulty in supporting even nearby partners, and the lack of security or economic interdependence. The institutionalist approach would expect thin institutionalization, if the region even developed security organizations at all. Consequently, SADC’s alliance strategy is a puzzle. Composed of some of the world’s weakest and poorest states, why did southern African countries adopt security structures with high financial and human resource costs? With only tenuous preexisting military and economic connections, why did these states create organizations mandating frequent and extensive coordination? With no serious external threats, why did they sign a collective defense treaty? And despite enthusiastic adoption of security integration proposals, why did it take twelve years to create institutions to implement that integration? Why create an organization with high autonomy costs if members were reluctant to pay them? Normative diffusion best answers these questions, and the case’s evidence is summarized in table 6.1. Throughout this period, South Africa and Zimbabwe competed for regional leadership, using OPDS and the MDP to consolidate their positions. For OPDS, Pretoria convinced the other SADC states to form a security institution based on NATO, overcoming pressure from Harare to adopt a looser organization modeled on the Frontline States (FLS), a Cold War political-military body opposing apartheid. These positions reversed for the MDP negotiations, with Harare wanting to emulate NATO, while Pretoria preferred a strategy tailored to the region to mitigate sovereignty concerns. In both cases, the NATO model won out, as Europe’s success guided alliance strategy.

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ta b l e 6 . 1 . Contribution of SADC Case to Normative Diffusion Mechanism Hypothesis

Evidence

Distinction from Alternative Explanations

The Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security (1996) H2

OPDS drafters cited Europe’s security institutions as an aspirational model for SADC.

Southern Africa and Europe did not experience common levels of interdependence, obviating the need for NATO-like security structures. Hegemonic imposition would expect that richer, powerful states impose their preferred alliance strategy on SADC. But SADC members themselves pushed for such institutions, even while locking European funders out of policy discussions.

C2.1

The OPDS and MDP suffered significant strategic misalignment, with states adopting integrative security institutions but refusing to delegate authority.

Institutionalism would expect states to grant the authority they had agreed to in pacts they themselves design.

The Mutual Defence Pact (2003) H2

As the most powerful regional state, South Africa did not want a collective defense treaty emulating NATO. But other SADC members considered that strategy as essential to regional defense integration.

Southern Africa and Europe did not share common threats. Despite its relative power, South Africa failed to convince other SADC states to adopt its preferred position, undermining a hegemonic imposition explanation.

The discrepancy between this strategy and southern Africa’s conditions produced extensive misalignment. The SADC states refused to delegate the decision-making authority they themselves had granted OPDS and the MDP. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe seized upon differences in treaty interpretation to unilaterally advance his own foreign policy under OPDS’s political cover. This nearly led to SADC’s collapse. Despite this, the heads of state papered over these problems for years until a face-saving compromise could be found.

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Both before and after the Cold War, South Africa was the dominant economic and military power in the region, with a GDP and military capabilities dwarfing its

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neighbors. According to Ngoma (2003) and drawing upon SADC records, South Africa possessed 74.9 percent of SADC’s combined GDP. On its own, Pretoria could easily and successfully confront any individual local challenger. In response, a “Black” camp of states led by Zimbabwe created two interstate institutions to coordinate economic and political/military opposition to the apartheid regime and its partners (the “White” camp): the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) and the Frontline States (FLS), respectively. SADCC was formally established in 1980 and promoted regional economic development and integration that would allow its nine members greater industrial independence from South Africa. FLS was formed during the 1970s as a political and military bloc united against apartheid. There was loose coordination between the two bodies, particularly as the heads of state directed both organizations, and they were relatively informal in nature. In seeking economic integration, SADCC operated in a markedly different manner than other international institutions. Rather than having a joint committee manage regional industrial policy with collective resources, SADCC appointed individual member states as “governors” for such areas as transportation, telecommunications, energy, and agriculture. These countries would devise collective SADCC policies but disseminate and advance them using only their own resources. Other members were free to and typically did ignore these recommendations to pursue their own programs. FLS was even more informal, possessing no regular coordinating mechanisms of any kind. It operated through ad hoc meetings among the members’ heads of state, usually when crises emerged. The modus operandi of FLS collaboration . . .—ad hoc summitry of a functional nature, rather than the establishment of permanent secretariats and other fixed structures— . . . is also probably the only workable way of operating, given the inhibiting factors mentioned above. This way, each national leader can pursue the foreign policy of his country, while the summitry format allows for flexibility, pragmatism, and rapid, collective responses to questions of vital importance to the common goals.

The body was lauded for both maintaining unified positions against South Africa and for the flexibility its informal nature afforded. FLS successfully supported nationalist and guerrilla movements in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), helped to consolidate regional and international opposition to the South African government, and received tacit endorsement from both the Organization for African Unity and even the United States as the principal international negotiating partner over the conflict with Pretoria. The fall of apartheid was the capstone to this group’s efforts, and a clear validation of a loose and adaptive alliance strategy for the region. Zimbabwean

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president Mugabe in particular emerged as a regional leader for his role in FLS. Postapartheid, he and the former FLS states continuously argued that regional security cooperation should be based on this informal, even personalistic, framework. With the end of the apartheid regime and superpower competition, however, southern Africa faced a significant problem of order: how to organize regional consolidation, integrate a newly democratic South Africa, and do so without superpower assistance. South Africa in particular faced contradictory incentives, seeking to institutionalize its leadership within whatever system emerged, while simultaneously mitigating fears about renewed regional domination. It benefited from President Nelson Mandela’s unique moral status to allay those concerns. Europe’s security, economic prosperity and integration, and social freedom were clear inspirations and aspirations for southern Africa. In reforming SADCC and creating a new security organization, regional states upheld NATO and other Continental bodies as standards for emulation. SADCC’s reformation was straightforward. The new SADC imported SADCC’s mechanism of appointing individual state governors who would develop and implement partnership-wide policies over economic, social, health, education, and a variety of other nonmilitary areas. It also established a coordinating secretariat sitting atop this structure, establishing governing and coordinating protocols similar to those found in NATO and the OSCE. To justify this change, the SADC declaration detailed how global changes, not local ones, were influencing the strategy and structure of interstate interaction, to which the southern African region had to adapt. The 1993 Framework and Strategy document, SADC’s official statement on regional security cooperation, claimed: World affairs are increasingly being managed on the basis of consultation and consensus, rather than confrontation and competition. . . . Integration is fast becoming a global trend. Countries in different regions of the globe are organising themselves into closer economic and political entities. These movements towards stronger regional blocs will transform the world, both economically and politically. ... There is, therefore, a critical need to develop; among all the countries and people of Southern Africa, a vision of a shared future, a future within a regional community.

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As these statements reflect, global norms pushed strategic and institutional change in southern Africa. SADCC countries were norm-takers, forced to adapt to new conceptions of how integrative approaches to foreign, trade, and military policy generate effective interstate cooperation post–Cold War. These were not entirely welcome adjustments. In 1991, the SADCC Secretariat declared, “In the face of the regions realities, and the current international tendencies toward the establishment of

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economic blocks, the region must accept to transform itself into an economic block similar to the proposed North American free trade zone or the European Economic Community.” Critically, as peripheral countries, SADCC members did not make means-ends institutionalist calculations about how local conditions required a strategy of regional integration to overcome coordination problems. As discussed above, the economic, political, and military foundations for this strategy were at best weak. Instead, beliefs about the efficacy and normative value of integrative approaches came first. Lenz (2012) states that “SADCC records mention no single study conducted to weigh the costs and benefits of the two potential options for regional economic integration.” In fact, the most recent regional study found that integrative institutions would have little effect on economic interdependence. The rational design approach typically depicts organizations as responses to exogenous interdependence and policy spillover. These cooperation problems precede their institutional solutions. The SADCC states, by contrast, hoped to manufacture interdependence by creating coordinating institutions. The “governors” approach was indicative of this, appointing one country to first establish shared coordinating rules to which members would hopefully adjust their policies. But these efforts fell flat, in large part because the interdependence and spillover that would generate gains from cooperation did not exist. SADCC members only changed their organizational strategies once global norms of interstate cooperation shifted. This same dynamic affected regional military integration, which proved to be much more controversial than economic coordination. The 1993 Framework and Strategy document called for the creation of a security coordinating body and a mutual defense pact modeled on NATO. Laurie Nathan, a drafter of this document and a South African official at the time, recounts, “In preparing the draft policies, our main point of reference was Europe because of its democratic values, its achievement in forging a security community after World War II and its success in managing peacefully, and eventually overcoming, the Cold War. The emergence of the Western European security community, which made war unthinkable in a region plagued by bloody conflict historically, was an extraordinary accomplishment.” During the 1996 summit meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, the members proposed an Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security (OPDS or “the Organ”). This followed the creation of formal SADC Sections on Conflict Resolution and Political Cooperation, as well as associated committees for foreign ministers and defense ministers in 1994. OPDS would coordinate military and foreign policy among members, serving as an integrative security body modeled on NATO. Although it did not include a defense guarantee (SADC expected to negotiate a separate collective security pact soon after), OPDS would become “the foremost institution of SADC, mandated to address

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issues relating to political stability, conflict prevention, . . . as well as issues pertaining to peace.” Critically, this meant the Organ had some authority to act on domestic as well as external security challenges. The body had its own leadership, which was empowered to represent the member states in security affairs and could draw upon and direct some of the SADC Secretariat’s resources. SADC members worried that such an organization might usurp national authority over military policy, as well as stretch member budgets and management capacity. Indeed, such sovereignty concerns collapsed the East African Community in 1977. While the SADC declaration espoused integrative goals, after its signing, officials inserted language about territorial integrity and sovereign equality into Community documents to buttress their status as independent states. This resulted in strategic misalignment, with principals promising integration but refusing to actually delegate the necessary authority to intergovernmental bodies. Mark Malan, at the time a senior adviser to South Africa on military affairs, claimed, “the politicians appear very ready to agree on what emerges as hollow policy i.e., lofty goals with very little in the way of substantial policy guidelines, and then leave the real policy debate to the officials, who, however technically competent, have to refer all the details back to their principals, since they are often left in the dark.” Nathan concurred, suggesting that intra-governmental divisions were to blame for strategic integration but member reluctance. “The contradiction was perhaps due partly to the distinction between ‘the state’, represented by the Heads of State (no surrender of sovereignty) and ‘the civil service’, represented by government officials (wanting formality).” OPDS especially aggravated these worries given its proposed authority over security issues. These concerns found form in an alternative alliance strategy proposed by Zimbabwe and former FLS members, the “Association of Southern African States” (ASAS). Modeled on FLS, it envisioned informal and flexible security cooperation, with members coming together and responding quickly to any emerging threat without the shackles of SADC procedure or giving up decision-making autonomy. ASAS would “preserve the key features of the FLS arrangements: informality, flexibility and unimpeded access to the SADC Heads of State.” Indeed, SADC’s official history highlighted the member states’ positive experience with loose and informal cooperation in FLS, especially its pragmatic and flexible institutional and operational mechanisms, and its innovative spirit.” ASAS would eschew SADC’s and OPDS’s integrative approach to security, focusing narrowly on military issues. While it would report to some SADC grouping, ASAS would operate independently of all other regional organizations. This last point traded on local fears of renewed foreign domination. Mugabe worried that, were a security institution housed within SADC, European funders could gain access to and manipulate regional military and foreign policy. His concern was widely shared by the other heads of state, and

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this proved to be one of his most successful arguments in the debates over SADC’s security bodies. South Africa, the non-FLS states, and the SADC Secretariat won the effort to create an integrative OPDS modeled on NATO. These countries worried that, under ASAS, the SADCC framework of “governorships” would be applied to military policy, domestic order and policing, and intelligence, allowing an individual country to determine regional positions on such sensitive issues. But they conceded a critical issue to Mugabe. The Organ chairperson, and OPDS more generally, would operate independently of SADC, responsible only to the SADC Summit. Ideally, this strategy of independent operation “would allow more flexibility and timely response, at the highest level, to sensitive and potentially explosive situations.” Consequently, even in the initial phase of southern African military integration, we see misalignment between security strategy and local intentions. NATO served as both model and eventual aspiration, mandating an integrative approach to military cooperation. But SADC members were keen to preserve their recently gained policy autonomy. OPDS therefore represented something of a false consensus, embodying deep disagreement about its own functions, delegated powers, and authority.

6.4 Misusing the Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security This disagreement about OPDS’s purpose and limits continued to generate strategic misalignment throughout its first decade of operation. Mugabe was appointed as OPDS’s first chairman, given his stature as the longest serving head of state, as well as his past leadership of FLS. But this put implementation of the Organ’s strategy into the hands of ASAS’s chief proponent. Mugabe largely ignored the Gaborone Summit’s instructions to create integrative coordinating institutions. Instead, he embarked on his preferred informal and flexible approach. He kept the Organ firmly separate from other SADC bodies and asserted that only OPDS and its staff (under his leadership as chairperson) could propose or make changes to it. The Organ had inherited a number of coordinating bodies from SADC, including those of the foreign and defense ministers. Mugabe delayed their meetings, instead concentrating decision-making power in the chairperson’s office with limited oversight from the Heads of State Council, which only met annually. Nevertheless, he “also referred to NATO as a model for regional security arrangements in southern Africa. No explanation was ever proffered for the contradiction between the informal approach and the NATO approach.” In effect, under Zimbabwean leadership, southern Africa faced a problem of “Two Summits”: two organizations established and operating at the highest intergovernmental level, with no clarity about which body had terminal authority over the other. As one commentator remarked, “Except at the SADC Heads of State

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level where the SADC Chair is located, there is no connection or formal interaction between the socio-economic sectors and the PDS wings of SADC.” Mugabe then embarked on a series of unilateral foreign policy initiatives under his asserted authority as OPDS chairperson. Corralling support from Namibia and Angola, Zimbabwe intervened in the Congolese civil war in 1998, claiming that SADC had come to a “unanimous” decision to defend Laurent Kabila’s regime. Similarly, OPDS intervened politically in burgeoning domestic conflicts in Lesotho and Madagascar, again purporting to act on behalf of the entire SADC body. Strategic misalignment facilitated Mugabe’s control of OPDS. Despite possessing multiple committees and a dedicated secretariat, SADC had neither the political will nor to some extent resources to effectively manage even its more important structures. “To some extent, officials were much more intransigent and radical in their interpretation of the [Gaborone] communiqué]—probably because they had little real idea of what had actually been agreed to in Botswana, or for that matter, at other Summits where no minutes where kept and officials were excluded from the most important deliberations.” Zimbabwe dismissed South African and other states’ concerns about misappropriating OPDS or misrepresenting SADC consensus. Lt. Col. Asher Walter Tapfumaneyi, a key Zimbabwean participant in the Organ Protocol’s drafting, argued, “Any fears about the separate SADC Organ Summit being abused by the SADC Organ Chairman are unfounded. This is not only because the leaders have the prerogative to limit the SADC Organ Chairman’s powers in the documents that lay down the Organ’s structures and operational modalities, but more importantly, because all the member states retain their sovereign right to act independently or to stand aloof if they are unhappy with the collective arrangements.” Nevertheless, throughout Mugabe’s tenure as Organ chair, SADC members proposed a series of strategic compromises they hoped would satisfy both Zimbabwe and South Africa. A 1998 resolution, for example, recommended that OPDS operate as a small committee of five SADC member states possessing a “full mandate to intervene in all conflicts arising within the region.” Moreover, “a small committee would operate more efficiently because it would be flexible and could easily meet at short notice to take appropriate decisions. Second, it would be possible to keep such sensitive information confidential to avoid leakage.” South Africa in particular rejected this proposal, as it would

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amount to a ham-fisted effort at steering a middle road between the positions of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Like the proverbial horse designed by a committee, the results are rather ugly. If the ministers’ recommendations ever become a reality, the SADC Organ is set to be a clique of rulers with supranational powers to meddle in the af-

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fairs of others. . . . The development (or lack thereof ) of a meaningful subregional security architecture continues to be based on compromise rather than on logic or principle. . . . It almost seems as if SADC leaders were wishing the harsh realities of the subregion would disappear.

The initiative did not resolve regional competition between South Africa and Zimbabwe, nor did it resolve which body—SADC or OPDS—had terminal authority. Instead, SADC continued to elide these differences in official communications. “The SADC states wanted formality but didn’t want to surrender sovereignty. They did not think this through adequately and did not appreciate, or seek to resolve, the contradiction.” South Africa claimed that the 1998 meeting effectively suspended the Organ. Zimbabwe declared otherwise, and, lacking any other guidance, Mugabe proceeded to ignore the rotating chairmanship provision, holding onto the post for an additional three years. Despite this constituting a clear violation of the Gaborone agreement, the SADC Summit communiqué merely noted that the ministerial council should review OPDS operations, but Mugabe would continue to serve as Organ chair. During those three years, Zimbabwe deepened OPDS’s intervention in the DRC, while South Africa and Botswana took advantage of SADC’s paralysis to intervene and reverse a coup in Lesotho. “As on other occasions, a major dispute within SADC was ‘resolved’ through the expedient of recording an artificial consensus expressed in a bland and ambiguous manner.” These escalating tensions and uncoordinated military interventions threatened to collapse SADC. Zimbabwe’s policies under OPDS’s aegis increasingly upset other SADC members and isolated the country diplomatically. Mandela grew so frustrated with Mugabe’s actions that he threatened to resign as SADC Chair. This situation finally forced the Community to commit to a single design and accountability structure for the Organ, again reinforcing NATO’s strategy. As Horst Brammer, then–deputy director for SADC Political Affairs in the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, argued: “Security and economic development go hand in hand—one is inconceivable without the other.” Similarly, Nathan recounted: “We had no confidence at all in informal arrangements. Such arrangements were not conducive to regional integration, crisis management and conflict resolution. They were bound to break down in times of crisis, precisely when they were most needed.” In October 1999 and May 2000, Albert Shabangu, the foreign minister of Swaziland, organized two meetings of the SADC defense, foreign, and prime ministers to finalize the Organ’s structure and to break Harare’s obstruction. Zimbabwe again protested that institutional plans should emerge from within OPDS. However, by this point, even former FLS members were wary of Mugabe’s control of the Organ

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and the latitude that informal structures had given the Zimbabwean president over regional security decisions. Harare capitulated and sent representatives. Over the course of these meetings, the ministers developed a protocol clearly laying out OPDS’s structure and relationship to SADC. It established SADC’s superior authority over the Organ, and it reinstated and clarified the rotational chairmanship requirement so that no single country could lead OPDS for more than one year. Article 4 further constrained the chairperson position, embedding it within a “troika” structure where the current chair must consult with his predecessor and successor in jointly managing OPDS and reporting to the SADC Summit. As each chair came from a different country, this stopped a single individual or state from making unilateral security decisions on behalf of the region. During his tenure, Mugabe had successfully prevented the Organ from establishing meaningful coordinating bodies. The protocol detailed an elaborate ministerial structure (Articles 3 and 5), as well as providing separate, specialized committees for foreign and defense ministers alongside their voting structures (Articles 6–8). Articles 11 and 13 set intra-allied conflict resolution and dispute settlement procedures, comprehensively outlining their jurisdiction, scope, and methods. Bowing to sovereignty concerns, Article 12 mandated that members maintain the confidentiality of any classified information shared through the Organ, and the Preamble specifically reaffirmed respect for strict sovereignty and noninterference in internal affairs. As if the protocol’s directives were not clear enough, the SADC members developed a Strategic Indicative Plan for the OPDS (SIPO). This plan elaborated how the Organ’s political, defense, state security, and public security sectors would implement the protocol’s twelve stated objectives. It even detailed personnel structures, funding sources, reporting requirements, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. SIPO also created a new department within the SADC Secretariat to manage linkages with OPDS. However, it took SADC an additional three years to complete this plan, with final ratification occurring only in 2004, emphasizing the limited urgency with which even foundational challenges to security cooperation were treated.

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The Mutual Defence Pact (2003)

Alongside the protocol discussions, Harare pressed for an SADC defense treaty. SADC had called for such an agreement in the 1993 Strategy and Framework document, as well as at the 1996 Gaborone Summit (and would do so again in the Organ Protocol of 2001). However, no member seriously considered southern Africa under direct, mutual, and external (or even interpartner) military threat, with SIPO stating that “the Southern African region is currently enjoying relative peace, political stability and security.” Instead, Mugabe raised this issue as another path to consolidate

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Zimbabwe’s leadership over regional security networks and limit South Africa’s growing strength in southern Africa’s interstate institutions. By 1998, rebel groups in the DRC threatened President Laurent Kabila’s government, which called for military assistance from regional states. Mugabe convened a series of security conferences among Angola, the DRC, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, ultimately producing the Luanda Defence Protocol on April 8, 1999. In his role as OPDS chair, Mugabe claimed that SADC fully agreed to support Kabila, and that the protocol served as the foundation for a southern African security pact. In particular, he hoped that it would eventually evolve into a “kind of North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the region.” In that, the Luanda Defence Protocol shared many of NATO’s features. The security guarantee was an almost exact copy of NATO’s Article 5, where “an armed attack against one of them shall be considered an attack against the other.” Allies were expected to use all necessary measures to defend the attacked party, including military force. However, as with the North Atlantic Treaty, the response would be determined individually and collectively by the members. Article 9 established a coordinating body, while Article 7 allowed for domestic intervention to support the sovereign and effective functioning of allied institutions and government, in response to the conflict in the DRC. The Luanda Defence Protocol caused a major rift within SADC. Those left outside worried that this pact, coupled with Mugabe’s control over the then-independent Organ, signaled the emergence of a new military-oriented and interventionist security regime. Moreover, they were concerned that the protocol’s NATO-like guarantee meant the four signatories had abandoned and undercut the SADC security framework. However, the Luanda allies again pointed to NATO and Europe, justifying their actions by arguing that countries commonly participate in multiple, overlapping security agreements. In addition, “like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, [this defense treaty] could, in time, begin to attract new members and, perhaps in the not so distant future, all SADC states would become members.” SADC took up the question of expanding the Luanda Defence Protocol alongside the OPDS debate in 2000–2001. Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, and Tanzania (labeled the “Pacifist” group) preferred to maintain the existing structures, favoring nonmilitary and diplomatic solutions to regional threats. Nathan recounts that, “for Mugabe, the NATO approach really meant a militarist or military approach to conflict resolution.” Tanzanian major general Herman Lupogo contended that a mutual defense pact would only embroil states in “unnecessary wars which were not of their own making.” He instead advocated for the “friendly co-operation that exists in security and defence issues” through existing SADC institutions. The other Pacifist states worried that an independent defense treaty would ignore the wider bases for sustainable development and peace and undermine national sovereignty. In

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this view, a military pact of any kind was unnecessary: SADC alone was sufficient to create a robust security community. Regional momentum was already moving against this group of states, however. Normative aspirations again proved decisive in prompting southern African countries to emulate European security. Zambia—not a member of the Luanda Defence Protocol—proposed direct emulation of NATO for the expanded SADC Mutual Defence Pact (MDP), particularly the North Atlantic Alliance’s Article 5 guarantee. Naison Ngoma, who was then a South African Air Command officer, argued: “The evolution of a mutual defence pact is, in many respects, an undertaking closely associated with the achievement of a higher level of cooperation among states, regardless of their geographical location.” For southern Africa, a collective defense alliance was “the ultimate requirement for a regional security structure.” As a result, even Pretoria acquiesced to the MDP, although its official statements focused on the broader benefits for economic development and management of nontraditional security threats. The pact would help in “stabilizing the region . . . cultivating an atmosphere conducive to investment and long-term stability . . . provid[ing] a mechanism to prevent conflict between SADC countries, as well as with other countries, . . . and for intervention in intra-state conflicts which had the potential to affect the stability of the whole region.” The final MDP text mirrored NATO’s strategy in most respects. The preamble included the same orientation toward general peace and security, as well as alignment with the UN Charter and African agreements. Article 5 mandated military consultation (similar to NATO Article 4), while Article 11 delegated implementation to the SADC Organ, analogous to NATO’s Article 9. The Luanda signatories also obtained more detailed statements about the types of military activities allies would engage in, as well as maintaining the commitment to intervene in cases of state failure. The MDP also detailed internal dispute settlement procedures, an unlimited duration, and cooperation on military training, intelligence, procurement, and research and development. Given Mugabe’s misuse of OPDS and the SADC states’ failure to delegate authority to implement their agreements, the Pacifist group had reason to be cautious about a NATO-like defense agreement. However, systemic normative standards overwhelmed these concerns.

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Conclusion

European security served as a normative model for southern Africa. SADC pursued an integrative alliance strategy due to a logic of appropriateness. NATO was the model for legitimate military cooperation globally, and SADC countries responded by adjusting their institutions to match it. This led to significant misalignment, especially as Zimbabwe seized upon gaps in interstate agreement to assert its own

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independent foreign policies. As one SADC drafter claimed, “The [European] models were aspirational because they were so successful in terms of both economic prosperity and peace and stability. With hindsight, the mistake made by the SADC architects . . . was to look at Europe and not at southern Africa. We did not adequately analyse our own region. Analytically and strategically, we had the wrong point of departure and no doubt also a teleological assumption about progress.” The case presents three key takeaways for the normative diffusion mechanism. First, beliefs about security integration preceded their foundational conditions. NATO set an aspirational goal for SADC. Southern Africa created OPDS and the MDP to generate the security interdependence and cohesion they witnessed in the European security community. In that, the case flips the functionalist/rational design causal chain. Whereas policy interdependence prompts institutionalization in those theories, in this case, African states hoped that institutionalization would generate interdependence. Second, this created significant strategic misalignment. SADC desired the formal trappings of an integrative alliance strategy, but its members were generally unwilling to delegate the sovereign authority necessary to implement it. Mugabe seized this opportunity to insert his preferred, unilateral approach to regional security under the political cover of OPDS’s integrative goals. A desire to preserve the appearance of functioning military cooperation led southern African states to repeatedly paper over deep policy disagreements. This nearly collapsed not just military cooperation but the wider SADC project. Finally, despite these challenges, SADC eventually returned to NATO’s integrative strategy in its security organizations. “The prevailing view . . . was the regional integration in general, and peace, defence and security in particular, required formal protocols.” The region possessed compelling examples of alternative security arrangements, ones that would better retain the national sovereignty SADC members were keen to preserve. The former FLS states in particular gravitated toward these models, such as ASAS. Yet they were eventually overridden, with SADC adopting an integrative alliance strategy on paper, even as its members continued to refuse to delegate authority to the very institutions they themselves had designed.

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7

The Dominant Strategy and Alliance Failure

7.1

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Introduction

Thus far, the book has focused on beliefs. States embrace the central pact as a socially defined standard of alliance strategy because they believe doing so enhances the credibility of their own partnerships and acts as a marker of legitimate security behavior. The preceding chapters provided quantitative and qualitative evidence supporting these mechanisms. But does copying the central pact’s strategy actually enhance alliance reliability and legitimacy? Do beliefs in the dominant strategy’s efficacy, credibility, and status improve alliance outcomes? This chapter explores the effects of core alliance emulation and the dominant form on interstate security behavior. Specifically, it focuses on “alliance failure,” as this concept helps to distinguish this book’s theory from the hegemonic imposition and common threat alternatives. Some security pacts are cohesive. They can survive enormous changes to their strategic conditions: member abrogation, internal policy disagreements, the disappearance of a motivating threat, even military defeat. Others are brittle, breaking apart over relatively minor disagreements. Alliances fail when they are unable to adapt to these changing conditions, where defections by members lead to the collapse of the partnership overall. Scholars have attributed variation in alliance cohesion and failure to the commonality of interests, imposition by more powerful states, or institutions that manage centrifugal forces. But the theory of core alliance diffusion assumes that a pact’s social and symbolic components are just as, if not more, important than its material/functionalist

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elements. Emulation provides social validation above and beyond the direct benefits of specific institutional designs. For example, institutionalization may bolster credibility through a sunk cost mechanism. But if such features are shared by the core alliance, emulation confers additional credibility through the weight of social proof and normative standards. Conversely, if not shared by the central pact, then institutionalization should degrade perceptions of reliability. In total, the theory would expect that dominant pacts are less likely to suffer from alliance failure. Members are likely to continue supporting a pact, even under changing circumstances, because of socially derived credibility and status benefits. These implications are both testable and distinguish the book’s theory from competing explanations. Consequently, this chapter probes the effects of the dominant strategy on the risk of alliance failure. It derives four hypotheses from the theory presented in chapter 2, evaluating them with statistical methods. First, pacts emulating the dominant strategy will experience reduced alliance failure. Second, this effect will be stronger among secondary and peripheral states. Third, as a socially validated standard, the dominant strategy’s reduction of alliance failure will increase the more it prevails in the international security system. Finally, alliance institutions will only systematically reduce failure when those features are shared by the core pact. Section 7.2 outlines these four hypotheses, while the four subsequent sections test each one in turn. I subject the results to the same robustness checks as in chapter 3. In all, I find strong support for each hypothesis. On average, the dominant form reduces the risk of alliance failure by 14.44 percent. Furthermore, this stabilizing effect scales as the dominant strategy spreads throughout the interstate system. In the counterfactual, we expect approximately 35.1 percent of alliances to fail when no one emulates the dominant form. As we approach complete diffusion, however, that figure drops to 2.2 percent. Finally, contrary to the rational design approach, alliance formalization increases failure by 26.46 percent when the core pact is itself informal. When that alliance is formalized, however, institutionalization reduces partnership collapse by 15.59 percent. In sum, emulation is systematically associated with enhanced alliance cohesion and stability, regardless of whether states model themselves on a realpolitik or integrative security strategy. The more complete the diffusion of this social dynamic, the more powerful these stabilizing effects are. This has important implications for the hegemon, which section 7.7 discusses. Due to its centrality to the core alliance, the leading state possesses a significant source of influence over the network of interstate military cooperation. Its decisions condition the reliability and prestige accorded to all dominant strategy pacts. Changes to the core alliance will ripple across the security network through the relative reliability and status mechanisms. This chapter’s tests allow us to identify the bounds of this influence, determining to what extent emulation prevents alliance failure.

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7.2

Theoretically Predicted Effects of Emulation

Together, the theoretical mechanisms presented in chapter 2 grant the core alliance’s design a unique social status. Under credibility diffusion, the design constitutes the standard of credible military commitment. Under normative diffusion, states participate in dominant strategy alliances to legitimize their foreign policies and acquire status. Of course, it is entirely possible that emulation only affects the form, and not the substance, of interstate security dynamics. Even as states mimic a specific strategy, these decisions may have no broader effect on their behavior or alliance outcomes. As we saw in the SADC case, members believed that robust institutionalization and a collective defense pact were required to create a European-style integrated security community. In actual practice, however, they chose not to delegate the necessary authority to implement this strategy. Zimbabwe in particular violated NATO norms of consultation and coordination to pursue an independent foreign policy under OPDS’s aegis. Consequently, as a final empirical task, we should ask whether following the dominant strategy systemically improves alliance outcomes. Are beliefs about the core pact’s efficacy, reliability, and normative standing simply beliefs, or do they affect security and military behavior in actual practice? This chapter’s statistical tests focus on alliance failure, a condition where an alliance fractures because it cannot successfully prevent what Cesa (2010) calls “heterogeneous” goals from disrupting the pact. As he puts it, states often pursue multiple objectives when establishing an alliance. In homogenous ones, State A is trying to achieve objectives X and Y; state B, in turn, is in pursuit of objectives X and Z. Their alliance, which centers around objective X, will be homogeneous if in order to achieve X, A does not have to forgo Y and B does not have to forgo Z; similarly, the alliance is considered homogeneous if the policy implemented by A in order to achieve Y, and that implemented by B in order to attain Z, do not compromise the common objective X.

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By contrast, with heterogeneous alliances, “one has to forgo particular causes if one wishes to safeguard a minimum degree of cooperation.” Forgoing these causes can strain an alliance, as members face centrifugal incentives that may eventually collapse the pact. Even short of that point, these policy disagreements can lead to a failure to abide by collective rules and procedures, an inability to fulfill material and financial obligations, or even intra-allied military conflict and betrayal. Alliance failure occurs when the pact terminates as a consequence of these tensions.

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As examples, the Three Emperors League (1873) was prematurely ended when Austria-Hungary and Russia could not settle their policy disputes and establish respective and respected spheres of influence in the Balkans. The Triple Alliance (1882) broke apart when Italy fought against its German and Austro-Hungarian allies in World War 1. In both cases, a member’s defection caused clear, adverse consequences for the pact and ended military cooperation. That latter condition is critical. In certain cases, alliances can survive member withdrawal, as the Rio Pact has in the cases of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Importantly, this definition distinguishes alliance failure from cases where allies successfully accomplished their goals and then decided to disband, or where the casus foederis was never invoked. The ATOP dataset includes a measure of alliance termination and specifically codes the reasons for the pact’s end. Using this measure, between 1815 and 2003, 512 dyadic security ties failed out of 3876, or 13.21 percent. Figure 7.1 presents these failure rates by year. Dominant strategy alliances fail as well, of course. But because emulation generates social and symbolic benefits, we should expect them to fail at lower rates than pacts with alternative designs. This leads to this chapter’s first testable hypothesis: Effect Hypothesis 1: Dominant strategy alliances are less likely to terminate due to violations of member obligations than nondominant strategy alliances, ceteris paribus.

Furthermore, both mechanisms expect secondary and peripheral states to drive emulation. Compared to major powers, secondary countries possess fewer capabilities with which to adapt to alliance abandonment. Peripheral countries should be particularly concerned about using the symbolic elements of emulation to bolster domestic and international standing. They too are more likely to remain in a dominant strategy pact even when conditions change. Consequently, we would expect that security partnerships excluding powerful states and also emulating the core alliance should have reduced failure rates. This leads to a second hypothesis: Effect Hypothesis 2: Dominant strategy alliances without major powers are less likely to terminate due to violations of member obligations than dominant strategy alliances with major powers and nondominant alliances, ceteris paribus.

The strength of the core alliance’s credibility and norm-generating effects is a function of social proof and weight. The more alliances emulating the core pact’s strategy, the stronger the members’ case that emulation is a socially approved standard of reliability and legitimacy. In effect, higher prevalence increases the social value and symbolic capital of emulation, reducing alliance failure. This leads to a third hypothesis:

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f i g ure 7 . 1 . Frequency of Alliance Failure, 1815–2003. Year

08

20

00

20

92

84

76

1946

19

19

60 68 19

19

19

44

1919

19

44

19

36

19

28

19

20

1870

19

12

19

04

19

96

18

88

80

18

18

72

64

1815

18

18

56

48

18

18

40

18

32

18

24

18

16

18

08

18

Percentage of alliances that failed

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100% 1992

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

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Effect Hypothesis 3: The dominant strategy’s prevalence within the international security system is negatively associated with the incidence of alliance failure, ceteris paribus.

Moreover, a key point distinguishing the theory of strategic emulation from rational institutionalism is that the social and symbolic component of a costly signal is as important, if not more so, than the direct material benefits that signal provides. A specific design characteristic will not possess these “intangible” components—and will not be considered as valuable by states—unless the core alliance shares it. Consequently, no matter how costly, institutional features like coordinating organizations and permanent staffing will only bolster reliability when the central pact also possesses those features. This leads to a fourth and final hypothesis: Effect Hypothesis 4: Alliance management institutions only reduce alliance failure when the core alliance possesses management institutions as well.

These hypotheses distinguish the emulation theory and its effects from competing alternatives. None of these approaches would associate emulation with increased alliance cohesion and durability. In addition, Hypothesis 2 specifically challenges the hegemonic imposition framework. If the effects of emulation are stronger for secondary states, that provides more evidence that these countries, and not the great powers, are driving the theory. Similarly, Hypothesis 4 questions the rational design expectation that institutionalization leads to greater reliability. If such organizational features only have an effect when they match the core pact, this evidence bolsters the book’s emulation theory. Even more, if institutions actually increase the likelihood of failure when they do not match the central alliance, this constitutes strong support for the hypothesis. Although no test specifically assesses the common threat approach, the models below will include controls for this and the other alternative explanations. If our operationalization of the dominant strategy can consistently gain statistical significance across all these models (and with the correct sign and magnitude), this would provide robust evidence favoring the theory, as well as that emulation directly affects security outcomes and alliance behavior.

7.3 Hypothesis 1: The Dominant Strategy and Alliance Failure This section tests the relationship between the dominant form and alliance failure, as captured in Hypothesis 1: Effect Hypothesis 1: Dominant strategy alliances are less likely to terminate due to violations of member obligations than nondominant strategy alliances, ceteris paribus.

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As in chapter 3, the baseline data comes from the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset. The independent variable is Dominant, a dichotomous indicator of whether the security relationship between the dyad matches the core alliance’s design. For the dependent variable, I use ATOP’s “Term Cause” measure. If a pact collapses due to policy disputes unrelated to the alliance; those related to alliance management; intra-allied military conflict; and/or violation of alliance provisions, I code this as an Alliance Failure. The models below use the same control variables as those in chapter 3. State power is captured through CINC and Major, reflecting studies that show that greater capabilities are associated with increased member defection. In addition, were a hegemonic imposition argument correct, we would expect both that Major has a negative and significant effect on Failure, and that Dominant does not. Similarly, if common threats inspire institutional similarity, then Rivalry—the count of mutual, long-term adversaries—should reduce alliance failure. More divergent interests—as captured by MID, whether a dyad is currently engaged in a militarized conflict with one another—should have the opposite effect. Polity2 is kept as a measure of political openness, as more democratic states are typically more reliable partners. Finally, Energy, Production, and IGO remain as controls. The baseline model therefore is Alliance Failureij  α  β(Dominant)ij  β(Dominant)ij  β(CINC)ij  β(Major)ij  β(Energy)ij  β(Production)ij  β(Defect)ij  β(Polity2)ij  β(MID)ij  β(Rivalry)ij  β(IGO)ij  ij Table 7.1, column 1 presents this model’s results using the observed data. As expected, Dominant has a negative and significant effect, suggesting that emulation reduces member defection and bolsters military ties. It also possesses some of the strongest substantive effects among the competing explanations. Overall, emulating the dominant strategy reduces the likelihood of alliance failure by approximately 11 percent.

7.3.1

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Robustness Checks

This provides initial confirmation of Hypothesis 1. But, as in chapter 3, I subject this model to a number of robustness checks. We begin with matching. To review, observational data is typically “unbalanced,” with “treated” units (in this case, those following the dominant strategy) systematically differing from “control” units (in this case, those with nondominant forms). Again, I use nearest neighbor matching with replacement, with Dominant as the treatment variable, to improve the balance

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ta b l e 7 . 1 . Are dominant alliances less likely to fail? Dominant regressed on Failure Model 1: Observed Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

Model 4: K-Adic

Dominant

–1.39 * (0.12)

–1.57 * (0.13)

–1.78 * (0.15)

–0.62 * (0.27)

Major

0.92 * (0.16)

2.07 * (0.49)

3.47 * (0.65)

–0.64 * (0.24)

CINC

–4.01 * (1.19)

3.69 (3.64)

9.83 * (4.29)

1.29 (2.02)

Polity2

–0.07 * (0.01)

–0.18 * (0.05)

–0.32 * (0.06)

0.08 * (0.03)

MID

–0.12 * (0.04)

–0.27 * (0.08)

–0.46 * (0.1)

0.04 (0.03)

Rivalry

1.18 * (0.14)

2.30 * (0.50)

3.44 * (0.61)

–0.17 * (0.06)

Defect

0.13 (0.31)

–2.13 * (1.04)

–4.47 * (1.29)

–0.04 (0.09)

IGO

–0.0033 (0.005)

0.01 (0.01)

0.03 * (0.01)

–9.09 × 10– (0.01)

Energy

–0.13 * (0.04)

–0.13 * (0.04)

–0.11 * (0.04)

3.50 × 10– * (9.28 × 10–)

Production

0.20 * (0.03)

0.23 * (0.03)

0.26 * (0.04)

–3.47 × 10– * (1.26 × 10–)

Intercept

–1.31 * (0.26)

–12.27 * (5.18)

–24.42 * (6.47) –0.26 * (0.13)

ρ

N AIC BIC log L

2.55 * (0.55)

3778 2179.01 2453.44 –1045.51

3504 1862.06 2157.82 –883.03

3503 1861.2 2155.68 –871.27

3200 1638.15 2036.74 –213.36

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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between these two sets of data and help ensure that extreme values on the covariates are not driving the results. Running the logistic regression on this new set of matched data (Model 2 in table 7.1) shows that Dominant remains statistically associated with Failure. Its coefficient increases slightly in substantive strength, and it maintains the correct sign. The hegemonic imposition approach is not supported by the model, as Major possesses a large and positive effect on Failure. This suggests that great power status increases the chance of member defection and alliance collapse, in line with Leeds et al. (2002). Similarly, common threats—as captured through Rivalry—also increase Failure. In total, alternative explanations for alliance design and their impact on alliance failure do not receive support from this model, while the theory of core alliance emulation does. In addition, the matching process provides greater assurance that Dominant’s effects on alliance failure are not driven by imbalances in observed covariates between those dyads copying the dominant strategy and those that do not. Turning to unit interdependence, the collapse of any single alliance has implications for other pacts that possess the same members. For example, CENTO’s termination called into question British commitment to other, similarly situated partnerships. Our units of observation and especially the dependent variable are spatially connected through common state membership. I use the spatial logit model developed by Klier and McMillen (2005) to directly account for this issue, as seen in Model 3 in table 7.1. Even after controlling for unit interdependence, the model continues to support Hypothesis 1. Dominant has one of the strongest inhibiting influences on Failure, reducing the risk of alliance collapse by 14.44 percent. Interestingly, ρ (the coefficient on the spatial interdependence measure) is negative, suggesting that defection and pact failure do not easily spread through these security networks. As in Model 2, our measures for hegemonic imposition and common threats (Major and Rivalry, respectively) again spur alliance collapse. Polity2 and IGO are statistically significant, but have smaller substantive effects than Dominant. As a final robustness check, all of these model results could be sensitive to omitted variable bias. Some unobserved factor may drive both emulation of the core alliance as well as alliance failure. While this is less likely in light of the results in chapter 3, I again use the Altonji et al. (2005) process to evaluate the sensitivity of these findings. As the spatial logit model is the most comprehensive, I use Model 3 on table 7.1 to run the calculation. This produces a ratio of observable versus against unobservable effects of 109.6. That is, unobserved factors must be at least 109.6 times as strong as the covariates in Model 3 (including the W matrix) to explain away the coefficient on Dominant. As the regressions account for the major explanations for alliance failure, it is unlikely—though of course still possible—that omitted variables would have such a large influence. These results lend stronger support to the

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general finding that Dominant has a negative and significant statistical association with Failure, in line with the theory of core alliance emulation.

7.4 Hypothesis 2: Small States, the Dominant Form, and Alliance Reliability According to the strategic diffusion theory, weaker states drive emulation as they suffer relatively higher costs if their partners defect. While the results on Major and CINC in section 7.3’s models imply this, we can sharpen this analysis under Hypothesis 2. Effect Hypothesis 2: Dominant strategy alliances without major powers are less likely to terminate due to violations of member obligations than dominant strategy alliances with major powers and nondominant alliances, ceteris paribus.

The leading state and the major powers appear in 22.7 percent of alliance dyads. I remove these observations from the dataset and rerun the full battery of models. For brevity, table 7.2 presents only estimates for Dominant’s coefficient and standard errors. For comparison, the first row is the same as in table 7.1, where major powers were included in the data. We are specifically interested in the second row for this hypothesis test, where major powers have been removed from the data. All results are statistically significant and negative, in line with theoretical expectations. Across the models (columns), those where the data did not include major powers have larger coefficients and stronger substantive effects than those that did include them. In addition, even as we apply statistical corrections (matching, spatial econometrics), the difference in coefficients get larger, further supporting Hypothesis 2. I again run the omitted variable sensitivity process and find that unobserved

ta b l e 7 . 2 . Does emulation have stronger effects on alliance failure for secondary and peripheral states? Dominant regressed on Failure, including and omitting major powers Model 1: Observed Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

Model 4: K-Adic

With Major Powers

–1.39 * (0.12)

–1.57 * (0.13)

–1.78 * (0.15)

–0.62 * (0.27)

Without Major Powers

–1.68 * (0.17)

–1.78 * (0.18)

–2.29 * (0.20)

–1.70 * (0.45)

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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factors must be 275.97 times stronger than the model covariates to wipe out these coefficient estimates on Dominant.

7.5 Hypothesis 3: Social Weight and the Dominant Form The core alliance serves as a standard of credibility and appropriate conduct in international security affairs. Standards are socially constructed and, to some extent, socially enforced concepts, and we should expect that their strength is a function of their systemic prevalence. If this approach is correct, then the more frequent the dominant form in the international security system, the more emulation should reduce alliance failure. The credibility and normative mechanisms act through social proof, as tested by Hypothesis 3: Effect Hypothesis 3: The dominant strategy’s prevalence within the international security system is negatively associated with the incidence of alliance failure, ceteris paribus.

As before, the dependent variable is Failure. However, I replace Dominant with Trend as the principal variable of interest in these tests. Trend is a continuous variable ranging from 0 to 1 that captures the frequency of dominant forms within the international security system. As with Dominant, we would expect a negative and significant relationship between this variable and Failure. As seen in table 7.3, Trend consistently reduces the risk of alliance collapse, even after applying the matching algorithm, spatial corrections, and k-adic adjustment. This analysis’s findings can be most clearly seen in figure 7.2. I ran 1000 simulations of Model 2 from table 7.3 to determine the predicted effects of different dominant form frequencies on alliance failure. The reduction in risk is dramatic: Where no security dyads emulate the core alliance, 35.1 percent suffer from member defection and treaty collapse. As we approach complete diffusion, however, the failure rate drops to 2.2 percent, with confidence bounds above 0 throughout the simulations. Lastly, after running the omitted variables sensitivity analysis, unobserved factors must be 1000.64 times stronger than the covariates in Model 3 from table 7.3 to undermine the results.

7.6 Hypothesis 4: The Changing Impact of Alliance Institutions

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While prior sections dealt with direct tests of the theory’s hypotheses, this section demonstrates how the book’s theory potentially resolves other puzzles in alliance studies. Leeds and Anac (2005) identified a curious problem with rational institutionalism. While the latter suggests that greater formalization should boost credibility, Leeds and Anac find no such relationship for military alliances. Mattes (2012) provides a possible solution, arguing that only those countries with previous

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ta b l e 7 . 3 . Does the dominant strategy’s prevalence reduce failure? Trend regressed on Failure Model 1: Observed Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

Model 4: K-Adic

Trend

–2.9 * (0.24)

–3.21 * (0.27)

–3.92 * (0.26)

–3.37 * (3.03 × 10–)

Major

0.88 * (0.16)

1.72 * (0.51)

4.22 * (0.68)

3.22 * (5.76 × 10–)

CINC

–1.43 (1.17)

4.19 (3.79)

17.95 * (4.65)

–6.96 * (8.34 × 10–)

Polity2

–0.09 * (0.01)

–0.18 * (0.05)

–0.43 * (0.07)

–0.15 * (1.99 × 10–)

MID

–0.16 * (0.04)

–0.27 * (0.09)

–0.62 * (0.11)

–0.08 * (5.10 × 10–)

Rivalry

1.17 * (0.14)

2.07 * (0.52)

4.21 * (0.66)

0.22 * (1.13 × 10–)

Defect

0.24 (0.32)

–1.52 (1.08)

–5.89 * (1.41)

0.66 * (9.44 × 10–)

IGO

1.75 × 10– (2.32 × 10–)

0.01 (0.01)

0.05 * (0.01)

0.04 * (3.67 × 10–)

Energy

–0.16 * (0.03)

–0.17 * (0.04)

–0.12 * (0.04)

2.63 × 10– (1.57 × 10–)

Production

0.22 * (0.03)

0.26 * (0.04)

0.30 * (0.04)

4.30 × 10– (2.68 × 10–)

Intercept

–0.48 (0.28)

–8.85 (5.36)

–31.90 * (6.93)

–2.96 * (5.48 × 10–)

–0.35 * (0.15)

ρ

N AIC BIC log L

3778 2178.53 2452.96 –1045.26

3504 1867.61 2163.37 –885.8

3504 1867.6 2157.63 –871.9

3200 1455.65 1966.71 –705.825

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

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Probability of alliance failure

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0 00

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

Frequency of dominant form

f i g ure 7. 2 . Predicted Effect of Trend on Alliance Failure.

defections and in a symmetric alliance should seek institutionalization in their pacts. However, the analysis is conducted only on bilateral pacts from 1919–2001. In 2003 (the latest year for this book’s data), such bodies comprised 89.64 percent of all alliances, but only 11.87 percent of alliance dyads belonged to such partnerships. This makes intuitive sense. With a fixed number of states, as alliances get larger, there should be fewer pacts encompassing more members. But to what extent do results derived from bilateral alliances apply to the rest of the security system, particularly when integrative and institutionalized pacts tend also to have more members? The theory of core alliance emulation provides an alternative way to understand institutionalization’s effect on partnership failure. Only when the core pact possesses robust coordinating bodies does formalization bolster credibility. In this final section, we test Hypothesis 4: Effect Hypothesis 4: Alliance management institutions only reduce alliance failure when the core alliance possesses management institutions as well.

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Again, Failure is the dependent variable, while ATOP’s Organ measure serves as the primary explanatory variable. Organ captures whether an alliance possesses a formal coordinating body, ranging from no such feature, to one with regular meetings among national representatives, to a named organization, or finally a permanent bureaucracy. These bodies typically have terminal responsibility for the partnership, managing its affairs and coordinating policy among members. As figure 1.1

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from chapter 1 demonstrates, Organ shows striking disjunctures around major wars. Immediately after the Franco-Prussian War, no security pacts possessed any kind of formal coordinating body, and this situation largely held until after World War II, when 90 percent or more of alliances included such a feature. The sharpness of these disjunctures further justifies examining the years where the core alliance possessed this feature and those when it did not as separate analytical categories. The theory would predict that, during the Bismarckian and Interwar eras, Organ would not have any effect on—or perhaps may even encourage—member defection. Partners would be unsure whether such coordinating bodies are necessary for effective security cooperation, as well as concerned that they mask ulterior motives. Certainly, the three conservative empires examined in chapter 4 felt this way. British prime minister William Gladstone attempted to revive the Concert system of great power comity and consultation beginning in 1880. Russia and Austria-Hungary constantly searched for venal motives in this English plan. Russian ambassador to Germany Peter Saburov stated, “I think that in this way I have answered your first question,—whether the desire to maintain the Concert of Europe is sincere or if it is a masque. I have no hesitation in thinking that it is a masque for every one; that no one believes in its continuance; that for Gladstone himself, who labours for it in the front rank, this Concert has only the value of a clever introduction.” During years when the core alliance had formal coordinating procedures, however, the rational design expectations should hold. Leeds and Anac focus on wartime reliability, examining what they call “alliance-war performance opportunities.” However, Failure needs to be a broader concept, in part because alliance institutions— following Schroeder (1976), Ikenberry (2001), and Wallander (2000)—are not simply focused on warfighting but can structure medium- and long-term security relations even in the absence of a defined state threat. Indeed, Mattes (2012) uses this exact measure in her statistical analysis. While reliability during war and crises is important, the theory of strategic diffusion prompts us to consider how emulation of the core alliance solidifies networks of military relationships even outside of active hostilities. This also allows us to draw upon a larger number of observations, bolstering the robustness of the results. Table 7.4 presents the findings of the statistical tests. Models 1, 2, and 3 use only those observations where the core alliance did not possess formal coordinating features, while models 4, 5, and 6 include only those that did. In the first set of “noninstitutionalized” years, we would expect Organ to be positively and significantly associated with Failure. Institutionalization that does not match the core treaty’s strategy does not benefit from the social and symbolic sources of legitimacy. What is more, adopting such features would violate social expectations of effective alliance design, raising credibility concerns among partners. Institutionalization under these conditions should increase alliance defection and collapse.

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ta bl e 7 . 4 . Does the dominant strategy drive institutionalization’s effects on alliance failure? Organ regressed on Alliance Failure, by dominant strategy type (realpolitik vs. integrative) Realpolitik Eras

Organ Major CINC Polity2 MID Rivalry Defect IGO

Model 1: Observed Data

Model 2: Matched Data

Model 3: Spatial Logit

2.04 * (0.33) 2.49 * (0.30) –4.14 * (2.02) –0.03 * (0.01) –0.13 * (0.04) 0.64 * (0.24) –0.63 (0.47) –0.02 * (0.01)

1.39 * (0.49) 1.22 (0.67) –9.06 (7.43) –0.06 (0.06) –0.17 (0.09) 1.88 * (0.76) –0.03 (1.90) –0.01 (0.02)

1.36 * (0.56) 1.20 (0.93) –9.25 (9.37) –0.06 (0.06) –0.19 (0.13) 1.96 * (0.83) 0.05 (3.36) –0.01 (0.02)

Integrative Eras Model 4: K-Adic –0.80 (0.72) –1.39 (0.77) –10.39 (8.39) 0.12 (0.07) 0.02 (0.22) 0.38 (0.28) 0.25 (0.25) –0.08 (0.04)

Model 5: Observed Data

Model 6: Matched Data

–1.18 * (0.17) 0.14 (0.21) –0.84 (1.55) –0.08 * (0.01) 0.01 (0.18) 0.98 * (0.19) 1.71 * (0.63) 2.62 × 10– 3.67 × 10–

–1.34 * (0.19) –0.13 (0.26) 3.22 (2.28) –0.10 * (0.01) –0.01 (0.23) 1.28 * (0.25) 2.78 * (0.95) –0.01 (0.02)

Model 7: Spatial Logit –1.55 * (0.21) –0.31 (0.29) 2.51 (2.74) –0.09 * (0.02) 0.18 (0.25) 1.33 * (0.29) 2.59 * (1.06) 1.74 × 10– (2.81 × 10–)

Model 8: K-Adic –0.98 * (0.38) –0.73 (0.39) 3.88 (2.82) 0.07 (0.04) –0.09 (0.08) –0.13 (0.08) –0.26 (0.14) 0.02 (0.01)

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Energy Production Intercept

–0.22 * (0.08) 0.21 * (0.09) –2.16 * (0.55)

–0.38 * (0.16) 0.42 * (0.18) –0.29 (1.14)

ρ

N AIC BIC log L

1338 560.51 789.27 –236.26

133 150.72 289.46 –27.36

Robust standard errors in parentheses. * indicates significance at p < 0.05

–0.38 * (0.17) 0.41 (0.23) –0.08 (1.27) 0.12 (0.46) 133 150.72 286.18 –41.58

7.66 × 10– (6.15 × 10–) –2.08 × 10– (9.92 × 10–) 2.13 (1.18)

688 412.87 676.32 –174.48

–0.20 * (0.04) 0.22 * (0.04) –0.75 * (0.32)

2411 1555.23 1809.89 –733.61

–0.22 * (0.07) 0.26 * (0.07) –1.06 (0.82)

2166 1330.89 1603.56 –617.45

–0.18 * (0.07) 0.19 * (0.08) 0.95 (1.07) 0.61 * (0.18) 2166 1330.9 1598.32 –612.18

3.57 × 10– * (9.32 × 10–) –3.81 × 10– * (1.28 × 10–) 2.63 * (0.73)

2098 1258.63 1431.97 –123.59

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And indeed that is what we see. Organ consistently has a positive and significant effect across the first three models. Substantively, it has some of the largest effects in these models. Having any kind of institutionalization increases the risk of alliance failure by 26.46 percent during these years (Model 2). Interestingly, the spatial term ρ is positive but insignificant, suggesting that a single collapse does not lead to cascades of alliance failures. By contrast, Models 5–8 show that alliance institutionalization can bolster reliability, but only when the core alliance shares that feature. The coefficients on Organ are all negative and statistically significant. Substantively, coordinating bodies during these years reduce alliance failure by 15.59 percent. Again, it is among the strongest predictors of the dependent variable, and the most consistently significant. As a final robustness test, I run the Altonji et al. sensitivity process on Models 3 and 6, the spatial logit models where institutions do not match the core alliance and where they do, respectively. Neither is sensitive to omitted variables, with Model 3 having a ratio of 48.49 (that is, unobserved factors must be almost 49 times as strong to wipe out Organ’s effects), while Model 6 has a ratio of 2232.63.

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Conclusion

This chapter presented and tested four hypotheses examining whether adopting the dominant strategy reduces alliance failure, thereby improving cohesion and network stability. All four obtained robust support from the statistical analysis, despite multiple robustness checks. Test 1 presented the main conclusion—emulation reduces alliance failure. This effect is particularly strong among secondary and peripheral states (Test 2). Moreover, as a socially validated standard, the dominant form’s influence increases the more it prevails across the alliance system (Test 3). Lastly, institutionalization only reduces failure when the core pact is also institutionalized (Test 4). If not, then alliance organs actually spur defection and collapse. Competing explanations like hegemonic imposition and common threats typically did not receive support from the models, either having statistically insignificant effects or actually increasing failure, contrary to expectations. In addition, the models were robust to unobserved covariates, improving our confidence that the statistical results reflect a genuine relationship between the explanatory variables and alliance failure, rather than being an outgrowth of an omitted confounder. As seen in the qualitative cases, states believed that emulation conferred credibility and legitimacy to their alliances. Regional SEATO and CENTO countries rejected alternative strategies, while SADC members pursued NATO emulation because they felt it was integral to the creation of their security community. As this chapter explored, these beliefs have practical and systematic effects on alliance outcomes. Consequently, the hegemon generates widespread network effects whenever

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it establishes or adjusts the core pact. Efforts to curtail or diminish the central partnership’s provisions, for example, will generate relative reliability concerns not only among primary states but also among secondary countries participating in dominant alliances. Those same credibility and normative mechanisms, however, provide the leading state with an unexpected source of influence. Its actions in and policies toward the core alliance can generate global effects on partnership cohesion and network stability.

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8

The Dominant Alliance Strategy Policy Implications and Theoretical Extensions

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a l l i a n c e s a re e s s e n t i a l to international security. They are the political bedrock for interstate military relationships. They enable and facilitate other forms of security cooperation like forward-deployed bases and combined military exercises. These pacts deter conflict and embody interstate military cohesion. They are integral to international order. And they generally look alike. Within any era, 75 percent of states follow the same dominant alliance strategy. Diverse threats, individuated financial and political constraints, divergent national interests: These are ignored as countries converge on a single standard of credible and legitimate military cooperation. This book presented a theory of core alliance diffusion to account for the dominant strategy’s origins and spread. Through historical case studies, it explored two causal mechanisms— credibility and normative diffusion—to detail how a state’s network position determines why it emulates the central pact’s strategy. Using statistical analysis, the book demonstrated that the theory’s microfoundations generate the overall pattern of strategic mimicry and institutional isomorphism driving the puzzle. Chapter 7 showed that emulation systematically reduces partnership failure, connecting this study to wider issues of alliance cohesion, interstate conflict, and international order. This concluding chapter further details those connections. Section 8.1 will discuss this book’s contribution to our understanding of international order. Under the Trump administration, the United States has embarked on a transactional approach to foreign and military policy, treating defense agreements to some extent as “protection rackets.” The book’s transhistorical framing allows us to situate this shift as

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a debate between integrative versus realpolitik approaches to alliance strategy. The transactional framework is significantly more challenging to implement, less durable, and entails much wider network costs than proponents acknowledge. But this debate raises theoretical questions deserving further research. Section 8.2 delineates several of these, particularly how the dominant strategy itself may increase the risk of war (and major war in particular). It also questions whether rank can help explain other alliance behavior, as well as whether the diffusion mechanisms may account for emulation in other international institutions and regimes. Finally, section 8.3 concludes the book with a central policy recommendation. Across successive administrations, Washington has grappled with China’s rise and challenge to the Asian regional order. This continent is strategically and economically vital to the United States, yet it is under-institutionalized relative to its international importance. Although the US sits at the heart of a “hub-and-spokes” model of bilateral pacts, Asian countries are perpetually worried about the relative reliability problem: that Washington prioritizes Europe and the Middle East above its interests in East and Southeast Asia. In confronting an increasingly authoritarian and belligerent China, the US must make a resolute political commitment to the region. An “Asian NATO” is essential to assuring allies of the American commitment, over and above competing security interests.

8.1 International Order and the Dominant Alliance Strategy This book contributes to several scholarly literatures. The most prominent is international order. As the United States reevaluates its global position and role, understanding how rules, norms, and common policy expectations spread is essential to predicting how other states will react to either American retrenchment or renewed primacy. The book adds to discussions of soft power influence, global stability, the role and latitude afforded to secondary and peripheral states, as well as questions about order preservation. On the first, hegemonic order is as much a contest over legitimacy as it is over material power. Work on international status and prestige examines how positional attributes can drive conflict and competition. The signaling literature highlights how states can demonstrate credibility when issuing threats during crises and making military promises. Similarly, Goddard (2018) discusses the critical importance of legitimation strategies for rising powers to alleviate the hegemon’s fears and gain support from other actors. All of these implicitly assume that states have mutually understood definitions of cost, value, and status, at least within security affairs. This book traces from where those common alliance standards come. Material rankings alone, for example, are not enough to create positional hierarchies. Instead, social validation driven by clear demonstrations of quality creates standards of

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credibility and legitimacy, as well as a potentially broader range of security behavior. The previous studies often take these shared understandings as constants, producing more nuanced analysis of state strategies and policies than offered here. But this book explains how those understandings themselves vary transhistorically, generating different sets of available strategies and behaviors. It unpacks how social recognition and acceptance drive the strength of perceptions of reliability and prestige. As a result, this book’s theoretical framework can contribute to analysis of transactional foreign policy and retrenchment. Shifting to a realpolitik alliance strategy while embedded in overlapping integrative pacts generates short-term gains for the leading state but imposes long-term, network costs. The Bismarck case in particular reframes our understanding of realpolitik alliance behavior. States following this strategy aim for fluid rebalancing, maximizing foreign policy choice and latitude, and occupying a pivotal position toward which other countries must respond. However, relative reliability generates network constraints on this approach, as portfolio consistency locks even the leading state into a uniform alliance strategy. This inhibits the policy fluidity on which a realpolitik framework is founded. Even if a leading state can circumvent these constraints, they suffer greater questions about reliability, as partners lack standards against which they can judge credibility or avoid allying in the first place, further reducing strategic options. In the short term, a country like the United States may gain significant advantages by threatening the rank of its core or highly ranked alliances. By activating relative reliability concerns, it can induce lower-tier partners to provide more troops and funding or acquiesce to specific policies in order to maintain their portfolio rank. Indeed, previous attempts by Washington to burden-shift may have fallen flat because they only affected local credibility. In 2006, George W. Bush obtained a promise from all NATO members that they spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. A decade later, only four of the twenty-nine members had met this goal. Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, called such spending levels “not sustainable. Our alliance can endure only as long as we are willing to fight for it, and invest in it.” The US has gradually shifted alliance resources to those Eastern and Central European countries more directly facing Russian threats and which have typically spent a higher share of GDP on defense as a result (even if many also do not reach the 2 percent expectation). But these efforts never touched rank reliability. Absent a resurgent Russian threat or a credible risk of US realignment, Washington could not effectively pressure NATO members for increased burden-sharing. Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia, China, and other authoritarian regimes, however, does affect portfolio rank, suggesting that the US will not only demand more from Europe but also shift increasingly toward Moscow if it does not get what it wants. To be sure, increased Russian

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assertiveness had already spurred greater NATO defense spending before Trump’s inauguration. But rank concerns put even greater pressure on European states to agree to US demands. Manipulating rank in this way provides negotiating leverage and a certain degree of autonomy, but only for a short while. Lacking firm standards of military cooperation and an irresolute leading state, primary countries will increasingly pursue independent diplomatic and military policies with fewer strategic or normative constraints. Indeed, in May 2018, German chancellor Angela Merkel stated: “It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us, but Europe must take its destiny in its own hands. That’s the task of the future.” At the same event, French president Emmanuel Macron declared: “If we accept that other major powers, including allies . . . put themselves in a situation to decide our diplomacy, security for us, and sometimes even make us run the worst risks, then we are not more sovereign and we cannot be more credible to public opinion.” Existing theories of strategic alignment—such as Snyder (1997)—would also expect this behavior, although relative reliability more precisely specifies when it will be effective. But the theory of core alliance diffusion makes a broader prediction. Undermining the core alliance’s rank in this way shakes confidence in all lower-tier pacts. As an example of this, Trump promised to suspend military exercises with South Korea following his first summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung-Un, supposedly due to their expense and provocative nature. Within hours, foreign policy experts noted that Central and Eastern European and Asian governments were asking what this suspension meant for their own security ties and training exercises with the United States. Asian alliance politics should have only limited bearing on European security. Yet such actions potentially indicate a shift in US foreign policy rankings, and it is the possibility and plausibility of realignment toward other actors (and even occasionally adversaries) that gives these threats power. Challenging a relationship’s rank—rather than manipulating local, bilateral signals of support— bolsters the credibility of intra-allied demands. The “lowered” party suffers positional and political costs that cannot be easily recovered by material means. None of this should be taken as saying NATO cannot nor should not change. But the diffusion theory carries two implications. First, by elevating a nondominant security relationship above its core or other high-tier pacts, the United States activates the most extreme relative reliability concerns and undermines its alliance network’s social foundations. It is, in a word, selling out its partners for the possibility of friendship with its adversaries. These initiatives’ benefits may outweigh their direct costs. President Nixon’s success in detaching China from the Soviet bloc was arguably worth betraying Taiwan. But the US suffered indirect costs too. South Korea worried that Nixon’s overtures demonstrated a willingness to undermine its security

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interests and relationship as well. Nixon went so far as to send the South Korean president a letter stating, “The United States will not overlook the interest of its allies and friends nor seek any accommodations at their expense. My talks in Peking will not deal with issues primarily involving third countries.” Even NATO members worried that, in combination with US overtures to Russia under detente, this policy indicated that their alliance “was losing all importance next to Nixon’s summit diplomacy with America’s Cold War enemies.” Consequently, the gains from such manipulations of rank must be sufficiently large and secure to outweigh not only direct bilateral costs (e.g., blowback from Taiwan over abrogating the defense treaty) but also network ones (e.g., Korean and European concerns about American reliability). These costs are typically large for countries embedded in multiple, overlapping alliances. Stemming from this point, the theory also implies that consistency in alliance strategy provides benefits, particularly for the hegemon. The common standard anchors credibility calculations, facilitating alliance creation, reducing disagreement, and stabilizing alliance networks. In that, the core alliance’s strategy acts as something of a public good, providing specific benefits (i.e., clearer indicators of credibility in a particular pact) and diffuse ones (i.e., increased alliance cohesion and stability globally). Consequently, continued US shifts toward a more transactional foreign policy decrease alliance cohesion in multiple ways. Failure is much more common under that strategy. A key takeaway from chapter 7 is that, in the counterfactual, full adoption of the dominant strategy reduces alliance failure by nearly one-third. But that reduction occurs on top of the base rate of failure. As seen in figure 1.4 in chapter 1, this rate is higher during realpolitik eras. Moreover, Washington would also sacrifice the network effects constraining and stabilizing the alliance system. This loss would be particularly problematic as the cohesive effects of alliance institutions—as seen in chapter 7—are conditioned on alignment with the core alliance’s strategy. If such institutions lose their social validation, they can actually spur partnership failure under a realpolitik framework. Effectively managing a shift to a transactional foreign policy requires careful and nuanced diplomacy to prevent partners from searching for the private gains of alternative alignment, as well as wider instability caused by disrupting a socially validated alliance strategy. Understanding how the dominant form spreads and contributes to order is essential to that task. This book casts the diffusion mechanisms as pathways of stability: other states adopt a uniform partnership strategy fostering common security and policy expectations. But they can just as easily serve to spread instability, as the erosion of the core pact simultaneously causes rank concerns throughout the alliance system. Moreover, the erosion is likely to be quick and steep, as social norms of prestige—not just material power—drove the dominant strategy’s spread.

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The theory suggests, however, that the hegemon may possess some ability to renew its central pact and the social standards drawn from it. The case studies explored the initial period of alliance design and implementation, roughly the first five to ten years of an emulating pact’s existence. Secondary members pressed for symmetry with the core partnership, even as that pact itself engaged in new forms of security cooperation and established novel coordinating mechanisms. As NATO, for example, began holding combined military exercises and fielding advanced military equipment, SEATO and CENTO partners—as well as secondary allies like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—clamored for similar activities. And as Gilady (2018) and Hunzeker and Lanoszka (2018) note, many states develop or ask for weapons not because they significantly enhance the chance of victory, but because they signal heightened social status and alliance prioritization. Similarly, returning to the first alliance discussed in chapter 1, the Arab League was founded almost four years before NATO. However, it subsequently modeled its defense treaty—the Treaty of Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation (1950)—specifically on the Atlantic Alliance’s defense guarantee, committees, and provisions. By manipulating the core pact’s standards, the hegemon can influence alliance policies and strategic aspirations throughout the interstate security system. Increasing the pace and ministerial level of meetings, launching heads of state visits, broadening security discussions to multiple government branches, hosting more joint military exercises, fielding advanced types and numbers of equipment, forward deploying troops: as the leading state advances these initiatives in the core pact, other partnerships will adopt similar programs to bolster the standing of their security guarantees. The hegemon can manipulate the diffusion mechanisms to indirectly generate specific military and political practices and norms among emulating alliances. What is unclear, however, is the extent to and conditions under which those efforts are likely to be successful. That points to new areas of research.

8.2

Scholarly Extensions: Alliances and Emulation

Beyond its implications for international order, this book prompts additional questions regarding the dominant strategy, alliances more broadly, and emulation in international politics. For the first, the previous section hinted that erosion of the dominant strategy is difficult to reverse. So how do these strategies erode? One possible explanation emerges from the theory. Misalignment degrades alliance efficiency, effectiveness, and cohesion. Allies are compensated with other benefits, but these may ironically prevent secondary and peripheral pacts from addressing organizational friction. As strategic conditions change, misalignment may increase, while the offsetting credibility and status gains may fail to keep pace. Yet emulation incentives may lock states into rigid security patterns that stop them from adapting

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to rapidly escalating international tensions. Many historians note that inflexible military blocs contributed to World War I. Chapter 4’s historical analysis suggests that relative reliability concerns ossified the nominally realpolitik system, preventing the fluid realignment that might have averted major war. In effect, the buildup of misalignment costs eventually overwhelms the system’s benefits, with the social foundations quickly collapsing. Alternatively, the erosion process could have little to do with interstate or alliance dynamics and much to do with the leading country’s domestic conditions. The chief role of major war in the theory is to confer prestige onto the leading state and its strategic choices. But other events could grant or remove prestige. Victory in the Cold War, for example, validated the American model and revitalized NATO’s status, as seen in the SADC case. This suggests that actual shooting wars between great powers are sufficient but perhaps not necessary conditions for the core alliance diffusion process, although decisive victory in a long-term, totalizing rivalry/ contest between great powers is. In a similar manner, strategic blunders, failure in minor wars, and organizational mismanagement may erode the leading state’s social standing. Insofar as we think reputations can cross policy domains, severe economic downturns or widespread societal unrest may have similar effects, especially if other countries weather those same events better. As the leading state’s prestige waxes and wanes, what effect does this have on the core pact’s place as the standard of credible and legitimate security cooperation? The post–World War II fluctuation in American power provides ample test cases and quantitative data for integrative alliances. This point highlights an additional research question. Different dominant alliance strategies may lead to major war via different processes. As suggested, the dominant form may ossify realpolitik strategies, preventing the fluid rebalancing they require to avoid conflict. By contrast, integrative dominant forms may fail via another method. The Concert system was increasingly unable to extend its system of consultation and bargaining to manage emerging threats and prevent core members from pursuing what Cesa (2010) calls heterogeneous goals undermining common security. The current moment of possible hegemonic retrenchment and restraint may provide additional cases to understand this process. More broadly, as illustrated in figure 8.1, eras with more limited, informal dominant strategies experienced significantly higher rates of interstate conflict. To what extent do the dominant form’s effects on fluidity and cohesion of regional security systems affect this propensity? The book also contributes to the wider alliance literature. The credibility diffusion mechanism contends that alliance reliability hinges on the concept of rank: How a state interprets a partner’s behavior depends on where their alliance stands in the partner’s security portfolio. Might rank also condition other alliance dynamics? The previous section suggests that burden-shifting may be more effective when

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0.008

Rate of interstate conflict

0.006

0.004

0.002

0.000 Concert

Bismarckian

Interwar

Cold War

post−Cold War

Era

f i g ure 8 . 1 . Base Rate of Interstate War by Era. Source: Militarized Interstate Disputes Data.

allies activate relative reliability concerns. These states demonstrate a willingness to undermine the broader security relationship to achieve specific gains, as well as hinting at preferable outside options should they not receive concessions. Similarly, rank may impinge alliance creation. As seen in the historical cases, relative reliability can constrain partnership strategy options. But they may also prevent pacts from forming outright, as the military obligations, policy coordination, and organizational features needed to secure cooperation exceed that of a country’s wider alliance portfolio. Moreover, rank undoubtedly has an effect on alliance reliability. That literature is conditioned on the “alliance war performance opportunity.” Essentially, reliability can be evaluated only when the casus foederis has an opportunity to be invoked. Rank may determine which alliances states abrogate, particularly if a single conflict activates multiple pacts. However, this book examines “alliance failure,” a much broader concept encompassing partnership collapse both inside and outside of performance

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opportunities. This concept better aligns with the book’s focus on intra-allied assessments of alliance strategy, credibility, and legitimacy. But the choice was also partially empirical. Berkemeier and Fuhrmann (2018) calculate that the alliance reliability rate fell from 75 percent prior to World War II to 33 percent afterward. But nearly 90 percent of alliances did not experience a performance opportunity at all, calling the generalizability of this reliability rate into question. Without the clarifying force of interstate conflict, countries are more likely to rely upon social standards of credibility to evaluate their partners’ actions. Rank and relative reliability are therefore critical concepts in determining which pacts allies abandon, both prior to and outside of war. Finally, we can also explore whether the causal mechanisms apply to other postwar hegemonic institutions or strategies. To what extent, for example, is the proliferation of preferential trade agreements or monetary unions a matter of social emulation and normative adherence rather than a direct cost-benefit calculation? McNamara (1999) discusses how a particular approach to monetary policy came into vogue among EU leaders. Can we identify the genesis of that policy in (inadvertent) diffusion of hegemonic decisions? Similarly, Allee and Elsig (2015) discuss how significant portions of preferential trade agreements are “copied and pasted,” even including grammatical or spelling errors. Furthermore, constitutions and international legal documents rely especially heavily on boilerplate language. And a variety of authors have examined diffusion and emulation of regional economic and political institutions, especially in Europe. These studies typically provide typologies of possible diffusion mechanisms or discuss how different processes interact to produce emulation. But we can push further, identifying the “deep” historical roots of this emulation and uncovering transhistorical patterns of variation. Similarly, we might also ask how strategic and institutional isomorphism in one policy area affects the chances of isomorphism in others. To what extent, for example, does NATO’s multilateral character influence the features of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and other institutions? Do we see dynamics of credibility or normative reinforcement between bodies?

8.3 Policy Contributions: Rank, Order, and NATO in Asia

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The dominant alliance strategy emerges from a search for credibility and legitimacy. And nowhere is such a need greater than in Asia. With its economic vibrancy, anchored by some of the richest and most advanced countries in the world, the region is a major area of US interest and concern. And of course, China presents a complex, geostrategic disruption, with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) identifying it as the top strategic competitor of the United States. The NDS further cemented a longer-term American foreign policy turn toward Asia. The Obama administration’s

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“pivot” or “rebalance” continued the George W. Bush’s administration’s earlier strategic “shift.” Integral to meeting the Chinese challenge is “expand[ing] Indo-Pacific alliances and partnerships,” as articulated by the NDS. Yet the US has effected this policy largely by increasing its own capabilities rather than by clarifying and assuring allies of American intentions. As noted by Beckley (2017, 80), this reflects a bilateral bias in US strategic thinking on confrontation with China. “For example, the most detailed studies of the military balance in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea assume, implausibly, that Taiwan and Southeast Asian nations do nothing in their own defense and that the U.S. military has to save the day singlehandedly.” Similarly, Cha (2018) notes how the US adopted a hub-and-spokes alliance structure to maximize Washington’s leverage over its smaller allies. Broadly speaking, the US preferred not to provide its Asian partners with the capabilities to launch independent foreign or military policies, occupying a pivotal position to restrain adventurism. There are credibility costs to this alliance strategy. The largest forward bases and troop deployments of the United States are in Asia, and there is extensive joint R&D and military equipment production with regional allies. But as this book’s theory explores, such buildups are insufficient on their own. The amount of money, men, and materiel that the US devotes to a region does not necessarily solve the problem of rank. Indeed, SEATO received more financial transfers than did NATO for nearly a decade, but that did not quell persistent questions about American reliability, instead simply generating anxiety in Europe. The challenge in Asia is fundamentally one of political and foreign policy prioritization. Recent, repeated policy shocks have called the ranking of US alliances in Asia into question, despite the Department of Defense placing strategic competition with China (and Russia) as its principal focus. For example, American withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) quickly overshadowed additional military deployments, with Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong stating, “It is your credibility as an ally [that is at stake]. How can anyone believe in you anymore?” In his discussions with Japanese officials, Natan Sachs reported that his interlocutors were concerned about American reliability broadly, as well as whether Washington would abandon its commitments for better “deals” with other countries. “In essence, they wanted reassurance that the United States was still committed to their side of the regional rivalry; that the U.S. president would choose sides, and choose their side.” Similarly, Zack Cooper argued that Asian leaders worry that the US is or may become distracted by other foreign policy challenges (like North Korea) and internal political feuds, undermining the singular focus and prioritization necessary to confront a rising China in favor of other local, short-term challenges. This record of uncertain engagement augments Asia’s “organization gap,” as weak international institutions attempt to

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structure interstate relations without robust coordinating mechanisms and delegated authority. This gap is particularly acute with regard to military and foreign policies. There is no equivalent to NATO in the region, and the question “Why is there no NATO in Asia?” pops up periodically in both scholarly and policy debates. Important regional groupings like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) largely remain outside the core security discussions, even as tensions increase in the South China Sea over unresolved and increasingly militarized territorial claims. Institutional preferences for consensus decision-making and the lack of deep and persistent great power engagement hobble these initiatives from having a sustained impact on regional security. If the United States hopes to assure Asian partners of the region’s priority, Washington must do more than “bring together bilateral and multilateral security relationships,” as the NDS proposes. At the most basic level, the US must make a lasting and credible political commitment, and there is no substitute for an emulative alliance in credibly conveying security prioritization. Washington must convert its hub-and-spokes network of bilateral partnerships into a pact modeled on NATO: integrative; multilateral; convening cross-domain discussions linking politics, military affairs, and regional economics; with a broad conception of how traditional and unconventional threats can disrupt the region. Such a body can absorb the missions of existing multilateral dialogue organizations (like the ASEAN Plus 3 and Shangri-La Dialogue), coupling them with the authority and resources of powerful states like the US and Japan. Without an emulative alliance, this book suggests that Washington will face continuing problems in assuring regional allies that Asia is the top American priority, especially against centrifugal pressures emanating from Europe and the Middle East. This “NATO in Asia” proposal will encounter significant resistance from regional states, not least China. For Japan and South Korea (the two most important Asian security partners), the US will have to overcome entrenched historical grievances and Chinese efforts to stymie closer trilateral cooperation. Washington must also reassure Tokyo and Seoul that this project augments—not detracts from—their separate bilateral pacts. Taiwan and the Philippines should also be folded in, although the former in particular presents challenges for current US policy. Including Taiwan requires America to abandon its position of strategic ambiguity toward the country’s sovereignty. While Washington can maintain its policy supporting a peaceful resolution to this status question, Taiwan’s participation in this organization is militarily and strategically necessary. It provides a critical geographic link between Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, and can serve as an “unsinkable” base from which to project power. It possesses advanced military capabilities and a vibrant economy,

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and its status as a “Chinese” democracy demonstrates to Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other regional states that such a political culture is compatible with open and transparent elections and governance. In addition to its strategic contribution, Taiwanese inclusion in this alliance concept will endow these qualities with the imprimatur of regional and great power support. Chinese belligerence in the East and South China Seas has already prompted closer security cooperation between these countries and Washington. This alliance concept proposes an even tighter core of high military, diplomatic, and foreign policy cooperation serving as a nucleus of political stability as the region undergoes dramatic changes in economic growth and military tensions. In addition, the theory suggests this proposal will encounter resistance from within the US military network, particularly from Europe. An Asian NATO threatens to supplant transAtlantic security as the centerpiece of Washington’s alliance portfolio. But that is in part the point. A serious American commitment to Asia requires a clear demonstration of its prioritization. Indeed, Washington can use manipulation of rank to gain greater European support for American policy in Asia generally and this alliance concept in particular. Earlier, section 8.1 discussed such manipulation in the context of the Trump administration’s overtures to authoritarian regimes, implicitly criticizing it because the likelihood of success and gains from this strategy were not clearly delineated, nor were they likely to outweigh the costs to the trans-Atlantic alliance specifically and American credibility and legitimacy more generally. With this “NATO in Asia” concept, however, the US would provide a clear foreign policy goal gathering together Asian countries already actively requesting American assistance and leadership. This would further enhance the integrative standard for alliance strategy, and there is precedent for the US to elevate multiple alliances with identical and identically extensive guarantees. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance—more commonly known as the Rio Pact—pledges Washington to the same defense commitment as NATO’s Article 5, without inciting European relative reliability concerns. The US can follow a similar path in dampening worries about rank and orienting its broader array of military partnerships toward renewed American leadership in multiple, critical geostrategic regions. Of course, Washington itself may reject this Asian NATO proposal and the broader, primacy-oriented strategy it entails. Trump—specifically, but by no means alone—has questioned the utility of many international institutions to US national interests, including NATO, NAFTA, the WTO, and the UN. Instead, he favored a more transactional and less institutionalized relationship with other states, limiting US engagement to specific issues and extracting maximal concessions through bilateral, rather than multilateral, negotiation. The Biden administration promises

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renewed American participation in these institutions, but the bipartisan consensus favoring active US foreign policy is fraying. Many politicians and scholars have called for restraint, loosening and reducing Washington’s international commitments to enhance diplomatic flexibility and leverage. As already discussed, such an approach is significantly more challenging, less durable, and entails much wider network costs than proponents acknowledge. Indeed, other states will seize upon Washington’s example to enact their own independent policies, spreading the instability more quickly and farther than anticipated. Moreover, once eroded, it is difficult to rebuild the legitimacy of the core alliance’s standard without substantial, sustained, and costly effort. For all its flaws and constraints, NATO is the standard of credible security cooperation, serving as an important source of American influence and international stability. Extending a similarly structured guarantee to Asian allies will concretely establish the region’s priority within Washington’s alliance portfolio and its centrality to future US security and foreign policy.

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Appendix Texts of Relevant Security Treaties

A.1

The Dual Alliance (1879)

(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/dualalli.asp) ARTICLE 1 Should, contrary to their hope, and against the loyal desire of the two High Contracting Parties, one of the two Empires be attacked by Russia the High Contracting Parties are bound to come to the assistance one of the other with the whole war strength of their Empires, and accordingly only to conclude peace together and upon mutual agreement. ARTICLE 2 Should one of the High Contracting Parties be attacked by another Power, the other High Contracting Party binds itself hereby, not only not to support the aggressor against its high Ally, but to observe at least a benevolent neutral attitude towards its fellow Contracting Party. Should, however, the attacking party in such a case be supported by Russia, either by an active cooperation or by military measures which constitute a menace to the Party attacked, then the obligation stipulated in Article 1 of this Treaty, for reciprocal assistance with the whole fighting force, becomes equally operative, and the conduct of the war by the two High Contracting Parties shall in this case also be in common until the conclusion of a common peace. ARTICLE 3 The duration of this Treaty shall be provisionally fixed at five years from the day of ratification. One year before the expiration of this period the two High Contracting

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Parties shall consult together concerning the question whether the conditions serving as the basis of the Treaty still prevail, and reach an agreement in regard to the further continuance or possible modification of certain details. If in the course of the first month of the last year of the Treaty no invitation has been received from either side to open these negotiations, the Treaty shall be considered as renewed for a further period of three years. ARTICLE 4 This Treaty shall, in conformity with its peaceful character, and to avoid any misinterpretation, be kept secret by the two High Contracting Parties, and only communicated to a third Power upon a joint understanding between the two Parties, and according to the terms of a special Agreement. The two High Contracting Parties venture to hope, after the sentiments expressed by the Emperor Alexander at the meeting at Alexandrovo, that the armaments of Russia will not in reality prove to be menacing to them, and have on that account no reason for making a communication at present; should, however, this hope, contrary to their expectations, prove to be erroneous, the two High Contracting Parties would consider it their loyal obligation to let the Emperor Alexander know, at least confidentially, that they must consider an attack on either of them as directed against both. ARTICLE 5 This Treaty shall derive its validity from the approbation of the two Exalted Sovereigns and shall be ratified within fourteen days after this approbation has been granted by Their Most Exalted Majesties. In witness whereof the Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty with their own hands and affixed their arms. Done at Vienna, October 7, 1879 (L.S.) ANDRÁSSY (L.S.) H. VII v. REUSS

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The Three Emperors Alliance (1881)

(https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/empleagu.asp) The Courts of Austria-Hungary, of Germany, and of Russia, animated by an equal desire to consolidate the general peace by an understanding intended to assure the defensive position of their respective States, have come into agreement on certain questions. With this purpose the three Courts have agreed on the following Articles: ARTICLE 1 In case one of the High Contracting Parties should find itself at war with a fourth Great Power, the two others shall maintain towards it a benevolent neutrality and shall devote their efforts to the localization of the conflict.

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This stipulation shall apply likewise to a war between one of the three Powers and Turkey, but only in the case where a previous agreement shall have been reached between the three Courts as to the results of this war. In the special case where one of them shall obtain a more positive support from one of its two Allies, the obligatory value of the present Article shall remain in all its force for the third. ARTICLE 2 Russia, in agreement with Germany, declares her firm resolution to respect the interests arising from the new position assured to Austria-Hungary by the Treaty of Berlin. The three Courts, desirous of avoiding all discord between them, engage to take account of their respective interests in the Balkan Peninsula. They further promise one another that any new modifications in the territorial status quo of Turkey in Europe can be accomplished only in virtue of a common agreement between them. In order to facilitate the agreement contemplated by the present Article, an agreement of which it is impossible to foresee all the conditions, the three Courts from the present moment record in the Protocol annexed to this Treaty the points on which an understanding has already been established in principle. ARTICLE 3 The three Courts recognize the European and mutually obligatory character of the principle of the closing of the Straits of the Bosporus and of the Dardanelles, founded on international law, confirmed by treaties, and summed up in the declaration of the second Plenipotentiary of Russia at the session of July 12 of the Congress of Berlin. They will take care in common that Turkey shall make no exception to this rule in favor of the interests of any Government whatsoever, by lending to warlike operations of a belligerent Power the portion of its Empire constituted by the Straits. In case of infringement, or to prevent it if such infringement should be in prospect, the three Courts will inform Turkey that they would regard her, in that event, as putting herself in a state of war towards the injured Party, and as having deprived herself thenceforth of the benefits of the security assured to her territorial status quo by the Treaty of Berlin. ARTICLE 4 The present Treaty shall be in force during a period of three years, dating from the day of the exchange of ratifications. ARTICLE 5 The High Contracting Parties mutually promise secrecy as to the contents and the existence of the present Treaty, as well as of the Protocol annexed thereto.

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ARTICLE 6 The secret Conventions concluded between Austria-Hungary and Russia and between Germany and Russia in 1873 are replaced by the present Treaty. SZECHENYI v. BISMARCK SABOUROFF Separate Protocol on the same date to the Convention of Berlin. June 18, 1881: 1. Bosnia and Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary reserves the right to annex these provinces at whatever moment she shall deem opportune. 2. Sanjak of Novibazar. The Declaration exchanged between the Austro-Hungarian Plenipotentiaries and the Russian Plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Berlin under the date of July 13/1, 1878, remains in force. 3. Eastern Rumelia. The three Powers agree in regarding the eventuality of an occupation either of Eastern Rumelia or of the Balkans as full of perils for the general peace. In case this should occur, they will employ their efforts to dissuade the Porte from such an enterprise, it being well understood that Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia on their part are to abstain from provoking the Porte by attacks emanating from their territories against the other provinces of the Ottoman Empire. 4. Bulgaria. The three Powers will not oppose the eventual reunion of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia within the territorial limits assigned to them by the Treaty of Berlin, if this question should come up by the force of circumstances. They agree to dissuade the Bulgarians from all aggression against the neighboring provinces, particularly Macedonia; and to inform them that in such a case they will be acting at their own risk and peril. 5. In order to avoid collisions of interests in the local questions which may arise, the three Courts will furnish their representatives and agents in the Orient with a general instruction, directing them to endeavor to smooth out their divergences by friendly explanations between themselves in each special case; and, in the cases where they do not succeed in doing so, to refer the matters to their Governments. 6. The present Protocol forms an integral part of the secret Treaty signed on this day at Berlin and shall have the same force and validity.

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Text of the Reinsurance Treaty (1887)

(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reinsurance_Treaty) The Imperial Courts of Germany and of Russia, animated by an equal desire to strengthen the general peace by an understanding destined to assure the defensive position of their respective States, have resolved to confirm the agreement established between them by a special arrangement, in view of the expiration on June 15/27, 1887, of the validity of the secret Treaty and Protocol, signed in 1881 and renewed in 1884 by the three courts of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.

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To this end the two Courts have named as Plenipotentiaries: His Majesty the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, the Sieur Herbert Count Bismarck-Schoenhausen, His Secretary of State in the Department of Foreign Affairs; His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russians, the Sieur Paul Count Schouvaloff, His Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to His Majesty the Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, who, being furnished with full powers, which have been found in good and due form, have agreed upon the following articles: ARTICLE 1 In case one of the High Contracting Parties should find itself at war with a third Great Power, the other would maintain a benevolent neutrality towards it, and would devote its efforts to the localization of the conflict. This provision would not apply to a war against Austria or France in case this war should result from an attack directed against one of these two latter Powers by one of the High Contracting Parties. ARTICLE 2 Germany recognizes the rights historically acquired by Russia in the Balkan Peninsula, and particularly the legitimacy of her preponderant and decisive influence in Bulgaria and in Eastern Rumelia. The two Courts engage to admit no modification of the territorial status quo of the said peninsula without a previous agreement between them, and to oppose, as occasion arises, every attempt to disturb this status quo or to modify it without their consent. ARTICLE 3 The two Courts recognize the European and mutually obligatory character of the principle of the closing of the Straits of the Bosporus and of the Dardanelles, founded on international law, confirmed by treaties and summed up in the declaration of the second Plenipotentiary of Russia at the session of July 12 of the Congress of Berlin (Protocol 19). They will take care in common that Turkey shall make no exception to this rule in favour of the interests of any Government whatsoever, by lending to warlike operations of a belligerent power the portion of its Empire constituted by the Straits. In case of infringement, or to prevent it if such infringement should be in prospect, the two Courts will inform Turkey that they would regard her, in that event, as putting herself in a state of war towards the injured Party, and as depriving herself thence forth of the benefits of the security assured to her territorial status quo by the Treaty of Berlin. ARTICLE 4 The present Treaty shall remain in force for the space of three years, dating from the day of the exchange of ratifications.

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ARTICLE 5 The High Contracting Parties mutually promise secrecy as to the contents and the existence of the present Treaty and of the Protocol annexed thereto. ARTICLE 6 The present Treaty shall be ratified and ratifications shall be exchanged at Berlin within a period of a fortnight, or sooner it may be. In witness whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed the present Treaty and have affixed thereto the seal of their arms. Done at Berlin, the eighteenth day of the month of June, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven. (L.S.) Count Bismarck Additional Protocol: Berlin, June 18, 1887 In order to complete the stipulations of Articles 2 and 3 of the secret Treaty concluded on this same date, the two Courts have come to an agreement upon the following points: 1. Germany, as in the past, will lend her assistance to Russia in order to re-establish a regular and legal government in Bulgaria. She promises in no case to give her consent to the restoration of the Prince of Battenberg. 2. In case His Majesty the Emperor of Russia should find himself under the necessity of assuming the task of defending the entrance of the Black Sea in order to safeguard the interests of Russia, Germany engages to accord her benevolent neutrality and her moral and diplomatic support to the measures which His Majesty may deem it necessary to take to guard the key of His Empire. 3. The present Protocol forms an integral part of the secret Treaty signed on this day at Berlin, and shall have the same force and validity.

In witness whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have signed it and have affixed thereto the seal of their arms. Done at Berlin, the eighteenth day of the month of June, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven. Count Bismarck : Count Paul Schouvaloff

A.4 Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (September 8, 1954)

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The Parties to this Treaty, Recognizing the sovereign equality of all the Parties, Reiterating their faith in the purposes and principles set forth in the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments,

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Reaffirming that, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, they uphold the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and declaring that they will earnestly strive by every peaceful means to promote self-government and to secure the independence of all countries whose peoples desire it and are able to undertake its responsibilities, Desiring to strengthen the fabric of peace and freedom and to uphold the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law, and to promote the economic well-being and development of all peoples in the treaty area, Intending to declare publicly and formally their sense of unity, so that any potential aggressor will appreciate that the Parties stand together in the area, and Desiring further to coordinate their efforts for collective defense for the preservation of peace and security, Therefore agree as follows: ARTICLE 1 The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. ARTICLE 2 In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack and to prevent and counter subversive activities directed from without against their territorial integrity and political stability. ARTICLE 3 The Parties undertake to strengthen their free institutions and to cooperate with one another in the further development of economic measures, including technical assistance, designed both to promote economic progress and social well-being and to further the individual and collective efforts of governments toward these ends. ARTICLE 4 Each Party recognizes that aggression by means of armed attack in the treaty area against any of the Parties or against any State or territory which the Parties by unanimous agreement may hereafter designate, would endanger its own peace and safety, and agrees that it will in that event act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes. Measures taken under this paragraph shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations. If, in the opinion of any of the Parties, the inviolability or the integrity of the territory or the sovereignty or political independence of any Party in the treaty area or

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of any other State or territory to which the provisions of paragraph 1 of this Article from time to time apply is threatened in any way other than by armed attack or is affected or threatened by any fact or situation which might endanger the peace of the area, the Parties shall consult immediately in order to agree on the measures which should be taken for the common defense. It is understood that no action on the territory of any State designated by unanimous agreement under paragraph 1 of this Article or on any territory so designated shall be taken except at the invitation or with the consent of the government concerned. ARTICLE 5 The Parties hereby establish a Council, on which each of them shall be represented, to consider matters concerning the implementation of this Treaty. The Council shall provide for consultation with regard to military and any other planning as the situation obtaining in the treaty area may from time to time require. The Council shall be so organized as to be able to meet at any time. ARTICLE 6 This Treaty does not affect and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations of any of the Parties under the Charter of the United Nations or the responsibility of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security. Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third party is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty. ARTICLE 7 Any other State in a position to further the objectives of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the area may, by unanimous agreement of the Parties, be invited to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. The Government of the Republic of the Philippines shall inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession. ARTICLE 8 As used in this Treaty, the “treaty area” is the general area of Southeast Asia, including also the entire territories of the Asian Parties, and the general area of the Southwest Pacific not including the Pacific area north of 21 degrees 30 minutes north latitude. The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, amend this Article to include within the treaty area the territory of any State acceding to this Treaty in accordance with Article 7 or otherwise to change the treaty area. ARTICLE 9 This Treaty shall be deposited in the archives of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines. Duly certified copies thereof shall be transmitted by that government to the other signatories.

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The Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited as soon as possible with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, which shall notify all of the other signatories of such deposit. The Treaty shall enter into force between the States which have ratified it as soon as the instruments of ratification of a majority of the signatories shall have been deposited, and shall come into effect with respect to each other State on the date of the deposit of its instrument of ratification. ARTICLE 10 This Treaty shall remain in force indefinitely, but any Party may cease to be a Party one year after its notice of denunciation has been given to the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, which shall inform the Governments of the other Parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation. ARTICLE 11 The English text of this Treaty is binding on the Parties, but when the Parties have agreed to the French text thereof and have so notified the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, the French text shall be equally authentic and binding on the Parties. UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA The United States of America in executing the present Treaty does so with the understanding that its recognition of the effect of aggression and armed attack and its agreement with reference thereto in Article 4, paragraph 1, apply only to communist aggression but affirms that in the event of other aggression or armed attack it will consult under the provisions of Article 4, paragraph 2. In witness whereof, the undersigned Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty. Done at Manila, this eighth day of September, 1954.

A.5 Pact of Mutual Cooperation Between the Kingdom of Iraq, the Republic of Turkey, the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Pakistan, and the Kingdom of Iran (February 24, 1955) Whereas the friendly and brotherly relations existing between Iraq and Turkey are in constant progress, and in order to complement the contents of the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourhood concluded between His Majesty the King of Iraq and His Excellency the President of the Turkish Republic signed in Ankara on March 29, 1946, which recognised the fact that peace and security between the two countries is an integral part of the peace and security of all the nations of the world and in particular the nations of the Middle East, and that it is the basis for their foreign policies; Whereas article 11 of the Treaty of Joint Defence and Economic Co-operation between the Arab League States provides that no provision of that treaty shall in any

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way affect, or is designed to affect, any of the rights and obligations accruing to the Contracting Parties from the United Nations Charter; And having realised the great responsibilities borne by them in their capacity as members of the United Nations concerned with the maintenance of peace and security in the Middle East region which necessitate taking the required measures in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter; They have been fully convinced of the necessity of concluding a pact fulfilling these aims, and for that purpose have appointed as their plenipotentiaries . . . who having communicated their full powers, found to be in good and due form, have agreed as follows: ARTICLE 1 Consistent with article 51 of the United Nations Charter the High Contracting Parties will co-operate for their security and defence. Such measures as they agree to take to give effect to this co-operation may form the subject of special agreements with each other. ARTICLE 2 In order to ensure the realization and effect application of the co-operation provided for in article 1 above, the competent authorities of the High Contracting Parties will determine the measures to be taken as soon as the present pact enters into force. These measures will become operative as soon as they have been approved by the Governments of the High Contracting Parties. ARTICLE 3 The High Contracting Parties undertake to refrain from any interference whatsoever in each other’s internal affairs. They will settle any dispute between themselves in a peaceful way in accordance with the United Nations Charter. ARTICLE 4 The High Contracting Parties declare that the dispositions of the present pact are not in contradiction with any of the international obligations contracted by either of them with any third State or States. They do not derogate from and cannot be interpreted as derogating from, the said international obligations. The High Contracting Parties undertake not to enter into any international obligation incompatible with the present pact. ARTICLE 5 This pact shall be open for accession to any member of the Arab League or any other State actively concerned with the security and peace in this region and which is fully recognized by both of the High Contracting Parties. Accession shall come into force from the date of which the instrument of accession of the State concerned is deposited with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Iraq. Any acceding State party to the present pact may conclude special agreements, in accordance with article 1, with one or more States parties to the present pact. The

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competent authority of any acceding State may determine measures in accordance with article 2. These measures will become operative as soon as they have been approved by the Governments of the parties concerned. ARTICLE 6 A Permanent Council at ministerial level will be set up to function within the framework of the purposes of this pact when at least four Powers become parties to the pact. The Council will draw up its own rules of procedure. ARTICLE 7 This pact remains in force for a period of five years renewable for other five-year periods. Any Contracting Party may withdraw from the pact by notifying the other parties in writing of its desire to do so six months before the expiration of any of the above-mentioned periods, in which case the pact remains valid for the other parties. ARTICLE 8 This pact shall be ratified by the contracting parties and ratifications shall be exchanged at Ankara as soon as possible. Thereafter it shall come into force from the date of the exchange of ratifications. In witness whereof, the said plenipotentiaries have signed the present pact in Arabic, Turkish and English, all three texts being equally authentic except in the case of doubt when the English text shall prevail. Done in duplicate at Baghdad this second day of Rajab 1374 Hijri corresponding to the twenty-fourth day of February 1955.

A.6

Additional Alliance Documents

For the sake of brevity, this appendix omits the North Atlantic Treaty and the security documents related to the Southern African Development Community. These agreements can be found at: North Atlantic Treaty (1949): www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_ 17120.htm Southern African Development Community Treaty (1992): www.sadc.int/ documents-publications/show/865 Protocol on Politics, Defence, and Security (2001): www.sadc.int/files/3613/5292/ 8367/Protocol_on_Politics_Defence_and_Security20001.pdf SADC Mutual Defence Pact (2003): www.sadc.int/files/2913/5333/8281/SADC _Mutual_Defence_Pact2003.pdf

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Notes

Chapter 1: Transhistorical Patterns in Alliance Strategy 1. These treaties can be found in Gibler 2008. 2. Ideas discussed in this chapter, as well as in chapters 2 and 4, have been explored in Kuo 2019. 3. Leeds et al. 2002, 238. 4. Waltz 1979; Walt 1987. 5. Snyder 1997. 6. Mattes 2012; Crescenzi et al. 2012; Fearon 1997. 7. Handel 1990; Vital 1982; Job 1992; Sylvan and Majeski 2009; Gasiorowski 1991. 8. Thies 2003. 9. Lipson 1991. 10. Fearon 1994; Siverson and King 1980. 11. Singer and Small 1966; Levy 1981; Siverson and King 1980; Kegley 1994; Wayman 1984; Midlarsky 1983, 1986. 12. Benson 2012; Kim 2011; Frost-Nielsen 2017. 13. Bensahel 2007; Bearce et al. 2006. 14. Leeds et al. 2002. Schroeder (1994) comprehensively analyzes the preceding Utrecht period. 15. More formally, the unit of observation is the nondirected alliance dyad, as further detailed in chapter 3. 16. ATOP does not contain data on the Utrecht period. Claims about those years instead come from handcoded analysis of Gibler 2008. 17. The secrecy graph is drawn from Kuo 2019. 18. Further, many alliances in the Utrecht period included provisions for nonmilitary cooperation and defined contributions. While these outwardly appear as integrative features, they were understood differently than today. Nonmilitary cooperation referred then to issues of succession and inheritance, with monarchs specifying lineage orders and, by extension,

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what territory nations gained. When modern alliances define contributions, they typically make general commitments to divide costs equally. The Arab League, for example, directs a Permanent Military Commission to discuss what contributions each member can provide. By contrast, Utrecht alliances specified the exact number, type, nationality (to exclude mercenaries), and even command structure and officers that each country would supply. 19. Leeds and Mattes 2007. 20. Taylor 1984. 21. Schroeder 1994, 7. 22. Article II, Peace and Friendship Treaty of Utrecht between Spain and Great Britain, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Peace_and_Friendship_Treaty_of_Utrecht_between_Spain _and_Great_Britain. 23. Ikenberry 2001, 23. 24. Huntington 1991; Gunitsky 2017. 25. Lipson 1991; Morrow 2000; Fearon 1997; Mattes 2012. 26. Wallander and Keohane 1999; Wallander 2000. 27. Benson 2012; Kim 2011. 28. Crescenzi et al. 2012; Siverson and Starr 1994; Leeds 2003; Lake 2009; Wallander and Keohane 1999.

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Chapter 2: The Theory of Strategic Alliance Diffusion 1. Wallander and Keohane 1999; Bensahel 2007; Yarhi-Milo 2013. 2. Copeland 2001, 27. 3. Leeds 2003. 4. Gilpin 1981, 42. 5. Dai 2005. 6. Leeds et al. 2002. 7. Fearon 1995; Blainey 1988; Slantchev 2010. 8. Ikenberry 2001. 9. Powell 1999. 10. Ikenberry 2001. 11. Lascurettes 2020. 12. Cesa 2010. 13. This approach dovetails with Goddard (2018), which examines how rising powers legitimate their revisionist actions. This book suggests that the dominant strategy is at least one mechanism by which leading states demarcate legitimate activity and spread that conception through the interstate system. 14. That is, they inhabit the lowest rung of Keohane (1969)’s small-state hierarchy. 15. Goddard 2018; Krasner 1999; Ward 2017. 16. Krebs and Spindel 2018. 17. Kuo 2019. 18. Veblen 1979; Zahavi and Zahavi 1997. See also work in field theory by Zhang 2004; Bourdieu 1986. 19. Cialdini 1984; Cialdini et al. 1999; O’Neill 2006; Festinger 1954. Work in information science similarly highlights the role of expertise/knowledge, credentials, and attractiveness in helping actors identify credible models and leaders; see Rao et al. 2001; Walthen and Burkell 2002; Metzger et al. 2003; Hong 2006; Metzger et al. 2010; George et al. 2016. 20. Kuo 2019.

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21. Jervis 1997. 22. Vital 1967; Job 1992; David 1991. 23. Huntington 1968; Krasner 1999. 24. Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Hawkins 2004; Harsanyi 1966; Blader and Chen 2012; Ridgeway 2013; Festinger 1954. 25. Veblen 1979, 51–52. 26. Wendt 1999; Hafner-Burton and Montgomery 2006; Krasner 1999; Elklit and Reynolds 2002; Tallberg and Zurn 2019. 27. Hurd 1999; Clark 2005; Reus-Smit 2007. 28. See Rucker and Galinsky (2008, 2009) for the social psychological underpinnings of inferior status as a negative condition. 29. Buunk et al. 1990; Collins 1996; Brown and Haeger 1999. 30. Weyland 2009; Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983. 31. Taylor 1984. 32. Gilady 2018, 38, drawing on Zahavi and Zahavi 1997. 33. Veblen 1979; Basman et al. 1988; Goffman 1951, 295. 34. Meyer and Rowan 1977, 357. 35. Wohlforth 2009; Larson and Shevchenko 2010. 36. Miller 2003; Dafoe et al. 2014; Press 2005; Mercer 1996; Tang 2005; Weisiger and YarhiMilo 2015. 37. See Alter 2012; Lenz 2012; Borzel and Risse 2012; Jetschke and Murray 2012; Jetschke and Lenz 2013. 38. Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006; Simmons, Elkins, and Guzman 2006; Simmons et al. 2007; Gleditsch and Ward 2006; Goldman and Eliason 2003; Horowitz 2010; Hafner-Burton and Montgomery 2006. Chapter 3: The Diffusion of Alliance Strategy 1. Fordham and Poast 2014. 2. Siverson and King 1980; Fearon 1994; Lake 1992; Reiter and Stam 1998; Choi 2001. 3. As a robustness check, I also use an alternative specification measuring the percentage of these features that a dyad possesses. The new specification has no substantive impact on the results. 4. I use alternative constructions of Dominant to ensure that the model results are not driven purely by a specific measurement. These include changing the strictness of institutional measures and matching of the core form, the number of indicators composing the measurement, and whether to include military obligations. The changes do not substantively alter the results. 5. Although Major and CINC are highly correlated (ρ=0.74), including both helps to stress Dominant by demanding that it have the expected effect beyond the great powers. 6. Boot 2006. 7. Note that this variable only dates back to 1870. The entire Concert period is therefore lost with the inclusion of this variable, which is particularly problematic given that the core alliance only varies across broad, transhistorical periods. Fortunately, the model results do not change the estimates on Dominant, and so it is omitted from the reported results for clarity. 8. This includes things like mandated, public ratification processes (Morrow 1993), audience costs (Fearon 1995), and the use of domestic institutions as enforcement mechanisms for international agreements.

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9. Adler and Barnett 1998; Deutsch 1969. 10. Specifically, it will have a row-weighted value 1 (if only one state is common across observations) or 2 (if both states are), and 0 otherwise. 11. Most studies use a variation of the Heckman selection model to account for this bias. However, without an exogenous selector, such models can inflate estimation bias. Fordham and Poast (2014) directly address this issue in their paper, showing how the nonparametric assumptions of their k-adic approach avoid this issue. Later on, I use the robustness check created by Altonji et al. (2005) to further verify that the results are not sensitive to omitted variable bias. 12. Only three draws of nonevents were possible before running out of available observations, without replacement. 13. See also Kuo 2019. 14. See Dafoe et al. 2014; Levy 1981; Weisiger and Yarhi-Milo 2015. 15. It is worth noting that several scholars disagree with the notion that reputation matters. Press (2005), for example, argues that, when assessing the likelihood of war, states are more concerned about present military capabilities than an adversary’s history of backing up its declared threats. See also Mercer 1996; Tang 2005. However, the control variables for state power should capture these effects, allowing us to determine if Defection has an independent effect on Dominant. 16. Crescenzi et al. 2012. 17. Although the confidence intervals increase in size across the plot, they never cross 0. The widening intervals are due to having few states with between 7 and 23 defections in the past ten years in the dataset. This reinforces the need to correct for selection bias through the k-adic method. 18. Greenhill 2010; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006. 19. Model 4 uses a multinomial logit model with k-adic corrected data. Here, Saving has three levels: “no alliance,” “alliance without saving provision,” and “alliance with saving provision.” The table presents results for “alliance with saving provision,” which—after changing the baseline category—are statistically different from the results for “alliance without saving provision,” as theoretically expected. 20. Such emulation also confers what social psychology calls “social proof,” or third-party validation of the acceptability of behavior. See Cialdini 1984; Asch 1951. For an application to international relations, see Axelrod and Keohane 1985. 21. Wasserman and Faust 1994; Bonacich 1987. 22. Two notes about this measure. First, it covers 1930–2000. Although not quite as broad a time frame as the other datasets used in this study, it still encompasses all countries over seven decades. Second, this measure is independent of other common proxies for a state’s importance within the international system. Centrality has a correlation coefficient of 0.3 with Trade, 0.32 with Polity2, and –0.1 with CINC. It does, however, correlate strongly with IGO (0.73), which is unsurprising as the two measures capture similar phenomena. Consequently, IGO is dropped in this section’s models, as Centrality better accounts for a state’s relational status with other countries, not just with international organizations.

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Chapter 4: Great Powers and Strategic Constraints 1. Weitsman 2004; Edelstein 2017; Cesa 2010; Langer 1931; Taylor 1967; Schroeder 1976; Medlicott 1956. 2. See Andrássy 1927.

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3. The Three Emperors League (1873) differs from the Three Emperors Alliance (1881), which is discussed as a case of credibility diffusion in section 4.4. 4. von Bismarck 1966, 255. 5. Quoted in Durman 1988, 126. 6. Rupp 1976, 470–73. 7. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Bismarck to Munster, dispatch, May 26, 1876, pp. 96–97. 8. Gwynn 1918, 334. 9. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Notes of Baron Schwegel, 1878, pp. 104–5. 10. Dugdale 1928, no. 441. This followed wider mistrust by Russia of German intentions throughout 1875–78. Peter Saburov, the Russian ambassador to Germany, listed numerous instances of Bismarck’s anxiety about Moscow, such as the publication of personal attacks in the Russian press, “the new disposition of Russian troops along the frontier—a matter without importance at ordinary times, but which assumes a gravity of the first importance when suspicion enters into the minds of Governments; the new battalions formed after the war” (Saburov 1929, 72). That mistrust was mutual. German General Hans Lothar von Schweinitz likewise lists “the constant flirting with France by Gorchakov, the endless preparations for war by Miljutin [Russia’s minister of war], the advanced position of Russian cavalry at our frontier, the raving language of the Petersburg and Moscow press, have convinced the Chancellor [Bismarck] that he can no longer rely on Russia nor even on its rulers to the same extent as before” (Medlicott and Coveney 1972, From Denkwürdigkeiten des Botschafters General v. Schweinitz, ii: 60, pp. 113–14). Czar Alexander did not help matters by sending a letter declaiming the chancellor’s policies and Germany’s consequent turn away from Russia (Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Emperor Alexander II to Emperor William I, letter, August 15, 1879, p. 114). 11. Settled in the Armistice of Versailles, which ended the Franco-Prussian War. 12. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Bismarck to Hohenlohe, private letter, February 26, 1875, p. 88. 13. Langer 1931, 44. 14. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Gontaut-Biron to Decazes, dispatch, April 21, 1875, p. 80. 15. Bismarck 1966, 191. 16. Wertheimer 1910, 243. 17. Langer 1931, 174. 18. Documents Diplomatiques Français 1939, no. 440. 19. Bagdasarian 1976, 304. 20. Dugdale 1928, vol. 3, Bismarck to AA, Varzin, November 10, 1879. 21. Weitsman 2004, 57. 22. Langer 1931, 20. 23. Schroeder 1976; Ikenberry 2001. 24. This attitude is best seen in Bismarck’s letter to Metternich, declaring the Austrian diplomat a man of a different and lapsed age. Bismarck similarly discounted broader systemic interests in favor of strict raison d’état (Gerlach and Bismarck 1893, 353). 25. Langer 1931, 183. Discussion of secrecy in this chapter’s alliances is drawn in part from Kuo 2019. 26. Waller 1974, 193. 27. Saburov 1929, 55. 28. Geyer 1987, 105. 29. Langer 1931, 186.

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30. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Bismarck to Andrássy, September 29, 1879, penciled note by Count Andrássy, p. 116. 31. Saburov 1929, 61–62. 32. Bismarck 1966, 270. 33. Saburov 1929, 137. 34. Andrássy 1927, 98. 35. Medlicott 1956, 270. Brown (1973, 149) further confirms this as Haymerle’s strategy. 36. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Bismarck to Andrássy, September 29, 1879, p. 116. 37. Saburov 1929, 173–74. Emphasis in original. 38. Saburov 1929, 260. 39. Saburov 1929, 133. 40. Andrássy 1927, 80. 41. Medlicott and Coveney 1972, Bismarck to Haymerle, dispatch, February 8, 1881, p. 124. 42. Pribram 1920, vol. 1, 33–35. 43. Saburov 1929, 216. 44. Medlicott 1956, 245. 45. Langer 1931, 205. 46. Medlicott 1956, 252. Translation from French by author. 47. Saburov 1929, 217. 48. Medlicott 1956, 275–76. 49. Medlicott 1956, 268. 50. Langer 1931, 185; Brown 1973, 156. 51. Saburov 1929, 208. 52. Medlicott 1956, 256. 53. Medlicott 1956, 259. 54. Medlicott 1956, 261. 55. Medlicott 1956, 263. 56. Saburov 1929, 228. 57. Brown 1973, 162. 58. Brown 1973, 149. 59. Saburov 1929, 172–73. 60. Goriainov 1917, 334. 61. Langer 1931, 424. 62. Goriainov 1917, 335. 63. Kennan 1981, 320. 64. Goriainov 1917, 341. 65. Goriainov 1917, 338. 66. Wallander and Keohane 1999; Schroeder 1976. 67. Langer 1931, 502–3; see also Goriainov 1917, 345.

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Chapter 5: Cold War Credibility 1. Reid 1977. 2. Ruggie 1992. 3. Kaplan 1994, 35. 4. Kennan 1947. 5. FRUS 1948, vol. 3, doc. 69. 6. Adenauer 1965, 273.

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7. Kaplan 1994, 36–37. 8. For example, the French attempted to claim that their troops in Southeast Asia should be counted toward their NATO allotment, as they were (broadly speaking) resisting Communism. 9. Acheson 1969, 329. 10. FRUS 1950, vol. 3, doc. 306. 11. NATO 1950, North Atlantic Council Resolution C5-D/11. 12. NATO 1952, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, January 7, Memorandum on Inter-Allied Exercises. 13. NATO 1952, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, January 7, Comments on Bomber Command Structure; Coordination of Air Defense; Tactical and Mobilization Plans. 14. NATO 1950, August 23, Information on NATO Command. 15. Ismay 2001, chap. 9. 16. TNA/FO 1950, Documents on British Policy Overseas. 17. Ismay 2001, part 1, chap. 5. 18. Ismay 2001, part 1, chap. 5. 19. For more on the changes, see FRUS 1950, vol. 3, pp. 272–392. 20. Jordan 1967; Thies 2003, 100–106. 21. Interview with State Department Civil Service Officer, February 2011. 22. FRUS 1954, vol. 13, part 1, doc. 45. 23. Eisenhower 1954. 24. FRUS 1954, Secretary of State to the Embassy in the United Kingdom, August 3, 1954, vol. 13, part 2, doc. 1107. 25. Sharan 1965, 250. 26. The Hindu (Chennai-Madras), September 24, 1954. 27. Approval of the remaining two Articles (3 and 8) hinged on resolving Articles 4 and 5. 28. FRUS 1954, Memorandum of Conversation, August 17, 1954, vol. 13, part 2, doc. 1133. 29. FRUS 1954, Verbatim Proceedings of the Third Plenary Session, Manila Conference, September 7, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 354. 30. FRUS 1954, Memorandum by the Counselor of the Department of State (MacArthur) to the Secretary of State, September 3, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 346. 31. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 250; see also vol. 12, part 1, doc. 244. Australian objections are found in FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 348; others are noted in FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, docs. 354, 355. 32. Franklin 2006, 157. 33. FRUS 1954, Revised United States Working Draft of Security Treaty, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 319. 34. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 354. 35. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 1. 36. Harper 1955, 4; see also FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 347. 37. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 354. 38. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 354. 39. FRUS 1954, Memorandum of Discussion at the 214th Meeting of the National Security Council, September 12, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 362. 40. FRUS 1954, Telegram, Ambassador to the Philippines to Department of State, September 3, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 343. 41. FRUS 1954, Telegram, Ambassador to the Philippines to Department of State, September 6, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 351.

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42. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 354. 43. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, docs. 351, 354. 44. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 362. 45. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of Conversation, February 26, 1957, vol. 21, doc. 131. 46. FRUS 1954, Memorandum of Conversation, August 26, 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 326. 47. Nuechterlein 1964, 1175–76. 48. Harper 1955, 208. 49. FRUS 1954, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 86. 50. FRUS 1957, Memorandum from Counselor of Department of State (MacArthur) to Sec. of State, December 2, 1955, vol. 21, doc. 76. 51. FRUS 1957, Minutes of US-UK Foreign Ministers Meeting, January 31, 1956, vol. 21, doc. 80. 52. FRUS 1957, Telegram from Department of State to Thailand Embassy, December 2, 1955, vol. 21, doc. 74. 53. FRUS 1957, Telegram from UK Embassy to Department of State, February 27, 1957, vol. 21, doc. 132. 54. FRUS 1957, Telegram from SEATO Council Meeting Delegation of Department of State, March 12, 1957, vol. 21, doc. 140. 55. FRUS 1957, Telegram from SEATO Council Meeting Delegation of Department of State, March 12, 1957, vol. 21, doc. 144. 56. Kerr 1971. 57. TNA 2018, CAB 129/26, C.P. (49) 183, “Middle East Policy,” August 25, 1949. 58. TNA 2018, Bevin to Campbell (Cairo), Dispatch no. 135, March 21, 1950, JE1051/21, 80376. 59. TNA 2018, Campbell to FO, Tel. 24 Saving, February 10, 1948, E2057, 68384. 60. TNA 2018, Troutbeck (B.M.E.O.) to FO, Tel. 80 Saving, November 2, 1949, E13446, 75080; TNA 2018, Kelly (Ankara) to Bevin, Dispatch no. 23, January 16, 1947, E766/111/80, 62197); TNA 2018, Mack (Baghdad) to Bevin, March 21, 1950, Dispatch no. 64, EQ1022/6, 82411. 61. FRUS 1954, Memorandum by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs (Jernegan) to the Secretary of State, June 17, 1953, vol. 6, doc. 415. 62. It did participate in CENTO’s two central coordinating bodies, the Military and Economic Committees. 63. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of Discussion at the 153d Meeting of the National Security Council, July 9, 1953, vol. 12, doc. 144. 64. FRUS 1954, vol. 9, part 1, doc. 171. 65. FRUS 1957, vol. 12, part 1, doc. 51. 66. Krebs and Spindel 2018. 67. FRUS 1954, Memorandum of Conversation, by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs (Jernegan), January 6, 1954, vol. 9, part 1, doc. 168; FRUS 1954, Memorandum to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (Merchant), January 12, 1954, vol. 9, part 1, doc. 171; FRUS 1954, Memorandum by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (Bonbright) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs (Byroade), January 23, 1954, vol. 9, part 1, doc. 176. 68. TNA 2018, Shuckburgh to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, FO371/115518/V1073/(372), June 18, 1955. The overlapping memberships

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were the US and UK in all three bodies, Turkey in CENTO and NATO, Pakistan in SEATO and CENTO. 69. For SEATO, the United States on average provided 25.8 percent of the regional countries’ military expenditures, and it gave US$37.9 billion more than it allocated to NATO from 1946–79, although doubtless that figure is inflated by the Vietnam War. 70. Stoddart 2012, chap. 7. 71. FRUS 1954, The Ambassador in Turkey (Warren) to the Department of State; December 2, 1953, vol. 9, part 1, doc. 162. 72. This was the so-called “Alpha Plan.” FRUS 1957, vol. 12, docs. 91-93; Podeh 1995, 196; Shimon 1989. 73. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of a Conversation, Department of State; January 13, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 91. 74. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of a Conversation, Department of State; January 13, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 91. 75. FRUS 1957, Dispatch from the Embassy in Iraq to the Department of State, January 6, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 88. 76. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of a Conversation, Department of State, January 13, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 91. 77. Historical Division 1956, American Foreign Policy, Current Documents, Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State, p. 561. 78. Kerr 1971. 79. FRUS 1957, vol. 12, doc. 170. 80. Eisenhower 2005, “Memorandum of Conversation,” December 18, 1957, p. 383. 81. Eden 1960, 336. 82. FRUS 1957, Telegram from the Embassy in Iran to the Department of State, November 9, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 137. 83. FRUS 1957, Telegram from the Embassy in Iran to the Department of State, November 14, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 138. 84. FRUS 1957, Telegram from the Embassy in Iraq to the Department of State, November 15, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 142; FRUS 1957, Telegram from the Embassy in Iran to the Department of State, November 14, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 138. 85. FRUS 1957, Dispatch from the Embassy in Iraq to the Department of State, January 6, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 89. 86. FRUS 1957, Dispatch from the Embassy in Iraq to the Department of State, January 6, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 89. 87. FRUS 1957, Circular Telegram from the Department of State to Certain Diplomatic Missions, March 12, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 197. 88. The text of President Eisenhower’s address can be found at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=11007. 89. FRUS 1957, Position Paper Prepared in the Department of State, March 8, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 192. 90. FRUS 1957, Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs (Rountree) to the Secretary of State, April 4, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 213. 91. FRUS 1957, Telegram from the President’s Special Assistant (Richards) to the Delegation at the Bermuda Conference, March 21, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 200. 92. FRUS 1957, Memorandum from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Secretary of Defense (Wilson), November 30, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 153.

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93. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of Discussion at the 287th Meeting of the National Security Council, June 7, 1956, vol. 22, doc. 496. 94. FRUS 1957, Memorandum from the Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration (Henderson) to the Secretary of State, December 6, 1956, vol. 12, doc. 162. 95. TNA 1955, FO371/115526/V1073/1200, “Message: Foreign Office to Geneva,” November 1, 1955. 96. Yeşilbursa 2005, 133. 97. FRUS 1957, Memorandum of a Meeting with the Secretary of State, Department of State, May 14, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 242; FRUS 1957, Memorandum for the File by Eli Stevens of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, May 15, 1957, vol. 12, doc. 242. 98. Yeşilbursa 2005, 192. 99. FRUS 1960, Memorandum of Conversation, December 8, 1959, vol. 15, doc. 375. 100. TNA 1960, PREM 11/3879, “Defence Secretary to Prime Minister,” December 5, 1960. 101. FRUS 1960, Telegram from Dept. of State to Turkish Embassy, January 19, 1959, vol. 12, doc. 53. 102. Archives 1955, Shuckburgh to Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, June 18, 1955, no. 371/115518/ V1073/(372). 103. FRUS 1960, Memorandum from Sec. of State Dulles to President Eisenhower, January 21, 1959, vol. 12, doc. 55. 104. Goktepe 1999, 16. 105. FRUS 1949, “Memorandum of Conversation, by the Director of the Office for Far Eastern Affairs (Butterworth), April 8, 1949, vol. 7, part 2, doc. 321. 106. Dulles, “USIS Seoul to Everett Drumright,” June 22, 1950, box 48, folder Korea, roll 16. 107. DOD 1953, A-26. 108. Rafferty 2003, 354. 109. FRUS 1957, Letter from Ambassador in Cambodia (McClintock) to Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson), August 1, 1956, vol. 21, doc. 244. 110. Krebs and Spindel 2018; Yarhi-Milo et al. 2016.

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Chapter 6: Diffusion to the Periphery 1. A note on terminology. In using the terms “southern Africa” or “southern African” (where possible with a lowercase “s” and with the adjectival form of “south”), I am referring to the region. “South Africa” or “South African” refers to the country. 2. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 3. SADC, Olusegun Obasanjo, “Opening Statement: Report on the Results of a Brainstorming Meeting,” Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Co-operation in Africa, Addis Ababa, 1990. 4. Data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2014. Calculations by author. 5. Solomon and Cilliers 1997. 6. Adedeji 1990. 7. Ngoma 2005, 101. 8. Ohlson 1991, 237. 9. Jaster 1985, 91–94. 10. Booth 1994; Vale and Maseko 1998. 11. Cawthra 1997, 4. 12. Lenz 2012.

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13. This system was later found inadequate and replaced in 2001 (Nathan 2012), 14. SADC, Declaration and Treaty (1993, 3–5). 15. SADC, Summit Communiqués (2006). 16. Lenz 2012, n12. 17. Nathan 1993, 2012. 18. SADC, Annual Consultative Conference Communiqué (1995, para. 6.1). 19. SADC, Summit Communiqués (2006, 6). 20. Between 80 and 85 percent of SADC’s funds came from foreign sources, primarily EU countries and the US (Cilliers 1996; Tjonneland 2004). In 1992, the Summit observed that “the most binding constraint to development of the region is inadequate professionally and technically qualified and experienced personnel to plan and manage the development process efficiently and effectively” (SADC, “Towards the Southern African Development Community: A Declaration by the Heads of State or Government of Southern African States,” 1992). This sentiment was echoed in the 1995 Summit report (SADC, Annual Consultative Conference Communiqué, 1995). 21. Oosthuizen 2006, 63. 22. Nathan 2012, 112; Schoeman 2003, 3; Williams 2005, 199. 23. Malan 1997, 7–8. 24. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 25. SADC, Annual Consultative Conference Communiqué (1995, 50–51). 26. Vale 2002, 17. 27. Mandaza and Tostensen 1994, ix. 28. Nathan 2012, 42. 29. SADC, Annual Consultative Conference Communiqué (1995, 50–51). 30. Malan 1997, 7. 31. SADC, Summit Communiqués (2006). 32. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 33. Cilliers 1996. 34. Breytenbach 2000, 88. 35. Cilliers 1999, 25. 36. Tapfumaneyi 1999b, 4. 37. SADC, “Report on the Ministerial Meeting of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security,” quoted in Cilliers 1999. 38. Malan 1998. 39. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 40. SADC, Summit Communiqués (2006, 108). 41. Likoti 2007. 42. Nathan 2012, 37. 43. Brammer 1999, 21. 44. SADC, 2001 Summit Communiqué (2006, 128). 45. SADC, “Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation” (2004, 16, Article 3.1.1). 46. Nieuwkerk 2003. 47. Cilliers 1999, 68–69. 48. SouthScan 1997, 258. 49. Tapfumaneyi 1999a, 35. 50. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 51. Ngoma 2005, 146.

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52. SADC, Republic of Zambia: Paper on Southern African Development Community (SADC) Defense Pact; Extraordinary Meeting of SADC Ministers to Finalize the Drafting of the Organ Protocol, Piggs Peak, Swaziland (2000). 53. Ngoma 2007, 413. 54. Ngoma 2007, 414. 55. “SADC Adopts Draft Mutual Defence Pact,” Africa News, July 30, 2001. 56. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. 57. Interview with Laurie Nathan, February 12–13, 2014. Chapter 7: The Dominant Strategy and Alliance Failure 1. Snyder 1984; Cesa 2010; Weitsman 2004; Lake 2009; Wallander and Keohane 1999; Wallander 2000. 2. Cesa 2010, 63. 3. Leeds et al. 2002. 4. Leeds et al. 2002. 5. In unreported analyses, I use different versions of this variable, including termination due to war with a third party. It does not change the statistical results. 6. Leeds et al. 2000. 7. Cesa 2010. 8. In separate, unreported analyses, I run the spatial logit model on years where the core alliance possessed realpolitik alliance features and years where it had integrative ones. For the former, ρ is positive and significant at 0.44 (sd = 0.23), suggesting that defection and pact failure spread easily through these networks. By contrast, it is negative but insignificant at –0.05 (sd = 0.17) during integrative years. At the least, strongly institutionalized partnerships may be inhibiting contagion, reducing “cascades” of alliance failure. 9. Koremenos et al. 2001; Fearon 1997; Wallander and Keohane 1999; Wallander 2000. 10. Other possible indicators do not as clearly imply deep and certainly not broader commitments. For example, Leeds and Anac (2005) include ratification in their measure of formality. However, an overwhelming number of alliances (upward of 85 percent) are formally ratified. Despite that, this type of formality does not necessarily imply a deep commitment, as even secret agreements are usually ratified according to ATOP. 11. Saburov 1929—Saburov to Jomini, Correspondence, May 12, 1880, 137. 12. Organ can be parsed in several different ways, including as an ordinal or dichotomous variable. Each time, the statistical results were substantively and statistically similar.

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Chapter 8: The Dominant Alliance Strategy 1. Ikenberry 2001; Goddard 2018; Nexon and Cooley 2020; Lascurettes 2020; Shifrinson 2018; MacDonald and Parent 2018. 2. Ward 2017; Greenhill 2010; Murray 2012; Dafoe et al. 2014; Renshon 2016; Larson and Shevchenko 2003, 2010; O’Neill 2006. 3. Fearon 1994, 1997; Koremenos et al. 2001; Snyder and Borghard 2011. 4. Auslin 2020, chap. 7; Hadar 2017; Beeson 2020; Lascurettes 2020. 5. Crawford 2003. 6. See “Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2010–2017),” NATO press release, March 15, 2018, www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2018_03/20180315_180315 -pr2018–16-en.pdf. 7. Robert Burns, “Hagel Says Europeans Should Step Up NATO Support,” Associated Press, February 26, 2014, www.yahoo.com/news/hagel-says-europeans-step-nato-support -145427038—politics.html.

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8. Jordan Fabian and Morgan Gstalter, “Merkel: Europe Can No Longer Rely on US Protection,” The Hill, May 10, 2018, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/387067 -merkel-europe-cant-count-on-us-to-protect-us-anymore. 9. “‘Don’t Wait, Act Now’ for Europe, Macron Tells Merkel,” France24, May 11, 2018, www .france24.com/en/20180511-dont-wait-act-now-europe-macron-tells-merkel-european-union -charlemagne-prize-trump. 10. For examples, see Nicole Gaouette, Barbara Starr, and Ryan Browne, “Trump’s Pledge to Stop ‘Provocative’ Military Exercises Provokes Alarm and Confusion in Seoul and Washington,” June 12, 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/06/12/politics/trump-north-korea -military-exercises/index.html. See also comments by CNAS Senior Fellow Julianne Smith (https://twitter.com/Julie_C_Smith/status/1006494842388656128) and Lieutenant General Mark Hertling (rt.) (https://twitter.com/MarkHertling/status/1006617609050181633). 11. See FRUS 1969, “Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State,” November 3, 1971, vol. 19, part 1, doc. 114; FRUS 1969, “Letter from President Nixon to Korean President Park,” November 29, 1971, vol. 19, part 1, doc. 115. 12. Sayle 2019, 175–76. 13. Granted, this could easily lead to overreach, which the literature attributes to domestic politics, hubris, or competition with an outside challenger (Snyder 1991; Kennedy 1987; Doyle 1986). This book suggests relative reliability among the hegemon’s α and β alliances may partially explain this dynamic. Even if powerful states successfully resist domestic pressures to expand, network pressure to maintain portfolio consistency may still drive overstretch. 14. Writing on regional economic organizations, Gray (2018) highlights the proliferation of “zombie institutions” existing in name only and with little productive or coordinating capacity. 15. Hartley and Sandler 1999; Sandler and Shimizu 2014; Hallams and Schreer 2012; Oneal 1990. 16. Poast 2019. 17. Leeds 2003; Leeds and Anac 2005; Berkemeier and Fuhrmann 2018. 18. Mattes (2012) and Kuo (2019) also focus on this concept. 19. Ben-Sharar and White 2006; Gulati and Scott 2012; Kahan and Klausner 1997; Radin 2013. 20. Jetschke and Lenz 2013; Jetschke and Murray 2012; Borzel and Risse 2012; Alter 2012; Lenz 2012; Arnold and Rittberger 2013; Meyer and Rowan 1977. 21. Silove 2016; Wright 2017. 22. Crawford 2003. 23. Krebs and Spindel 2018. 24. J. Berkshire Miller, “Is There Anyone in Asia Who Still Trusts America?” Foreign Policy, November 23, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/23/is-there-anyone-in-asia-who -still-trusts-america/. 25. Natan Sachs, “Whose Side Are You On? Alliance Credibility in the Middle East and Japan,” Foreign Policy Trip Reports, Brookings Institution, May 31, 2016, www.brookings.edu/ blog/order-from-chaos/2016/05/31/whose-side-are-you-on-alliance-credibility-in-the-middle -east-and-japan/. 26. Zack Cooper, “Implementing the Indo-Pacific Strategy,” AEIdeas, June, 25, 2018, www .aei.org/publication/implementing-the-indo-pacific-strategy/. 27. See Calder and Ye 2004; Pempel 2010; Rozman 2011. 28. For scholarly takes, see Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002; Acharya 2005; He and Feng 2011. For popular or policy takes, see Huang 2017; Keck 2014; Scott 2017.

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Index

alliance: cohesion, 6, 134–35, 139, 152, 156; member, 3, 18, 21; defection, 14, 17, 30, 53, 55, 147; design, 4, 7, 14, 24, 33, 36, 45, 66, 87, 117, 142, 147, 157; high-tier, 32, 155; isomorphism, 15; network, 2, 18, 22–23, 25–27, 33, 42, 73; obligations, 14, 53; reliability, 31, 134, 143, 158– 60; single alliance strategy, 3, 15; security strategy, 2, 4, 6; size, 8, 10. See also core alliance; dominant alliance strategy alliance class: α-class, 25–26, 28–29; β-class, 25–27, 29, 91; γ-class, 26, 30–32, 35, 60, 118 alliance failure, 134–36; and homogenous versus heterogeneous alliances, 136; and small states, 143; and social weight, 144; and alliance institutions, 144 alliance strategy, 3, 15; integrative alliance strategy, 8, 45, 119, 132–33; predatory, 7, 8, 13. See also dominant alliance strategy; misalignment; realpolitik Alliance Treaty Observations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset, 3, 7, 9–12, 16, 42–43, 50, 124, 137, 140 arbitration, 8, 13, 17, 43, 79 Andrássy, Gyula (elder), 79

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Andrássy, Gyula (younger), 71, 75– 77, 80, 166 Arab Cold War, 1, 111 Arab League, 1–2, 14, 16, 25, 107–8, 157, 173– 74, 178 Association of Southern African States (ASAS), 126–27, 133 asymmetric obligation, 5, 8, 11, 13, 41 Australia, 97– 99, 101, 105 Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS), 97, 99–102 Austria-Hungary, 18, 68–89, 117, 137, 147, 166– 68 Baghdad Pact (or Central Treaty Organization, CENTO), 18–19, 91– 92, 97, 106, 108–17, 150, 157 balance of power, 14, 68, 74 Bismarck, Otto von, 68– 71, 73–83, 85–89, 154, 168– 70 Bismarckian era, 8, 68, 108 burden sharing, 6, 41, 154 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). See Baghdad Pact Cold War, 7, 9–10, 13, 16, 18–19, 48, 91, 95, 111, 119–22, 124–25, 156, 158–59

N L 205

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206

index

collective security pact, 1, 8, 100, 119, 125 Colombia, 2 common threat, 4, 15, 22, 34, 44, 65, 69– 71, 73, 88, 98, 108, 110, 117, 122, 134, 139–40, 142, 150 Concert: period, 8, 13, 43; system, 16, 69, 147, 158 core alliance, 22, 24–30, 32–36, 38–41, 43, 45, 47, 52–55, 57–58, 66, 72, 86, 90, 93, 97, 134–35, 137, 139, 142, 144, 146–47, 150–52, 155, 158 credibility: diff usion, 34, 53, 87, 158; problem, 5, 17, 89 decolonization, 16 democracy, 6, 16, 38, 42, 44, 48–49, 56, 163, 171 democratization, 16, 23 dominant alliance strategy, 2–4, 7–8, 13–15, 24, 27, 33, 36–38, 47, 53, 56, 60, 61, 66, 139, 152–53. See also core alliance; institutional isomorphism Dual Alliance, 18, 69– 70, 72– 73, 77–89, 165 Dulles, John Foster, 97, 99–105, 107–8, 113–14, 116 Eastern Question, 70, 74– 75, 81, 85, 88 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), 17, 121 Ecuador, 2, 137 Egypt, 1, 107, 111–12 Eisenhower Doctrine, 109–10, 113–14, 117 fluid rebalancing, 13, 93, 154, 158 France, 23, 39, 68, 71– 74, 76– 78, 85–86, 89, 93, 97–100, 110, 112, 169 Franco-Prussian War (1870– 71), 8, 18, 22– 23, 68– 69, 72, 147 Franco-Russian Alliance (1892), 18, 70– 71, 85, 88 Frontline States, 121, 123–24, 126–27, 129, 133

N L 206

Germany, 18, 23, 39, 68– 74, 76–82, 84– 90, 94, 147, 166– 70 Giers, Nikolay, 84–85, 87

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global: conflict, 3; economy, 121, 124; hegemony, 5, 22; leader, 3; norms, 56, 119, 124–25; order, 2; security, 67; stability, 6, 151, 153; system, 13, 26 great power, 3–4, 15, 17, 23, 24, 33, 44, 68– 69, 72– 73, 75– 76, 78, 80, 84, 88, 120, 142, 147, 162– 63, 166, 169 Haymerle, Heinrich von, 70, 80–85, 88– 90 hegemon, 3, 21–26, 30–31, 34, 36, 117, 135, 150, 156–57; hegemonic imposition, 15, 22, 34, 44, 70– 71, 73, 98, 108, 110, 116, 120, 122, 134, 139–40, 142, 150; hegemony, 5– 6, 22 human rights, 14, 56 hypotheses, 35–36; applied to case studies, 73, 89, 98, 110, 122; applied to quantitative tests of diff usion, 1, 40, 55; applied to quantitative tests of alliance failure, 135, 137, 139–40, 142–44, 146 institutional binding, 5, 14 institutional design, 15, 17, 32, 89 institutional isomorphism, 4, 15, 39, 152, 160 institutionalization, 5– 7, 16–17, 30, 35, 42, 45–50, 54, 69– 70, 81, 84, 90, 105– 6, 110, 121, 133, 135–36, 139, 144, 147, 150 integrative: dominant form, 8, 158; security policy, 33, 119, 122, 135 international: law, 14, 100, 167, 169; order, 3–4, 15, 19, 24, 32, 37, 152–53, 157; security, 2–3, 7, 15, 22–24, 135, 139, 144, 152 interstate security, 6, 8, 19, 25–26, 42, 69, 134, 136, 157 Interwar period, 8, 13, 39, 93 Jerusalem, 1 Jordan, 1, 113, 117 Khan, Ayub, 115 Korean War, 94, 96, 116 leading state, 3, 21–26, 30, 44, 46, 86, 135, 143, 151, 154–55, 157–58. See also hegemon

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ind e x legitimacy, 3, 17, 22, 23, 31–33, 35, 56, 60, 66, 106, 134, 137, 147, 150, 153–54, 160, 163– 64, 169 Little Entente, 39, 56 major war, 3, 15, 22–23, 30, 153, 158 Malan, Mark, 126 Mandela, Nelson, 124, 129 Manila Pact (or Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, SEATO), 18–19, 91– 92, 97–112, 114–17, 150, 157, 161 mediation, 8, 10, 13, 43, 70, 73, 80, 82, 84, 88– 90. See also arbitration Menderes, Adnan, 112–13 Middle East, 1, 20, 101, 106– 7, 109, 112–14, 153, 162, 173– 74; Defence Organisation (MEDO), 107–8 military: cooperation, 3, 7, 10, 21, 32, 36–37, 45, 55, 69, 72, 80, 87, 91, 97– 98, 105, 119, 127, 132–33, 135, 137, 152, 155; coordination, 6, 99, 103; pact, 2, 13, 15–16, 18, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 32–34, 40–41, 54, 56, 67, 70, 73, 93, 99, 105, 132; policy, 3, 20, 124, 126–27, 152; security, 2, 118 misalignment, 32–33, 36, 117, 119, 122, 126– 28, 132–33, 157–58 Mugabe, Robert, 119–20, 122, 124, 126–31, 133 Mutual Defence Pact (2003), 19, 119–20, 122, 130, 132, 175 Napoleonic Wars, 21–23 Nathan, Laurie, 125–26, 129, 131 network: centrality, 61; effect, 29, 40, 150, 156 neutrality, 5– 6, 12–13, 75, 84, 86, 166, 169– 70 normative diff usion, 56–57 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1–2, 14, 18–20, 26, 30, 41–42, 50, 56, 91– 92, 94– 96, 98, 100, 102, 105– 7, 109–12, 114–22, 124–25, 127, 129, 133, 136, 153– 58, 160– 62, 164; Article 2, 1, 93; Article 5, 2, 93, 97, 99, 101, 103–4, 108, 131–32, 163; in Asia, 160, 162– 64; International Staff, 96– 97, 106, 119; Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), 95,

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207 97; Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), 95– 97, 105, 115

Organ on Politics, Defence, and Security (OPDS), 19, 119–22, 125–33 Ottoman Empire, 23, 69, 74, 168 Pakistan, 98– 99, 101, 108, 110–11, 114–16, 173 Philippines, 99, 101, 104, 162, 172– 73 portfolio consistency, 29, 38, 45, 49, 52, 66, 78, 89, 154 prestige, 21–23, 25–26, 30–33, 35, 39, 53, 56, 58, 72, 74, 89, 99, 112–13, 135, 153–54, 156, 158 Quadruple Alliance (1815), 2 rank credibility, 28 rational institutionalism, 15 realism, 4– 6 realpolitik, 3, 5, 7–8, 13–14, 16, 19, 24, 29, 35, 45, 69, 73, 77, 78, 90, 93, 135, 148, 153–54, 156, 158 Reinsurance Treaty, 69, 71, 73, 85, 87–89, 168 relative reliability, 3, 18, 20–21, 26–28, 30, 34–35, 55, 65, 67, 69– 70, 72– 73, 80, 88– 90, 92, 97–100, 109, 117, 119, 135, 151, 153–55, 158– 60, 163 Rio Pact, 14, 116, 137, 163 Russia, 18, 23, 39, 69– 79, 81–85, 87– 91, 112, 118, 137, 147, 154, 156, 161, 165– 70 Saburov, Peter, 70– 71, 79–85, 147 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). See Manila Pact security: behavior, 4, 15, 134, 154; challenge, 3–4, 16–17, 21, 28, 126; guarantee, 25–26, 28, 30, 110, 114, 131; relations, 6, 8, 18, 24, 27, 44, 58, 69– 70, 72, 91, 93, 118, 147 Shuvalov, Pyotr, 70, 76, 85–87 social: weight, 30, 60, 144; recognition, 30, 154; proof, 28, 36, 49, 135, 137, 144. See also prestige

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Southern African Development Community (SADC), 19, 119–33, 136, 150, 158 Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), 119, 123–25, 127 state types: primary, 26–27, 30, 117, 151; secondary, 3, 21–22, 26–30, 32, 35–36, 97, 109, 117, 139; peripheral, 3, 16, 18, 31–32, 36, 39, 61, 65– 66, 108, 117–18, 135, 137, 143, 150, 153 status, 3–4, 18–19, 22, 24, 26–27, 29–36, 39, 44, 46, 53, 55–57, 60, 63, 65– 66, 72, 75, 112, 119, 124, 126, 134–36, 142, 153, 157– 58, 162– 63, 167, 169 strategic: conditions, 15, 72, 119, 134, 157; convergence, 2, 18 Suez Crisis, 112, 115 sunk cost, 14, 16, 35 Taiwan, 155–57, 161– 62 Tapfumaneyi, Asher Walter, 128 territorial: acquisition, 8, 13; dispute, 5, 16, 72

Three Emperors Alliance (1881), 69– 70, 73, 79–85 Three Emperors League (1873), 72, 73, 84, 137 transactional foreign policy, 154, 156 Trump, Donald J., 152, 155, 163 Turkey, 41, 110–11, 114–16, 167, 169, 173 United Kingdom, 72, 79, 91, 93, 98–100, 104, 106–108, 110–12, 114, 116, 173 United Nations, 15, 56, 160, 170– 72, 174 utility maximization, 3, 17 Utrecht period, 8 War of Spanish Succession, 22–23 War Scare, 70, 76 Western Union, 93, 107; Defence Organisation, 25 World War I, 2, 8, 21–23, 68, 71, 74, 78– 79, 89, 158 World War II, 8, 13, 21–22, 44, 91, 93, 107, 125, 147, 158, 160

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