Читать книгу Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka - Страница 15

Before fleshing out these arguments in greater detail, a crucial question remains: what exactly is a military alliance? This question is deceptively simple, not least because news media often invoke the term to describe a wide variety of security arrangements like NATO, bilateral partnerships that involve the United States and countries such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, as well as the burgeoning cooperation between China and Russia. And indeed, some scholars would agree that such relationships constitute alliances. Michael Barnett and Jack Levy (1991: 370) define an alliance “in its broadest sense to refer to a formal or informal relationship of security cooperation between two or more states and involving mutual expectations of some degree of policy coordination on security issues under certain conditions in the future.” In his seminal study on alliances, Stephen Walt (1987: 12) similarly defines them as “a formal or informal arrangement for security cooperation between two or more sovereign states.” As such, scholars have counted alliances in all sorts of ways, creating confusion as to the true count, and running the risk of comparing apples to oranges. Mira Rapp-Hooper (2020: 17) writes, for example, that the United States had thirty-seven allies as of 2020, but she includes in her count Israel and Pakistan (which do not have a formal defense agreement with the United States) and omits countries that make up the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, popularly known as the Rio Pact (which notionally does contain one).

For its purposes, this book adopts a more restrictive definition. Specifically, I define military alliances as arrangements made between two or more sovereign states on the basis of a written treaty that serves to coordinate military policy toward at least one common goal. This definition has several components that need unpacking.

First, only sovereign states have military alliances. Sovereignty is, of course, a fraught concept. Few states, if any, are fully sovereign in terms of their own domestic and foreign policies, whether because they delegate some juridical authority to international organizations, subordinate some decision-making to a stronger state, or both (Krasner 1999). In the modern context, though, a country is at least nominally sovereign if it has its own representation at international bodies and, most importantly, is recognized as a state by other states. Of course, violent nonstate actors can align themselves with states or even other nonstate actors so as to have an alliance in the common sense of the term (Tamm 2016; see also Grynaviski 2015). The most famous formal example is the 1778 Treaty of Alliance signed by the Kingdom of France and the Thirteen United States of America during the American Revolutionary War. This example notwithstanding, such relationships are often ad hoc and, as we will see, lack the other key ingredients that make up a military alliance. That said, sovereign states can forge, and have forged, military alliances in order to counter threats emanating from transnational movements.

Second, military alliances are based on some written treaty. This feature is crucial to the definition I use in this book. Treaties outline, with varying degrees of clarity (or, one might say, ambiguity), the rules of the game that constrain their relationship: they spell out the promises and obligations, sometimes even listing the conditions under which their provisions would or would not be activated. Not all written commitments are alike. A mutual defense treaty with reciprocal obligations could constitute the alliance, as in the case of NATO, but a security treaty could simply entail one-sided obligations, as in the case of the US–Japan alliance. The United States is an ally of Thailand even though the founding treaty – the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (popularly known as the Manila Pact) – produced a multilateral organization that was eventually dissolved in 1977. In addition to the Manila Pact, the 1962 Thanat-Rusk communiqué and the 2012 Joint Vision Statement for the Thai–US Defense Alliance form the basis of their ongoing security partnership.

By stressing the importance of having a written treaty, I exclude informal partnerships or alignments that other scholars like Barnett, Levy, and Walt include in their studies. I also do not cover so-called “alliances of convenience” – that is, instances where adversaries cooperate informally to tackle urgent security challenges (Resnick 2010/11). I believe excluding them is defensible on several grounds. Incorporating both informal (i.e., nontreaty) and formal (i.e., treaty) arrangements in a definition of alliance blurs the distinction between friendly diplomacy and active military partnership. We distinguish between dating and marriage when we discuss romantic relations because they entail different expectations and obligations. We should make similar distinctions with respect to international security cooperation. Treating alignment and alliance as interchangeable introduces unnecessary difficulties in measuring the concept: in the absence of a treaty, how much alignment must we see for it to qualify as a military alliance? The answer to this question is not self-evident. In emphasizing the formal signing of military alliances, I avoid these difficulties. Nevertheless, I am aware that other problems could arise with my decision. The United States is a treaty ally of North Macedonia via NATO, but not of Israel or Saudi Arabia. China and Russia arguably engage in more military cooperation now than some treaty allies have had historically. The reinvigorated Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) – comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States – does not qualify as an alliance because it is not based on documented security guarantees. Why, then, leave out these more strategically significant relationships from the analysis? Suffice it to say for now, not extending a treaty to such states, however closely aligned they appear to be, is a deliberate choice to avoid the very problems that can come with alliances.

Third, military alliances are focused primarily on coordinating military policy. This point seems redundant, but it is worth highlighting because states cooperate with one another on a wide range of issues. In the economic sphere, they can form free or preferential trade areas, common markets, as well as customs, monetary, or other types of economic unions. They can also participate in other international organizations that center on human rights promotion, environmental protection, or social development. Yet none of these international organizations would qualify as a military alliance because they are not geared toward coordinating military policy – specifically, plans and decisions relating to the kinetic and lethal use of force against third parties. Hence, the United States is not, formally speaking, a military ally of the EU, even though many EU members are also part of NATO. Of course, military alliances do sometimes feature nonmilitary provisions in their charters. Article II of NATO’s founding document – the Washington Treaty – provides that its members “will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions” as well as “encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them” (NATO 2019). That said, nonmilitary goals are often aspirational and usually handled through alternative modes of cooperation such as, in the case of many NATO members, the European Community (now the EU), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (now the World Trade Organization), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many of NATO’s internal debates turned on defense planning and war preparations in case the Soviet Union were to carry out a strike against Western Europe, North America, or the Eastern Mediterranean. One scholar even described Article II as “a dead letter during the cold war” (Haglund 1997: 469). Nevertheless, the business of a military alliance need not focus exclusively on high-intensity threats. NATO, for its part, also does counterterrorism, defense sector reforms, counterproliferation, counterpiracy, intelligence cooperation, and civil emergency planning.

Fourth, and finally, alliances are a means by which their members strive to achieve some common security goal. The purposes of an alliance could be defensive or offensive. A defensive alliance serves to prevent a war and to maintain the territorial integrity and political autonomy of its members vis-à-vis adversaries; defensive alliances uphold the status quo. In contrast, offensive alliances function as a way for states to coordinate their war-making in the pursuit of gaining territory and direct influence over other sovereign states. Offensive alliances are historically very rare and so receive far less coverage in this book than defensive ones. Note that military alliances do not require members to agree on everything. In fact, precisely because states have different interests and often disagree, the alliance management issues of the sort discussed in this book exist. The more that is at stake for any one member, the greater the discord. Yes, states form alliances because they broadly agree on issues of core military concern, but, as we will see, they form alliances in order to manage their disagreements as well.

Military alliances are, therefore, distinct from other types of security cooperation. Unfortunately, many datasets that aim to collect information on alliances for quantitative study often pool military alliances together with coalitions, nonaggression pacts, and ententes (Wilkins 2012: 57). These arrangements should not be conflated. Coalitions are ad hoc and usually built around a specific military campaign or mission set in wartime, even though states sometimes draw on their military alliances to build those coalitions. Nonaggression pacts involve states pledging not to attack one other; they do not contain promises to render assistance if a party to the agreement comes under attack by a third party. An entente – from the French for “understanding” – is, by dint of lacking a treaty basis, “a far less conspicuous form of association than alliance” and can be construed as an amiable form of geopolitical alignment (Kann 1976: 616). Nor are military alliances “concerts,” which stress “the preservation of peace and order through the negotiated adjustment of conflict” (Snyder 1997: 368). Concerts can involve the provision of mutual protection, but, as the archetypal example of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe indicates, they often serve to regulate interstate relations among states that do not necessarily see each other as friends, let alone as allies (Slantchev 2005: 579).