Читать книгу Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka - Страница 18

Any discussion of why states establish alliances must begin with at least three observations about international politics. The first is that states form and sustain their military alliances in an anarchic international environment. No higher governmental authority exists above the state – none that can make and enforce rules that states would feel, for whatever reason, they have little choice but to obey. Accordingly, states are uncertain about the intentions of others, be they allies or adversaries, because the absence of a higher authority compounds the difficulties of getting reliable information about what others are planning to do. There is lively scholarly debate about the nature of uncertainty in world politics (see Rathbun 2007) or the meaning of anarchy (see Nedal and Nexon 2019), but the point is that some degree of uncertainty ultimately exists in international relations.

The second observation is that violence not only is possible under anarchy, but can, in the extreme, lead to the elimination of a state or its governing political system (Fazal 2007). This potential for violence raises the stakes for international cooperation. Some states may be able to wield sufficient capabilities that they can defend against most threats without needing the support of others. Most states are not so fortunate and thus may have to seek outside assistance in order to get a handle on the challenges that they face. Precisely because of the high stakes that are involved, alliance decisions can be emotional, sometimes turning on fear, distrust, and even anger. That alliance politics can have a strong emotional dimension does not automatically imply irrational behavior. A park visitor would be right to be afraid of a hungry grizzly bear in his or her path, but some responses to mitigate that danger are more sensible than others.

The third observation is that states have different interests that they wish to advance in their foreign policymaking. Of course, many states want the same things: territorial integrity, freedom to determine their foreign and domestic policies, economic prosperity, higher welfare for their citizens, and safety from harm. Nevertheless, that interests often overlap does not imply that states are all favorably predisposed to the status quo or that they interpret the status quo in the same way. Their leaders might have conflicting beliefs on how to obtain those goods – some might even be hostile to the status quo, valuing expansion over security (Schweller 1996: 106–7). Alternatively, states might value the same things but have different priorities, creating disagreement over which matters most. Because we live in a world of scarcity, whether in terms of material resources, time, or attention, states must make choices about which capabilities to develop and how they should use them to achieve their desired ends. Compounding these issues is the problem of modernity, which John Ikenberry (2020: 14) describes “as the set of deep, worldwide transformations in domestic and international society unleashed by the forces of science, technology, and industrialism” that began in the eighteenth century. Modernity means that different societies, and the states that govern them, can exhibit varying levels of development and so have contrasting preferences or ideas on how to achieve wealth and prosperity. Such discord can exist despite how, or perhaps because, societies around the world have become increasingly connected with one another. How to organize relations in such a complex global system itself can be an object of contention. International politics, in a nutshell, is about states often having conflicting interests and values in an environment where violence is possible, where no overarching supreme authority is available to act as a referee.

These three basic observations about international politics do not imply a single theory for what drives alliance formation. After all, military alliances can be either offensive or defensive. Offensive alliances, which help states coordinate an attack against others, are relatively simple to grasp. Jack Levy (1981: 590) finds that military alliances were often offensive prior to 1815, with their founding treaties calling for the use of force even in the absence of an external military attack. Following the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), the offensive alliance became a very rare form of international political organization, at least as far as the public record is concerned. Still, according to Randall Schweller (1994: 79, 87), states sometimes bandwagon for profit, forming offensive alliances with a more powerful state to “share in the spoils of victory” as well as “to improve their position.” For example, the leaders of Austria, France, and Spain came together in 1508 as the League of Cambrai in a bid to divide Venetian territory amongst themselves. Fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini overcame his initial reservations about Adolf Hitler and signed his country to the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany in March 1939. Though blindsided by the German invasion of Poland later that year, Mussolini participated in the Battle of France after some delay in June 1940. In each case, leaders held a shared belief that the status quo was undesirable and that their partnership would allow them to revise it in a mutually satisfactory manner.

The vast majority of military alliances are defensive in character, however. Yet the notion of a defensive alliance is a misnomer, for defensive military alliances do not serve to fight defensively as much as they serve to deter war. Indeed, defensive military alliances practice extended deterrence. Deterrence refers here to how military alliances strive to prevent war by communicating to an adversary that the costs of aggression are too high for it to be worthwhile. Extended deterrence is a form of deterrence put into practice by a defender that wishes to prevent external aggression against another state – typically, a treaty ally. A defensive military alliance need not have to demonstrate that it would win a potential war for (extended) deterrence to work, but it must somehow convey that it has the political will, military capability, and resolve to inflict unacceptable pain on an adversary that it believes to be against the status quo (Jervis 1979). Deterrence is admittedly a deceptively simple concept. Just because an adversary has not acted aggressively does not necessarily mean that deterrence has worked. The adversary may never have had a desire to attack, making successful deterrence an illusion and thus a false positive (Lebow and Stein 1995). Divining adversarial intentions can be tricky, and with the stakes being sometimes existential, countries feel that they must err on the side of caution to undertake measures, like forming military alliances, to augment deterrence. And finally, deterrence does not imply having a militarily defensive strategy. Sometimes going on the offence is the best way to impose costs if deterrence fails.