Читать книгу Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka - Страница 20

A second common explanation of alliance formation looks less at threat perceptions and focuses more on the differences in military power that potential allies can bring to the table. To be sure, the arms versus alliances trade-off mentioned earlier suggests that stronger states should be more reluctant to forge alliances than their weaker counterparts. After all, a strong state presumably can generate enough military power to withstand threats on its own – at minimum, it should be less reliant on others. If weaker states form alliances, then the aim should be to use those alliances to balance against the strongest states.

And yet, as already noted, the most powerful state today – the United States – has the most allies, many of which lack sufficient military power to deter adversaries on their own. In fact, most existing alliances today are asymmetric – that is, alliances in which military power is largely concentrated in one member. The Mutual Defense Treaty between the Philippines and the United States is one example of an asymmetric alliance. North Korea’s alliance with China is another. Yet these arrangements are puzzling. Should these weaker allies not fear domination by their stronger patron as well? Why would a strong state form a pact with a much weaker state – one that might even be a liability in a war if it is unable to defend itself from another great power? Are such partnerships not superfluous if the great power can rely on its nuclear weapons arsenal as the ultimate source for its security?

One simple answer to all these questions is that asymmetric alliances often reflect mutually beneficial bargains, whereby the strong state and the weak state have overlapping interests but derive different benefits. Consider how the strong state has more security than that of the weak state. The latter may have autonomy, but it does not have security against a particular threat due to its lack of relative military power. Scholars like James Morrow thus argue that the strong state trades away some of its security to the weaker state in return for policy concessions that reduce the latter’s autonomy (1991: 914). These concessions can include hosting military bases and giving access to strategic locations useful for projecting power. The strong state may even win rights to shape the domestic and foreign policy of the weaker state. Alternatively, the strong state could have greater input in shaping the language and content of the alliance treaty – a point to which we will return when we discuss entrapment (Johnson 2015). What the weak state gets in return is a security guarantee against another state that it fears much more, whether for ideological or military reasons. Shared threat perceptions provide the basis for the partnership, but a loss of autonomy on the part of the weaker state seals the deal.

To what extent is this view correct? It seemingly has much going for it. The United States had military bases or forward deployed military assets in all of its most important treaty partners – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom – at one point or another during the Cold War. In many allied countries, it still retains a major military presence, although in some cases allies have tried to expel US military forces, or, at least, alter the terms of basing agreements, amid major domestic political change (Cooley 2008). Moreover, Washington and Moscow did occasionally intervene in the affairs of their allies during the Cold War, with the most spectacular episodes being those within the Soviet bloc. The Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 come to mind. Still, in the 1950s and the 1960s, the US intelligence community quietly contributed funds to Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the conservative political party that would go on to dominate Japanese politics, and has done so ever since (Williams 2020). After the Cold War ended, those states that aspired to join NATO agreed to make a number of changes in their military organizations in order to qualify. Some scholars argue that the more troops that a major power has stationed on a weaker ally’s territory, the more that weaker ally is subordinate to the authority of that major power (Lake 2011).

Nevertheless, the notion that reciprocal bargains exist of the sort postulated here has its problems. To begin with, although a weak state may provide military basing rights to a stronger state, it may not necessarily be a policy concession. In fact, the opposite may be true: forward military basing could be a concession that the great power makes to the weaker state. One reason why the United States stationed as many as a quarter of a million military personnel in West Germany in the Cold War was to strengthen the alliance, rendering Washington’s promises to fight – using nuclear weapons, no less – on its European ally’s behalf more believable by making any major Soviet invasion of its territory less likely to succeed without incurring massive cost. Indeed, the historical record features many allied leaders worrying that the United States might withdraw forces, thereby leaving them vulnerable to external aggression (Lanoszka 2018b). Moreover, it is unclear whether an alliance per se can grant major powers the right to interfere in the domestic and foreign policymaking of their weaker partner. The United States may have intervened in Italy’s general elections in 1948, but this was one year before NATO was founded. The Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact in 1955, partly in response to West Germany’s incorporation in NATO. But by this time, it had already shaped the domestic and foreign policies of many of the alliance’s members. If anything, Warsaw Pact members were able to assert their status as independent countries by using the formal alliance to demand concessions from the Soviet Union, making the organization less hierarchical over time. Documentary evidence shows Warsaw Pact leaders in Poland and East Germany pushing the Soviet leadership in the Kremlin to intervene in neighboring Czechoslovakia in order to put a stop to the Prague Spring and its liberalizing tendencies (Crump 2015). Amid public criticism that the alliance was too one-sided and domineering, US decision-makers agreed to renegotiate the 1951 Security Treaty with Japan, thus making the alliance ultimately much less intrusive within Japanese domestic politics (Swenson-Wright 2005). The LDP also benefited from the covert support that it may have received from the United States. North Korea arguably conceded little in the two separate alliances that it forged with China and the Soviet Union in 1961.

If asymmetrical alliances are not entirely the result of concessions made by their weaker members, then what explains them? Why, to reiterate the puzzle, is the United States able to accumulate so many allies? Geography is one possible explanation. Specifically, the United States is separated from most of its allies by oceans. Thanks to physical distance, allies have less reason to fear it and so they are much more concerned with threats closer to home. They can leverage support from Washington to help deter nearby adversaries. The problem with this explanation – intuitive though it may be – is that geography is a double-edged sword. The United States may be less threatening because it is far away, but it may also be less militarily useful – and perhaps even unreliable – because it has to make up a lot of distance if it wishes to fight an adversary alongside a far-flung ally. Moreover, geographically contiguous states can be allies, and very good ones at that. Canada may fear the domination of US cultural products in its own domestic marketplace; it can even be anxious about preserving its own autonomy. Nevertheless, it does not fear a land invasion given that it engages in defense cooperation with the United States (Bow 2009). Joseph Jockel and Joel Sokolsky (2009: 323–4) even argue that Ottawa enjoys an “involuntary guarantee” from Washington because so many Canadians live close to the US border. In Central Asia, states such as Kazakhstan participate in the CSTO, of which Russia is the most powerful country. They too worry about their autonomy vis-à-vis the Kremlin, but they still willingly engage in some joint military exercises and other forms of military-to-military cooperation (Costa Buranelli 2018: 389). Of course, geographically contiguous allies may sometimes lack agency and be subject to domination because the powerful state projects a preponderance of power over them. At the beginning, many Warsaw Pact countries took directives from Moscow in part because the local presence of commissars and the Red Army had an outsized impact on local domestic politics (see Rice 1984). Geography is not destiny.

There are, of course, benefits in allying with a weaker state. The example of the Soviet bloc suggests how political control over domestic and foreign policy can be one such benefit, but again such control is often incomplete and can dissipate over time (Cooley and Spruyt 2009). A second benefit is to acquire so-called defense-in-depth. In military parlance, defense-in-depth refers to a strategy where an attacker must confront successively robust layers of defensive points designed to absorb the first blow, delay the attacker’s forces, and buy time for the defender to respond. A third, cruder benefit is that allies can be buffer states if they provide a battleground away from the territory of the great power where fighting with the adversary will first take place. The Soviet presence in East Germany and Poland offered Moscow this defense-in-depth against Western Europe, which it did not really have prior to the Second World War. Still, a defense-in-depth strategy or a buffer zone is no good if allies wrangle with each other. In cases where allies have a history of acrimonious relations with one another, extending security guarantees to each of them can help diffuse tensions by reassuring them both that their interests are heeded. The US military presence in Europe has, arguably, had this stabilizing effect. By becoming a European power in its own right during the Cold War, the United States inserted itself between France and West Germany, allaying concerns that the historical antagonisms they had for each other could resurface and would lead each to take up their disputes with military force again.

A fourth possible benefit to military alliances is that they facilitate such military cooperation as joint military exercises, interoperability, and personnel exchanges. Military alliances are not entirely necessary in order to create this particular benefit, but they can provide an institutional foundation for their continuous and regular operation. True interoperability requires reducing uncertainty and so can benefit from technological transfers, unified command systems, intelligence sharing, and other cooperative endeavors that allies would not consider doing for those that they fear would almost certainly renege on their pledges. Of course, these institutional foundations may or may not be of service if the great power needs to cobble together a coalition of states to undertake a military campaign. As Chapter 5 highlights, major problems of interoperability can persist and hamper those military operations that even longstanding allies undertake. Finally, having an ally on one side may in some cases be better than having it in the enemy’s camp. For example, the ally might be positioned near key waterways or other sites of strategic interest that could be useful for projecting power in a wartime situation. Turkey has been consistently valuable to NATO precisely because of its location vis-à-vis the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Put together, it is unclear whether great powers really do give up their security to weaker states if such arrangements can augment their sense of security as well.

A version of the concession-extraction argument holds that alliance formation can result from an expansionist foreign policy that is pursued for its own sake. This sort of argument has gained currency in recent years among those critics of US foreign policy who allege that Washington has taken on too many alliance commitments as part of a global liberal crusade or hegemonic project (Posen 2014; Mearsheimer 2018). Allies might not necessarily have made concessions, to be sure, but alliances still serve to project influence in the pursuit of a grand ideological initiative. As an explanation for alliance formation, this thesis overlooks how the United States has been uneven in advancing liberalism abroad (Jervis 2020: 18–19). After all, Taiwan is a successful liberal democracy but receives no such treaty commitment from the United States despite Taipei’s eagerness to have one. Nevertheless, it is possible that the United States emerged from the Cold War victorious and with so much power that it sought to exploit the situation by trying to widen its authority even more (Mearsheimer 2018). Again, if Washington aimed at achieving global hegemony, then the willingness of small states to jump on that bandwagon rather than oppose it still requires explanation. Part of the answer may be that, for democratic states especially, the United States is an attractive partner because its democratic constitution and willingness to use international institutions, however selective this may occasionally be, make it less likely to dominate other states (Ikenberry 2001). But even this explanation is incomplete. Not only should the United States be nonthreatening to potential allies, but, as the previous discussion suggests, those potential allies should likely perceive to some degree the same threats that the United States perceives.