Читать книгу Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka - Страница 21

A major weakness of both sets of arguments discussed above – that alliances are formed to face threats and help states to extract small power concessions (and thus to gain influence) – is that they leave unexplained the existence of a treaty. States can collaborate in face of a threat without having to sign a treaty. Alarmed by Iran, the countries of Israel and Saudi Arabia have improved their ties despite the historical animosity that they felt for one another. Their security personnel and their defense officials have met on multiple occasions. Saudi Arabia has apparently signaled its “willingness to provide Israel an air corridor and air bases for rescue helicopters, tanker aircraft and drones in case Israel decided to bomb the Iranian nuclear facility” (Abadi 2019: 444). No alliance seems probable between them, however. Similarly, uneasy about the rise of China, Vietnam has signed memoranda of understanding and enhanced defense cooperation with Australia and Japan, but has so far not signed an alliance treaty with either (Liff 2016: 450). In the book in which he advances the theory that states forge alliances to balance threats, Walt (1987) considers both formal treaty alliances and informal alignments. As I highlight in Chapter 5, many coalitions of states have been formed in wartime and fought effectively against their adversaries, despite not having an alliance treaty beforehand. Leaders of states should just as easily be able to communicate their intention to stand firm against an adversary through public statements. In this vein, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged to defend Canada in a thinly veiled reference to Nazi Germany when he accepted an honorary doctorate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1938 (Granatstein 2020: 145).

Strong states should not have to sign treaties if they wish to extract concessions from smaller states. They should be able to do so by dint of their strength alone, in keeping with the oft-repeated notion that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer as they must.” Strong states presumably have options other than alliance commitment if they wish to safeguard another state from external attack. As the United States did with Saudi Arabia between the 1990–1 Gulf War and 2003, a great power can station its forces on the partner’s territory in the absence of an alliance treaty. Another option is to provide security assistance. This can involve the transfer of weapons, especially those that are largely defensive in character so as to lower the risk of the recipient starting an unwanted war of its own. The United States decided against extending a treaty commitment to Israel in the 1960s and the 1970s, but stepped up its arms transfers in part to ensure that Israel would not be outmatched by its Arab rivals. Not long after abrogating a treaty alliance with Taiwan in 1979, the United States supplied it with weapons as a means of deterring China from launching an assault across the strait (see Yarhi-Milo et al. 2016). As former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro once remarked, “[w]hen a country acquires an advanced US defense system, they are not simply buying a product to enhance their security, they are also seeking a relationship with the United States” (2012: 20).

International relations scholar James Morrow (2000) argues that states write down their alliances because doing so serves to signal commitment. Recall how “defensive alliances” really aim to deter war rather than to fight a war on the defensive. But to deter a war, a state, or a group thereof, must communicate to its adversary which actions are unacceptable, what consequences would follow if those actions are undertaken, and, significantly, how resolved it is to follow through on imposing those consequences, provided that it has the will and capacity to do so. One prerequisite to deterrence is assurance: the notion that promises will be kept and good behavior will not be exploited. Assurance is key to defensive alliances just as much as deterrence, with respect to both allies and adversaries. States need to determine whether an ally will truly come to their aid in the event of an attack. They will look for, and oftentimes ask for, statements or gestures that indicate that the ally has every intention of adhering to its pledges.

Unfortunately, communication in international politics is not straightforward precisely because the anarchic environment creates uncertainty: states can say one thing but do another, without worrying too much about being held to account by a higher authority. There is no one thing that all states can say or do to achieve deterrence or assurance. Otherwise, every state would then be doing that one thing. Statements of interests can thus be muddy.

The solution to this problem is to take actions that are costly enough that not every state would perform them. Costs come in two forms: ex ante and ex post. Ex ante costs refer to sunk costs that states must pay before performing an action; they can include buying armaments and deploying military personnel abroad. Ex post costs reflect measures that may not be felt immediately but nevertheless can constrain future decision-making options (Fearon 1997: 70). According to this rationalist perspective, only in rare cases when interests are completely and obviously aligned – that is to say, identical and harmonious – would states not have to pay costs to demonstrate their support for one another. As may be possibly true of Israel and the United States, “the shared interest carries the entire relationship, and therefore that relationship need not be negotiated formally” (Morrow 2000: 64).

According to Morrow (2000), treaty alliances help to signal interests and, as an ex post cost, to make binding commitments. Indeed, “alliances are institutions” that help to define “the rules of the game” by creating greater predictability in what states are trying to achieve in their foreign relations (Keohane 1988: 184; North 1991: 3). To begin with, states usually have to ratify their international agreements through their domestic legislatures. Treaty ratification can be particularly difficult and time-consuming in multiparty democracies where opposition groups may have reasons for opposing the foreign policy initiatives of the executive. A country’s leadership cannot embark on a treaty alliance capriciously lest it loses domestic support over the issue (Morrow 2000: 72). In order to enhance its international reputation, the state leadership will presumably only endure the pains of treaty-making if it believes that it has enough shared interests with another state to do so. Simply put, an alliance treaty – once signed and ratified – indicates to others that the signatory states have common interests.

An alliance treaty also generates ex post costs by way of tying hands and, therefore, creating commitments. Signing a treaty might only be worth the cost of the paper on which it was written at the outset, but it conveys the state’s intent to come militarily to the aid of another under certain conditions. The public nature of such a treaty creates reputation costs that the signatory state would incur if it decides to renege on promises made to its ally. That signatory state might come to be seen as duplicitous and an unreliable partner for others that confront similar challenges. Faced with greater distrust, the unreliable state would be forced to make more concessions in order to assure potential allies in the future. The ex post costs can also be domestic, especially in a democracy. If domestic legislators ratify a treaty, then they may not wish to see the executive violate the agreement when its obligations are operative, because the national interest, in their view, would be harmed as a result. No such constraints purportedly exist in the absence of a treaty. As such, leaders may feel that they have to fulfill their alliance commitments (Gaubatz 1996; Leeds and Savun 2007; Leeds et al. 2009).

Morrow’s view has become standard in international relations theory, but it has certain conceptual weaknesses. The first weakness touches on whether shepherding an alliance treaty through domestic legislative processes allows the state to signal its interests more clearly to others. States are certainly selective concerning the treaties they sign and ratify, suggesting that, if they have done so, then they were interested enough in striking those agreements. That said, foreign policy interests are not static. If such a signal is sent with the formation of a military alliance, then its strength can easily dissipate over time as new political leaders take power, resources become more or less available, and geopolitical events have the effect of changing citizens’ attitudes and policy priorities (see, e.g., Gartzke and Gleditsch 2004). Even the example of the United States and Israel highlights that interests are not at all harmonious despite what leading theories of alliance formation might imply. President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clashed over issues like Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Iran’s nuclear program (Gilboa 2013: 20–1). Such disagreements should presumably create more pressure for a treaty. Further, whether legislators, and their voters, care about foreign policy, much less military alliances, is an empirical question with no clear answer. In the United States, for example, Congress has historically deferred to the president on foreign policy issues, at least before the Vietnam War. Even afterwards, the White House still “matters more than Congress,” although that is not to say that Congress has no influence on foreign policy, given that it controls the purse strings (Lindsay 1992/3: 608). Finally, there is a question about how reputation costs are generated. Suppose that legislators do care about foreign policy issues and have the capacity to punish the executive when it undertakes actions that are contrary to the national interest. Setting aside the implicit assumption that national interests transcend partisanship and other parochial interests (Trubowitz 1998), legislators and voting publics might still forgive the violation of an alliance treaty if they believe that the risks and costs of compliance outweigh its benefits. After all, fulfilling a treaty commitment could mean a devastating, unwelcome war. As discussed in Chapter 2, reputation concerns are but one of many inputs that figure into a decision to fight, if they matter at all.

So why, then, have written alliances? It may seem that “[a]lliances require specification because the allies need to clarify their degree of shared interests, both to each other and to others outside the alliance” (Morrow 2000: 64). Confirming this view, as discussed in the next chapter, is that states do use treaties to attach escape clauses or specify key conditions about the scope of their commitment, thereby preventing their ally from abusing their military support. However, this view is incomplete. There is not much that is specific in the Washington Treaty, for example. Article V, so often seen as the gold standard of alliance commitments, provides that NATO countries:

agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them … will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. (NATO 1949 [2019])

Most of the specificity contained in the most important article of the Washington Treaty concerns geography – a major issue of contention, to be sure, in light of how several European countries still had colonies in adjacent regions and even further afield when the treaty was signed (see Coker 1982). Indeed, Article VI further delineates the territorial scope of Article 5 and notes that the attack could be “on the forces, vessels, or aircraft” of members in Europe, on the Mediterranean Sea, or in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer. But there is no automatic obligation to do anything even when an attack occurs. No details are given on what assistance is necessary. Mira Rapp-Hooper (2015: 16) finds that alliance treaties have become much vaguer since the Second World War relative to their pre-war antecedents. Still, alliances require at once specification and ambiguity. Written treaties ironically allow for both.

The reason why anyone would want to have a signed agreement is to avoid a future misunderstanding by managing expectations regarding how the signatories are to behave across a range of possible scenarios. Such expectations can be managed not only by defining the conditions under which the main provisions of an alliance treaty become operative, but also by leaving vague as to what might constitute an attack. Clarity can convey to allies and adversaries an intent to advance certain interests internationally and to highlight a willingness to defend militarily a common set of values. Nevertheless, enough ambiguity can allow states sufficient wiggle room to extricate themselves from an alliance obligation if so desired. Adversaries know well enough that a direct attack of some sort would precipitate an alliance reaction, but the vagueness keeps them in the dark as to which scenarios would produce a particular kind of reaction and which would not. The downside, of course, is that adversaries might still exploit this ambiguity in order to see what they can get away with. Not having a public treaty creates too much ambiguity over interests, but no alliance treaty can be completely unambiguous too. Excessive clarity is impossible because an alliance treaty cannot cover every single contingency, especially when looking further into the future. But even if a high level of clarity is possible, it would be impractical and even useless because states will simply adapt or exploit new opportunities as technology evolves, political priorities are adjusted, and threat perceptions change. With too much precision, adversaries would know how to work around a treaty to their own advantage – for example, whether to attack in ways that stop short of clear red lines. When we explore entrapment risks in the next chapter, we will see that states often design their treaty commitments to mitigate such concerns.

Another reason to have a written agreement is that it indicates who is in and who is out. Put another way, the choice is not only whether to sign a treaty with one state, but whether to sign the same treaty with multiple states. Military alliances can be either bilateral or multilateral, with contrasting benefits and shortcomings for each. John Ikenberry (2005: 146–7) argues that the United States opted for bilateral alliances in East Asia because it saw less need to give up policy autonomy to partners that were much more differentiated in size than in Europe. Bilateral alliances are thus easier to manage and so can provide a strong state with more flexibility and greater control over its weaker counterpart (see also Cha 2016). In contrast, the United States preferred multilateralism in Europe because it had a much more ambitious agenda that went beyond simply deterring the Soviet Union – one that required the partnership of “roughly equal-sized states” in order to consolidate centrist democratic governance. A multilateral arrangement like NATO would allay concerns over domination because it provided those partners with more opportunities to articulate their policy demands and to restrain the United States (Ikenberry 2005: 146–7). More cynically, some argue that racial prejudices have shaped alliance decisions – as Christopher Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein (2002), for example, allege in their explanation for why no NATO equivalent exists in East Asia. In their reading, US decision-makers saw East Asian leaders as culturally alien and lacking the racial fitness necessary for multilateral cooperation. This argument may be taking it too far. In Europe, geography and the ground threat posed by the Red Army encouraged a common front, whereas the maritime environment and the difficulties of projecting power over water lessened such a need. Moreover, countries have a say in whether they prefer bilateralism or multilateralism. The United States was, and has been, in fact keen on connecting its bilateral allies in East Asia (Izumiwaka 2020). Unfortunately for Washington, many of them were too suspicious of Japan, so formal multilateral defense pacts were invariably stillborn (Robb and Gill 2019: 161–3). For their part, Japanese leaders themselves were reluctant to build regional security institutions (Izumiwaka 2020: 26–9) Deciding against multilateralism does not imply a total aversion to fostering wider defense ties, but it can indicate a wish to avoid being exposed in the disputes of others. As such, bilateralism lends clarity to the limits of alignment within a wider bloc of states, although states are increasingly opting for multilateral arrangements over bilateral ones (Kuo 2021).

Regardless of the format, a treaty alliance allows for greater efficiency in security cooperation. Of course, greater efficiency does not necessarily imply actual efficiency. At a minimum, uncertainty over intentions and differences in capabilities will put bounds on how credible their alliance will be. That said, a written alliance gives signatories enough confidence that, if they so choose, they can pursue further military coordination, including the drawing up of war plans. This in turn can foster a degree of institutionalization that enables the alliance to weather variable conditions. Arguably, decision-makers sign alliances in part because they anticipate that threat perceptions will shift. Alliances help “lock-in” cooperation so as to mitigate any adverse consequences those changing threat perceptions might have. Interests between prospective allies are already divergent enough at the time of signature for the treaty to be able to manage those differences. Whether by attaching escape clauses or by injecting some ambiguity in the treaty language, states can discourage undesirable behavior on the part of their ally. By treading the fine line between uncertainty and clarity, states can take their security relationship to the next level. Perhaps that is one reason why arms transfers are not a perfect substitute for treaty alliances: arms transfers complement alliances more often than they substitute for them. At least since 2001, according to one study, “the United States sells over twice as much to allies as to nonallies” (Thrall et al. 2020: 113).