Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Stephen M. Walt

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801469985
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"The Origins of Alliances offers a different way of thinking about our security and thus about our diplomacy. It ought to be read by anyone with a serious interest in understanding why our foreign policy is so often self-defeating."
? New Republic

How are alliances made? In this book, Stephen M. Walt makes a significant contribution to this topic, surveying theories of the origins of international alliances and identifying the most important causes of security cooperation between states. In addition, he proposes a fundamental change in the present conceptions of alliance systems. Contrary to traditional balance-of-power theories, Walt shows that states form alliances not simply to balance power but in order to balance threats.

Walt begins by outlining five general hypotheses about the causes of alliances. Drawing upon diplomatic history and a detailed study of alliance formation in the Middle East between 1955 and 1979, he demonstrates that states are more likely to join together against threats than they are to ally themselves with threatening powers. Walt also examines the impact of ideology on alliance preferences and the role of foreign aid and transnational penetration. His analysis show, however, that these motives for alignment are relatively less important. In his conclusion, he examines the implications of "balance of threat" for U.S. foreign policy.

[1]

Introduction: Exploring Alliance Formation

This book is about the origins of alliances.1 I seek answers to questions such as these: What causes states to support one another’s foreign policy or territorial integrity? How do statesmen choose among potential threats when seeking external support? How do the great powers choose which states to protect, and how do weaker states decide whose protection to accept? In short, how do states choose their friends?

The importance of this subject is manifest.2 The forces that bring states together and drive them apart will affect the security of individual states by determining both how large a threat they face and how much help they can expect. At the same time, the factors that determine how states choose alliance partners will shape the evolution of the international system as a whole. The ability to establish durable empires, for example, will depend in large part on how potential victims respond. Will they work together to thwart these ambitions, or can a potential hegemon keep its opposition isolated and weak? Does aggression become easier with each new conquest, or does resistance increase at a faster rate?

Failure to understand the origins of alliances can be fatal. In the Franco-Prussian War, for example, France entered the war confident that Austria-Hungary would soon join it in battle against Prussia. When the Austrians chose to remain neutral (a decision Bismarck’s diplomacy had encouraged), a key element of French strategy collapsed.3 In the decades before World War I, Germany’s leaders ignored the possibility of a Franco-Russian alliance (1892) and an Anglo-Russian entente (1907), only to be surprised when their own actions helped create the very alignments they had believed were impossible.4 In much the same way, Japan’s leaders were convinced that their alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy would deter the United States from opposing their expansion in the Far East. They could not have been more wrong; the formation of the Axis encouraged the United States to resist Japanese expansion even more vigorously and to move closer to its wartime alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union.5

In each of these cases, the error lay in a faulty understanding of the causes of alliances. As a result, these states adopted grand strategies that were seriously flawed. In the simplest terms, a state’s grand strategy is a theory explaining how it can “cause” security for itself.6 Strategy is thus a set of hypotheses or predictions: if we do A, B, and C, the desired results X, Y, and Z will follow. Ideally, a statement of grand strategy should explain why these results are likely to obtain and provide appropriate evidence. Because the challenges one may face and the capabilities one can employ will be affected by the behavior of other states (e.g., will they help, remain neutral, or oppose?), the hypotheses that statesmen accept about the origins of alliances should play a major role in determining the strategies they select. The success of these policies will depend on whether the hypotheses they embrace are correct.

THE DEBATE

The United States offers no exception to these principles. More than anything else, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union has been a competition for allies. As a result, many recurring debates over the conduct of U.S. foreign policy ultimately rest on disagreements about the causes of alliances. The policies that have emerged depend on which hypotheses of alliance formation were endorsed. The question is whether or not these hypotheses are correct. Answering this question is the principal goal of this book.

One central issue is how states respond to threats. Do states seek allies in order to balance a threatening power, or are they more likely to bandwagon with the most threatening state? This basic question lies at the heart of a host of policy issues. For example, should the United States increase its military spending and its commitment to NATO to prevent the growth of Soviet military power from causing the “Finlandization” of Europe? Alternatively, should the United States do less so its allies will do more? Similarly, will the fall of the Shah and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan drive the Gulf states into a pro-Soviet position, or are they more likely to join forces with the United States and one another? The answer depends on whether states most often ally to oppose a threatening power or try to appease it.

Throughout the Cold War, U.S. statesmen have consistently embraced the latter view. As the “Basic National Security Policy” formulated by the National Security Council in 1953 stated: “If our allies were uncertain about our ability or will to counter Soviet aggression, they would be strongly tempted to adopt a neutralist position.”7 “Pactomania” was the logical result. In the same way, the lengthy involvement of the United States in Vietnam was justified by the widespread fear that U.S. allies would defect if the United States withdrew. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it: “America’s alliances are at the heart of the maintenance of peace, and if it should be discovered that the pledge of America was worthless, the structure of peace would crumble and we would be well on our way to a terrible catastrophe.”8 Because U.S. statesmen have believed that allies are attracted by displays of strength and will, they have sought to preserve an image of credibility and military superiority despite the obvious costs.9

A second issue is whether states with similar internal characteristics are more likely to ally than states whose domestic orders are different. The early debates over the implementation of containment, for example, were due in part to disagreements on this point. Where George F. Kennan saw the Communist bloc as prone to ideological rifts and internal divisions (and therefore vulnerable to U.S. blandishments), his opponents in the Truman administration saw the Communist world as a cohesive ideological alliance that had to be confronted militarily because it could not be dissolved through positive inducements. Different beliefs about what held the Soviet alliance system together thus gave rise to very different policy prescriptions.10 Since then, U.S. opposition to leftist and Marxist movements throughout the world has been based primarily on the belief that ideological solidarity will make these regimes loyal allies of the Soviet Union.11 Here again, an unstated hypothesis about the causes of alignment has been a key element of contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

Finally, can certain policy instruments cause other states to alter their alliance preferences? In particular, can the provision of economic or military aid create loyal allies? How easily and how reliably? Are foreign agents, advisers, and propaganda effective instruments of influence or control? The belief that these instruments will have a significant effect on alliance choices underlies U.S. concern for Soviet arms shipments to the Third World as well as the widespread conviction that states with a large Soviet or Cuban presence are reliable tools of the Kremlin.12 Once again, an important element of U.S. national security policy rests on an untested assertion about the effectiveness of certain instruments on alignment.

These popular hypotheses paint a dramatic picture of U.S. insecurity. The belief that states are attracted to strength implies that any appearance of weakness or irresolution could damage the international position of the United States irreparably. The belief that ideology is a powerful cause of alignment implies that virtually all Marxist governments and leftist movements are reliable Soviet assets. And if foreign aid or foreign agents can create loyal satellites, then the United States is also threatened when non-Marxist countries receive material support from the Soviet Union. If these hypotheses are correct, in short, the United States faces an extraordinary challenge.

THE ARGUMENT

In the pages that follow, I argue that each of those beliefs is exaggerated. First, I demonstrate that balancing is far more common than bandwagoning. In contrast to traditional balance of power theorists, however, I suggest that states ally to balance against threats rather than against power alone. Although the distribution of power is an extremely important factor, the level of threat is also affected by geographic proximity, offensive capabilities, and perceived intentions. Thus I propose balance of threat theory as a better alternative than balance of power theory.

Second, the evidence shows that ideology is less powerful than balancing as a motive for alignment. Indeed, I argue that many apparently ideological alliances are in fact a form of balancing behavior. The record also shows that certain ideologies are extremely divisive. In other words, states sharing these ideologies are more likely to compete than to form durable alliances.

Third, I conclude that neither foreign aid nor political penetration is by itself a powerful cause of alignment. Even more important, neither is an effective way to gain leverage except under very unusual conditions.

Taken together, these results help explain why the international position of the United States is extremely favorable and likely to remain so. Because states balance against threats, (not against power alone), the United States has been able to create and sustain a global alliance whose capabilities exceed those of the Soviet Union and its own allies by a considerable margin. Ideological rifts (e.g., the Sino-Soviet split) reinforce Soviet isolation. Neither extensive foreign aid nor covert political penetration is likely to alter these tendencies.

Once we understand the origins of alliances, we can correctly judge the burden of preserving U.S. national security. It is relatively light. We can also see how recent U.S. foreign policy has been misguided, and we can identify how present errors can be corrected. Thus an enhanced theoretical understanding of the origins of alliances will yield important practical results as well.

THE ALLIANCE LITERATURE

Although the literature on alliances is enormous, much of it does not address the questions identified here.13 Most of the existing research on alliances has examined other issues, such as whether there is a relationship between alliance formation and the likelihood of war and whether the rate of alliance formation fits some specified mathematical model.14 Similarly, although the extensive collective goods literature on alliances implicitly assumes that alliances are created to provide security against threats, these models focus on explaining the distribution of burdens within existing alliances rather than on explaining why the alliances were formed in the first place.15

Nevertheless, a number of works do examine the origins of alliances. Among the traditional works on international politics are many accounts of individual alliances and several important theoretical treatments. Hans Morgenthau’s classic Politics among Nations, for example, contains a lengthy discussion of alliances supported by a variety of historical illustrations. Similar analyses are provided by George Liska and Robert L. Rothstein. Like Morgenthau, Liska relies on anecdotal evidence to support his points, whereas Rothstein bases his conclusions on case studies of Belgium and the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia) in the 1920s and 1930s.16

The traditional literature almost always falls within the broad compass of balance of power theory, although other hypotheses appear as well. Thus Liska writes that “alliances are against, and only derivatively for, someone or something,” and Morgenthau refers to alliances as “a necessary function of the balance of power operating in a multiple state system.”17 At the same time, however, Liska suggests that “alignment…may [also] express ideological or ethnic affinities,” and he states that “opportunistic alignments” may occur when a state believes that the effort to balance power will fail.18 To complicate matters further, Paul Schroeder has argued that alliances are formed either to (1) oppose a threat, (2) accommodate a threat through a “pact of restraint,” or (3) provide the great powers with a “tool of management” over weaker states19 In short, although most of the traditional literature relies heavily on balance of power concepts, doubts remain regarding the universal applicability of this hypothesis.

A limitation of the traditional approach is that its proponents rarely offer systematic tests of general hypotheses. Although Liska provides many apt examples, he does not attempt to assess the relative validity of his many interesting propositions. Case studies o...

Table of contents

• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Exploring Alliance Formation
• 2. Explaining Alliance Formation
• 3. From the Baghdad Pact to the Six Day War
• 4. From the Six Day War to the Camp David Accords
• 5. Balancing and Bandwagoning
• 6. Ideology and Alliance Formation
• 7. The Instruments of Alliance: Aid and Penetration
• 8. Conclusion: Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power
• Appendix 1: Alliances and Alignments in the Middle East, 1955–1979
• Appendix 2: The Balance of World Power
• Bibliography