Alliance politics is a regular headline grabber. When a possible military crisis involving Russia, North Korea, or China rears its head, leaders and citizens alike raise concerns over the willingness of US allies to stand together. As rival powers have tightened their security cooperation, the United States has stepped up demands that its allies increase their defense spending and contribute more to military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. The prospect of former President Donald Trump unilaterally ending alliances alarmed longstanding partners, even as NATO was welcoming new members into its ranks.
Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to explore fully the politics that shape these security arrangements – from their initial formation through the various challenges that test them and, sometimes, lead to their demise. Across six thematic chapters, Alexander Lanoszka challenges conventional wisdom that has dominated our understanding of how military alliances have operated historically and into the present. Although military alliances today may seem uniquely hobbled by their internal difficulties, Lanoszka argues that they are in fact, by their very nature, prone to dysfunction.
Author(s): Alexander Lanoszka
Publisher: Polity
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 263
City: Cambridge
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Tables and Figure
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Arguments of this Book
Conventional wisdom #1: States form alliances to balance power and/or to gain influence over other states
Conventional wisdom #2: The alliance dilemma is a fundamental problem shared by all military alliances
Conventional wisdom #3: Members of US alliances must do more to bear their fair share of the common defense burden
Conventional wisdom #4: Military alliances aggregate capabilities and thus allow their members to confront security
challenges more effectively
Conventional wisdom #5: Military alliances are only useful for as long as the strategic circumstances that led to their
emergence hold
Defining Military Alliances
Plan of the Book
1 Formation
Uncertainty, Violence, and Political Difference
Balancing Threat as a Classic Explanation of Alliance Formation
Concession-Extraction as Another Standard Explanation of Alliance Formation
But Why Have an Alliance Treaty?
Predicting Future Military Alliances
2 Entrapment
What Is Entrapment?
Treaty risks
Systemic risks
Reputational risks
Transnational ideological risks
Entrapment Risks in the Contemporary Era
3 Abandonment
Abandonment: Natural, Rare, but Consequential
What Shapes the Intensity of Abandonment Fears?
Foreign policy interests
The military balance
Forward military deployments
Can reliability be bought?
Complications with Reassurance
Fearing Abandonment in the Early Twenty-First Century
4 Burden-sharing
Burden-sharing in Theory and History
The growing complexity of conventional military power
The paradoxes of nuclear weapons
Burden-sharing Controversies in the Contemporary Era
5 Warfare
What Is War and What Are the Trends in War?
Why Take Part in Multilateral Military Operations?
Why Military Effectiveness Is Hard for Military Alliances to Achieve
Strategic factors
Organizational factors
Technical factors
Coalition Warfare in the Contemporary Era
6 Termination
How to Get Out of an Alliance via the Alliance Treaty Itself
Fulfillment
Military defeat
Downgrading
Unilateral abrogation
Transformation
The Analytical Importance of Understanding Alliance Termination
Conclusion
Conventional wisdom #1: States form alliances to balance power, and/or to gain influence over other states
Conventional wisdom #2: The alliance dilemma is a fundamental problem shared by all military alliances
Conventional wisdom #3: Members of US alliances must do more to bear their fair share of the common defense burden
Conventional wisdom #4: Military alliances aggregate capabilities and thus allow their members to confront security
challenges more effectively
Conventional wisdom #5: Military alliances are only useful for as long as the strategic circumstances that led to their
emergence hold
Military Alliances and World Order in the Twenty-First Century
References
Index
