Do Alliances Actually Make States More Secure?

Immediately following the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, President Obama reaffirmed that the United States is prepared to provide “whatever assistance the government and the people of France need to respond.” This called to mind the Franco-American alliance, which began with the 1778 Treaty of Amity and Commerce and continues today with their membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and is a reminder of the interconnectivity of nations through longstanding military alliances, even in our current age of relative interstate peace.

The ability to deter adversarial attacks, in addition to increasing the probability of victory in war, has been a primary thrust behind military alliance formation. Historically, alliances reflected nations’ geopolitical strategies and shaped the international order. Whether or not these alliances serve a purpose has become an increasingly crucial question against the backdrop of wars in the Middle East and military budget cuts in many Western nations. A recent paper by Michael R. Kenwick, John A. Vasquez, and Matthew A. Powers addresses this question by examining the relationship between interstate conflict and defensive alliances.

Current literature is divided on the effectiveness of defensive alliances. On the one hand, the deterrence hypothesis holds that alliances deter armed conflicts by signaling the high cost, and high-risk, of a potential attack to their adversaries. On the other hand, the steps-to-war hypothesis maintains that alliances augment the possibility of conflict by increasing threat perception and subsequent aggression.

Kenwick et al. differentiate interstate conflict into two sub-categories: militarized interstate disputes (MID) and the actual initiation and occurrence of war. The authors justify this classification by arguing that an actor that initiates an MID is not responsible for escalating that dispute to war. The study examines all defensive alliances formed between 1816 and 2000 to identify whether statistically significant changes occurred in the relationship between alliances and interstate conflict in the post-Napoleonic era (1816-1945) and the Nuclear (1945-2000) era.

The authors find evidence to support the steps-to-war hypothesis; alliance formations, for the most part, were found to be positively associated with MID. Moreover, they find that the effect of alliances has changed with the introduction of nuclear weapons. Whereas in the pre-Nuclear era, alliance formations were positively associated with both the initiation of MID and the onset of war, in the Nuclear era, they reduced the likelihood of MID initiation, but not the occurrence of war.

The fact that states often choose to form defensive alliances as a consequence of perceived risks to their security suggests that states with defensive alliances may be more conflict-prone than those without defensive alliances. The authors attempt to address this bias, though they acknowledge that the problem of nonrandom selection is not completely resolved and that this prohibits them from inferring causal relationships between alliance formations and conflict.

Considering the evidence that alliances do not prevent war, policymakers should evaluate their value through other lenses. For example, the level of analysis undertaken by the authors ignores geostrategic benefits, which are hugely important in the eyes of realist international relations scholars. Policymakers should also consider the possibility and consequences of shifting alliances, which may increase the cost of sustaining alliances even further. After all, few interstate relations endure as long as the Franco-American alliance.

Article Source: Kenwick, Michael R., John A. Vasquez, and Matthew A. Powers. “Do Alliances Really Deter?” The Journal of Politics (2015).

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