1  Cover

      2  Dedication

      3  Title Page

      4  Copyright Page

      5  Tables and Figure

      6  Acknowledgments

      7  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

      8  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

      9  2 Entrapment What Is Entrapment? Treaty risks Systemic risks Reputational risks Transnational ideological risks Entrapment Risks in the Contemporary Era

      10  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

      11  4 Burden-sharing Burden-sharing in Theory and History How Advances in Military Technology Shape Burden-sharing The growing complexity of conventional military power The paradoxes of nuclear weapons Burden-sharing Controversies in the Contemporary Era

      12  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

      13  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

      14  Conclusion