Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century. Alexander Lanoszka

Читать онлайн книгу.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century - Alexander Lanoszka


Скачать книгу
in alliance politics that this book explores figured in the events of that one year, 2008. Those events have reverberations that carry through to the present day. The United States sought to form new official alliance partnerships by way of enlarging NATO further, only to be rejected by some of its longstanding partners out of fear of being entrapped in disputes with Russia they did not wish to have. Amid the fallout of a terrible economic crisis, allies began to worry that the United States might loosen its commitments to them, thereby stoking fears of abandonment. Some Obama administration officials – most notably, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – would indeed later chastise US allies for free-riding and call for more equitable burden-sharing. Part of the frustration that Gates articulated emerged from the US experience in Afghanistan, where the NATO-led mission saw not only greater US troop numbers, but European partners placing caveats that inhibited the military effectiveness of their own national forces. The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were examples of coalition warfare that saw the participation of some US allies and partners, but not others. Still, the geopolitical shifts produced by the 2008 financial crisis suggested that some alliances could eventually come to an end, if the United States was no longer able or willing to support them. Of course, no alliance was ever truly at risk of being revoked during the Obama administration, but how sustainable such commitments could be and whether some should be terminated became increasingly a matter of debate.

      That said, as the events in 2008 demonstrated, changes are afoot in world politics that portend important adjustments in US security guarantees in Europe and East Asia, on the one hand, and, on the other, military partnerships that involve China, Russia, or both. These changes are not reducible to the personal character or rhetoric of any one leader, including someone like Trump, Putin, or even Xi. Rather, these changes reflect a transforming international environment characterized by the rise of China, the roguishness of Russia, and the maturation and proliferation of once cutting-edge technologies like precision strike as well as the malicious use of cyber operations and disinformation campaigns. In fact, these changes had already begun years before Trump declared his candidacy for the US presidency, and will continue to unfold into the future. After all, alliance politics is usually marked by divergent geopolitical interests, worries about the consequences of commitment-making, and, in today’s technological context, burden-sharing controversies. These issues will shape alliance politics going forward even if Trump’s successor, Joseph Biden, has consistently spoken favorably of US military alliances. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could accelerate these trends as countries grapple with its economic and political fallout.

      Many observers agree that states form military alliances in order to aggregate power in the face of a security challenge or to gain influence over another. Sometimes both motives are operative. There is much to be said for this canonical understanding of alliance formation: it is intuitive and easy to grasp.

      Still, as shown in Chapter 1, although balancing power and influence-seeking can drive particular instances of alliance formation, these explanations are at best insufficient and may not even identify conditions necessary for states to agree to a military alliance. They indeed tend to overpredict how many alliances actually form. Most importantly, it is unclear why having a written alliance by way of a treaty is at all necessary for balancing power against adversaries or for projecting influence over would-be allies.

      Scholars and observers frequently allude to something


Скачать книгу