Alliance Participation, Treaty Depth, and Military Spending

How does alliance participation affect military spending? Some argue that alliance membership increases military expenditures, while others contend that it produces spending cuts. I argue that deep formal defense cooperation modifies the impact of alliance participation on military expenditures and can explain increases and decreases in spending by small alliance members. Security-seeking junior members of deep alliances usually decrease military spending because these treaties are more credible. Joining shallow alliances often increases junior alliance member military spending, however. I test the argument by creating a latent measure of alliance treaty depth and using it to predict differences in how alliance participation affects military spending. The research design generates new empirical evidence linking alliance participation and percentage changes in state military spending from 1919 to 2007. I find that deeper alliance treaties tend to decrease military spending by junior alliance members, and shallow alliances often increase military spending. These results help scholars and policymakers better understand a central question about alliance politics that has been debated in scholarship for decades.

The Power to Divide in Alliance Politics

This introductory chapter provides an overview of selective accommodation wedge strategies. Great power competition inevitably entails alliance competitions. Facing the fact or prospect of a hostile alliance, a state has a few basic strategic options. Whether its motive is defensive or offensive, whether it seeks to enhance or deplete balancing power, the menu does not change. If the state is not willing to surrender the primary values or goals the alliance would harm, it must try to reduce the alliance's potential to harm them. One way they can try to weaken the opposing alliance is by dividing it. Selective accommodation extends inducements toward a specific state in the opposition, in order to better isolate, deter, or coerce others. The chapter details that the book seeks to explain how selective accommodation works, when states try it, and what makes them succeed or fail. It examines eight cases of great power diplomacy surrounding the two world wars, in which selective accommodation was tried, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

The Power to Divide

This book examines the use of wedge strategies, a form of divisive statecraft designed to isolate adversaries from allies and potential supporters to gain key advantages. With a multidimensional argument about the power of accommodation in competition, and a survey of alliance diplomacy around both world wars, the book artfully analyzes the past and future performance of wedge strategy in great power politics. It argues that nations attempting to use wedge strategy do best when they credibly accommodate likely or established allies of their enemies. It also argues that a divider's own alliances can pose obstacles to success and explains the conditions that help dividers overcome them. The book advances these claims in eight focused studies of alliance diplomacy surrounding the world wars. Through those narratives, the book adeptly assesses the record of countries that tried an accommodative wedge strategy, and why ultimately, they succeeded or failed. These calculated actions often became turning points, desired or not, in a nation's established power. For policymakers today facing threats to power from great power competitors, the book argues that a deeper historical and theoretical grasp of the role of these wedge strategies in alliance politics and grand strategy is necessary. The book drives home the contemporary relevance of the analysis with a survey of China's potential to use such strategies to divide India from the United States, and the United States' potential to use them to forestall a China–Russia alliance, and closes with a review of key theoretical insights for policy.

Book review: Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Defending Frenemies: Alliance Politics and Nuclear Non-proliferation in US Foreign Policy

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Defending Frenemies: Alliance Politics and Nuclear Non-proliferation in US Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, 312 pp. ISBN: 978-0-190-93930-4.