Title: Power changes, alliance credibility, and extended deterrence, 2019.
Journal: Conflict Management and Peace Science, p.1-22, 2019.
Author: Jesse C Johnson & Stephen Joiner
1. Backgrounds of alliance argument
Why states ally? Conventional wisdoms has told that interstate alliances are formed for deterring adversaries. For example, U.S.-ROK alliance, which has formed in 1954, created Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) recently in order to deter nuclear threat of DPRK. Therefore, the priority of alliance is thwart adversary’s attempt to military threat, attack, or invasion.
How forming alliance can deter adversaries? Most defensive alliance commit mutual defense. Which means if one member attacked by an adversary, all members of alliance presume it as the attack on themselves. This postulation allows achieve collective security. In the other hand, stronger member can offer his strategic weapons as extended deterrence to weaker member for her security.
In real world, however, there were alliances which successfully deter potential adversaries and also alliances failed to deter. On this account, scholars concentrated on figuring out the reasons of alliances’ failure in various way. This paper tried to figure it out in terms of power change.
To explain why some alliances are more effective at deterrence than others, Jesse and Stephen focused on variation in the credibility of alliances. Credibility is one of the most important concept to understand alliance. Credibility of alliances means that its member states are willing to comply with alliance pact, commitments. Alliances won’t be credible, if the members didn’t join the war or dispute between them.
Then, who determine credibility of alliance? Potential enemies do. Stephan M. Walt, who is the author of The Origins of Alliances, was reluctant to define alliance as ‘formal arrangement between two or more states’ because of credibility. Even some particular alliances without a formal agreement also enough to deter adversaries, such as informal U.S.-Israel or China-North Korea alliance. It’s because those alliance are recognized as a credible alliance. These implies that alliance effectiveness is ultimately depends on how much adversaries measure their reliability.
The fact that alliance credibility is measured not by objective degree but by subjective perception of potential enemies, logically allows us to question as follow. What factor makes adversaries perceive our alliance as less credible alliance? Which means, what factor makes alliance weak? Power change of alliance members makes it weaker, paper argued.
2. How the power change affects to alliance credibility?
Forming an alliance and maintaining a credible alliance entails costs. Member states should collaborate in, for example, military exercise or reconnaissance ability or etc. States would bear those costs only when the benefits of alliance are higher than the costs. The benefits of alliance are come from sufficient capability of deterrence of alliance, which guarantee security of members.
But what if we have already enough power to deter our enemy, is an expensive alliance necessary? Or what if we got weaker, can we still assure that our allies still be willing to protect us? Or what if our ally got weaker, can we still trust them? Those questions might come up with significant power change in both increasing and decreasing way.
In the view of these questions, the paper argued as follows;
- When a state experiences enormous power change, it may no longer be pleased to intervene the disputes on behalf of its ally. A significant power change increases probability of violation against alliance commitments. One empirical study showed that the probability on alliance violation increased more than 700% when alliance experienced significant power change. These effects in both way, increase or decrease.
- Intervene has its impact on the conflict, such as effects on probability of win, state’s bargaining power and so on. And these influence of intervene fundamentally rest on intervener’s power. Thus, power change affect outcome of conflict. If a state’s power become too weak so state cannot impact a conflict sufficiently (i.e., if power weakened as much as there could be no differences between whether intervene or not), the state may not willing to comply with original promises.
- How about power change in increasing way? Significantly power increase also make states unwilling to intervene. What if a state becomes powerful enough to deter or win its enemy by its own capability, will its ally give costly military support? The paper argues they won’t. States take power change into account linked to expected outcome. Both power increase and decrease reduce expected benefits while enhance expected costs of intervene.
- More importantly, a potential challenger can perceive it. From their perspective, moments of significant power change is the timely moments of attack, because probability of ally intervention of a state under attack become lower.
3. Datasets for research.
Taken above explanations together, the paper suggested their central hypothesis: a challenger is more likely to embark a militarized dispute against a state whose allies have experienced power change significantly since the time of alignment.
To verify the hypothesis, the paper primarily used datasets as follows; by these datasets, samples are suggested as Figure 1.
- The Composite Index of National Capabilities (CINC) as a measurement on states’ power change.
- The Alliance Treaty, Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) dataset as information of international alliances.
- Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset (MID) as information of cases of interstate disputes.
4. Conclusion: Power change of alliances’ member states adversely affects to alliance credibility
Military alliances are different from deterrence capability. Member states’ Power change affects to its credibility, which this paper statistically proved. It gives us useful implications about the deterrence effectiveness of alliances in the world.
Previous literatures focused on the type of alliance obligation; non-aggression, neutral, defensive pact, etc. This paper, however, focused on the changes in member states’ power. Thus, it highlights how change in power that have emerged since alliances was formed in the first place can measure its deterrence effectiveness.
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