Alliances
At Level III the question is how the structure of anarchy channels alignment. Walt refines balance-of-power into balance-of-threat; Schweller brings the revisionist, profit-seeking state back in; Risse-Kappen relocates alliance persistence in collective identity; Kang asks what changes when the theory travels to a historically hierarchic Asia; and Edry, Johnson & Leeds open the black box, showing that internal threats demand different alliance designs than external ones.
Reading list
- Walt. 1987. The Origins of Alliances, Ch. 1 & 2.
- Schweller. 1994. “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In.” International Security.
- Risse-Kappen. 2016. “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO,” Ch. 4.
- Kang. 2003. “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks.” International Security.
- Edry, Johnson, and Leeds. 2021. “Threats at Home and Abroad: Interstate War, Civil War, and Alliance Formation.” International Organization.
- Application: Spektor. 2025. “Rise of the Nonaligned: Who Wins in a Multipolar World?” Foreign Affairs.
Walt (1987): The Origins of Alliances
Ch. 1 & 2 · balance of threat, and why balancing beats bandwagoning
Walt defines an alliance as a formal or informal relationship of security cooperation between two or more sovereign states, a relationship that entails commitment and an exchange of benefits, where breaking the bargain carries costs. He deliberately keeps the definition broad, because in practice formal treaties reveal less than actual behavior or words: there was never a formal treaty between the United States and Israel, yet no one doubts the commitment, just as the USSR and Egypt were tightly aligned before any 1971 treaty. Over-reliance on strict typologies is misleading, especially in the turbulent diplomacy of the Middle East. Against this backdrop he splits responses to threat into two modes. Balancing means allying with others against the prevailing threat, motivated both by self-preservation against a would-be hegemon and by the wish to gain influence in a coalition (a weaker side values your help more); observable signs are rising defense spending, new partnerships, or joining a containment coalition. Bandwagoning means aligning with the source of danger, motivated either by appeasement (hoping to deflect an attack elsewhere) or by a share of the spoils of victory; observable signs are asymmetrical concessions and the acceptance of a subordinate role. Balance-of-power (BOP) theory, the cornerstone of classical realism, exemplified by Britain’s historic policy of opposing the strongest continental power, holds that states ally according to the distribution of capabilities, joining the weaker side to stop the strongest from dominating. Its limit is its exclusive focus on raw power: it cannot explain why the overwhelmingly resource-rich coalitions of World Wars I and II formed at all. Walt’s balance-of-threat (BOT) theory answers that states ally to balance against perceived threat, not power alone; power is only one ingredient. Threat is a function of four factors: aggregate power (total resources), geographic proximity (nearness magnifies threat because power projection decays with distance), offensive capabilities (the ability to threaten others’ sovereignty, not mere defense), and aggressive intentions (whether a state is seen as expansionist). In my assessment intentions are the decisive modifier: a powerful but benign state (the postwar United States) draws no universal balancing, while a weaker but menacing one (Qadhafi’s Libya, or Nazi Germany whose aggression looked immutable) provokes strong counter-coalitions, Eyre Crowe’s 1907 memorandum on Germany makes the point that perception governs. What Walt under-weights, though, is non-military threat: economic coercion and financial dependence, and the way a target’s internal fragility can amplify how external threats are felt. Walt argues balancing is preferred because bandwagoning is dangerous: it stakes your survival on the aggressor’s continued forbearance and good will, and since intentions are unreliable and can change at any moment, balancing is the safer, risk-averse choice that preserves autonomy and avoids being dominated by a strong ally. What tilts the choice are state strength (strong states balance; weak states, especially when facing an unstoppable great power, may bandwagon), the availability of allies (if outside help looks unreliable or too slow, states bandwagon with the nearest threat), and context (balancing dominates in peacetime and early war, but once a war’s outcome is settled states rush to the winner, “piling on”). I find the logic compelling under a security-maximizing premise, but my own intuition is that pure balancing and pure bandwagoning are often too clean. My main example is imperial China’s policy toward the nomads: when temporarily weaker it bought time through marriage alliances and tribute, short-term accommodation that can look like soft balancing or even bandwagoning, then turned to hard, military balancing once strength was restored. This worked because China’s more integrated civilization meant that even militarily victorious nomads usually lacked the administrative capacity or cultural legitimacy to rule unless they adopted Chinese institutions. I would read this not as either/or but as strategic hedging and a temporal sequencing of the two: short-term bandwagoning to survive, long-term balancing to restore dominance. And importantly, if a state seeks profit rather than security (Schweller’s revisionist), the risks of bandwagoning for gain can be worth taking.
Ideological solidarity means states aligning because they share political, cultural, or other characteristics. Walt argues ideology is a weaker, less consistent motive than balancing, for several reasons. First, security overrides ideology: facing a serious threat, states will cooperate with an enemy, Churchill’s Britain and Stalin’s USSR in WWII, and such wartime pairings tend to dissolve once the threat recedes. Second, many seemingly ideological alliances are balancing in disguise, formed to oppose the spread of a hostile ideology (the nineteenth-century Holy Alliance). Third, some ideologies are inherently divisive: Leninism or pan-Arabism, demanding centralized or singular leadership, breed competition and conflict among co-ideologues rather than durable unity (the Sino-Soviet split). Fourth, ideological rhetoric is routinely inflated, leaders dress alliances as “communities of value” for legitimacy, and observers who mistake the rhetoric for cause over-read its weight; ideology matters most as a conditional variable, when survival is not at stake and states have the luxury to choose partners by preference (under deterrence or high stability). I broadly agree that threat-balancing is the stronger and more consistent driver. But I would add, anticipating Risse-Kappen, that ideology is not unimportant so much as constitutive: shared values establish collective identity, defining who counts as “us” and whose power therefore counts as a threat in the first place. Walt challenges the policy assumption that economic or military aid, or political penetration through agents, lobbyists, and propaganda, can manufacture loyal allies; he thinks these beliefs are exaggerated and that neither is, by itself, a powerful cause of alignment. Often what looks like “aid → alliance” is really a common cause: the two sides converge because they already share security interests under a mutual threat, and aid merely operationalizes a pre-existing alignment rather than starting it (Lend-Lease in WWII). For aid to create genuine, independent leverage, several demanding conditions must hold at once: a supplier monopoly over something vital and renewable (wartime weapons); dependence asymmetry favoring the donor; motivation asymmetry favoring the donor (the recipient cares less about the issue at stake); and enough donor domestic autonomy to adjust or cut aid credibly. These rarely all hold. Worse, large aid is self-defeating: it strengthens the client so it can resist the patron’s demands, while the donor, fearing the client’s defection (bandwagoning) and having sunk prestige into the relationship, is reluctant to cut support, so leverage actually falls. Political penetration works similarly: easier in open societies and when it reinforces existing interests, but it seldom changes alliance choices on its own and can backfire if seen as intrusive. The result for Walt is that aid and penetration are reinforcing mechanisms, boosters, not the engine, of alliances that are really driven by threat perception. I find this persuasive and a healthy corrective to overconfident statecraft. Walt picks the Middle East for its high strategic importance, its frequent and dramatic shifts in alliance commitments, and its value for testing whether theories derived from European great-power history travel to non-European, non-great powers. The region is a strong test precisely because it is saturated with high threat, intense ideological rivalry, major power shifts, and superpower involvement (the Arab-Israeli conflict above all): if even there balancing predominates, that strongly confirms BOT, that security calculations override regional particularity when survival is at stake, which is roughly what he finds. On generalizability, I think BOT travels well wherever international politics is organized around military-security competition, because it rests on a universal rational assessment of survival risk. But it is challenged in two settings. In low-threat, high-opportunity environments, alignment may shift toward Schweller’s gain-seeking “balance of interests,” which BOT does not capture. And in regions historically organized by hierarchy rather than anarchic balancing, Kang’s East Asia, state behavior may follow deference and accommodation instead of balancing. So the theory needs amendment or supplement once we leave a security-dominated, European-style anarchic system.
Schweller (1994): “Bandwagoning for Profit”
International Security · bringing the revisionist state back in
Schweller’s central charge is that the whole alliance debate, including Walt, wrongly assumed that bandwagoning and balancing are opposite behaviors driven by the same goal: greater security. That framing defines bandwagoning too narrowly. He separates the motives: balancing aims at loss avoidance and self-preservation (a security maximizer), whereas bandwagoning is usually about gain-seeking and self-extension (a profit maximizer). So balancing requires a significant external threat; bandwagoning does not. I think this is a fair and powerful critique, because it exposes a status-quo bias baked into security-focused theory, which simply overlooks alignment driven by the expansionist appetites of revisionist states. On his redefinition: bandwagoning is behavior driven by the opportunity for gain, and when the purpose is profit rather than security it is best seen as predatory buck-passing, riding free on others’ offensive efforts to grab unearned spoils. That is the mirror image of defensive buck-passing, and it is voluntary, sharply unlike Walt’s bandwagoning as capitulation or appeasement under threat. Schweller argues that when Walt tests the balancing-versus-bandwagoning hypotheses he considers only cases involving a significant external threat, and by holding that initial condition constant in selecting cases, he systematically excludes the very alignments that are motivated by profit rather than fear, stacking the deck toward finding balancing. The fix is to bring the revisionist state back in: a comprehensive account must study states that are not under direct threat but choose to align out of an expectation of expansion or gain. So his preferred design widens the aperture to include the opportunistic alignment choices of unthreatened states, rather than conditioning the sample on the presence of a clear external threat. Schweller types states by their political goals. A status-quo state seeks self-preservation and the protection of what it already holds, a security maximizer pursuing loss avoidance. A revisionist state seeks self-extension: it values what it covets more than what it currently possesses and is willing to use force to overturn the status quo; it is a gain maximizer. The distinction matters because revisionist alignment is driven by the compatibility of political goals (shared appetite for profit), not by a reaction to external threat, which is exactly what threat-based theories miss. This yields his “balance of interests” (BOI) theory: alignment turns on the configuration of states’ goals and the relative weight of gains versus security, rather than on the distribution of power (BOP) or of threat (BOT). Only by understanding revisionist motives can we explain why states would voluntarily bandwagon with a rising, expansionist power.
Against Walt’s appeasement motive, Schweller offers three profit-centric logics. Jackal bandwagoning: just as a lion attracts jackals, a powerful revisionist state attracts opportunistic lesser revisionists who feed on its kill, Hitler drawing Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria to share the spoils. Piling-on bandwagoning: late in a war whose outcome is already determined, states join the winner to claim spoils or avoid retribution (the USSR declaring war on Japan in 1945). Wave-of-the-future bandwagoning: states are drawn to a rising power whose ideology or system they read as the inevitable future and align voluntarily (developing states attracted by Soviet successes like Sputnik, not just coerced). All three are driven by the expectation of gain, not the wish to avoid loss. I would add a fourth that he gestures at, domino or contagion bandwagoning, where success spreads because the momentum looks unstoppable (the spread of democracy after 1989). And beyond fear and profit, later scholars identify still other motives: domestic legitimation, where regimes bandwagon to secure external backing for internal stability (Egypt–U.S. in the 1970s, Steven David’s “omnibalancing”); economic interdependence, joining stronger states for market access or investment; and symbolic or status reasons, aligning with the dominant power for recognition or prestige. Distinguishing BOI from BOT and BOP is extremely hard empirically, because a revisionist’s expansion (BOI-driven) instantly generates threat perceptions (BOT-driven) in its neighbors, so determining whether an alliance springs from fear or greed requires reconstructing decision-makers’ internal motives, and outside observation is usually ambiguous. In practice researchers fall back on process tracing, elite statements, and historical context to infer which logic was operating. Contemporary cases fitting BOI include Asian states’ deep economic integration with China (gain-seeking) and the Global South’s hedging, though that is really hedging more than pure bandwagoning. Conversely, Finland and Sweden joining NATO after Russia’s invasion is classic loss-avoidance balancing consistent with BOT, though it also fits Schweller, since both are satisfied, status-quo states. On balance, I read the two as complementary rather than contradictory: Schweller refines and extends Walt by folding revisionist, profit-seeking motives into alliance theory, yet Walt’s BOT still has greater predictive reach for most states, especially great powers, whose overriding aim remains survival and autonomy, so balancing against threats continues to dominate behavior under anarchy. The fullest synthesis is to integrate them: balance of threat explains fear-driven, defensive, status-quo behavior, and balance of interests explains greed-driven, opportunistic, revisionist expansion.
Risse-Kappen (2016): Collective Identity & NATO
Ch. 4 · alliance persistence, security community, and a liberal-constructivist account
Traditional realist alliance theory has a simple answer to NATO’s origins and persistence: the Soviet threat. The trouble comes after the Cold War. Structural realists like Waltz predicted NATO should wither away once bipolar competition ended and great powers no longer needed allies to survive, Waltz flatly called NATO “a disappearing thing.” Yet NATO did the opposite: it persisted, expanded, reformed, and took on peacekeeping. A more sophisticated realism can rescue the theory by enlarging “threat” to include geography, military capacity, and ideology, but Risse-Kappen’s decisive objection is that this version can explain the opposite outcome just as easily, so it has no predictive power, it is indeterminate. As he puts it, realism can be made consistent with actual U.S. behavior, but it could also explain the reverse: if NATO survives, realism says it is guarding against future threats; if it collapses, realism says the threat is gone. Almost any choice can be accommodated after the fact, which drains the theory of falsifiability and of any real account of why NATO endured. Beyond indeterminacy, Risse-Kappen presses two more points. The origins are contradictory: under bipolarity, why did war-weakened Western Europe align with the distant United States rather than accommodate the proximate Soviet superpower, as crude BOP might predict? And the early U.S. threat perception focused on the Soviets’ ability to psychologically blackmail and subvert a war-weakened Europe, an ideological and political reading, more than on imminent military invasion, which fits a liberal story better. Power asymmetry did not translate into dominance: realism expects a superpower to dictate to weak allies, yet across NATO’s history (the Cuban Missile Crisis included) European allies exercised disproportionate influence on U.S. decisions, and the asymmetry never became outright American command. I think these are largely fair rather than a straw man, because he engages the strongest realist move, expanding “threat”, and shows it buys consistency only at the price of falsifiability. The honest caveat is that he sometimes contrasts his account with a fairly rigid Waltzian baseline; a more sophisticated realist could fold some of his evidence back in, which is why I read the real payoff as identity-infused power politics rather than a clean knockout of realism. Risse-Kappen offers a social-constructivist reading of republican liberalism, built on collective identities and norms of appropriate behavior. The logic runs in three steps. Externalization of domestic norms: liberal democracies rarely fight each other because their internal decision-making norms, compromise, non-violence, consultation, constitute a political culture that they project outward when cooperating. Identity defines threat: actors carry their domestic identities into international relations, so France and Britain did not treat postwar U.S. power as a threat because they saw America as part of “us,” while the Soviet Union, by virtue of its totalitarian domestic order, was cast as “the other” whose power therefore menaced. Norms mediate power: inside NATO, consultation, consensus, and non-hierarchy channel material asymmetry, letting weaker allies meaningfully shape the hegemon’s policy. From this follows his key concept, borrowed from Karl Deutsch: a pluralistic security community is a group of states bound by mutual responsiveness, mutual sympathy and loyalties, a “we-feeling,” trust, partial identification of self-images and interests, and the ability to predict one another’s behavior, among whom war becomes literally unthinkable. NATO is the institutionalization of such a community for a particular external threat. I find the logic strong precisely because it grounds persistence in something beyond material power and so solves the puzzle realism cannot.
Two crises anchor his case. Suez (1956) is a norm-violation case: Washington was enraged less by the military action itself than by the allies’ deliberate deception, which breached the consultation norm of trust and confidence at the community’s core, Eisenhower felt betrayed by an “unreliable ally,” Dulles called it “the blackest day.” Once the norm was broken the U.S. concluded it was no longer bound and used overwhelming economic coercion to force a retreat, after which both sides worked to repair the relationship and strengthen consultation, which shows the norms were real precisely because their violation was treated as a betrayal, and because power, once unleashed, ran through a normative breach. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) is identity in action: even at the height of an existential threat, Kennedy prioritized alliance unity and credibility, fearing that acting unilaterally over the obsolete Jupiter missiles in Turkey could “lose Berlin,” and treating Berlin’s fate as inseparable from American cities, so he chose a secret missile swap to preserve the alliance rather than escalate. That U.S. leaders did not distinguish domestic from European concerns shows collective identity constituting the very definition of the national interest. I find this genuinely persuasive but partial, and I would press three weaknesses. The causal mechanism is ambiguous: he never cleanly separates norms constraining behavior from norms serving power, U.S. multilateralism could equally be Ikenberry-style liberal hegemony locking in European followers. The counterfactuals are thin: would the U.S. really have abandoned a non-democratic Europe, given that it sustained close ties to Cold War South Korea and Pakistan? And case selection is convenient: Suez and Cuba happen to fit, while NATO’s history is studded with U.S. unilateralism. The hard cases are real. Kosovo (1999): NATO bypassed the Security Council to bomb Yugoslavia for 78 days. Libya (2011): a UN mandate to protect civilians was stretched into regime change, leaving Russia and China feeling deceived and hardening their later Syria vetoes. Vietnam: the U.S. barely consulted allies, and France withdrew from NATO’s military integration in 1966. The 2003 Iraq War: Washington bypassed the UN and Franco-German opposition with a “coalition of the willing,” tearing up consultation norms when core interests were at stake. Afghanistan: Article 5 was invoked, but combat was overwhelmingly U.S.-led. Risse-Kappen’s defense is that these prove the cost of norm violation, France’s exit, the transatlantic rifts after Iraq, the trust crises, but the deeper problem is sharp: if norms can be systematically violated while the alliance persists, are they really constitutive or merely regulative? He needs a theory of the conditions of norm failure, why community works in 1962 but not 2003, which he lacks. I would also discount the Berlin-equals-New York evidence somewhat: that can be domino-theory reputational concern and ideological mobilization (“Ich bin ein Berliner”) rather than genuine identity fusion, though strategy and identity need not be opposed, and Kennedy’s real anxiety suggests more than cold cost-benefit. The comparison set sharpens all this. Along his two axes, institutionalization and collective identity, only the EU scores higher than NATO on both. US–Japan is an “interesting anomaly”: highly institutionalized (the 1951/1960 treaty, bases, Defense Guidelines) but with weak collective identity, contested in Japanese domestic politics by Article 9, anti-base movements, and war memory, a democratic alliance, but perhaps not a Deutschian security community. US–Israel is the mirror image: moderate institutionalization but very strong identity politics (Judeo-Christian framing, the “only democracy in the Middle East” narrative, Holocaust memory, the lobby), and, tellingly, its strains arise from challenges to that shared democratic identity (Israeli occupation policies) rather than from shifts in the external environment. The lesson I take is that institutionalization alone is insufficient (US–Japan) and identity alone is unstable (US–Israel); only their combination (NATO) yields the most durable community, identity-infused power politics, not an either/or between realism and liberalism. The Trump years and the Russia–Ukraine war test exactly this. Trump’s transactionalism, treating NATO as a protection racket, questioning Article 5, exiting Paris and the Iran deal without consultation, partly validated realist expectations of erosion as threat receded, and exposed that norm externalization is neither automatic nor one-directional, since populist democracy can externalize exclusion and unilateralism rather than compromise. Yet NATO did not dissolve; it consolidated after 2022, with Finland and Sweden joining, U.S. troops increasing in Poland, and Congress legislating against unilateral withdrawal. That outcome validates the institutional and identity stories together: structural institutional constraints proved more durable than one leader’s will, anchoring the norms Trump challenged, which actually corrects Risse-Kappen, who under-weighted domestic institutions as the anchor that holds international norms in place. Ukraine then layered all three lenses: realism explains the threat shock and Finland/Sweden’s loss-avoidance balancing; domestic institutions explain how fast and how far (parliamentary authorization, budgets, courts); and norm-identity explains the extra, costly value commitments, German energy decoupling, large aid, and whether “democracy versus autocracy” is mere mobilizing rhetoric or real resonance, testable by whether identity-aligned states give more and more durable support once threat and economic exposure are held constant.
Kang (2003): “Getting Asia Wrong”
International Security · Eurocentric frameworks, regional hierarchy, and Asian stability
Kang challenges the broad pessimism among Western scholars who, after the Cold War, predicted that Asia would slide into arms racing and a return to power politics. Traditional IR theory, induced largely from European experience, expected this because Asia is marked by wide economic and military disparities, divergent political systems, deep historical animosities, and weak regional institutions, so realists judged the region “ripe for rivalry.” Kang’s point is that these dire forecasts largely failed. From the late 1970s onward, Asia saw enduring regional stability and minimal conflict, with no arms race, no balancing coalition against China, and no wars among the major powers. To be fair to IR theory, he is not saying European-born theory is worthless; he is saying that projecting it onto Asia “as is” distorts, and that we should re-specify assumptions and offer falsifiable propositions on Asian material rather than discard the old theories. He also concedes that the presence of U.S. power complicates any clean read of whether states are balancing China, but the evidence to that point showed stability and a degree of accommodation rather than the predicted arms racing. Two problems. The first is Eurocentrism: much of the literature simply applies European-derived frameworks to Asia without modification, producing forecasts the evidence does not bear out. The second is the intellectually evasive “just wait” response, when contradictory evidence accumulates, pessimists say instability is still coming but name no time frame, which renders the claim unfalsifiable. Kang argues we should revise theory to incorporate Asian historical context, in particular the long-standing East Asian pattern of regional hierarchy centered on China, which historically delivered more stability and peace than the Western anarchy/balance-of-power model. The empirical regularity he stresses is striking: in Asian history it has been Chinese weakness, not Chinese strength, that produced chaos. So the revision he wants reorients us toward identity, regional history, and hierarchical order rather than treating anarchy and balancing as universal defaults. Traditional realists expect that as China’s economic and military power surges, neighbors must balance against it. The two theories of the week split on the mechanism. Walt’s balance of threat predicts balancing if China’s proximity and growing offensive capability combine with rising perceptions of aggressive intent, high threat should produce counter-coalitions. Schweller’s balance of interests predicts the opposite for states chiefly pursuing economic gain: bandwagoning with China becomes the rational, profit-seeking move. What Kang observes, as of 2003, is that Asian states were not visibly balancing China but instead seemed to be bandwagoning, suggesting that economic opportunity was outweighing military threat perception. He links this to his historical claim: a strong China was associated with regional order and stability, while Chinese weakness brought instability and war, so accommodation, not balancing, was the regional norm.
Japan is Kang’s strongest case against balancing logic. Traditional theory predicted that the world’s second-largest economy would rearm massively, yet Kang observed Japan keeping defense spending low and declining to build a great-power military. His explanation is the hierarchic model: Japan is a status-quo secondary power that does not rearm because it does not need to, it accepts China’s central place in regional politics, its prosperity depends on a stable order rather than on challenging it, and it behaves with deference rather than balancing. He points to the striking finding that Japanese publics worried more about a strong United States than about a strong China, which he reads as acceptance of a hierarchical order rather than the threat-balancing that realism would predict. His 2003 picture needs revision. On stability, Asia is still mostly peaceful, no major war since the article, but the peace is now tense, with frequent incidents and military activity in the South China and East China Seas; call it stability with constant friction. On balancing, Kang said Asian states were not balancing China, and that is now only partly true: Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and India have deepened security cooperation with the United States and one another (the Quad, new defense pacts), and Washington calls China its “biggest strategic challenge,” even as those same states keep trading heavily with China and avoid open confrontation, so balancing has become partial and selective. On Japan, the country is no longer the passive status-quo power of 2003: it is raising defense spending, acquiring offensive missiles, building alliances, and taking a more active role, trying to shape the regional order rather than merely adapt to it, while still avoiding open conflict and preserving economic ties. The cleanest way to update Kang is that the region has shifted to a hybrid: selective military balancing (BOT, driven by fear as China’s perceived intentions changed) alongside economic bandwagoning and hedging (BOI, driven by gain). His prediction of “far more stability and more bandwagoning than balance-of-power theorists expect” remains partly true, economic integration still dominates, but overt balancing is rising with threat perception, and the future looks like hedging, the most precarious form of stability, in which states lean on U.S. balancing to avoid loss while leaning on Chinese prosperity to capture gain, with the whole arrangement hostage to the intensity of U.S.–China rivalry and to China’s intentions.
Edry, Johnson & Leeds (2021): “Threats at Home and Abroad”
International Organization · internal threats, civil war, and the design of alliance obligations
The innovation is to reconceive alliance formation by placing internal threats, those raising the likelihood of civil conflict, alongside external threats as coequal drivers of alliance demand, and to argue that different threats lead leaders to design different alliance obligations: external threats motivate defense pacts, internal threats motivate consultation pacts, and internal threats with the greatest potential to be internationalized motivate neutrality or nonaggression pacts. The contribution to the literature is to crack a standing puzzle, the prevalence of consultation pacts that contain no explicit defense promise, which deterrence and capability-aggregation views struggle to explain. By tying consultation duties to domestic threat environments and their need for flexible, lower-visibility support (training, intelligence, restricting rebel logistics), the paper gives a threat-based rationale for why such “weaker” commitments are so common, and insists they are not simply “half-hearted.” It reads as an IO paper because IO prizes work that bridges subfields and revises core IR mechanisms: this links civil-war scholarship (ethnic exclusion, transborder kin) to alliance design, shows states assembling security portfolios that mix obligations to manage multi-source threat environments, and backs the argument with clear empirical tests on a global sample, 1946–2009. The three obligation types are distinct. Defense pacts commit members to military assistance if a member’s sovereignty or territorial integrity is attacked. Consultation pacts commit members to communicate and coordinate policy during crises that could turn military, with no automatic promise of military support. Neutrality/nonaggression pacts commit members not to fight each other; neutrality further requires abstaining from aiding a partner’s adversaries. The core logic is that different threats require different forms of assistance and different political optics, so leaders design obligations to fit. External threat leads to defense pacts (H1): by aggregating capabilities and signaling support, defense pacts credibly raise the expected cost of interstate aggression and deter challengers who would prefer an isolated target. Internal threat leads to consultation pacts (H2): defense clauses are often limited to external aggression and a direct troop intervention is operationally ill-suited to guerrilla war and carries legitimacy costs and nationalist backlash, so leaders want flexible, lower-visibility tools, intelligence, training, cross-border policing, which consultation obligations enable. Internal threat with high internationalization potential leads to neutrality/nonaggression pacts (H3): when excluded groups have transborder ethnic kin, the risk of external sponsorship rises, so governments contract neighbors to withhold aid from rebels and deny them bases or supply chains. I find the three mechanisms coherent and well matched to observable institutional choices, and they are stated explicitly as H1–H3, with the internal-threat logics strengthened by micro-foundations on legitimacy, the limited efficacy of intervention, and third-party support. They focus on the presence of politically excluded groups, ethnic groups with no regular executive representation in the state, measured with the Ethnic Power Relations dataset, because such exclusion robustly predicts both civil-war onset and the risk of internationalization through transborder ethnic kin. The choice is methodological as much as substantive: exclusion is empirically robust, including instrumental-variable evidence, across specifications and qualitative corroboration, whereas other civil-war correlates such as income or oil could affect alliance formation through other channels (partner attractiveness, side-payments), muddying the test, so exclusion offers a cleaner read of the paper’s threat mechanism. They are explicit that their argument is broader, that any threat of civil war should encourage these policy responses, but they operationalize exclusion for identification clarity. Other plausible internal threats I would flag, consistent with their broader claim, are ideological insurgencies, low state capacity or rough terrain that creates rebel opportunity, and coup threats or elite splits.
The data are country-year, covering 180 countries from 1946 to 2009, with the country-year as the unit of analysis because the theory is about the monadic demand to add obligations to a state’s security portfolio, a demand-side, not dyadic, question. They estimate three logit models, one per obligation type, with robust standard errors, plus King-Tomz-Wittenberg simulations for first differences and confidence intervals; logit fits the binary formation outcomes and matches the focus on the initial decision to form. The dependent variables are, in year t, indicators for forming an alliance that (1) includes a defense obligation, (2) includes a consultation obligation, or (3) includes neutrality or nonaggression, with all obligations coded from ATOP. The key independent variables are external threat, the summed CINC of non-allied rivals, contiguous states of dissimilar orientation, and major powers, and internal threat, the presence and size of excluded groups, and whether those groups have large transborder ethnic kin. The headline results map cleanly onto the hypotheses: in Model 1, external threat strongly predicts defense-pact formation (a one-standard-deviation increase raises the probability roughly 59 percent, Figure 1); in Model 2, the presence of excluded groups, small or large, raises consultation-pact formation by about 54–68 percent relative to none (Figure 2); in Model 3, only excluded groups with large transborder kin show a clear positive effect on neutrality/nonaggression (about +65 percent versus none, +36 percent versus excluded-but-no-kin, Figure 3). Overall I find them persuasive, for three reasons: the theory and measures are tightly aligned (obligations coded directly from ATOP and mapped to explicit H1–H3, with theory-consistent threat measures); the design fits (a monadic, country-year focus matches a demand-side theory of assembling a portfolio, and dyadic dependence problems are avoided by design); and inference is transparent (logit with simulated first differences and confidence intervals, plus many robustness checks, alternative thresholds and denominators, a multivariate probit, added controls). What would convince me further is a complementary dyadic, supply-side design testing who is willing to provide which obligation and under what inducements (the authors flag this as future work); placebo outcomes such as trade pacts to show the threat variables are specific to military-alliance design rather than generic treaty activism; and timing tests linking changes in exclusion, kin, or external threat to subsequent formation. Qualitatively, one could process-trace formation episodes and use archives and elite interviews to surface leaders’ fear of domestic backlash from foreign boots and their preference for flexible support. Cases that fit include the 1947 Iraq–Jordan consultation clause explicitly mentioning coordination to suppress disturbances, and the 1984 Nkomati Accord between Mozambique and South Africa, a mutual commitment not to support each other’s rebels with detailed do’s and don’ts. A clarifying counterpoint is the 1992 Tashkent Treaty, whose wording was limited to external aggression: Russia refused Kyrgyzstan’s 2010 request to quell domestic violence, illustrating exactly why internal threats push leaders toward consultation rather than hoping a defense treaty will apply. Promising extensions, beyond the authors’ own (moving from demand to supply, and studying alliance consequences such as whether consultation deters civil war), include portfolio dynamics as threat composition shifts, textual analysis of counter-insurgency clauses, and comparative work on the legitimacy and audience-cost differences between overt and covert allied support.
Application · Theory in current events
Spektor. 2025. “Rise of the Nonaligned: Who Wins in a Multipolar World?” Foreign Affairs.
Spektor argues that the Global South has been a net winner from the shifts in global power over the last two decades, the rise of China, U.S.–European frictions, and intensifying great-power competition have moved the world toward multipolarity and diffused power, handing developing states new strategic leverage that they have used to build coalitions (BRICS, the African Union) and push a more assertive agenda in global forums. I find this broadly sound: power competition raises the transactional value of allies, so weaker states can hedge more effectively and maximize what they extract from each great power without making exclusive commitments. He reaches back to the mid-twentieth-century Non-Aligned Movement, which arose to dismantle Western imperial legacies and fight for sovereignty, racial equality, economic justice, and cultural liberation, and argues the analogy still illuminates today: the Global South continues to read Western financial protectionism, tariffs, and legal double standards (its treatment of the Palestinian cause, for instance) as imperial legacies, and that shared perception of liberal-internationalist hypocrisy supplies an ideological basis for collective action. The NAM was an earlier instance of leveraging great-power competition to carve out autonomy within an unequal order; invoking it shows that today’s multipolar world reproduces the same dynamic, in which materially weaker Southern states translate systemic fragmentation into bargaining leverage and normative influence.
Spektor’s most counterintuitive claim is that the Global South may actually benefit from Trump’s foreign policy. The view there is paradoxical: many fear his “America first” approach for the economic risks of trade protectionism, tariffs, and deportations, and for its disregard of global norms, yet many governments also welcome his departure from the perceived hypocrisy of U.S. liberal internationalism in favor of an amoral pragmatism, a more candid, transactional approach that, stripped of moral packaging, gives them clearer strategic room for maneuver and is in some ways more predictable and more tradable. He sees three benefits: his hostility to international norms pushes Southern states to cooperate more effectively to protect their interests; his transactionalism lets them play the great powers off one another to maximize economic, security, and technological concessions; and if he trades away ground to Russia (acknowledging a sphere of influence) to confront China, that accelerates the very multipolarity the Global South embraces. I think this is a forceful confirmation of Schweller’s balance-of-interests logic: when the global order fragments and great powers turn pragmatic, risk converts into opportunity for the weak. More generally, non-alignment and hedging are soft, risk-spreading hybrids that differ from the hard choices of balancing and bandwagoning: hedging typically couples military balancing (relying on U.S. security guarantees to avoid loss) with economic bandwagoning (integrating with China to capture gain), the whole point being to maximize options and leverage in a competitive multipolar environment rather than to commit.
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