Alliances

Alliance Motivations

Military alliances are conventionally understood as an important avenue for states to augment their power capabilities. In other words, states are motivated to join alliances to add the power of other states to that of their own. This will help them counter threats they might face in the international system. Kenneth Waltz described this motivation for forming an alliance as balancing—states form alliances to balance the capabilities or threats facing them in the international system. Stephen Walt later argued that states do indeed balance, but against threats, not power capabilities alone. From this perspective, NATO was formed by its original signatories to counter the capabilities and threats posed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc powers. Although capability aggrandizement is indeed a central role alliances play, it is by no means the only one. Scholars such as Paul Schroeder sought to understand the conflict management role of these institutions. Elaborating on this perspective, Patricia Weitsman argued that another motivation for a military alliance to be forged might contain an adversarial relationship, that is, states tether their enemies to them to neutralize the threat. From this point of view, alliances function as other international institutions do, to enhance transparency, increase the costs of defection, and make cooperation cheaper, and, therefore, more likely.

Viewing alliances as institutions generates insights into the ways in which threats within an alliance are managed. Thus, in the words of its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, NATO was originally formed “to keep the Soviets out, the United States in, and the Germans down.” Examining NATO purely as a balancing response to the Soviet Union misses the important dynamics that exist within the alliance. Both Greece and Turkey are members of the NATO alliance even though they are mutual enemies; they do not add the other's [Page 15]power to their own within the context of the alliance. Nonetheless, they might gain important institutional advantages from being allied adversaries, in transparency and conflict management functions. One unintended consequence, however, of effective tethering alliances is that although they are formed to manage conflicts among signatories, they might appear threatening to nonmembers, heightening the level of threat and uncertainty in the international system. Weitsman calls this dynamic the alliance paradox and argues that it culminates in an overall higher probability of war.

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