Robert drove a great deal of traffic to the Duck with his provocative posts on retrenchment and US alliances. His efforts to “grade” allies by strategic importance has led to some interesting results and fascinating discussions. But I think he’s working with an overly narrow view of what alliances are good for. Here I agree with Steve Walt in general, although I have a somewhat different spin.
Robert’s analysis treats alliances as if they are basically cooperative security arrangements, produce little in the way of externalities, and amount to a net negative investment only offset by the relative “strategic importance” of an ally. Thus, Robert advances three major criteria: (1) direct security interest, (2) need, and (3) values/symbolism. This can be summed up as “where is it located? Can it defend itself? Does a US commitment help Washington in the war of ideas?”
One problem with these criteria should be obvious. As Robert is quite aware, “security interests” can get pretty fuzzy once we move beyond “contiguous territory.” It isn’t even clear that common borders make necessary allies; after all, who exactly will be invading the US via Mexico? Regardless, one of the problems with “selective engagement” strategies hinges on precisely this ambiguity: it is too easy to slip into either *nothing* being a vital national interest or *everything* being crucial to national security. The “values” criteria is, I submit, even more subject to abuse.
But even if we wave away problems with the three criteria, my suspicion is that Robert’s assumptions about alliances are wrong. Alliances — whether formal defense pacts, strategic partnerships, or whatever — are also control mechanisms by which states reduce the autonomy of their partners: sometimes states forge alliances precisely because they judge other states to be unreliable (for a classic treatment, see Snyder’s Alliance Politics). In some strategic partnerships, the capabilities of the ally are irrelevant: the relationship enables power projection by providing extra-territorial bases and access. Alliances often involve significant externalities, in terms of the signals they send to potential friends and enemies alike. These signals aren’t just about “values,” but the scope and nature of US commitments. In short, an assessment of US alliance commitments requires a more nuanced outlook than Robert provides, and his consequent analysis may be significantly flawed.
Mexico is a good example. It isn’t so much that the US forges a close relationship with Mexico to pool military resources, but because it is more costly for the US to impose formal hierarchy on the country. When it comes to US basing and access agreements, it is true that these can develop relatively quickly — as in Central Asia after 9/11 — or that lost opportunities can return as a result of shifts in power and threat. But it is also the case that long-term basing arrangements tend to enjoy a degree of stability that often proves elusive in newer US-host relationships. Which amounts to a rather elliptical way of saying that it isn’t always efficacious to abandon strategic partnerships to save some short-term cash.
Adopting a more nuanced view of the “importance” of various bilateral and multilateral partnerships doesn’t take away from the importance of the exercise. I agree that everyone needs to spend more time thinking, and writing, about US strategic interests and which international relationships are most important in light of those interests.
But, at the end of the day, we need to be clearer about what we mean when we talk about “strategic overextension,” “relative decline,” and other key terms in the debate over “retrenchment.” The connection between bloated military budgets and strategic partnerships is not necessarily a direct one. US relative decline may force Washington to adopt clearer strategic priorities — such as pivoting toward East Asia — particularly when it comes to providing robust security guarantees. However, a lot of the recent “damage” done to the blood and treasure of the United States stems from wars of choice — and one in particular — that had very little to do with the central connective tissue of its alliances and partnerships.Â
The irony of focusing on the number of these relationships — rather than how much the US commits to them or broader aspects of the US defense budget — is that Washington’s alliance architecture is probably its best hedge against the rise of potential competitors. It both allows for the pooling of resources and it also reduces the likelihood of rising powers being able to wedge apart possible balancing coalitions. So, yes, the US needs to be smarter about how it allocates resources and less willing to resort to expensive military ventures of dubious geo-strategic value, but nothing about “retrenchment” requires slashing and burning its strategic relationships with other states. At least not in the foreseeable future.
Retrenchment requires a serious pruning that will inevitably force a ranking of allies – if it happens, which it won’t, for awhile: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/more-on-us-allies-americas-exorbitant-privilege-means-it-can-borrow-to-sustain-hegemony-longer-than-anyone-ever-expected/. Readers curious to see the original post to which this post is a response, please go here: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/would-ron-paul-retrench-the-us-from-korea/
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Hi, Thanks for responding after all those posts. I guess was thinking of allies in the fairly traditional sense. I had just re-read Origins of Alliances with all those allies flipping and flopping all over the place. And I was listening all spring to Ron Paul tell me how we are way overcommitted to allies who can defend themselves. So I was trying to think of which allies actually get us a lot of bang for the buck spent. But in a traditional way – I hadn’t thought of your nice expansion that keeping allies we don’t need is a nice way of controlling them or keeping them down permanently. I think that is a good addition.
But there is a cost though to controlling them/preventing them from becoming competitors: they’re all free-riding, as you have also observed: https://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/2012/06/speaking-of-retrenchment.html. That raises the question of whether or not it makes sense to carry so many states in order to prevent any balancing. I also wonder if we need to control democracies. I wonder if Germany or Japan or Italy would really start balancing if we pushed them harder. I wonder. I don’t really have a good sense either way.
Next, I wonder if Walt’s 6-point criteria make it hard to actually generate a ranking. I tried to mention that in my own response: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/ranking-us-allies-a-response-to-stephen-walt-andrew-sullivan-all-those-canadians/. The more complicated the criteria, the harder it is to do Walt’s ‘zero-based alignment.’ I think my rankings have the benefit of being a stripped-down, minimalist order which is what a genuine financial crisis, as the GOP loves to tell us we are heading toward, will require.
I was out of town. Sorry for the late response.
I’ve really enjoyed Robert’s original posts and all the discussion they generated on this blog and elsewhere. The only thing I’d note in relation to this particular post is that while I think its true that long-term basing arrangements provide more stability in general, they also have key disadvantages, which Dan doesn’t address here. Most notably, if the U.S. maintains a few large static bases in a particular region, its troops are easy targets for enemies (see: U.S. basing polices in East Asia)  and Washington will become overly reliant on one or two particular countries. The danger of the latter was demonstrated by U.S. Middle East policy during 1970’s, particularly with regards to the Shah and Iran. Although US wasn’t using Iran so much for basing purposes (CIA did have intelligence outposts though), starting with Nixon the U.S. relied heavily on Iran for its Middle East security architecture, which first allowed the Shah to exploit this dependency (which he did on a number of issues including, as Aaron Scott Cooper documents in his wonderful diplomatic history Oil Kings, by purposely perpetuating the oil embargo and ignoring U.S. pleas to relent on the issue), and secondly created major problems for U.S. regional policy when Shah was overthrown. (None of this seemed to register much to policymakers at the time because we turned around and became wholly dependent on Pakistan for fight against Soviets in Afghanistan, and need not actively seek to build up our own relationships in the country.) Over-dependency is not just a risk in dealing with authoritarian regimes as changes in political parties or public opinion in democratic countries just as often frustrates U.S. basing problems.Â
In this way it makes more sense for U.S. to make more numerous but less costly commitments; that way the U.S. maintains upper-hand with Allies (see Nye & Keohane discussion on relative inter-dependence) and can abandon or lose one without too much apprehensive should circumstances warrant (see: uprising against Mubarak in Egypt). This would seemingly be the luxury afforded to an Island nation great power who has a lot to offer to potential allies.
‘Places not bases’ is the new DoD mantra in response to exactly this concern. But my concern is more the piling on of commitments that we may not want to honor or that we may not be able to afford to honor. Preble’s review of Kagan’s book (https://nationalinterest.org/print/bookreview/the-critique-pure-kagan-7061) argues pretty well that US elites love all this expansion, but not regular Joe Citizen who thinks we shouldn’t defend foreigners so much. I think the idea of pre-emptively preventing rising challengers by aligning with them and effectively neutering them is a good theoretical addition and may well be true. But the costs of commitments in basically every part of the globe is huge. At some point, we have to scale back either national security spending or Medicare/Medicaid/SS.