Do foreign alliances and partnerships make the U. S. more secure? Or do their entanglements lead us into war? The answers provided in this RAND study by Miranda Priebe, Bryan Rooney, Caitlin McCulloch, and Zachary Burdette may surprise you:
Key Findings
- Entanglement dynamics contributed to, but were not the only cause of, U.S. involvement in wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Libya and in two conflicts short of war in the Taiwan Strait.
- Entanglement dynamics in these cases involved a U.S. desire to maintain its reputation with allies and adversaries for upholding its commitments or a U.S. willingness to take on allies’ interests as its own.
- More research is needed on how prevalent and consequential entanglement dynamics are in U.S. decisionmaking.
- Scholars have not identified any cases of U.S. entrapment in war, in which the United States fought to defend an ally or partner that risked conflict because a U.S. commitment emboldened it to behave aggressively.
- The United States has allied with states that it believed posed entrapment risks, but it sought to minimize these risks through conditional alliance terms.
- Globally, states in conditional alliances have generally been less likely to initiate conflict, but U.S. alliances could still lead individual states to adopt policies that risk conflict.
- The United States has attempted to restrain allies and partners from initiating conflict in the past by leveraging military and economic aid, and it has had both successes and failures.
at least if you’re a foreign policy idealist. It doesn’t surprise me. In theory alliances and partnerships could make us more secure but in practice they’re dangerous as well for a simple reason. Our allies and partners have interests of their own which are not necessarily aligned with ours. They have fewer problems pursuing their own interests than we do pursuing ours as far as I can tell.
