Research

Reshaping the International Order: Wars and Alliances, with Alex Weisiger

A large literature examines the impact of alliances on war. Far less work closely studies the ways in which war shapes alliances, especially from the perspective of war participants who might wish to use war to shape the international alliance system in their favor. This article identifies some plausible expectations arising from existing literatures on balance of power theory, the sources of international order, and alliance politics, and begins the process of conducting empirical tests. We develop a strategy for measuring the attractiveness of the existing international alliance network from the perspective of a given state, which allows us to compare prewar and postwar conditions to calculate how a country’s alliance position changed as a consequence of the war. Initial tests of the hypotheses reveal there is evidence in favor of claims that war initiators tend to suffer a deterioration in their alliance position.

Electoral Campaigns and Alliance Reliability

US Presidents frequently urge allies to increase their defense spending, but what happens when US presidential candidates publicly threaten to abrogate alliance treaties? While leaders have incentives to encourage greater burden-sharing among allies, I argue threatening abandonment either during Presidential elections or Presidential transitions entails significant costs to a state’s reputation for reliability. I administer a survey experiment in the United Kingdom and find that threatening abandonment both on the campaign trail and while in office decreases the public’s perception that the US is a reliable ally, makes them less likely to support fighting alongside the US, and makes them more likely to seek alternative allies. Threatening abandonment decreases perceptions of US reliability even if the candidate does not win office. Meanwhile, encouragements to burden share do not change the UK public perception of US reliability, its willingness to fight alongside the US, or seek alternative allies. These findings suggest that leaders should carefully consider threatening abandonment, given costs to reputation for reliability.

Costly Capitulation: Backing Down from Sanction Threats

Economic sanctions are more effective at the threat stage than at the imposition stage. Why? Threats serve as credible signals that the threat issuers (senders) are resolved to impose sanctions in the absence of concessions from targets. This paper argues that the domestic audience costs for sender leaders that back down from a sanction threat explain why states targeted by economic sanction threats believe these threats to credible. However, I predict sanction audience costs to be less intense than military audience costs because sanctions are less confrontational. A policy’s level of confrontation is the extent to which it damages relations with the target of the policy and the intensity of costs it generates for the user (or sender) of the policy. I argue that audience costs increase with the degree to which a policy is confrontational as confrontational policies generate more salience among domestic and international actors and thus have create larger reputational implications for backing down. The intensity of audience costs is not only the product of a policies level of confrontation, but also the hawkishness of domestic observers. The findings from my original survey experiment only partially conform to my initial expectations. Sanction audience costs exist, but they are surprisingly indistinguishable from backing down from threats to use military force. Hawks are marginally more likely to disapprove of backing down from military threats than backing down from sanction threats. Having established the existence of sanction audience costs, this paper seeks to spark future research on the drivers of the intensity of sanction audience costs.

Untying Hands: The Political Cover of Ally Pressure

The literature on audience costs suggests that backing down from sanctions, either those that are merely threatened or those that are imposed, would signal the actor’s lack of resolve. However, the states that offer credible justifications to their audiences can mitigate domestic audience costs. In this vein, ally pressure also reduces bottom-up constraints sanctioning state leaders face in lifting ongoing sanctions through providing political cover for a leader to lift a sanction that has not yielded concessions. While capitulation decreases support for a leader among his domestic citizenry, capitulation in the presence of ally pressure leads to less intense decreases support for leaders. I conduct a survey experiment on the US public and show that audience costs become less intense.

Economic Coercion in US Grand Strategy

Existing definitions of grand strategy tend to be narrow definitions that focus on military means, such as force posture and force structure, to achieve goals. I argue that grand strategy as grand plans that are the detailed product of intentional efforts of individuals to achieve a state’s long term goals, prioritize among them, and consider all spheres of statecraft (military, diplomatic, and economic) in the process of identifying the means by which to achieve them. Economic coercion, the threat or act by a sender government to disrupt economic exchange with the target state, to compel the target to acquiesce to an articulated demand, must be analyzed alongside military tools because states increasingly turn to economic statecraft to achieve their goals and opt to use it in lieu of military statecraft. Ideal type grand strategies vary on their beliefs on the degree of interventionism (high v. low) and the type of sanction coalitions they prefer (multilateral v. unilateral). Liberal internationalism believes that sanctions are effective and prefer to impose them in multilateral coalitions in pursuit of democracy promotion and global norm promotion. Conservative Primacy prefers frequent use of sanctions to enforce US dominance and coerce adversaries into changing their behavior without seeking multilateral support. Restraint sees little reason to impose sanctions given that the US is fundamentally safe and, if sanctions are used, Restraint is pessimistic about the role that institutions play in international politics. Lastly, Deep Engagement prefers using sanctions sparingly, but alongside allies, to maintain global stability through preventing nuclear proliferation and deterring aggression. Offshore Balancing does not quite fit in the two-by-two typology but would see the US to support regional powers in leading sanctions to prevent regional hegemony, minimizing US involvement.