Wallace J. Thies

Alliances and Collective Goods

How are burdens shared within an alliance? How many and what kinds of armed forces are alliance members likely to purchase in support of their collective interest in deterrence and defense? These questions are the province of the economic theory of alliances, which has been widely accepted as offering an explanation for two tendencies often found within alliances: disproportionality in burden sharing and suboptimality in the amount of military spending. Proponents of the theory have marshalled an impressive body of evidence in support of propositions derived from it, but efforts to test the predictive power of the theory have relied exclusively on data derived from alliances after World War II. An examination of burden-sharing arrangements within seven pre-1945 alliances produces outcomes that cannot be adequately explained by the theory as it now stands. Consideration of the pre-1945 cases thus suggests additional refinements to the theory, the most important of which have to do with the degree of substitutability of the armed forces of alliance members and the difference between deterrent and defensive alliances.

Compellence Failure or Coercive Success? The Case of NATO and Yugoslavia

What is coercion? How does it work? Much recent work in this regard has centered on two issues: the relative merits of punishment versus denial strategies, and whether air power can work in the absence of forces on the ground. These are important issues, but they also convey the misleading impression that coercion is something that occurs after the first bomb is dropped. This paper argues that an air war is better viewed as a last resort that occurs only after the failure to deter and/or compel by means of verbal threats and threatening gestures. Whether such verbal threats and threatening gestures are done well or poorly will go a long way toward explaining 1) whether an air war is necessary at all, 2) how long and how hard the target will resist, and 3) whether the target can be coerced at a price the coercer is willing to pay. To illustrate these points, the paper re-examines four instances of deterrence and compellence that preceded NATO’s 1999 air war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo. These four episodes are used to shed new light on why the air war was necessary, why it took much longer than expected for air power to “work,” and why the Yugoslav government led by Slobodan Milosevic thought it could get away with depopulating Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority.

Was the US Invasion of Iraq NATO'S Worst Crisis Ever? How Would We Know? Why Should We Care?

Abstract This paper focuses on the NATO-in-crisis literature, particularly the variant claiming that the Atlantic Alliance is facing its worst crisis ever. The paper argues that this approach is an analytical dead-end, incapable of producing new, cumulative knowledge about NATO in particular and alliances in general. It also suggests ways of getting out of the blind alley that the NATO-in-crisis literature has become.

When Governments Collide in the Taiwan Strait

Are authoritarian states better at coercion than democracies? The latter frequently find it difficult to make credible and persuasive threats; orchestrate words and deeds; and signal by deed as well as by word. Authoritarian states are often believed to be less bound by constraints such as divided government and organizational rivalries, but this belief has rarely been tested. This paper examines the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, in which the Peoples Republic of China was the coercer and the United States the target. A close examination of what China said and did reveals policy reversals and conflicting signals often associated with the US in the coercion literature.

Does NATO Enlargement Spread Democracy? Evidence from Three Cases∗

Does NATO enlargement spread democracy? The issue has been vigorously disputed since the mid-1990s, but no consensus has yet emerged. We test rival claims about what NATO enlargement can and cannot do by examining three cases—Slovakia, Latvia, and Croatia. We use both numerical ratings by Freedom House and our own qualitative assessment to determine whether these three became more democratic after 1994, when NATO opened the door to expansion, and before 2002, when the second round of expansion was announced. Since all three were more democratic in 2002 than they were in 1994, we conclude that the “carrot” of NATO membership can indeed spread democracy to prospective members.

Proliferation and critical risk

Does proliferation increase the risk of war between new nuclear powers? Two schools of thought ‐ proliferation pessimists and optimists ‐ offer very different answers. The former stress the first‐strike danger of nuclear‐armed ballistic missiles and the resulting crisis instability as a cause of preemptive war. The latter stress the caution‐inducing effects of nuclear warheads and fear of retaliation as a check on would‐be attackers. To bridge the gap between these two schools, Daniel Ellsbergs concept of critical risk is used to show how the likelihood of war changes as new nuclear powers enlarge and improve their missile forces. Ellsbergs framework suggests that the danger of war is low between recent proliferators but rises as nuclear stockpiles grow, thereby changing the payoffs associated with striking first or striking second and increasing the danger of war due to accidents, miscalculations, and uncontrollable interactions between rival nuclear forces. Ellsbergs framework also suggests that the transition from weaponization to secure second strike force is likely to be long and difficult, in part because short‐range missiles like Indias Prithvi are better suited to strike first than to strike second, and in part because negative control procedures reduce the value of striking second, thereby increasing the attraction of a preemptive strike.

When Governments Collide in the South Atlantic: Britain Coerces Argentina during the Falklands War

How effective are parliamentary democracies at sending coercive signals and orchestrating them into coherent messages? Are parliamentary democracies any better at doing this than presidential democracies? In order to answer these questions, the research project uses an in-depth analysis of the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War as a case study. This article seeks to determine how effective the United Kingdom was at sending coercive signals and orchestrating them into coherent messages. In general we observe that the United Kingdom suffered from many of the same problems in executing a coercive strategy as presidential governments do.

Randomness, contagion and heterogeneity in the formation of interstate alliances— a reconsideration

The diversity in form and purpose exhibited by interstate alliances and the difficulty of developing generalizations about them have led political scientists interested in alliances to investigate new research techniques to help them in coping with the intractability of their subject matter. Prominent in this regard have been efforts to use stochastic process models to search for regularities in the process by which alliances have formed and re‐formed. Such an approach, however, has not as yet proven conducive to the development of a theory of alliance behavior, in large part because of inconsistencies in the empirical findings and in part because of the difficulty of bridging the gap between describing a set of outcomes and elucidating the processes that produced them. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to make the case that progress toward a theory of alliance formation is possible, and to suggest that the most appropriate way to pursue that goal is through a combination of deductive reasoning and de...