The pattern of alliances among states is commonly assumed to reflect the extent to which states have common or conflicting security interests. For the past twenty years, Kendall's τb has been used to measure the similarity of nations' "portfolios" of alliance commitments. Widely employed indicators of systemic polarity, state utility, and state risk propensity all rely on τ b . We demonstrate that τ b is inappropriate for measuring the similarity of states' alliance policies. We develop an alternative measure of policy portfolio similarity, S, which avoids many of the problems associated with τb, and we use data on alliances among European states to compare S to τ b . Finally, we identify several problems with inferring state interests from alliances alone, and we provide a method to overcome those problems using S in combination with data on alliances, trade, UN votes, diplomatic missions, and other types of state interaction. We demonstrate this by comparing the calculated similarity of foreign policy positions based solely on alliance data to that based on alliance data supplemented with UN voting data.

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Dangerous Alliances: Proponents of Peace, Weapons of War. By Patricia A. Weitsman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 264p. $49.50.Patricia Weitsman sets out to provide a unified theory of alliance politics that explains when states will manage threatening neighbors by allying with them rather than allying against them, when allies will undertake different types of military obligations, when alliances will be more or less cohesive, and how alliances aimed at preserving peace sometimes provoke war. Although she is not entirely successful in fulfilling this extensive agenda, Dangerous Alliances is nevertheless a constructive contribution to several ongoing debates about alliance politics.

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