Cash or Combat? America’s Asian Alliances During the War in Afghanistan

Abstract

A basic trade-off in military cooperation exists: States must respond to the dominant ally's demands and act as a reliable partner while simultaneously making a decision that is acceptable to domestic audiences. We argue that compensatory burden-sharing strategies are imperfect but dependable solutions to manage foreign policy decisions at the domestic and alliance levels. Our theoretical expectations are tested using the US-Japan and US-Republic of Korea alliances and, in particular, the contribution of each country to the war in Afghanistan. We find that foreign aid commitments to third parties are made as a form of compensation when alliance expectations are substantial, but the secondary ally's ability to contribute militarily is highly constrained. Foreign aid has therefore served as an alliance management tool.

Keeping Your Friends Close, but Acquaintances Closer: Why Weakly Allied States Make Committed Coalition Partners

“…There are a variety of ways to measure burden sharing, including the number of troops as a share of population, armed forces, coalition troops, and GDP (Hartley and Sandler 1999, 668-69). The costliness of a state’s contribution is measured as a share of the size of their armed forces as opposed to GDP or military spending since the risk of casualties and collateral damage are two costs unique to personnel contributions that states are attentive to when deciding whether and to what extent they should participate in coalition warfare (Ringsmose 2010; Chivvis 2014; von Hlatky and Darden 2015; Haesebrouck 2017). This measure thus best captures the security burden a country has willingly undertaken to fight in another state’s war.…”

The politics of multinational military operations

“…Much of the study of alliances at war tends to focus on the leading countries, especially the United States (Kreps, 2008(Kreps, , 2011Weitsman, 2003Weitsman, , 2004Weitsman, , 2014 although there are, of course, exceptions (Mello, 2014;Schmitt, 2018;Von Hlatky, 2013;Von Hlatky & Trisko Darden, 2015). The contributions to this special forum address this gap by considering the factors that cause countries to join American-led multilateral efforts and how they define the terms of their participation.…”