Alliance Theories And U.S. Alliance Strategy

Since war and conflict came into being, alliances (or alignments) have been perceived as one of the most frequently-used or the most efficient instruments to fight against threats, obtain security, aggregate power, safeguard or enlarge national interests. Thus alliance politics and alliance strategy becomes one of the core themes of international politics and security studies. Yet, as a kind of abstract theory, the studies of alliances always lack for obvious identity and peculiar research realm, which makes it rather difficult to come to the forefront of the theoretical studies of international relations.So far the U.S. and European scholars' academic achievements or breakthroughs are mainly concentrated on the exploration of alliance origins which roughly determined different schools of alliance theories. The classical realist alliance theory chooses power as the main analytical variable and assumes balance-of-power as its basic theoretical proposition and supposes that alliances are tools to aggregate power in order to achieve the balance of power. Through refining the classical realist alliance theory, the neo-realist alliance theories pick up threat or interests as their respective analytical variable, thereby constituted the balance-of-threat and balance-of-interests theories, both of which make the alliance theories more systemic and verifiable. In the past decade, a modest invigoration occurred in the studies of alliance theories and 90's of last century witnessed a round of intense academic argumentation by which new paradigms and academic achievements burst into existence. On one hand, the realist camp weeded through the old to bring forth the new, some partial theories such as "alliance dilemma" theory, "balancing and bandwagoning" theory, "chain-ganging and buck-passing" theory were put forward one by one. On the other hand, the institutionalist and constitutionist attempted to provide new interpretations to the origins and preservations of alliances from the perspectives of institution and identity, while they pointed out sharply the serious shortcomings and disadvantages in the realist paradigms because of their lack of interpretation force. But it is really a pity that as later comers, the institutionalist and constitutionist failed to constitute any systemic alliance theories. It seems that their single-variable analytical patterns perhaps can only supplement the dominant realist alliance paradigm with dynamic perspectives.By employing the neo-realist and neo-classical realist paradigm, and mainly drawing on Randall Schweller's analytical framework, this dissertation attempts to put forth a brand-new alliance theory, i.e. authoritative alliance theory. This theory is actually not an alliance theory in general meaning, it is merely a theoretical analysis concerning a particular type of alliance or an alliance of peculiar nature. This kind of theoretical analysis absorbs those often used variables, such as power, threat and interests while pays more attentions to some new variables, for example,...