Locking in Leverage: Security Assistance and Power in Alliances

• In Event: Empire, Great Powers, and Methods of External Control

Abstract

Great powers have many motivations for providing security assistance junior partners, including bolstering partners’ ability to defend against threats, and cultivating leverage within the junior ally. Yet there is little empirical evidence to support the belief – common among scholars and policymakers – that security assistance leads to leverage. To the contrary, I suggest that junior partners are able to exercise leverage over their great power partners, and can push back or even dictate policy positions to major powers. Junior partners can threaten to act in an “undesired” way, to realign, or to cause general problems for the great power, in effect using misbehavior to keep spigot of security assistance open and flowing. To explain how and when junior partners have used leverage successfully, this paper analyzes one form of security assistance – arms transfers – in two key cases: US arms transfers to Taiwan since the early 1970s, and US arms transfers to Israel immediately before and since the 1967 war. This paper shows that providing security assistance often causes more problems than it solves by locking great powers into security relationships without much control over their partners’ behavior. More generally, this paper challenges assumptions about where power in alliances comes from and how it is exercised.

Author

• Jennifer Spindel, University of Oklahoma