Reliability and Alliance Interdependence

Alliances have long been a core topic in the study and practice of international security, and much scholarship has focused on the drivers and dynamics of the US hub-and-spokes system of bilateral alliances in Asia. How, if at all, are alliances interdependent? In his new book, Iain D. Henry answers this question by proposing an “audience alliance effect theory” consisting of three hypotheses. First, he argues that US allies monitor Washington's actions toward its other allies and that their observations influence their perception of US reliability. Second, he argues that if allies judge the United States to be unreliable, they will act to improve their own level of security. Third, he expects that this prospect of alliance interdependence will affect US policy by enabling Washington to set the example of acceptable allied behavior in one alliance to influence other alliances.Drawing on tens of thousands of documents and process tracing methodology, Henry tests these hypotheses on Asian alliance interactions during the first twenty years of the Cold War, specifically focusing on events in which US behavior in one bilateral alliance was observable by other allies and significant for the security of these allies and therefore relevant to Washington's reliability. In chapter 2, he argues that the alliance audience effect influenced when and how US alliances were formed with Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. Chapters 3 and 4 examine how the alliance audience effect played out with the Republic of China (ROC) from the 1953 to the end of the first Taiwan Strait crisis, demonstrating how US policy toward the ROC was strongly influenced by the policy of its allies. Chapter 5 describes how Tokyo's entrapment concerns affected the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960, while chapter 6 focuses on how negotiations over the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese administration in 1967–69 were perceived by the ROC and the Republic of Korea (ROK).Henry's careful and nuanced analysis makes a significant contribution to the debates on alliances that will appeal to international relations scholars, area studies specialists, and policy practitioners. Most prominently, the author calls on analysts to be more precise in their language and in their understanding of what it means for one ally to make a meaningful commitment to another. Claiming that “the common assumption—that disloyalty to one ally will undermine or destroy the alliance system—is very questionable, but rarely questioned” (8), he instead argues that the more relevant concept is reliability, defined as “the degree to which shared interests enable allies to cooperate and rely on each other” (4). According to Henry, allies do not want Washington to demonstrate indiscriminate loyalty but instead want their relationship with the US to pose no alliance risks. To many experts—particularly area specialists—this definition will seem intuitive, and it is convincingly supported by the case studies. In addition, although existing literature has primarily focused on how allies' preferences constrain US policy, this book demonstrates that alliance interdependence can also be used by the US to its own advantage. Specifically, the US has avoided undesired system effects through simultaneous alliance management, and it has used interdependence to set the example of acceptable allied behavior.Given the ambitious scope of this book, there are naturally some limitations to the analysis. Although the book focuses on the perceptions of US allies, data is drawn primarily from US records rather than archival data from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or the Philippines, since the author felt that the need to translate such documents would have reduced the overall amount of data that could be collected (10). However, this focus on US documents limits the author's ability to fully evaluate competing explanations, and instead privileges US-centric factors such as the proposed alliance audience effect. While the evidence presented in the book confirms Henry's theory, this limitation presents an opportunity for other scholars with the requisite language skills to follow up on Henry's case studies using alternative primary source evidence. The author also acknowledges limitations related to the generalizability of the theory and points out that it does not predict how states will attempt to mitigate unreliability on the part of an ally.This impressive book sheds new light on alliance theory, US foreign policy, and Asian regional security and provides future scholars with a more nuanced conceptual toolkit with which to examine alliance dynamics. Future research can fruitfully test the theory's applicability to additional cases of alliances in other regions and in multilateral configurations. Questions about alliance interdependence are becoming even more important as the United States calls for enhanced networking among its allies and partners under the Biden administration, and as the dynamics of US alliances in Europe and Asia are increasingly evaluated jointly in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

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