The Limits of Alignment

Southeast Asia and the Great Powers since 1975

John D. Ciorciari

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781589016965
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016262
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Limits of Alignment is an engaging and accessible study that explores how small states and middle powers of Southeast Asia ensure their security in a world where they are overshadowed by greater powers. John D. Ciorciari challenges a central concept in international relations theory—that states respond to insecurity by either balancing against their principal foes, “bandwagoning” with them, or declaring themselves neutral. Instead, he shows that developing countries prefer limited alignments that steer between strict neutrality and formal alliances to obtain the fruits of security cooperation without the perils of undue dependency.

Ciorciari also shows how structural and normative shifts following the end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S. primacy have increased the prevalence of limited alignments in the developing world and that these can often place constraints on U.S. foreign policy. Finally, he discusses how limited alignments in the developing world may affect the future course of international security as China and other rising powers gather influence on the world stage.

Chapter 1
The Appeal of Limited Alignments

I HAVE CLAIMED THAT DCs USUALLY PREFER to enter into limited alignments, tilting toward one or more great powers but stopping shy of tight, deeply embedded alliances. I have also argued that limited alignments are particularly likely today. This chapter attempts to explain why.

I begin with the premise that states generally prefer alignments they expect will deliver the greatest rewards at the least possible risk under conditions of strategic uncertainty. Security cooperation with a great power carries both dangers and benefits for a small state or middle power in the Global South. I review some of these risks and rewards and argue that limited alignment is usually the optimal strategy. Genuine non-alignment tends to leave DCs too vulnerable, whereas tight alliance often renders them too susceptible to great-power domination or dependency. Limited alignment is usually an appealing intermediate option, delivering adequate benefits at an acceptable price.

Of course DCs do not decide the forms of their alignments alone. Their great-power friends also have a meaningful say in the matter. Sometimes great powers simply impose security arrangements on unwilling weaker partners. The pressure to align is often considerable and makes it difficult for most DCs to pursue true nonalignment, even when they wish to do so. Even DCs willing to engage in limited security cooperation sometimes find themselves coerced into tight, rigid alliances by a mightier protector. In other instances DCs have the opposite problem: they seek security cooperation with a great power only to be rebuffed and left to fend for themselves. Great powers do not always seek to cultivate tight alliances, either because they do not wish to commit the necessary resources to a particular state or because forging a tight alliance with one DC would complicate the great power’s relations with other states in the same region. When DCs do demand tight pacts they may not find a supply.

It is thus crucial to distinguish in this study between preferences and outcomes. My argument is one about preferences. I contend that DCs usually prefer limited alignments and usually pursue that outcome. This pursuit is observable in DCs’ foreign policy behavior, even when they fail to achieve their desired outcomes. I argue that DCs seeking limited alignment do in fact obtain their preferred outcomes in many cases (and perhaps most).

The argument that DCs’ alignment preferences depend on weighing perceived risks and rewards raises an obvious question: what factors determine those potential hazards and payoffs? The second part of this chapter addresses that question. There is no simple formula. Material and ideational factors at both the domestic and international levels influence DCs’ assessments of risks and rewards. Nevertheless, I attempt to identify some of the variables that are likely to be the most important in the greatest number of cases. I conclude by discussing why changes in the structure and nature of the international system have made limited alignments even more common in the Global South since the end of the Cold War.

THE BASIC ARGUMENT

In their pursuit of national interests, the leaders of DCs undertake the same kinds of rough risk-reward assessments that ordinary people do every day. They consider security cooperation with great powers as a way to obtain a number of rewards. Sometimes they seek only state or regime survival in a dog-eat-dog security environment. Other times they seek above all to stay afloat economically, and the price for great-power aid is fealty in the security sphere. Motives can also be personal: elites are sometimes driven by greed or a lust for material power that only a great power’s coffers or arsenal can satisfy. Similarly, a desire to ride the coattails of a powerful protector can provide psychic benefits to leaders in search of prestige or legitimacy. Most DCs align at least to some degree because the world is a dangerous place for small countries and middle powers, and few want to take their chances unprotected. Spurning all great-power allies can leave a DC highly exposed and vulnerable to conquest from outside or from within.

The rewards make some degree of security cooperation with a great power appealing most of the time. However, there is no free lunch in international security affairs. Great powers seldom hand out guns, butter, and security guarantees without demanding some obeisance from their weaker partners in return. Alignments thus come with substantial risks as well as rewards. The tighter an alignment, the higher these risks tend to be. DCs are always constrained to some degree by their international environments, but aligning too tightly with a powerful protector can make matters worse. It can turn a DC into a dependent satellite or stooge of an overbearing protector, or it can lead to entrapment in unwanted conflict. A DC also runs a risk if it brandishes the sword while standing confidently beside a mighty ally: it might later find itself abandoned in an hour of need.

Entering a tight alliance is like signing a big business contract or deciding to get married. The possible rewards are tremendous, but such commitments also narrow options, tie one party’s fate to another, and carry a certain risk of betrayal. For small states and middle powers in the developing world, picking the wrong partner can have grave consequences in blood, freedom, and treasure. Thus it is hardly surprising that when they have a choice, DCs usually prefer limited alignments that keep their options open. When they have a meaningful choice, DCs usually prefer dating to marriage.

DCs can also try to pursue strict nonalignment, which carries a different kind of risk-and-reward profile. An investor who hides his money in a mattress is relatively unexposed to stock price fluctuations, and a Romeo who never asks Juliet to the dance faces little chance of refusal. However, such extreme risk-avoiders also forego the possible rewards of a booming portfolio or a fulfilling relationship. DCs can try to split the difference and they usually do. They can avoid the high risks of rigid defense commitments by cooperating in a more ad hoc, informal, and flexible way. At the same time, limited alignment gives them some security ties to a great power that can develop into closer cooperation if conditions warrant.

In short, the leaders of DCs usually consider limited alignments to be utility-maximizing in that they deliver the best possible ratio of risks to rewards. Clearly, keeping a powerful protector at arm’s length is not always the best strategy. A DC that refuses to ally tightly may similarly find itself written off by a great-power friend, just as a vendor who, to preserve wiggle room, refuses to sign a long-term contract with a buyer may soon lose the deal. I argue that in the dangerous arena of international security, limited alignments are usually more attractive to DCs than the ideal-type options of balancing, bandwagoning, or strict neutrality, especially when the risks and rewards of alignment are difficult to gauge. The sections that follow examine the principal hazards of alignment, as well as the main benefits.

Risks

The principal risks of alignment to a DC are the dangers of diminished autonomy, abandonment, entrapment, and domestic backlash. These dangers vary from case to case, but they are usually greater in tight alliances than in limited alignments. This is the main reason DCs often prefer to stay at arm’s length, even if that means passing up the arms, cash, and other benefits that flow from rock-ribbed security pacts.

Diminished Autonomy and Dependency

As just mentioned, one risk of alignments—and especially tight ones—is that they can turn DCs into satellites or stooges of a great power. Most DCs have been victims to military occupation, colonialism, or other forms of imperial rule during modern history. Unsurprisingly, most are loath to accept external masters if they believe they can run their own affairs independently. Many DCs won their independence from colonial or imperial powers only after the end of World War II or more recently. Their leaders’ personal legacies and political regimes are often intimately identified with national independence movements. Most remain wary of a return to subordinate status. States that pried their independence away from colonial or imperial powers—often at no small cost in human lives—are rarely apt to seek alignments that dramatically undercut their hard-earned freedom.¹

Policy flexibility. Autonomy implies foreign and domestic policy flexibility. George Kennan argued that, because of the fluid nature of international politics, “most wise and experienced statesmen usually shy away from commitments likely to constitute limitations on a government’s behavior at unknown dates in the future in the face of unpredictable situations.”²

Most DCs have seen economic, political, and military dependency as the way neo-imperial powers would wedge their way into the drivers’ seats of national policymaking. This enables a great power to rule the roost and treat its ally with disdain. The more tightly a DC aligns—and the more dependent it becomes on a great power—the more constrained it will be in formulating independent policies. Even a friendly great power is likely to demand some fealty as the price of protection and security support. Reduced policy flexibility denies the DC the flexibility to change its position as strategic conditions evolve over time. In 1983 Colombian President Belisario Betancur clearly explained the rationale for avoiding tight alliances when possible: “It is a question of not being a satellite of any one power center and of maintaining our own power of decision.”³

Concerns about independence tend to be particularly strong in the developing world. This point is crucial, because it largely explains why limited alignment strategies are likely to be of particular appeal to the states of the Global South (and why northern states more often exhibit a willingness to enter strong defense pacts). Many DCs are economically weak and only partially coherent as modern nation-states. Their governments often possess questionable legitimacy, their borders are often arbitrary, and some elements of their populations often have only a diffuse sense of belonging to the state. To the extent that leaders seek to build domestic legitimacy and viable nation-states, the appearance of relative autonomy can be critical. Some leaders—like Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam or Babrak Karmal in Afghanistan—have banked on heavy great-power support to consolidate their positions, but that strategy carries enormous risks of dependency and domestic dissatisfaction. The leaders of DCs are almost always sensitive to the risk that tight alliances can turn their countries into mere client states and themselves into puppets.

Dependency. Fears of diminished autonomy are inextricably linked to the dangers of dependency and loss of leverage. For some DC leaders, dependency is accepted as the price for survival or kleptocratic gains; the development of the nation-state is a secondary concern. However, for many other governments in the Global South, survival is not enough. Their leaders also seek to build viable states that can stand on their own. Leaning on a great power often provides a helpful aid in the process of economic and military development, but it can also retard growth in some cases by providing too great a crutch. Local authorities sometimes become too dependent on its aid or markets and avoid making the difficult decisions necessary for building strong independent security forces and a robust economy. Moreover, in a highly dependent relationship, a DC often has to devote some of its modest resources to fighting the great power’s causes rather than its own. Subordination of its security policies to the goals of its larger partner can skew the development of the DC’s own forces and leave it unprepared to meet its independent needs.

Modern history reveals many cases of limited alignments motivated largely by a desire to guard national autonomy and preserve some leverage and flexibility. For example, a long history of U.S. and other great-power intervention in the region has made most modern Latin American governments fearful of dominance by their mighty northern neighbor. Under considerable U.S. pressure, almost all Latin American governments signed the Rio Treaty of 1947, which committed them to repel any attack (presumably a Soviet one) on a member state.⁴ Nevertheless, most governments sought to limit ties, and by the 1960s, most had joined the NAM as members or observers, and the Rio Treaty became largely moribund.⁵ Latin American governments generally sought to confine military ties to the U.S. International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, joint training exercises, and some arms provision. Few contributed any troops or money to America’s wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Even during the conflict-ridden years of the Second Cold War in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only a few states in the region became tight American allies by choice. As Lars Schoultz has argued, “To Latin Americans the long history of U.S. armed intervention in the region militates against inviting the camel to stick its nose under the tent once again.”⁶

African relations with the Soviet Union provide numerous other examples. During the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, the USSR sought to build a network of alliances with African states, essentially by trying to swap arms for bases and political influence. It met with relatively little success. African governments that had recently shaken off the shackles of a century or more of European rule were hardly eager for Russian apparatchiks to set up a new imperial order. Only five sub-Saharan African states agreed to sign friendship treaties with Moscow, and only Somalia (briefly) and later Ethiopia agreed to grant the Soviets basing rights.⁷

Angola and Mozambique became reliant on Soviet arms to fight off domestic rivals and the South African army, but after suffering the brunt of Portuguese rule, they turned down Soviet requests for military facilities and willingly suffered some aid cutbacks as a price. The governments of Congo and Guinea-Bissau followed a similar path, turning down Soviet entreaties for tight alliances and basing rights that would have jeopardized their newfound independence. In a host of other African countries—such as Mali, Benin, Guinea, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, and Madagascar—Soviet aid generally met with a similar refrain: thanks for the arms, but scant interest in Soviet bases or tight, deeply embedded alliances.⁸ American administrations sought less energetically than the USSR to establish strong defense relationships in sub-Saharan Africa, but when they did, they usually received a lukewarm response for similar reasons.⁹

Post-Soviet states provide further cases of limited alignments driven largely by a desire to avoid continued dependency on Russia and subordination to the Kremlin. Russia and the surrounding Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) signed a collective security agreement at Tashkent in 1992, which Russia’s neighbors generally felt compelled to sign due to their deficient or nonexistent stand-alone military capabilities. However, almost all CIS governments feared Russian domination, and as soon as they were able to stand on their own two feet, almost all sought to wean themselves off of Russian security dependency by reducing bilateral defense links to Moscow and engaging with the West and the United States, largely through NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) training program. Some invited Russian forces to resolve episodic crises, such as the risk of a spreading Afghan civil war in the mid-1990s, but the overall trend was toward limited ties.

By 1998 Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeev said that Russia only had three “close allies [with] fairly advanced military contacts”—Armenia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Two of those, Belarus and Kazakhstan, worked to limit their alignments with Moscow by espousing policies of neutrality and establishing military links to the West. In general, post-Soviet states have pursued “strategic partnerships” (or similar informal arrangements) with Russia and limited ties to NATO to achieve autonomy without making unnecessary enemies in Moscow.¹⁰

Leverage. As noted, maintaining one’s distance from a grea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Appeal of Limited Alignments
• 2 Latter Stages of the Cold War
• 3 The Post–Cold War Era
• 4 Maritime Southeast Asia
• 5 The Mainland Peninsula
• 6 The Prevalence of Limited Alignments Today
• Conclusion Key Findings and Implications
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index