Abstract
Do states defect from multilateral military coalitions? And if so, how—and why? This book argues that coalition defection is prompted by heightened perceptions of political and military risk. Yet the choice of how to defect—whether to completely withdraw forces or instead find another, less risky way to participate—is largely a function of alliance and international pressures to remain engaged. As such, this chapter lays out the analytic puzzle of contemporary coalition defection, why it is so hard for analysts to detect, and the methodology this book employs to analyse how and why states defect from contemporary coalitions.
As discussed later, this book defines defection as “non-routine abrogation of responsibilities in order to minimize operational risk, undertaken at other coalition partner’s expense, significantly prior to mission conclusion.” As it will argue, there are any number of ways that states can minimize their operational risk while still appearing to remain fully engaged in a military coalition. As a result, the term “defection” is more appropriate to use than “withdrawal” or “exit,” as both imply a full removal of forces from a coalition, which is only one of many possible risk minimization strategies (and an infrequently employed strategy at that).
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Notes
- 1.
The term “surge” throughout this book refers to a significant increase in military forces into a given theatre—in addition to forces already on the ground—in a relatively short timeframe.
- 2.
Gerald de Hemptinne, “Dutch Troops to Stay in Afghanistan until 2010: Government,” Agence France Presse, November 30, 2007.
- 3.
iCasualties.org, “Operation Enduring Freedom Casualties,” https://web.archive.org/web/20121124154118/ (Accessed November 12, 2012). Steve Coll, “Burden Sharing,” The New Yorker, March 11, 2010.
- 4.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, “Handover of Command of the Danish Contingent in Helmand,” August 19, 2013. http://afghanistan.um.dk/en/about%20us/news%2D%2D-denmark-in-afghanistan/newsdisplaypage/?newsid=9afb733e-8c46-4b1c-9012-8ce103414210.
- 5.
“Barack Obama Orders 30,000 More Troops to Afghanistan,” BBC News, 2 December 2009.
- 6.
Sarah Kreps, “Elite Consensus as a Determinant of Alliance Cohesion: Why Public Opinion Hardly Matters for NATO-Led Operations in Afghanistan,” Foreign Policy Analysis 6, no. 3, pp. 191–215.
- 7.
Daniel F. Baltrusaitis, Coalition Politics and the Iraq War (Boulder, CO: FirstForumPress).
- 8.
The Cabinet Office, The Strategic Defense and Security Review: Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty, Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom (2010).
- 9.
Barack H. Obama, “National Security Strategy of the United States,”. The White House (Washington, DC, 2010), p. 41.
- 10.
Donald J. Trump, “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” The White House (Washington, DC, 2017), p. 4.
- 11.
See George Liska, Nations in Alliance; the Limits of Interdependence (Baltimore,: John Hopkins Press, 1962); Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Nora Bensahel, “International Alliances and Military Effectiveness: Fighting Alongside Allies and Partners,” in Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness, ed. Risa Brooks and Elizabeth A. Stanley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
- 12.
Olivier Schmitt, Allies That Count: Junior Partners in Coalition Warfare (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018).
- 13.
Napoleon, as quoted in, Ole R. Holsti, P. Terrence Hopmann, and John D. Sullivan, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances: Comparative Studies (New York: Wiley, 1973), p. 22.
- 14.
Kathleen J. McInnis, “Lessons in Coalition Warfare: Past, Present and Implications for the Future,” International Politics Reviews 1, no. 2 (2013); Kathleen J. McInnis, “Coalition Contributions to Countering the Islamic State,” Congressional Research Service (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2016).
- 15.
Robert H. Scales, “Trust, Not Technology, Sustains Coalitions,” Parameters 28, no. 4 (1998).
- 16.
Gal Luft, Beer, Bacon and Bullets: Culture in Coalition Warfare from Gallipoli to Iraq (BookSurge, 2009).
- 17.
Ernst B. Haas, “Regime Decay: Conflict Management and International Organizations, 1945–1981,” International Organization 37, no. 02 (1983); Atsushi Tago, “When Are Democratic Friends Unreliable? The Unilateral Withdrawal of Troops from the ‘Coalition of the Willing’,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 2 (2009); Brett Ashley Leeds and Burcu Savun, “Terminating Alliances: Why Do States Abrogate Agreements?,” The Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007); Brett Ashley Leeds, “Alliance Reliability in Times of War: Explaining State Decisions to Violate Treaties,” International Organization 57, no. 04 (2003); John S. Duffield, “Alliances,” in Security Studies: An Introduction, ed. Paul D. Williams (Routledge, 2012); Stephen M. Walt, “Why Alliances Endure or Collapse,” Survival 39, no. 1 (1997); Laurence Wellman Beilenson and Bernhard M. Dain, The Treaty Trap (1969); Avi Kober, Coalition Defection: The Dissolution of Arab Anti-Israeli Coalitions in War and Peace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Holsti, Hopmann, and Sullivan.
- 18.
Stephen Biddle, as quoted in Ken Herman and Don Melvin, “White House Lauds British Cuts; Opponents of War Say U.S. Should Follow Suit,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 22, 2007.
- 19.
Thomas Harding, “British ‘Abandoned Basra to Terror’; US Generals Tell BBC That the 2007 Withdrawal Was a Defeat While Army Officers Admit It Was ‘Not Our Finest Hour’,” The Daily Telegraph, September 29, 2010.
- 20.
“UK Basra Base Exit ‘Not a Defeat’,” BBC World News, October 15, 2013.
- 21.
See Thomas Harding and Stephen Adams, “British Troops Leave Basra City as Row Grows over America’s War Strategy,” The Daily Telegraph, September 3, 2007; Robin Yapp, “Pentagon Stokes Tensions over Basra,” ibid., August 31, 2007; Tim Reid and Philip Webster, “US Commander to Meet Brown as Pullout from Basra Frays Ties,” The Times, September 13, 2007.
- 22.
Stephen Fidler, Demitri Sevastopulo, and Alex Barker, “Iraqi Offensive Draws in Extra Forces to Basra,” The Financial Times, April 23, 2008.
- 23.
Max Hastings, “As British Troops Withdraw from Basra, Good Men Die in a Sorry Story That Can Only Get Worse,” The Daily Mail, September 4, 2007.
- 24.
Shaw, as quoted in, Sam Collyns, “Secret Iraq: Awakening,” in BBC Frontline (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 2012).
- 25.
Mansoor, as quoted in, ibid.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Richard Norton-Taylor, “Iraq War Inquiry Asks General: Were UK Troops ‘Sitting Ducks’ in Basra?,” The Guardian, January 6, 2010; The Chilcot Inquiry, “Transcript of Testimony: Ltg Barney White-Spunner,” Report of the Iraq Inquiry (London: Her Majesty’s Government, 2010). See also: Huw Bennett, “The Reluctant Counter-Insurgents: Britain’s Absent Surge in Southern Iraq,” in The New Counter-Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective, ed. Celeste Ward Gventer and MLR Smith (Springer, 2014), p. 209.
- 28.
Nick Beadle, “Afghanistan and the Context of Iraq,” in The Afghan Papers: Committing Britain to War in Helmand, 2005–06 ed. Michael Clark (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2011), pp. 79–80.
- 29.
Anthony Cordesman, as quoted in: Ken Herman and John Melvin, “White House Lauds British Cuts; Opponents of War Say U.S. Should Follow Suit,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 22, 2007.
- 30.
Bennett, p. 208. Emphasis added.
- 31.
In this formulation, domestic politics includes the degree of consensus, particularly amongst elites as expressed through political debates and public statements, on the national security interests being advanced through participating.
- 32.
Interview Ministry of Defense of Australia Official, Canberra, Australia, September 20, 2013.
- 33.
Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Basic Books, 1984).
- 34.
Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Transaction Publishers, 2009).
- 35.
Sharan B. Merriam, Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2009).
- 36.
David Collier, “Understanding Process Tracing,” PS: Political Science & Politics 44, no. 04 (2011).
- 37.
Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005), p. 209.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 213.
- 39.
Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009); Robert Keohane, Sidney Verba, and Gary King, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- 40.
As noted earlier, individuals interviewed as part of this research chose to remain anonymous. I therefore relied on publicly available information as much as possible while using insights from interviews to select the most relevant materials for inclusion in case studies. Taking this approach allowed me to overcome one of the key obstacles to building a meaningful analysis of the coalition defection phenomenon, namely, the sensitive nature of coalition participation and defection discussions. Due to these sensitivities, participants in state deliberations on defection are often reluctant to speak about these matters on the record. Fortunately, for most countries, withdrawing from a coalition is surrounded by such significant controversy that deliberations about national strategic options make their way into local and international press accounts, which I used to either augment or validate the accounts articulated to me through interviews. An added advantage of using these sources—particularly news articles from reputable sources—is that it is significantly easier to construct a chronologically accurate account of key events and decision points. After gathering and coding materials, a largely complete picture of the dynamics leading states to remain in or defect from coalitions could be built.
- 41.
George and Bennett, pp. 205–232.
- 42.
Hamel, 1993 as quoted in Merriam, p. 52.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 213.
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McInnis, K.J. (2020). The Puzzle of Coalition “Defection”. In: How and Why States Defect from Contemporary Military Coalitions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78834-0_1
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