Abstract
What foreign policy-making problems may caveats contribute solving at the level of global politics? Caveats seem to limit the political costs of participating in coalition forces due to concerns about alliance commitments. Instead of buck-passing entirely, caveats allows the lukewarm or hesitant coalition member to contribute the smaller proverbial buck. Based on the theory of the security dilemma in alliance politics, an argument is developed for the deduction of three hypotheses on coalition participation and caveats. In this theoretical context, caveats become a foreign policy instrument used to optimize the balancing of the dual fears of being abandoned by the alliance and be trapped in a risky military commitment not justified in other national interests. National reservations on the use of force is an instrument to strike a balance between diverging national concerns, and thereby also a tool to maximize coalition force generation within what is politically feasible. Caveats may thus become the lesser evil to the alternative of desist from participating in the coalition altogether.
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Notes
- 1.
Glenn H. Snyder treats security alignments and alliances as identical phenomena: “Alignments, whether or not they have been formalized as alliances, are essentially expectations in the minds of statesmen about whether they will be supported, opposed, or ignored by other states in future interactions” (1997: 21–22). It is reasonable to assume that Snyder’s theoretical propositions apply to all kinds of security cooperation, from formal alliances to ad hoc “coalitions-of-the-willing .”
- 2.
The principle of collective defense is enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which is the formal name for the North Atlantic Treaty underpinning NATO . Collective defense implies that an attack against one ally treated as an attack against all allies.
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Fermann, G. (2019). Alliance Politics Dynamics. In: Coping with Caveats in Coalition Warfare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92519-6_8
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