Conventional wisdom in international relations suggests that, given the anarchical nature of world politics, in which there is no central authority above individual states, international commitments are hard to make and harder to sustain. The logical correlate of this assumption is that states are particularly averse to remaining committed to institutional arrangements, such as military alliances, that directly affect their security and survival. What, then, makes states enter into military alliances and, in some cases, stick to them? In his book Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances, which examines the bilateral security alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) since the end of the Cold War, Jae-Jung Suh “develops, as an answer, a historical institutionalist explanation” that synthesizes the main variables in three schools of American international relations theory: power, interest, and identity (p. 8).
Explanations of the unprecedented endurance of international alliances in the post–Cold War world have been largely confined to the case of NATO, and theoretical debates have focused on either the rationalist/material conditions or the reflective/sociological base, but not both. This book takes up what has been left by previous scholarship and makes original contributions to the current debate on the subject.
The book examines the U.S.–Korea alliance as an “analytically strategic” case to test the strengths and weaknesses of mainstream international relations theories (p. 4). According to Suh, the persistence of the U.S.–Korea alliance poses a difficult challenge to neorealists, who equate fluctuation in an alliance with change in military capability. Chapter 2 critically assesses the capability-based theory and suggests that, even though the power/threat balance favored South Korea over North Korea in the 1990s, the bilateral security alliance against the North remained persistent. In chapter 3, Suh also criticizes the neoliberal explanation for the alliance persistence, which highlights interests as the key variable but fails to adequately explain how those interests are presented, articulated, and debated in the political process. Using the economic theory of asset specificity, Suh argues that past decisions have produced political forces with vested interests in maintaining status quo and created cost barriers to alternative security arrangements. In chapter 4, Suh notes that identity-based theories are useful in explaining the alliance persistence once the security partners shared a collective identity as “natural” allies. But the theories are not as strong in explaining the heyday of the U.S.–Korea alliance, when the allies actually had little basis for a collective identity in terms of common cultural heritage, democratic norms, and history.
Suh concludes that a state's choice in a security alliance is embedded in a triple-layered structure: in the stage of power, the state's choice of alliance creation and maintenance is a matter of balancing power; in the stage of interests, the choice is governed by domestic interest constellations; and in the stage of identity, the state's behavior affects and is affected by the social constitution of its identities (pp. 12, 175).
Suh's analysis of the alliance persistence reflects trends in social science that make explaining important puzzles with multiple approaches a priority. But Suh's call for analytical eclecticism may not be agreeable to everyone. First, it is difficult to judge how much marginal benefit can be gained by using multiple variables in explaining a political outcome instead of explaining the same outcome with one major variable, such as power. For instance, Suh contends that power/threat-based explanations fail to account for the anomaly of the early 1990s. However, the end of the Cold War was far from a protracted process. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union were shocking events that were unexpected by all reasonable measures. And less than two years later did North Korea come out to confront the world over its secret pursuit of nuclear weapons, threatening to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.” Considering the rapidity and magnitude of the events that occupied the span of five years between 1989 and 1993, it is debatable whether the allies’ policy in favor of keeping the military alliance as usual was based on unfounded and exaggerated perception of threat.
The second issue is measuring the degree of alliance persistence and predicting its future. A military alliance as an institution, Suh concludes, “is most likely to persist when it is supported by an interest structure that makes it cheaper than the alternatives and by an identity formation that makes it seem natural” (p. 21). However, the book does not offer detailed accounts regarding how to measure the relative affordability of the existing alliance and its status in domestic politics as hegemonic discourse, or where the tipping point between a cost-friendly and natural military alliance and an expensive and unpopular alliance exists.
Suh says that “[t]he alliance will, of course, not sail on smoothly and indefinitely” (p. 202). “Persistence … does not preclude disagreements or disputes about the configuration of the allied militaries, burden sharing, social friction, and other issues that arise out of alliance operations” (p. 204). Yet some readers will remain curious as to how his alliance persistence theory helps make a distinction between the phenomena that portend the imminent termination of the alliance and the symptoms that reflect the alliance undergoing adjustments to a new reality.
Bridging case study and theory building and integrating diverse international relations theories, Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances is an outstanding example of historical institutionalism applied to the field of international relations. The book is a welcome scholarly work, both for those who wish to learn about the U.S.–Korea security alliance and for those who engage in theoretical debates in international politics.
