Abstract
How should alliance patterns respond to changing relative power? The bargaining theory approach to international relations suggests that as a country grows in power, it will acquire a credible threat to fight against other countries who then may become more likely to put aside their differences and ally against the threat. Nuclear weapons reduce the threat and balancing incentive by making war more costly. Advanced nuclear capabilities, however, hold out the hope of destroying adversary nuclear forces and thereby lowering the cost of nuclear war, making threats to fight more credible. I analyze this process and discuss US-Chinese-Russian relations as an illustration of the theory.
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Notes
- 1.
International Monetary Fund data, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper.
- 2.
International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2018.
- 3.
SIPRI Trends in World Nuclear Forces, 2016.
- 4.
See Beckley (2011) for a dissenting view.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
From which this one borrows the previous two pages and literature review.
- 8.
For an exception, see Talmadge (2022).
- 9.
For many more examples, see Larson (2020).
- 10.
Ross (2020) argues that Russia lacks the power to balance against China in the far East.
- 11.
See Walt (1997) for his views on why alliances collapse.
- 12.
Steven David (1991) argues that leaders balance against the greatest threat to their tenure, whether that threat is foreign or domestic. Daniel Drezner applied this perspective to the Trump administration, “Trump, Russia and Omnibalancing: What Happens if Trump Views His Domestic Threats as More Dire Than Any Foreign Threat?” The Washington Post, June 15, 2017.
- 13.
By explicitly considering the value of the issue at stake between the two powers, the theory presented here departs from a simple structural realist framework, in which all states are assumed to want to conquer the world. In the structural realist framework, alliances are motivated by the desire to avoid conquest and all wars are total. In this model, they may be motivated lesser desires and wars need not be total. In this model, therefore, power disparities can be peaceful, so long as war is costly in comparison with the stakes, which is puzzling in a structural realist context.
- 14.
US costs of war are also lower in the US-Russian axis, narrowing the bargaining range there as well.
- 15.
Neil MacFarquar and David E.Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities.” The New York Times, March 1, 2018.
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The author would like to thank Brandon Yoder for comments.
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Kydd, A. (2022). Bargaining, Nuclear Weapons, and Alliance Choices in US-China-Russia Relations. In: Yoder, B.K. (eds) The United States and Contemporary China-Russia Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93982-3_9
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