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Chapter I: Introduction
Ever since the inauguration of the Obama administration, the US foreign policy in
Asia-Pacific has made considerable progress. Despite the fluctuation under the Trump administration, the US role within the region has remained crucial. From the earlier “Rebalance to Asia,” to a more recent “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy,” they all anchored on the
long-standing hub-and-spoke alliance system.
Beyond that, however, is a qualitative change. While the system still hinges on a US-centered mechanism, it has also been deUS-centered from her. Instead, we are seeing a trend of growing autonomy, which is especially obvious in terms of defense cooperation. For instance, Japan and Australia, despite no formal alliance relationship, have strengthened their cooperation in defense and security. Identically, India has also pursued a greater engagement in the West-Pacific. The efforts are particularly clear in its strategic relationship with Japan.
This so-called “spoke-and-spoke” approach reveals the complexity of regional cooperation.
On the other edge of Eurasia, a similar tendency also emerged along with a rising discussion of closer security cooperation between the European members (the EU). Though the
EU has stumbled for decades when military issues are involved, its recent progress should not be ignored. Since the earlier "European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP)”, which is later known as “Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP),” the EU has been consistently
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calling for better security policy in response to diversified challenges around the globe. As a
result, in the past five years a series of initiatives has been enforced in more concrete ways, including “European Global Strategy (EUGS)”, “Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO)”, “Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (CARD),” and “European Defence Fund.”
The cases above are not exemplary. Instead, they are part of a bigger picture that there is, in fact, a tendency showing that defense cooperation is becoming even more common in recent years. While there is considerable literature discussing policy and geopolitical trends, the theoretical and academia counterparts are relative of shortage. Defense cooperation
particularly is receiving limited attention nowadays. Security and defense, conventionally attributed as “high politics” deserve more inquiries for their rich leverage to explore the state’s
behavior rationale. Furthermore, to go beyond ad-hoc discussion and oversimplified assumption, this discussion should benefit from a more inclusive way of theory-building that could relax the tension of policy relevance.
Research Goal
The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the formation of defense cooperation agreements. Three threads of discussion are worth examining. Altogether, they crystallize the formation of defense cooperation agreements at different levels and aspects.
First and foremost, the realist explanations provided that the formation of defense cooperation agreements roughly reflects the dynamic of international structure. From the
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earlier Waltzian proposition to a more recent argument put by Mearsheimer, this thread has analyzed the security affairs through the lens of power and geopolitics. A sense of strategic contingency has featured in both theoretical and policy discussions in this line. Secondly, neoliberal institutionalists argued for a more introspective view of institution formation. While
the realist accounts committed themselves to a more structural explanation, the institutionalists theorized states “demand” for international institutions, or more broadly, international
cooperation. This line of explanation offered a specific framework of how institutions might
be formed in the long run. Final but not least, the deterrence theories and alliance theories delivered a more “relational” account of the interaction between states. Formal and informal literature relocate their aims on “interaction” per se and mapped out states’ rational. In terms
of these theories, it is plausible to conjecture that defense cooperation is an instant response to threats or niche for interests.
Using this literature, some of the preliminary questions should be answered. Why states sign defense cooperation agreements? What do they expect to respond, threats or opportunities?
Specifically, in the presence of higher-level structures like alliances, why do they choose a certain form of defense cooperation rather than others? It is apparent that theories above provide considerable answers for why states cooperate. Yet so far there is limited discussion about defense cooperation agreements and why this specific form is chosen. Answering these questions should enable us to understand the formation of defense cooperation agreements,
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which is becoming pervasive in the realm of international security. Furthermore, the insights derived from the literature will help us establish a concrete context in which states act upon.
This point would be particularly important given the turbulent international situation nowadays.
This thesis is structured as follows. First, I will review the literature relating to defense cooperation agreement. Particularly, I should develop a feasible typology that should facilitate theory-building later on. Second, I will wrap up different schools of theories to look into the theoretical account for the establishment of cooperation. As for the scope, I mostly concentrated on the materialist explanations since an idealist one would require an almost different ontology. Here, the most important task is to structure hypotheses accounting for the
formation of defense cooperation agreements. Next, I will layout the research design. In this thesis, I employed the framework of Alexander George’s “structured and focus comparison.”
To fortify the causal inference, I also use process tracing to test the hypotheses derived from the literature. Finally, I will examine two cases. The first one is the security and defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region which has gradually replace Asia-Pacific as a new space for strategic and geopolitical engagement in the past decade. The other is the European Common Defense Policy. Despite its long criticized stumbles, its enormous progress in the past few years should not be ignored. Furthermore, progress does not come from nowhere. Instead, it should be deemed as an outcome stemming from early experience.
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In sum, this thesis aims not only for theoretical synthesizes but also for a more coherent way to inquire about the development of international security. After all, to my own belief, a discussion regarding the international relations theory should not isolate itself from the dynamic development of the world, but rather, engage.
Tracing DCAs in Literature: Structure, Institution, and Strategic Bargaining
Defense cooperation agreements (DCA) received fewer inquiries, especially in contrast to alliances. Nonetheless, it is rather unreasonable if we look into the trend in the past four decades Using the data from Correlates of War, it can be soon discovered that there has been much less newly formed alliance than DCAs (Kinne 2019). A quick comparison could be observed in Figure I.1. While the blue line represents DCAs and the red counterpart stands for alliances, the horizontal axis marked the starting year of given observations. It is clear that, after the end of the Cold War, international society came to face a surge of DCAs. Compared
to the almost dormant growth of alliances, DCAs continue to increase at a rapid rate. Merely in terms of the sample size, DCAs carry great potential for us to explore states’ security policy.1
1 The Defense Cooperation Agreement Dataset (Kinne 2019) spans from 1980 through 2010, which covers years during the Cold War and the post-Cold War. Nonetheless, the data should be interpreted with caution. The face value of the dataset implies a great deal for analyzing security cooperation after 1980. Yet we should not easily conclude that DCA flourishes only after 1980. On the contrary, it is highly likely that DCA has already been popular immediately after the Cold War, no matter as a part of alliances or as a more informal exchange between states.
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Figure I.1: Growth Trend of Alliance and DCA
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Despite its pervasiveness, DCAs have no uniform definition. Besides, the data used above suffered from relatively short temporal span which ranges from 1980 to 2010, during which the paradigm or first case of DCAs would be hard to be located. However, there is some reference that could enable us to commence the inquiries.
To my knowledge, there is only one general definition in academic society trying to locate DCAs. It roughly sketches DCAs by defining them as “formal bilateral agreements that
establish institutional frameworks for routine defense cooperation. DCAs typically involve relatively symmetric, long-term commitments for both sides, with an emphasis on coordinating core areas of defense policy and encouraging interpersonal contacts” (Kinne 2018). This definition and its following studies effectively pointed out that DCAs are important tools to solve the information asymmetry and distribution problems, both of which are a prominent hindrance against cooperation. Nonetheless, as I will point in the following paragraphs, the definition is too limited to probe into the defense cooperation between states despite its nicely framed operationalization.
Governmental agencies have also attempted to delineate the scope of cooperation.
Despite the frequent usage of DCA in naming bilateral documents, security cooperation appears to be more common in general documents. For instance, the US Defense Security Assistance Agency (DSAA), which is now known as the Defense Security Cooperation Agency
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(DSCA), coined the term security cooperation. In the most recent manual, it was defined as follows (Defense Security Cooperation Agency 2019):
All DoD interactions with foreign defense establishments to build defense relationships
that promote specific U.S. security interests, develop allied and partner nation military
and security capabilities for self-defense and multinational operations, and provide U.S.
forces with peacetime and contingency access to allied and partner nations. This includes
DoD-administered security assistance programs.
Yet it should be noticed that the mandate is not exclusive to the Department of Defense (DoD). In fact, the clause includes a broader reference to the Department of State (DoS) which
possesses general control but not necessarily actual executing.2 More specifically, those administering “any program or interaction of DoD with the security establishment of a foreign country to build capabilities, to provide access or to build relationships” are mostly referred as
security cooperation. For example, the manual just mentioned provides a comprehensive categorization. Other than funding, arms sales, and peacekeeping operation (PKO), security cooperation puts more emphasis on personnel exchange, security education, and military-to-military or military-to-military-to-civilian contacts. The activities above are all policies to enhance engagements between the US military and its partners. Furthermore, they are integral parts to
2 To clarify, it is the official definition that distinguish the so-called “security assistance”, which refers to those solidify the military capability through multiple financial means. See Defense Institute of Security Cooperation Studies (2018); Defense Security Cooperation Agency (2019).
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support the national strategy for US that each of them receives comprehensive assessment (Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy 2016). DCAs function is specifically illuminated by the following address given by the US ambassador to Slovakia, Bridget Brink,
before the 15th anniversary of NATO (U.S. Embassy Bratislava 2019),
“...a Defense Cooperation Agreement that, once completed, will offer a legal and practical mechanism for increasing cooperation across all facets of our defense
relationship. It will also provide the legal framework for the United States to extend
approximately $105 million dollars in European Deterrence Initiative funding for needed infrastructure improvements at Malacky and Sliac Airbases…”
These types of agreements, as mentioned after the quotation above, are all bilateral in nature.
Again, the agreements are aimed at upgrading defense capabilities. Put in another way, if the national strategy is the bones, then defense cooperation plays the role of connecting meats and bones.
It is immediately clear that security cooperation includes a wide array of instruments and realms. While it provides a riveting starting point for us to bolster our understanding of interstate cooperation, it nonetheless posed a theoretical hindrance. That is, how should we locate it in the current literature? While there is much literature on alliance politics, the DCA counterparts are relatively absent. But this is not the end of the world. Literature regarding alliance politics, in fact, offers the very starting point from which we might locate DCAs.
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Accordingly, it would be vital to set a theoretical stage in order to determine where we should stand to elaborate the formation of DCAs.
Locating DCAs in typologies
Some might doubt the plausibility to juxtapose DCAs with alliances. Since the formation of DCAs has just caught attention, there are currently no consensual definition and position for DCAs so far. Moreover, some have argued that DCAs are analytically different from the alliance for they usually include no mutual defense or nonaggression obligation (Kinne 2018). My goal here is not to refute the conceptualization. Instead, I believe that alliances and DCAs are highly compatible.
The connection is cogent in that DCAs have been used as a tool to advance the national interests at least since the end of the Cold War. Despite different nomenclature, the aims remain.
For instance, William Clements (1972). claimed,
Had we not become involved and, for more than two decades, supported and
encouraged the efforts of allied and friendly countries to protect themselves
against threats to their territorial integrity and internal security, the complexion
of the globe might be dangerously different today, and the international climate
far more hostile.
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Clearly, DCAs have been a major instrument of both security and foreign policy through coordination and collaboration with other countries. The problem, then, would be the way we use the word, alliance. While the word has been used in a quite uniform fashion in the recent literature, it is not always so. For instance, Stephen Walt in 1987 used alliance and alignment in a rather ambiguous way. It is clearly not the case in other places. For more recent literature, alignments could refer to extensive forms of groupings while the more formal ramifications would tend to be known as an alliance.
DCAs without doubts is a form of alignments since they would require states to hold share interests to behave in a coordinated, or at least not conflictual fashion. After all, alignment is a rather comprehensive concept capturing a pattern in which states cooperated in any form as long as they have common interests on certain issues (Wilkins 2012). In terms of DCAs, states have to have some extent of shared views on security and defense issues before entering into such agreements. Part of the reason why DCAs are signed in practice is that signing parties are aware of the need to normalize military activities even during peacetime (Murphy 1991). It is clear that whether DCAs are alignments tells not much about this form of cooperation.
The unclear position of DCAs arguably leads us to further instigate whether DCAs are a form of alliances. Thus, I start the discussion with the definition of the alliance. Alliance, as just described, has been endowed with multiple meanings. Stephen Walt, for example, defines alliance as “a formal or informal relationship of security cooperation between two or more
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sovereign states” (Walt 1987). This definition provides little insight for its almost infinite
coverage of interstate security cooperation and hence not of much use here. In contrast, Glenn Snyder provided a more concise definition: “alliances are formal association of states for the
use (or non-use) of military force, in specified circumstances, against states outside their own membership” (G. H. Snyder 1997). In this sense, the scope becomes usefully narrower for it
clearly pointed out that formalization and presumed threats are the central features of alliances.
Similarly, the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP), a dataset focusing on the military alliance, makes a stricter requirement. Unless parties in alliances are obligated
to cooperate in the face of military conflicts, even formal security cooperation that is legally binding would not suffice to be “alliances” (Ashley Leeds et al. 2002). Clearly, several
necessary conditions could be listed to identify alliances. First, they are formal documents signed between independent states. Second, they required mutual cooperation during wars or conflicts. That says, sharing facilities and joint exercises do not automatically qualify despite apparently close relationships. Finally, they tend to assume a certain state of crisis to be dealt with.3
Thus far, DCAs are hardly equivalent to alliances given the lack of obligation to mutual
defense or threat-oriented guidelines. Even in terms of defense pacts, DCAs remained outside
3 The analytical context of ATOP should be taken into consideration. Ashley Leeds and her colleagues (2002) focus on the contingency amidst warfare, which is a significant departure from DCA. DCA is mostly applied in peacetime cooperation rather than warring scenarios. Such a difference, however, does not undermine the comparability between alliance and DCA. As I elaborated in the previous and following sections, both alliance and DCA are on the exactly same continuum of alignment, especially in the realm of security cooperation.
Hence, even though the doubt of comparability is legitimate, it does not erode my arguments here.
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of the typology. A defense pact is a type of alliance that required allies to provide wartime assistance. For instance, the Austro-Germany Alliance of 1879 concentrated mostly on the coordination in case of crises or specified circumstances.4 DCAs, on the other hand, do not comprise such demands. As we have seen above, DCAs are rather concerning training and exchanges. In other words, they are primarily measures of improvements in capabilities, strategic coordination, or logistics support. Viewing DCAs as alliances would certainly be misleading since they could be signed, logically and realistically, between non-allied states.5 This is exactly the case of the 2015 Framework for the U.S.-India Defense Relationship, which extends the content of the previous New New Framework for the India-U.S. Defense Relationship and mentioned no obligation of mutual defense (United States Department of Defense 2015a).
Departures as such, nonetheless, do not mean that DCAs and alliances are mutually exclusive. Rather, they are compatible, even supplementary to each other, in terms of their functions and aims. Taking a deeper look at the security treaty between the US and its allies, treaties as such provided mostly a broad range of obligation in concise phrases and clauses. For
4 The alliance bred itself out of the souring relationship within the Three Emperors League, an alliance between Germany, Russia, and Austro-Hungary Empires. The alliance was first established in 1873 and soon disbanded in 1878 given the earlier tension between Germany and Russia. Because of Russia’s involvement in holding back Germany’s deterrence against France and Germany’s counterefforts to displace Russia’s payoff in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1888. The Austro-German Alliance of 1879, hence, was mainly an effort to deter attacks from Russia as well as accommodating Austria. In this case, the alliance is mainly one of a defensive pact rather than wartime coalition. For detailed assessment, see Snyder (1997, 84–93).
5 However, it should be noted that while there are fewer newly formed alliances, there are indeed some other forms of formal relationships that might essentially equivalent to alliances.
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example, Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) outlined the circumstances requiring consultation and mutual-aid. Yet the treaty does not offer any details
example, Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS) outlined the circumstances requiring consultation and mutual-aid. Yet the treaty does not offer any details