Impact turns + answers – bfhmrs russia War Good
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Harbor Teacher Prep-subingsubing-Ho-Neg-Lamdl T1-Round3, Impact Turns Aff Neg - Michigan7 2019 BFHMRS
| Blankenship ‘18 (Brian Dylan Blankenship, Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences @ Columbia University, "Promises under Pressure: Reassurance and Burden-Sharing in Asymmetric Alliances," Columbia University, 2018, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8XK9XKG/download, Date Accessed: 7-18-2019, SB).
Other stands of literature similarly suggest that reassurance can have undesirable consequences. Theories on defense burden-sharing in asymmetric alliances stress that as long as a great power’s protection is relatively assured, allies have little incentive to increase their military contributions (Olson and Zeckhauser, 1966; Oneal, 1990; Palmer, 1990a,b; Sandler, 1993). By reassuring them, the patron effectively encourages its allies to free-ride. Furthermore, reassuring allies can run the risk of moral hazard. Allies confident in their patron’s support may be prone to take risks such as confronting their adversaries because they expect that the patron will bail them out, thus increasing the probability that the patron will be entrapped or entangled in allies’ conflicts (Christensen and Snyder, 1990; Fearon, 1997; Posen, 2014). In the years leading up to World War I, for example, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov cautioned against reassuring Serbia of Russia’s support too strongly, lest the Serbian government be encouraged to take a more intransigent stance vis-à-vis its territorial disputes with Austria-Hungary. He lamented that this was rendered more challenging by the attitudes of other senior Russian officials – including the ambassador to Serbia – whose support for Serbia’s pan-Slavic ambitions in the Balkans ran the risk of encouraging Serbian adventurism (Jelavich, 1991: 244-245, 250). The puzzle of reassurance is only magnified in asymmetric alliances. In his seminal book, Waltz (1979) argues that unlike in symmetric alliances between great powers, where each ally is a crucial component of the overall balance of power, in asymmetric alliances weak states are comparatively much less important, as their allegiance is less likely to influence the course of a war. Recent scholarship suggests that great powers can shape their alliance treaties and withhold support from their allies as a means of reducing the risks of moral hazard (Kim, 2011a; Benson, 2012; Mattes, 2012). Beckley (2015: 19), for one, claims that the United States “is unlikely to incur major costs to display loyalty to allies that depend on U.S. protection and patronage for their survival,” as none of its allies are inherently important for its own security. This asymmetry becomes even more pronounced in bipolar and unipolar systems, where the gap between the capabilities of the superpowers and other states is even wider and small states have even fewer patrons to choose from (Snyder, 1997; Kim, 2016). It may be understandable, then, that Walt (2005: 242) would conclude: “the credibility of U.S. commitments is not [the United States’] problem”; rather, it is “a problem for those who are dependent on U.S. help.” Download 0.83 Mb. Share with your friends:
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