![]() ![]() Furthermore, the OAS charter states: “No State shall be required to use armed force without its consent.” Finally, all of the United States' bilateral defense pacts merely ask each side to “act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional process.” In sum, U.S. Similarly, the Organization of American States (OAS) charter obliges members “to provide for common action on the part of member states in the event of aggression” without defining “aggression” or specifying what actions must be taken. In other words, intervention is not automatic it is contingent on the authorization of domestic veto players. The North Atlantic Treaty requires only that each member “provide assistance” and “take action as it deems necessary … in accordance with their respective constitutional processes” if an ally is attacked. alliances are vague and contingent commitments. would be embroiled in Eurasian wars.” 45 Freedom of Action Theory: How Great Powers Avoid Entanglement alliances are cost-free commitments, but it would cast doubt on the claim advanced by advocates of retrenchment that “America's alliances are transmission belts for war that ensure that the U.S. Failure to find such evidence would not mean that U.S. national interests to include those of allies, or alliances sparking conflicts by provoking adversaries or emboldening allies. leaders expressing concerns about the United States' reputation as an ally, leaders expanding their conception of U.S. It also seems reasonable to expect to find within many other cases evidence of the entanglement dynamics discussed above-for example, U.S. involvement or escalation in a costly conflict. But given that the United States has maintained more than sixty alliances for more than sixty years, it seems reasonable to expect to find at least a few clear-cut cases-that is, those in which the existence of an alliance functioned as a necessary condition, if not a necessary and sufficient condition, for U.S. ![]() ![]() If entanglement theory is correct, what trends should scholars expect to see in the empirical record? Unfortunately, the writings cited above do not make precise predictions about how much entanglement one should observe in the case of the United States. 11 According to these scholars, the United States should reduce its entanglement risk by revising, 12 scaling back 13 or scrapping altogether its alliance network 14-measures that if implemented would constitute the biggest shift in U.S. alliance network to the tangled web of European security commitments that helped catalyze World War I. alliances are not valuable assets but rather “transmission belts for war” 8 that “risk roping the United States into conflicts over strategically marginal territory” 9 and “ensnaring the United States in wars that it otherwise need not fight against nuclear-armed adversaries.” 10 One study even compares the U.S. ![]() 7 A growing number of prominent scholars, however, argue that such commitments are dangerous and should be abandoned. commitments to defend allies during recent crises between North and South Korea, 4 Iran and Israel, 5 Russia and Ukraine, 6 and China on the one hand and Japan and the Philippines on the other. For sixty-five years, the United States has maintained a global network of alliances, and President Barack Obama reaffirmed U.S. ![]()
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