Alliance Politics in a Nuclear-armed World

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How has the advent of nuclear weapons affected the politics of decision-making and control in military alliances? Existing theory of alliance politics—and, in particular, the logic of the alliance security dilemma—is largely derived from the experiences of European states in the pre-nuclear era. As a result, scholars assume that whether or not alliances face the prospect of nuclear-armed conflict is incidental to the management of fears of military abandonment and entrapment among their member states. By critically examining this "conventional assumption" in existing accounts, this presentation seeks to develop a new basis for analyzing contemporary military alliances and predicting their cohesion, durability, and structure.

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