Research
Research Agenda
My research interests lie primarily in the areas of alliance politics and U.S. foreign basing. More broadly, I am interested in bargaining within cooperative, interstate security relationships.
In my book project, Promises under Pressure: Reassurance and Burden-Sharing in Asymmetric Alliances, I examine the conditions under which the United States has taken measures to reassure its allies, as well as those under which it has been able to make its assurances conditional upon allies' contributions to the alliance's common defense. Great power patrons frequently go to great lengths to reassure allies that they are committed to protecting them. Yet reassurance is puzzling because it can have adverse consequences—namely, it undermines a key source of the patron’s bargaining leverage: the threat of abandonment. Nevertheless, patrons need to reassure their allies in order to discourage them from pursuing outside options and leaving the alliance. Thus, patrons face a dilemma in which they trade-off between withholding reassurance for the purposes of driving hard bargains and reassuring allies in order to discourage them from leaving the alliance. The first component of the project studies the conditions under which this dilemma is most severe by identifying the conditions under which patrons have the greatest incentive to reassure allies. The second component, in turn, further explores the dilemma by testing the conditions under which a patron is able to reassure its allies without encouraging them to free-ride.
I argue that bargaining over the distribution of costs in alliances are driven in large part by each party's threat of exit. The more credible an ally's threat to distance itself from the United States and pursue outside options, and the more strategically valuable it is, the better able the ally will be to extract assurances from the United States. By the same token, the more credible the United States' threat to distance itself from an ally, and the higher threat the ally faces, the better able the United States is to make its assurances conditional upon allied burden-sharing. I test the theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis using an original dataset of U.S. reassurance and allied burden-sharing, as well as four qualitative case studies.
In other projects, I study bargaining and the exchange of quid pro quo for military bases between the United States and host nations in Africa and Central Asia (with Renanah Miles); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); and the causes and consequences of interstate joint military exercises (with Raymond Kuo).
In my book project, Promises under Pressure: Reassurance and Burden-Sharing in Asymmetric Alliances, I examine the conditions under which the United States has taken measures to reassure its allies, as well as those under which it has been able to make its assurances conditional upon allies' contributions to the alliance's common defense. Great power patrons frequently go to great lengths to reassure allies that they are committed to protecting them. Yet reassurance is puzzling because it can have adverse consequences—namely, it undermines a key source of the patron’s bargaining leverage: the threat of abandonment. Nevertheless, patrons need to reassure their allies in order to discourage them from pursuing outside options and leaving the alliance. Thus, patrons face a dilemma in which they trade-off between withholding reassurance for the purposes of driving hard bargains and reassuring allies in order to discourage them from leaving the alliance. The first component of the project studies the conditions under which this dilemma is most severe by identifying the conditions under which patrons have the greatest incentive to reassure allies. The second component, in turn, further explores the dilemma by testing the conditions under which a patron is able to reassure its allies without encouraging them to free-ride.
I argue that bargaining over the distribution of costs in alliances are driven in large part by each party's threat of exit. The more credible an ally's threat to distance itself from the United States and pursue outside options, and the more strategically valuable it is, the better able the ally will be to extract assurances from the United States. By the same token, the more credible the United States' threat to distance itself from an ally, and the higher threat the ally faces, the better able the United States is to make its assurances conditional upon allied burden-sharing. I test the theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis using an original dataset of U.S. reassurance and allied burden-sharing, as well as four qualitative case studies.
In other projects, I study bargaining and the exchange of quid pro quo for military bases between the United States and host nations in Africa and Central Asia (with Renanah Miles); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); and the causes and consequences of interstate joint military exercises (with Raymond Kuo).