Research
Research Agenda
My research interests lie primarily in the areas of alliance politics, economic statecraft, and U.S. foreign policy. More broadly, my research agenda lies at the intersection of international security and international cooperation. In particular, I study how states bargain over the distribution of benefits and costs in their cooperative partnerships, and am especially interested in how great powers use economic and security rewards and punishments to influence their partners.
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. Reassurance can therefore be counterproductive by emboldening allies to take risks such as free-riding or provoking adversaries.
I argue, however, that reassurance is fundamentally an instrument of alliance control. Patrons need to reassure their allies in order to discourage them from pursuing outside options and reducing their dependence on the alliance. Thus, a patron faces a dilemma in which it must trade off between withholding reassurance for coercive leverage and reassuring allies in order to encourage them to remain dependent on its protection and thus subject to its influence. 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.
Bargaining over the distribution of costs in alliances is thus 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 foreign aid and other forms of compensation for military bases between the United States and host nations in Africa (with Renanah Miles); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); U.S. government overseas procurement of goods and services for strategic purposes (with Renanah Miles); and the causes and consequences of joint military exercises between states (with Raymond Kuo).
Thus, my research informs scholarly understanding of global order by showing how great powers build and maintain partnerships, both within and outside the context of formal military alliances. Additionally, my research has implications for understanding the determinants and effectiveness of nuclear nonproliferation strategies which rely upon security assurances.
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. Reassurance can therefore be counterproductive by emboldening allies to take risks such as free-riding or provoking adversaries.
I argue, however, that reassurance is fundamentally an instrument of alliance control. Patrons need to reassure their allies in order to discourage them from pursuing outside options and reducing their dependence on the alliance. Thus, a patron faces a dilemma in which it must trade off between withholding reassurance for coercive leverage and reassuring allies in order to encourage them to remain dependent on its protection and thus subject to its influence. 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.
Bargaining over the distribution of costs in alliances is thus 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 foreign aid and other forms of compensation for military bases between the United States and host nations in Africa (with Renanah Miles); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); U.S. government overseas procurement of goods and services for strategic purposes (with Renanah Miles); and the causes and consequences of joint military exercises between states (with Raymond Kuo).
Thus, my research informs scholarly understanding of global order by showing how great powers build and maintain partnerships, both within and outside the context of formal military alliances. Additionally, my research has implications for understanding the determinants and effectiveness of nuclear nonproliferation strategies which rely upon security assurances.