The Bureaucratic Politics of Nuclear Alliance Management: The Role of U.S. Allies and Partners in U.S. Nuclear Strategy

About

Given the centrality of reassurance to U.S. nuclear posture design, the wishes of allies have hugely consequential implications for the United States’ procurement policy, deployment practice, and approach to arms control and disarmament.

It is often claimed that U.S. extended deterrence commitments oblige the United States to retain numbers and types of nuclear weapons it “might not deem necessary if it were concerned only with its own defense.”

Along similar lines, it is regularly asserted that America’s allies prefer a forward-leaning U.S. nuclear posture and oppose any shift to a no-first use or sole-purpose policy. Against this view, it has been argued that many U.S. allies would in fact strongly support further nuclear arms reductions and/or a shift to a more restrained posture.

Those two incompatible claims exist within different intellectual traditions and, as  a result, the fact that they cannot both be correct has not triggered a scholarly discussion about how to decide which one is.

There is an acute knowledge gap with respect to the bureaucratic politics of nuclear alliance management. In our view, the existing literature on nuclear alliance politics has not sufficiently acknowledged the epistemological challenges alluded to above. First, the stated nuclear policy preferences of U.S. allies are likely to vary depending on factors such as the identity of the speaker, the composition of the audience, and whether the statement is made in private or public. Second, and relatedly, representatives of U.S. allies and partners may not always say or communicate what they truly believe but rather what they think those on the receiving end, in the world’s most powerful government, want to hear.

This project aims to begin filling the knowledge gap associated with the bureaucratic politics of nuclear alliance management. Specifically, we ask, first, how the interests of U.S. allies and partners are ascertained and brought to bear on policymaking processes, and, second, how sub-state actors in America and its global network of allies and partners work to pursue their interests, be they conservative or progressive. Gaining new knowledge in this field is crucial to understanding the limits and drivers of U.S. nuclear strategy, including, for example, the decision to build new submarine-launched cruise missiles and ICBMs.

The project does so in the context of the European Union with a series of case studies, presented as country case studies, but they will be much more sociological and transnational : the cases of two non-nuclear weapons states (one state hosting US nuclear weapons and one that is not and has never hosted them) and two nuclear weapons states: Germany, Norway, France and the UK. 

Scientific coordination

• Benoît Pélopidas

Partners

• Carnegie Corporation of New York