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This introductory chapter provides an overview of alliance treaties. Alliance treaties are documents calling on the signatories to cooperate in responding with active military force to a non-signatory's aggression. The documents are written and signed by official representatives of states, and the signatory states become allies. The military action specified in the document can be either offensive or defensive. Defensive action entails protecting another signatory under attack, while offensive action entails protecting a non-signatory by attacking its aggressor. Reflecting the variety of documents that can constitute an alliance treaty, a negotiation can be a simple conversation between diplomats or a series of formal meetings involving officials from numerous countries. A negotiation concludes in either agreement, meaning it produces an alliance treaty signed by all the participants, or nonagreement, meaning the talks end without a signed alliance treaty and the participants have no plans to continue the talks. This book assesses why alliance treaty negotiations end in agreement or nonagreement. Since states have attempted but failed to negotiate alliance treaties, there is a need to explore the process that distinguishes groups of states that form alliances from groups of states that attempt to do so but fail. Only then can one truly understand the meaning and purpose of military alliances.

This chapter explores basic patterns in the data described in the previous chapter using cross tabulations. These tabulations show that having strategic and operational compatibility is strongly associated with a higher rate of agreement in alliance treaty negotiations. They also demonstrate that agreement can be reached, though less often, even between states that lack ideal war plan compatibility. The suggestive evidence offered by these cross tabulations is useful, but the cross tabulations also raise questions. While the initial patterns are supportive of this book's theory, the chapter is concerned about potential complications in the data that could undermine the ability to draw inferences about the relationships between variables. These potential complications include selection bias and omitted variable bias. The chapter then identifies how and under what conditions the existence of an outside option influences the outcome of alliance treaty negotiations.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main claims and empirical findings, discussing the implications of these findings as well as directions for future research. At their heart, alliance treaties are about using military force. As such, war planning can be conceptualized as the core of alliance treaty negotiations. Equipped with this premise, the book argued that the key variable determining whether conditions are conducive to agreement is the compatibility of the participants' ideal war plans. These plans must be both operationally and strategically compatible. When war plan compatibility is low, the second key explanatory variable comes into play: the number of negotiation participants that have attractive outside options. The chapter then highlights how the arguments and evidence in the book indicate new research directions in four areas related to alliances: alliance treaty design, alliance reliability, NATO expansion, and the formation of defense cooperation agreements.

This chapter focuses on an important example of an alliance treaty negotiation that ended in nonagreement: the 1901 Anglo-German negotiations. There are three reasons why this case is useful for evaluating the book's theoretical claims. First and foremost, this case is well predicted by the statistical model from Chapter 3. The model from Chapter 3 predicts this particular case well because the case was coded as 0 on the both strategic and operational compatibility variable. This score means that Germany and Britain had incompatible ideal war plans. Second, the 1901 Anglo-German negotiations are historically important. Indeed, a number of observers following World War I viewed these negotiations as the great “missed opportunity” to set Anglo-German relations on a path that might have avoided the war. Third, this case is useful for contrasting the author's war-planning explanation with the competing explanation of reliability concerns. The chapter then describes Britain's outside options on entering the negotiation and explains why the British considered their outside options to be attractive. Focusing on the British outside options is important, because the British were the party that walked away from the negotiation.

This chapter discusses the book's argument that joint war planning provides a useful conceptual framework for explaining agreement and nonagreement in alliance treaty negotiations. Drawing on bargaining theory and negotiation analysis, it focuses on two key variables. The first variable is compatibility of ideal war plans. This refers to the participants' respective ideal war plans not having contradictory strategic components or operational components. Tensions can arise from conflicting military doctrines, such as one negotiation participant adhering to an offensive doctrine and another following a defensive doctrine. Thus, the key to ideal war plan compatibility is that both participants have similar notions of the threat and similar philosophies about the application of military force against that threat. The second variable is the attractiveness of outside options. Outside options are the policies each participant will pursue if the negotiation ends in nonagreement. Such policies include unilateral action or an alliance treaty with another state. The chapter then explains how these two variables lead to four types of alliance treaty negotiations: Same Page, Pleasant Surprise, Revealed Deadlock, and Standard Bargaining. It also details the three components of a war plan: strategic, operational, and tactical.

This chapter describes the data collection and data manipulation required to measure alliance treaty negotiation outcomes (agreement or nonagreement) and ideal war plan compatibility. To code agreement, the author uses two sources of data to identify negotiations that ended in agreement and to identify negotiations that ended in nonagreement. To code ideal war plan compatibility, the author uses data on both strategic compatibility and operational compatibility. Drawing from well-established data identifying the threats states face, the author identifies the threats facing each negotiation participant and then codes strategic compatibility as the ratio of the participants' shared threats to the total number of threats faced by the participants. The higher this ratio, the more likely the participants are to have compatible views regarding which state(s) should be the target of the alliance treaty. Drawing on the idea that the operational component of a state's ideal war plan emanates from its military doctrine, the author uses battle-level data from previous wars fought by negotiation participants to code whether the participants shared offensive or defensive military doctrines. These measures of strategic compatibility and operational compatibility are used to code when the negotiation participants have only strategic compatibility, only operational compatibility, or both strategic and operational compatibility.