Legitimizing Power Projection in the US Foreign Policy

Abstract

International relations (IR) scholars have traditionally viewed military alliances as vehicles, serving to ensure the states’ survival under anarchy and to maintain the balance of power essential for the systemic stability. At the same time, alliances that include a dominant state are often employed by the latter as the means of attaining its core objectives and the tools of legitimizing its extraordinary might and ambitious policies. Apparently, this situation favors ambiguity and uncertainty in terms of developing proper theoretical understanding of the nature of alliances as the core institutions, which pattern the states’ interactions, sustain international order, and ensure smooth functioning of the power relations. Seeking to elaborate more comprehensive approach to studying “asymmetric alliances” as the tools of both wielding the dominant state’s influence and legitimizing its preeminence, the paper engages the insights borrowed from the theory of structuration that helps overcome methodological limitations conditioned by dual understanding of “power” as either “attribute” or “relationship”. Specifically, the paper examines the United States’ “asymmetric alliances” in Europe and East Asia as distinct social structures, comprised of “resources” and “rules” that sustain practices of U.S. engagement in regional affairs so as to ensure reproduction of inequitable relationships between the allies and to legitimize the United States’ hegemony. This approach allows to reach more integrative understanding of the role of these alliances as the tools of Washington’s influence and the means of reproduction of the inequitable relationships between the allies, as well as to identify contradictions inherent in these hierarchical arrangements, engendered by growing tension between “resources” and “rules” involved in the process of wielding and legitimizing the “American power”.