Alliance Commitment and the Maintenance of the Status Quo

Abstract

Our study shows that alliance commitment is the key to the maintenance of the status quo between a weak challenger and a major- power attacker. In order to verify our theory, we employ data from Benson’s typology of compel lent military alliances and conduct empirical tests for our theoretical hypothesis. The statistical results comply with the theory, indicating that a trustful and strong military commitment creates negative effects on the status quo. We examine the cases of the Korean War and US-China-Taiwan relations to buttress our arguments. The latter case also shows the need to modify our original model under certain conditions.