Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics: The Military Alliance between the United States and Republic of Korea

T he twenty-first century has witnessed the unprecedented endurance of international alliances. Not only have many of the present-day military alliances—such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, and U.S.-Australia alliances—existed for over half a century, but they are also redefining their purposes and missions. The phenomenon of alliance persistence, defined as the maintenance of the alliance past the point of its original purpose, necessarily threatens academic and political explanations of alliance formation, maintenance, and dissolution: despite changes in the circumstances that gave rise to them, these alliances persist , thus calling into question both the internal consistency of the alliance’s conceptual structure and the historical consistency of that structure over the alliance’s lifespan. The seemingly contradictory behavior of alliance persistence exhausts the explanatory resources of current academic paradigms in American international relations (IR). As such, it also suggests that the phenomenon is a particularly compelling unit of analysis for the conceptual structure of institutions in general, which has of late received much scholarly attention. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.