Intra-Alliance Bargaining and U.S. Bosnia Policy

Alliances are promises of cooperation, but allies typically have to bargain over what policy should be adopted when a given contingency arises. Whether this bargaining leads to collaborative outcomes and what form cooperation by allies takes have important implications for the effectiveness of an alliance. Neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism, the author argues, do not provide adequate explanations for this problem because they mischaracterize, or fail to come to grips with, the bargaining process at work. To redress such shortcomings, the author turns to game theory, providing a general model of intra-alliance bargaining. The model's insights are then used to interpret the historical record on U.S. Bosnia policy from 1991 until the fall of 1995. The author shows how domestic and international considerations affected the preferences and beliefs of the Bush and Clinton administrations. These led, as suggested by the model, to the U.S. tendency to avoid bargaining hard with the NATO allies and to pursue compromise strategies with them in the Bosnian crisis.