’An Elite Anglo Saxon Club’? Race, ‘Civilization’ and the Making of America’s Asian Alliances.

Traditional theories of alliance formation emphasise the distribution of power or the balance of threats in determining when alliances will be created. While these theories offer important insights and have the advantage of parsimony, they are underdetermining when it comes to the question of alliance form and quality. After World War II, for example, the United States formed the multilateral NATO alliance to deter the threat of Soviet invasion in Europe. However, in Asia it only responded to perceived Soviet and Chinese threats with a series of ‘hub and spokes’ bilateral alliances. Neither power nor threat-based realism can easily explain this difference in form, nor why European allies were consulted in military planning and given intelligence by the US (features of qualitative multilateralism), while Asian allies were not. This paper argues that to understand the patterns of alliance formation in post-war Asia and the Pacific, it is critical to incorporate non-materialist variables such as culture and identity. In particular, a careful analysis of the official primary source documents that describe the creation of US alliances in the region ? especially the formation of ANZUS in 1951 - shows the important ways in which ideas and assumptions based on race and ‘civilization’ influenced key policy makers and shaped their expectations of would-be allies. Drawing on a rich literature in diplomatic history and sociology the paper makes a broader argument for the inclusion of race as a factor in our analysis of national security decision making in International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]