Research
Research Agenda
My research agenda lies at the intersection of international security, international cooperation, and energy policy, with a substantive focus on U.S. foreign policy, military alliances, and the geopolitics of the renewable energy transition. One of my core areas of research studies how countries cooperate to achieve security goals, with a focus on how they bargain over the distribution of the costs and benefits of doing so and how great powers use economic and security inducements to influence their partners – including, but not limited to, in the context of alliances. Military alliances are among the most central security institutions in international politics, allowing states to pool their resources in pursuit of common objectives. Yet a number of scholars suggest that alliances pose trade-offs, including the risks that forming alliances can provoke and raise tensions with third party adversaries and that receiving a guarantee of protection can create moral hazard problems, encouraging allies to either free-ride on their partners’ defense efforts or be emboldened to behave more aggressively toward their rivals. My research attempts to explain both how states manage these trade-offs, as well as the conditions under which these trade-offs are more or less severe.
In my book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy and Alliance Politics (releasing November 15, 2023, with Cornell University Press), I examine the conditions under which the United States attempts to encourage its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense, as well as those under which its pressure is more likely to succeed. The book argues that U.S. burden-sharing pressure is shaped by twin dilemmas. First, although efforts to reassure American allies -- for example, by stationing troops on their territory and publicly pledging U.S. support -- are central to maintaining alliance cohesion and encouraging them to remain loyal partners to the United States, doing so simultaneously discourages them from investing in their own defense. Thus, the success of U.S. burden-sharing pressure depends on the degree to which it can credibly threaten to make its assurances of protection conditional on allies' defense contributions. But doing so runs up against a second dilemma: while allied burden-sharing allows Washington to reduce its own costs, it also empowers allies to go their own way, reduce their commitment to and involvement in the alliance, and resist American influence.
With these dilemmas in mind, the book derives testable hypotheses on the use and success of American burden-sharing pressure. I argue that the United States is less likely to seek burden-sharing from allies that have the latent capacity to become truly independent and thus less susceptible to its influence, and more likely to seek burden-sharing when it perceives a high level of threat from great power rivals and when it faces constraints on the resources it can devote to its foreign commitments. In turn, when the United States does seek more burden-sharing, the success of its pressure depends on the degree to which allies fear the possibility of U.S. abandonment. The more credible the United States' threat to distance itself from an ally, and the greater an ally's perception of threat, the better able the United States is to encourage allied burden-sharing. I test these expectations using qualitative evidence from U.S. burden-sharing pressure toward West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Iceland during the Cold War.
I am currently working to expand my research on burden-sharing in U.S. alliances by exploring which strategies are more effective than others for encouraging burden-sharing. With funding from the Stanton Foundation, I am conducting elite interviews and public opinion surveys in four U.S.-allied countries -- Germany, Japan, Poland, and South Korea -- that test the effectiveness of competing approaches to solicit burden-sharing. The project also explores the degree to which there is a trade-off between encouraging burden-sharing, on the one hand, and discouraging nuclear proliferation, on the other.
In related projects, I study bargaining and the exchange of foreign aid and other forms of compensation for military bases between the United States and host nations (with Renanah Joyce); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); U.S. government overseas procurement of goods and services for strategic purposes (with Renanah Joyce); and the causes and consequences of joint military exercises between states (with Raymond Kuo). This body of research has been funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, and informs our understanding of how great powers build, maintain, and leverage their partnerships, both within and outside the context of formal military alliances.
In other projects, I study the politics of energy policy, with a focus on how the global transition to renewable energy will shape patterns of influence, competition, and cooperation. Currently, I am working on projects funded by a four-year grant through the Research Council of Norway called "Understanding Oil Producers’ Responses to the Renewable Energy Transition" (OPRET, with Johannes Urpelainen, Indra Øverland, Nina Poussenkova, Stella Tsani, and Joonseok Yang), that assesses how major oil producers are adapting to and preparing for the global energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Mitigating climate change will require rapid uptake of solar and wind energy, together with growing sales of electric vehicles. Yet these very trends pose challenges for countries that rely on the production of fossil fuels, most notably oil. Long-term decline in demand for oil will over time reduce both the revenue that oil producers collect and the amount of oil they produce, with implications for their ability to distribute patronage to political supporters, provide jobs and a generous welfare state to citizens, and make investments in public goods such as education and infrastructure. Thus, these projects explore how different oil producers are likely to adapt to declining revenue, using a combination of qualitative comparative case studies (historical and contemporary) and large-N quantitative analysis on cross-national data. The project’s aim is to understand variation in adaptations across countries: why some governments are adapting more, less, or differently than others. The research team for OPRET includes both political scientists and economists with expertise on subjects that include energy and environmental policy, sustainable development, political economy, and international relations.
In my book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy and Alliance Politics (releasing November 15, 2023, with Cornell University Press), I examine the conditions under which the United States attempts to encourage its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense, as well as those under which its pressure is more likely to succeed. The book argues that U.S. burden-sharing pressure is shaped by twin dilemmas. First, although efforts to reassure American allies -- for example, by stationing troops on their territory and publicly pledging U.S. support -- are central to maintaining alliance cohesion and encouraging them to remain loyal partners to the United States, doing so simultaneously discourages them from investing in their own defense. Thus, the success of U.S. burden-sharing pressure depends on the degree to which it can credibly threaten to make its assurances of protection conditional on allies' defense contributions. But doing so runs up against a second dilemma: while allied burden-sharing allows Washington to reduce its own costs, it also empowers allies to go their own way, reduce their commitment to and involvement in the alliance, and resist American influence.
With these dilemmas in mind, the book derives testable hypotheses on the use and success of American burden-sharing pressure. I argue that the United States is less likely to seek burden-sharing from allies that have the latent capacity to become truly independent and thus less susceptible to its influence, and more likely to seek burden-sharing when it perceives a high level of threat from great power rivals and when it faces constraints on the resources it can devote to its foreign commitments. In turn, when the United States does seek more burden-sharing, the success of its pressure depends on the degree to which allies fear the possibility of U.S. abandonment. The more credible the United States' threat to distance itself from an ally, and the greater an ally's perception of threat, the better able the United States is to encourage allied burden-sharing. I test these expectations using qualitative evidence from U.S. burden-sharing pressure toward West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Iceland during the Cold War.
I am currently working to expand my research on burden-sharing in U.S. alliances by exploring which strategies are more effective than others for encouraging burden-sharing. With funding from the Stanton Foundation, I am conducting elite interviews and public opinion surveys in four U.S.-allied countries -- Germany, Japan, Poland, and South Korea -- that test the effectiveness of competing approaches to solicit burden-sharing. The project also explores the degree to which there is a trade-off between encouraging burden-sharing, on the one hand, and discouraging nuclear proliferation, on the other.
In related projects, I study bargaining and the exchange of foreign aid and other forms of compensation for military bases between the United States and host nations (with Renanah Joyce); the effectiveness of reassurance measures (with Erik Lin-Greenberg); U.S. government overseas procurement of goods and services for strategic purposes (with Renanah Joyce); and the causes and consequences of joint military exercises between states (with Raymond Kuo). This body of research has been funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, and informs our understanding of how great powers build, maintain, and leverage their partnerships, both within and outside the context of formal military alliances.
In other projects, I study the politics of energy policy, with a focus on how the global transition to renewable energy will shape patterns of influence, competition, and cooperation. Currently, I am working on projects funded by a four-year grant through the Research Council of Norway called "Understanding Oil Producers’ Responses to the Renewable Energy Transition" (OPRET, with Johannes Urpelainen, Indra Øverland, Nina Poussenkova, Stella Tsani, and Joonseok Yang), that assesses how major oil producers are adapting to and preparing for the global energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Mitigating climate change will require rapid uptake of solar and wind energy, together with growing sales of electric vehicles. Yet these very trends pose challenges for countries that rely on the production of fossil fuels, most notably oil. Long-term decline in demand for oil will over time reduce both the revenue that oil producers collect and the amount of oil they produce, with implications for their ability to distribute patronage to political supporters, provide jobs and a generous welfare state to citizens, and make investments in public goods such as education and infrastructure. Thus, these projects explore how different oil producers are likely to adapt to declining revenue, using a combination of qualitative comparative case studies (historical and contemporary) and large-N quantitative analysis on cross-national data. The project’s aim is to understand variation in adaptations across countries: why some governments are adapting more, less, or differently than others. The research team for OPRET includes both political scientists and economists with expertise on subjects that include energy and environmental policy, sustainable development, political economy, and international relations.