9
9
in an alliance may be enough to create new interests for the partners; third, when states
enter an alliance, they may adopt some of their partner’s interests as being their own;
fourth,, alliance members have an interest in maintaining the alliance; and fifth, alliance
members may consider that their own reputations are at stake when deciding what to
do.
14
He continues by suggesting that alliances are both “more highly valued, and are
likely to form, when their members have substantial interests in common.”
15
While in
practice such interests tend to be not fully shared but partially shared, those that do share
more in common are part of an alliance that has a greater net value. That is, Snyder
contends, “the greater the perceived surplus of benefits over costs.” The reasons for this,
Snyder continues, are that “costs are inherently more certain than benefits; and costs are
lower when interests are shared.”
16
As the British-American relationship shows, shared
interests are part and parcel of the partnership—whether they are the result of the shared
heritage, history, and language, or of the shared strategic interests born as a result of
World War II and the Cold War era that followed.
We may think, too, in terms of alignment in regard to the special relationship.
Snyder writes that alignment “marks the lines of amity and enmity in the system and thus
determines the general kind of relationship—adversarial, allied, or indifferent—each state
will have with every other. Consequently, it also determines the focus and significance
of other relationship variables: conflicts, capabilities, and interdependence.” Snyder
continues: “Alignments, whether or not they have been formalized as alliances, are
13
Glenn Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 9
14
Snyder, pp. 9-10.
15
Snyder, p. 10.
16
Snyder, p. 10.
Convention