Existing research on the connection between alliance formation and conflict initiation has explicitly focused on the direct effect of alliances on conflict by including some measure of alliance behavior as an independent variable in models of conflict behavior. Existing research misspecifies the...

Existing work cannot explain why countries form alliances when direct security threats are not a key political issue, though we know countries routinely do engage in that behavior. Countries form alliances to manage the essential problem that they must use finite budget resources to provide...