This volume analyzes the diplomatic theory of quasi-alliance in international relations. It is clear that the academic study of the special security relationship involves many aspects of international security. This book integrates international military, diplomacy and Cold War history. It mainly adopts qualitative, empirical, comparative and historical research methods. It has applied the realistic rational analysis model to probe security and interests and post-rationalism for the relationship between culture and cognition. It aims at academic innovation with the comparison of quasi-alliance and quasi-alliance diplomacy as well as the combination of quasi-alliance theory and its practice.

The starting point of this book is that the foreign policy of the international actors mainly revolves around three roles: country, enemy and friend. The art of all diplomacy is undoubtedly to strive to increase the number of friends while minimizing the number of enemies, to increase revenues while minimizing costs and to maintain national security while minimizing erosion of sovereignty. It helps a state shape power relations that are good for the country and avoid being entrapped by allies. In an international politics full of fierce struggles, if you do not want to make enemies, you will not have friends. The quasi-alliance diplomacy studied in this book attempts to break this dilemma by investigating the possibility of a country choosing the middle path, that is, to increase friends and reduce enemies through quasi-alliance diplomacy.

Quasi-Alliance Theory in Diplomatic Strategy

In the early post-war period, research on international security strategy mainly focused on the issue of nuclear weapons, and later extended to the issues of grand strategy, conventional war and domestic causes of international conflicts. International security research has increasingly become interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary. As an important issue in international security research, alliance has undoubtedly become an important factor frequently discussed in both academic and political circles. As the power aggregation among countries in the field of international relations, there are important differences in the connotation and extension of terms in Chinese and English. Generally, it refers to “Alliance” in Chinese while the English term is more specific, including “Alliance”, “Coalition”, “Alignment”, “League”, “Association”, “Union”, “Federation” and so on. The terminology of “Alliance” used in this book is based on formal written agreements, mainly manifested as a common defense treaty, in which member states sometimes participate voluntarily or are coerced by allies to participate to form a war community in the face of external security threats. The “Coalition” or “Alignment” is broader and vaguer than “Alliance”, covering political, military, security, economic and cultural fields. But both coalition and alignment lack legal effects without signing military covenants. They are relatively temporary and vague and not merely confined to the field of security cooperation.