ABSTRACT
Why is there no NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in Asia? It is a highly debated question among international relations scholars. Rationalists, especially neorealists and neoliberals, suggest power disparity and institutional efficiency arguments to account for different U.S. alliance strategies after World War II, i.e., bilateralism in Asia but multilateralism in Europe (Weber 1992; Crone 1993; Press-Barnathan 2000/1; Ikenberry 2003). Constructivists contend that the different densities of collective identity between the United States and its allies in Europe versus Asia explain the variation in U.S. alliance strategies. Whereas the United States prefers a multilateral alliance, i.e. NATO, with its European partners who share a common identity, bilateral alliances are designed for dealing with its alien, inferior partners in Asia (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002). Although many scholars correctly point out that the United States should not take all the credit or blame for Europe’s success and Asia’s failure in multilateralism, different U.S. alliance formation strategies in Europe and Asia in the postwar era are a major, if not the only, reason for the variation in regionalism in these two areas. 1
