Trusting Relationships in the NATO Alliance

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is one of the longest-lasting alliances in world history despite a large membership with often disparate foreign policy goals. For many theorists who focus on the problem of uncertainty and potential for defection among alliance partners, this is a puzzle – particularly given the historical (and even current) animosities between some of the member states. How is it that so many states can work together given the structural bias towards distrust in the international system? Given the goal of the papers on this panel to investigate how NATO might in fact facilitate trust-building among its members, this paper represents an initial attempt to consider how the question of trust can be considered with respect to the existing literature on both alliances and NATO. In doing so, it brings together three literatures: trust theory, alliance theory, and NATO studies, in order to reveal the points of intersection that might help us to understand how and why trusting relationships can be formed within the NATO alliance.