Excerpt

I sat on the tarmac of the Chinggis Khaan International Airport outside of Ulaanbaatar, waiting for a plane to load and take off before mine. It contained 180 Mongolian soldiers on their way to Iraq to join George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing”—thirty-four nations committing troops to support the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq. I was in Mongolia conducting anthropological research on Mongolians’ perceptions of democracy. 

Like several former Soviet countries, Mongolia wanted to show its solidarity with the United States. What better way to demonstrate its desire to make America its “third neighbor” than to support President Bush’s war effort? (Mongolia is landlocked, sandwiched between the Russian Federation and China; “third neighbor” refers to Mongolia’s interest in balancing its immediate neighbors with more Western-leaning nations.)

But did Mongolia want a true alliance with the United States, or was the relationship something else entirely? 

It helps to define alliance. Although many people—including scholars—often call any cooperative relationship between two powers an alliance, not all alliances are the same. Nations or people in a true alliance treat each other as equals. They work together to meet a common goal—defeating or deterring an enemy, for example. 

Allies make decisions together and they deal with the consequences of their decisions together. Once its goal is reached, an alliance may dissolve. The shared goal is the nucleus of the partnership.

Of the prominent US allies in the 2003 Iraq invasion, only the United Kingdom supported the war effort until 2009, when it withdrew its troops. Australia withdrew its troops in 2003 but sent in more troops in 2005. France, Germany, and New Zealand, traditional US allies since the end of World War II, refused to participate in the war effort.

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