Description
According to Homolar and Turner, “narrative alliances are often comprised of participants with unequal membership cards” (2024: 218). Alliances are hierarchical, with great powers leading not only decision-making but framing the narrative around the alliance, its purpose and identifying threats. This power to construct or convey a specific alliance narrative places small states/middle powers in difficult positions regarding their self-narratives and ideas of ontological security. While the ‘meta-story’ of alliance narratives, such as the defence of the rules-based international order, aligns with ontological security narratives of smaller powers like Australia and Sweden, other aspects of their alliance membership do not rationally cohere and requires narrative management. How states manage narrative alliances is explored in this paper in the case of AUKUS and NATO under the second Trump administration. Trump tells a different story about alliance relationships and the broader security environment, where unity comes at a price and the defence of the post-war rules-based order is not necessarily guaranteed. this paper explores the tensions that emerge in narrative alliances and debates in the context of uncertainty and unpredictability and what it means to be ontologically secure as alliance members.
