INTERMARIUM ALLIANCE FRAMEWORK ASSESSMENT

The Intermarium doctrine is usually attacked on politics: the members distrust each other, the history is unresolved, the largest member is suspected of wanting a protectorate. Those objections are real and they are also the weak ones. The doctrine fails earlier than that, on arithmetic. A coalition of the size Intermarium describes cannot reach a decision fast enough to matter, and the deterrent weight it promises requires a defence budget none of its members has sustained for a single decade. Neither problem is about trust. Both are about counting.

This assessment does not argue that the doctrine is wrong. It argues that the doctrine, as usually stated, is unpriced. What follows is the price.

The mechanism: what a buffer coalition actually is

An alliance and a buffer coalition are different objects that use the same vocabulary.

An alliance is a promise by a distant strong party to a nearby weak one. Its credibility problem is the strong party’s willingness. A buffer coalition is a promise by a set of nearby weak parties to each other. Its credibility problem is coordination. The first can be solved by one decision in one capital. The second requires simultaneous decisions in every capital, under time pressure, on the day the exposed member is the one nobody wants to be exposed for.

The doctrine’s own slogan states the design goal precisely: no one is left alone. That is a commitment to act on behalf of the member who is attacked first. It is therefore a commitment whose cost falls entirely on the members who are not attacked first. Every member knows this. Every member also knows every other member knows it. The coalition is, structurally, a repeated game in which the dominant individual move is to be second.

That is not a moral failing of the participants. It is the shape of the object.

The arithmetic of size

Coordination cost in a coalition does not grow with membership. It grows with pairs of members.

A coalition of n members has n(n-1)/2 bilateral relationships that must be maintained, deconflicted, and kept from being separately bought. Add members and the maintenance load grows quadratically while the added military weight grows, at best, linearly.

Decision speed degrades faster still. Model each member as independently blocking a given decision with probability p. Under unanimity, the probability that a decision passes is (1-p) raised to the power n.

Read the bottom right cell. Twelve members, each of whom objects to one decision in ten, produce a coalition that agrees on slightly more than one crisis decision in four. The other three are handled by whoever is willing to act without the coalition, which is to say, handled by the largest member acting alone and then being accused of acting alone.

Note also that p=0.10 is generous. It assumes objections are independent. They are not. A neighbour with a gas contract, a port concession, or a minority population inside two member states does not need to buy twelve vetoes. It needs to buy the correlation.

The arithmetic of weight

The second unpriced claim is deterrence. The doctrine holds that the aggregate of the members is large enough to matter. Aggregate of what, at what rate?

Model the coalition’s combined annual output as 100 units. Model the counterpart it is designed to balance as spending 6.0 units per year on force. The question is what share of GDP the coalition must commit to reach a given fraction of that spend.

Parity on these assumptions requires 6.0% of combined output, sustained. That is the number the doctrine does not print. And parity is the wrong target anyway: an attacker chooses the time and the point, so the defender needs a multiple, not a match. At a modest 1.5x requirement the coalition needs 9.0 units, which is 9.0% of combined output per year.

Now distribute it. If the largest member holds 40% of coalition GDP, its share of a 9.0-unit bill at proportional burden is 0.40 x 9.0 = 3.6 units, which is 3.6 / 40 = 9.0% of its own output. If the smallest four members together hold 8% of coalition GDP, their combined obligation is 0.08 x 9.0 = 0.72 units per year. Their contribution is real but it does not change the picture. The doctrine is, in budget terms, a proposal that one country spend around nine percent of its economy on force while eleven others hold its coat.

Sustained multi-decade defence spending at that level is not a policy choice. It is a change in what the state is for.

The strongest counter-argument

The veto arithmetic above assumes unanimity, and serious coalition designers do not propose unanimity for military action. They propose a core.

On that reading, Intermarium is not a twelve-member decision body. It is two or three capable members who act, surrounded by nine or ten who supply depth: airspace, rail gauge, repair capacity, fuel, hospitals, legitimacy, and the diplomatic cost an attacker pays for touching any of them. Depth is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a front and a pocket. Under that design the correct table is not the veto table at all, and the burden table changes too, because the periphery is buying with geography rather than with budget.

This is the honest version of the doctrine, and it is defensible. It has one condition: the core must be named in advance, in writing, with the obligations asymmetric on paper. A coalition that will not write down which two members do the fighting has not solved the coordination problem. It has agreed to discover the answer during the crisis.

Consequence

Three things follow.

First, membership breadth is a liability that is being sold as an asset. Each additional low-capability member adds bilateral maintenance load and one more purchasable veto while adding little force. The doctrine should be arguing for a small core with a wide association tier, and it usually argues the opposite because breadth is easier to announce.

Second, the doctrine is quietly a budget document. Anyone advocating it without printing a percentage of GDP and a duration is advocating a feeling. The percentage is the argument.

Third, the failure mode is specific and predictable. It is not betrayal. It is a delay of six to ten days while twelve capitals seek a formula, during which the exposed member is told that consultations are ongoing. That delay is the actual deliverable of an unpriced coalition, and it is the outcome an adversary is buying when it buys the correlation rather than the veto.

The doctrine survives all of this if it names its core and prints its number. It does not survive being popular.

Related Documents

• Poland Alliance Doctrine: Międzymorze
• Intermarum: The Free-Will Coalition
• Davos 2026: The Alliance Fracture Summit