The REAL Reason Neutrality Is Better Than NATO | E. Golson & H. Briffa

## Neutrality in a changing international order What emerges from this conversation is a renewed claim: neutrality is not anachronistic but a dynamic and adaptable strategy for states navigating a fracturing international order. Far from a single legal status stamped in Hague-era ink, neutrality functions as a spectrum of practices—legal postures, diplomatic trades, defensive postures and domestic narratives—that can be tuned to changing threats and opportunities. The conversation reframes neutrality as a practical toolkit for preserving autonomy when great-power competition and institutional erosion make hedging through alliances less reliable. In short, neutrality's value lies less in an ideal of abstention and more in its capacity to give states room to maneuver politically, economically and militarily without becoming clients or battlegrounds for larger powers. This argument is grounded in contemporary anxieties: the retreat of multilateral institutions that once leveled the playing field, the pressures of sanctions regimes that cascade beyond their target, and the militarization of economic and cyber spaces. The exchange emphasizes that neutrality gains much of its current salience from the messy realities of power—where legal protections are partial, alliances are selective, and the costs of alignment are rising. When large states increasingly treat smaller ones as instruments or stages of confrontation, the craft of staying out becomes a strategic response, not merely a moral preference. ## Law, diplomacy and the flexibility of neutrality The conversation maps neutrality across three interacting registers: law, diplomacy and practice. On the legal side, traditional Hague and UN-era frameworks once gave neutrality a clearer shape, but those norms are fraying. Treaties, constitutional clauses and international adjudication once offered small states predictable levers—witness the WTO's leveling effect on trade disputes—but the weakening of those mechanisms reduces the protective scaffolding that made strict neutrality plausible. At the same time, newer domains such as cyberspace complicate the old categories: duties of due diligence, the management of information flows, and neutrality-like norms in internet governance show that neutrality's logic is migrating into technological realms. Diplomatically, the conversation highlights neutrality's chameleon quality. Neutral actors can act as interlocutors, mediators and nodes of communication precisely because they are not formal partisans. That role depends less on legal purity and more on perceived impartiality and usefulness. The capacity to host talks, facilitate trade, or provide humanitarian services is a form of leverage that neutral states can cultivate. Even institutions that claim neutrality, such as humanitarian organizations, are pressured to prove their impartiality; their struggles illustrate how frail neutrality can be in practice and how much active work it requires to maintain trust. Flexibility is therefore both an asset and a liability. It allows states to "dip a toe" into policies—sanctions, humanitarian measures, technical cooperation—and to retract if costs rise. But it also creates domestic contestation and international ambiguity. The Swiss debates over stricter versus more flexible neutrality are a case in point: flexibility can generate political bitterness when publics or elites disagree on the acceptable threshold for engagement. ## Small states and the limits of alliances One of the conversation's central contentions is that alliances are not always the panacea they promise to be for small states. Formal security guarantees and base arrangements deliver material protection but can also make states dependent, expose them to blowback, and reduce their strategic autonomy. The Gulf states’ historical reliance on an external guarantor provides a cautionary tale: outsourcing defense can leave a state politically vulnerable if the guarantor's priorities shift or if the presence itself becomes a liability. Neutrality, in contrast, is proposed as a sovereignty-preserving alternative. It can enable small states to remain useful to multiple great powers without being subsumed by any single patron. That usefulness—financial hubs, mediating venues, logistics nodes—translates into bargaining capital. But for neutrality to be credible, a state must command a credible means of self-defense or deterrence, or else rely on informal recognition from powerful neighbors. The conversation stresses that neutrality is therefore not a passive waiver of responsibility: it requires institutions, capacity-building and credible policies to dissuade predation. The limits of alliances also show up politically: membership can drag a country into conflicts that undermine domestic legitimacy. Conversely, a neutral posture can preserve national cohesion by avoiding divisive external entanglements. Yet neutrality is no guarantee against coercion; the historical record shows both successful and failed neutralities depending on context, balance of power and the willingness of major states to respect sovereign choices. ## Hillary Briffa: the craft of staying out of wars The discussion insists on treating neutrality as craft rather than label—a deliberate set of practices that governments must perform. Staying out of wars involves continuous assessment of international risks, careful domestic framing to sustain legitimacy, and nimble diplomacy to reconfigure relationships as threats evolve. The craft metaphor underscores that neutrality is work-intensive: it entails intelligence gathering, legal preparedness, military calibration, economic diversification and public communication. Historical case studies in the exchange illustrate how this craft operates in varying contexts. The early United States used neutrality to buy time for economic development; Hawaii leveraged treaties to secure its international standing; Portugal balanced alliance commitments with claims to neutrality; and Luxembourg's experience shows how guaranteed neutrality can be hollowed out when guarantors no longer have the will to defend it. For each case, neutrality was not an automatic shield but an instrument that required constant tending. The conversation also teases apart neutrality from non-alignment. While overlapping, non-alignment often implies active leadership within a bloc of similarly positioned states (as in the Cold War non-aligned movement), whereas neutrality emphasizes a state's outward posture of impartiality and its domestic legal commitments. Both strategies require craft, but they mobilize different networks and forms of legitimacy. ## Five conditions for lasting neutrality From the exchange emerges a practical checklist for neutrality to endure in the contemporary era. First, legal grounding: a constitution, treaty or recognized status can anchor policy and provide a basis for international recognition. Second, credible defense capacity: whether through territorial defense forces, strategic deterrence, or diversified security arrangements short of formal alliance, a neutral state must make itself a difficult or costly target. Third, diplomatic usefulness: neutral states must cultivate roles—mediation, finance, logistics—that make them valuable to multiple parties. Fourth, domestic legitimacy: public support and political consensus around neutrality reduce vulnerability to partisan shifts that could drag a country toward alignment. Fifth, adaptability and technical competence: the ability to manage new domains (cyberspace, information flows, sanctions-busting techniques) is essential to keeping neutrality functional. The speakers emphasize that no single condition suffices; neutrality requires a constellation of capabilities and reputational strengths. When one pillar erodes—say, legal recognition or domestic consensus—the whole edifice becomes fragile. Equally, the costs of investing in these capabilities ar

The REAL Reason Neutrality Is Better Than NATO | E. Golson & H. Briffa Neutrality is back! Not just on this channel but in the international debate. And we are happy to announce the first-ever (academic) book series on the topic. Listen to Eric and Hillary introducing the two volumes that will come out shortly and why they show that neutrality is the better foreign policy strategy. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Presentation 10: Eirc Golson & Hillary Briffa Eric Golson and Hillary Briffa explore how neutrality helps states preserve autonomy in an increasingly contested international order. Drawing on historical cases, they examine the legal foundations, practical demands and political limits of staying outside wars and military alliances. Their discussion considers recognition, defence capacity, diplomatic usefulness, domestic legitimacy and adaptation, alongside examples from Switzerland, Malta, Hawaii and the Gulf. The audience debate addresses nonalignment, mediation, Taiwan, security guarantees and the pressures that powerful states place on neutral actors today. The (BRAND NEW) Neutrality Studies Books and Book Series: Reframing Neutrality: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reframing-neutrality- 9781350628496/ Neutral Actors in History: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/neutral-actors-in- history-9781350628670/ Open Access: Both books will be made available Open Access. You don't need to purchase them. PDFs will be available in due course. Eric and Hillary's Links: Eric Golson — University of Surrey: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/eric-golson Hillary Briffa — King's College London: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/hillary-briffa Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com /donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Neutrality in a changing international order 03:39 Law, diplomacy and the flexibility of neutrality 10:48 Small states and the limits of alliances 16:52 Hillary Briffa: the craft of staying out of wars 22:22 Five conditions for lasting neutrality 31:55 Failure, hierarchy and empire 40:31 Q&A: nonalignment, guarantees and mediation 53:22 Gulf security and opposition to neutrality #Eric Golson Thanks, Pascal. So before I get started, I just wanted to say I've really enjoyed the discussion so far, in part because I'm a University of Chicago-trained economist whose thesis was with John Mearsheimer. So I feel like I'm the person that's very much on the outside looking in a little bit, or maybe I'm on the inside looking out. I'm not quite sure. But I'm very much enjoying the discussion because I almost want to put my hand up constantly and go, "But John would say..." or whatever the response would be. But I think, wearing my Chicago hat for a moment, and not wanting to go too far into this because that's not what I'm here to talk about, but wearing my Chicago hat for a -- 1 of 20 -- moment, there is an element to which neoliberal economics acknowledges that it doesn't—and I'm not going to phrase this correctly—but neoliberal economics acknowledges it doesn't work at some stage. And I think we've hit that in this room quite well, but it also thinks that it's self-correcting. If I've got my Chicago hat on correctly, it thinks that it's self-correcting. And I guess the question that I'm asking myself as I've been sitting here all day is, when does the self-correction come now, and how does it take the form of what we're discussing? So it's been a really cool discussion for me. I just wanted to say that because I know I've been keeping myself relatively quiet. I've sort of been in my seat with the John Mearsheimer hand that wanted to go up, but I didn't want to give myself away too quickly to the audience and turn into that guy that you exile down in the hallway. In any case, I'm here to talk about the first volume of a two-volume series and apply the concepts and ideas of neutrality more generally to the discussion we've been having today. And as Pascal introduced, Hillary and I and Pascal have been very busy over the last couple of months putting this together. It's been a bit of a road, but I think there's some core claims that help us out quite a bit in our discussion today. Core claim number one, I think, is that, obviously, neutrals exist, and neutral states are, in effect, not one single thing. They never have been. Throughout history, they've been a whole collection of different ideas, of ideas that evolve, of practice: that you can be neutral and you can step back and put yourself in a little box, and then you can put your foot outside the box, and then you can put it back in the box, depending on what the situation is. There's no single concept of neutrality in a multipolar world. And I think that's one of the things that may be helping a number of small states at the moment survive the current situation. But it's one thing that's also clouding the current situation tremendously. The Swiss have gone from being neutral and talking about neutrality as something relatively strict, to coming up with a more flexible thing, to having a recent vote and debate on whether it should be more strict. And we don't really... There's almost a bitterness now, I think, about that vote. If I've been speaking to my Swiss friends correctly, I'm looking at Pascal because I got a brochure in the mail with his face on it in Switzerland, and I was jumping up and down because I'm looking at it going, there's all these people I don't know, and then there's this guy I know really well. Voting pamphlet. But neutrality encompasses philosophy. It encompasses law and systems theory. It encompasses economics and diplomacy and a bunch of non-state actors. And all of those things come together to offer these neutral countries tremendous amounts of flexibility in the kinds of conflicts that we're talking about in here all day today and yesterday, I think, at least from my view. The reason for this, perhaps, is that these countries are allies of neither side. And so when you have the big monster, and I love this monster, by the way, if you have the big monster, you have a country that can stand back and be behind or beside or in the next room of the big monster and somehow survive its way through. -- 2 of 20 -- The Switzerlands of the world are the obvious candidates, having survived two world wars without being invaded and now standing outside of the European Union, which we've talked about in sort of very complicated terms today. But it's also not just driven by single concepts. It's driven by a whole range of different vocabulary that we've used, and political philosophy. In the book, we talk about— one of the authors talks about—it's a co-edited volume. Sorry, I missed that phrase there. It's a co- edited volume. One of the authors talks about different typologies, things like median and viscerality, neutrality of the strong, ministrality, the neutrality of the weak, extra-neutrality, the neutrality of the outsider or isolationism, and I'll never pronounce this correctly because I'm a tired dyslexic, but katastematic tranquility, calm, many different concepts and ideas, all of which have come together. The neutral state has a long legal history in this way, everything from participation in major wars to minor wars. And it's not one that is very well defined on purpose. It's also one—and this comes to sort of my chapter and some of the more recent things in the book—it's also one that was designed, prior to World War II, to be eliminated as a concept. In the sense that, at least from my perspective, collective security, the League of Nations, the ideas of collective security, were designed to make neutrality irrelevant. But actually, collective security broke down pretty quickly in Europe. And neutrals had to return to their very, very strong neutral positions. We have evidence of various international institutions which have been challenged in their own neutrality. Things like the Red Cross, for instance, which obviously has a long history of being effectively a third party to many conflicts, operating under the Red Cross flag, but having, if you will, been challenged by both sides to prove that it is both a contributor to the process as a neutral party, but also actually non- combatant, non-conflicting, and building a sense of trust towards that. At the same time, we move into cyberspace now. One of the chapters deals with the cyberspace issue, and I think is really cool, the idea that cyberspace itself is born into and is a part of neutrality, in a sense, and that things like—Jan Lemnitzer wrote this chapter, and he talks about a duty to prepare, to accept responsibility, help to monitor what's going on in the wider world. These things are applied to cyber, but at the same time, the idea of having to apply the ideas of due diligence: our information that is being passed to you through cyberspace, should it be allowed? And the fact that cyber encompasses things like neutrality, net neutrality, if you will, that are based on ideas that go all the way back to 1872, apparently, and wartime radio, the propagation of wartime radio and wartime ideas. #Pascal Hey, just a very quick note. The best way to support this channel is by signing up for my free Substack. You can also help with a paid subscription there, or you can get some of our new merch on NeutralityStudies.com. Links below. See you there. #Eric Golson -- 3 of 20 -- The bit of neutrality that you're probably most familiar with is, of course, the fancy legal one. But the fancy legal one, which is based on the Hague Treaties of 1907 and many of the ideas that came out of the UN Charter and other things, as we've been discussing here over the last two days, has been breaking down. In one way or another, small states have been being challenged. The ideas of the World Trade Organization, for instance, benefited tremendously the small state, from my view. It allowed small states to be on equal terms with large states and for neutral countries to take on transgressors, economic transgressors, in a forum that allowed for an economic, not a military or a political solution. We obviously—this is now—the system, this WTO system, is falling apart piece by piece because the large states have chosen no longer to participate. We have constitutional requirements for neutrality in Austria and Ireland. But, of course, even the Irish are facing challenges now, things like cable cutting. The Austrians find themselves increasingly difficultly placed between East and West, despite being inside the European Union. They find themselves with political problems related to closer relations with Russia while being inside the EU. And we come to even more weakly declared ideas of neutrality, where individual states have declared, such as Serbia in 2007, which is, I think, very weakly recognized these days, the ideas of neutrality there. Neutrality has therefore let, I think, at least in my view, and hopefully Hillary is going to back me up on book number two here because we've been co-editing, working on both, but neutrality has in effect let small states pick their fights over the years. And it's allowed them to dip their toes in the water when they want to, but not too far and not too dramatically, and pull them back out again. It has created a whole series of laws and ideas, but those laws and ideas, since I would argue about 2014, have begun to break down. And it's the breakdown that I'm now interested in. It's this problem that we have, that neutrality is under threat. Switzerland and Singapore being effectively forced to adopt sanctions, European Union sanctions, and sanctions that have been forced on the Singaporeans within Asia. It's the ideas that countries within NATO can somehow be more neutral than other countries within NATO, and the challenges that that brings to a NATO