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This article presents an examination of the dynamics of multilateral military alliances or 'coalitions'. Framed within the wider debate over the future security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region, it has the dual objective of both enriching the academic debate and offering guidance to policy-makers by investigating the theory and practice of coalition behaviour. The article expounds the case for the American-Japanese-Australian combination and analyses the issues that confront such an alliance-coalition using two competing theoretical perspectives of allied behaviour: 'balance of power' and 'intra-alliance politics'. The main propositions of these perspectives are empirically tested against policy statements based on American, Japanese and Australian foreign and defence policies and associated academic writings. The paper demonstrates the continued validity of realist-conceived approaches to security provision and concludes that both theoretical perspectives are useful tools of analysis in this case. Focusing on separate levels and therefore different aspects of allied behaviour, they can in fact be viewed as complementary, rather than competing, and clearly exhibit strong potential for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]