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This paper will historically and theoretically study conditions under which states develop bilateral versus multilateral security alliances. Specifically, the paper will discuss a question on why the United States built mainly bilateral alliances in the Asia-Pacific region while it established a multilateral alliance, namely the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the early Cold War period.Understanding security alliances have been the subject of major research in international relations studies. However, there has been so far insufficient scholarly attention and rigorous archival research focusing on the question I proposed above. The findings of the proposed paper will not only be historical and theoretical, but will also attempt to provide insights on how future Asia-Pacific alliance policy can be managed.This paper argues that the difference between the German rearmament and the Japanese rearmament is a key for solving the puzzle. The nature of the German rearmament is very much different from that of the Japanese counterpart, because the Japanese rearmament was far modest and limited in its nature and scope. The large-scale German rearmament generated more complex interdependent interactions among the United States and its European allies, while the limited Japanese rearmament created less interdependent relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Therefore, the Atlantic alliance developed into NATO with multilateralism, while alliances in the Asia-Pacific remained bilateral in nature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]