With freedom and transparency data for more than 150 countries, we find that almost 70 percent of countries with a high degree of internal freedom are also transparent when it comes to reporting data on arms transfers. Comparatively, only 21 percent of countries that protect few individual freedoms report such data. Though robust, our findings are little comfort to scholars who theorize a causal link between democracy and transparency, and attribute international peace and security to this relationship. Our findings also question transparency’s status as an international norm and validate standard structural realism’s thinking about the limits of security cooperation.

In recent years, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the role of transparency in international relations. U.S. efforts during the early Cold War to press for greater openness as a way of reducing tensions with the Soviet Union are often cited by specialists on military transparency. Yet the ill-fated Open Skies proposal has not been thoroughly investigated. This article draws on primary documents from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to show that proponents of transparency have generally drawn the wrong conclusions about Open Skies. The U.S. proposal for a system of aerial observation was part and parcel of a strategy to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union. Consequently, Open Skies does not conform to the logic of transparency as a confidence-building measure; it instead affirms basic realist thinking about the competition for security between rivals. Future scholarship that appreciates how the quest for a more open world is affected by the competition for security would improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and limitations of transparency.

American statesmen have long held that peace and security depend on America possessing overwhelming power. Primacy has also meant constructing a system of world order conducive to American interests and values. To this end, America has championed the cause of greater transparency. In the mid-1950s and again in the late-1980s, it proposed the establishment of an international system of mutual aerial observation. The Open Skies Treaty, which came into force in 2002, is a triumph of American statecraft because it places Russia under closer international scrutiny and makes it more accountable to its neighbors.

American statesmen have long held that peace and security depend on America possessing overwhelming power. Primacy has also meant constructing a system of world order conducive to American interests and values. To this end, America has championed the cause of greater transparency. In the mid-1950s and again in the late-1980s, it proposed the establishment of an international system of mutual aerial observation. The Open Skies Treaty, which came into force in 2002, is a triumph of American statecraft because it places Russia under closer international scrutiny and makes it more accountable to its neighbors.