Bret Devereaux

Now those stories are valid, important stories - there are some relationships that the USA might want to reconsider in light of the human rights violations going on. But the transactional informality of those relationships is an important point that gets elided. 3/6

So no, Ethiopia is not a US ally, neither is Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, etc. It's fine to describe those countries as friendly, or cooperative or what have you - and argue that the USA ought to be more critical of them - but they are not formal allies and that matters. end/6

How much arms do we sell them and other informal military guarantees of independence even if there is no formal agreement? What is a term that you can have for that?

Informal military guarantees are, historically speaking, worth exactly the paper they are written on and no more.

Written ones aren't worth much more, too, aren't they?

The value of a written alliance is that it imposes greater costs for failure to live up to the terms of the arrangement. This is obviously not a perfect system and countries do breach treaties but reliability and credibility also matter.