The asymmetry in these negotiations is rarely about willingness. It is about how many people in the room have read a comparable contract before. A financier that has closed two hundred of these deals sits opposite a ministry that has closed three, and the terms reflect the difference long before any question of alignment arises.
Small states are the useful comparative case precisely because the constraint is visible. Where a larger state can absorb a badly priced agreement inside a large balance sheet, a small one cannot, and the consequences of the capacity gap show up in the fiscal accounts within a few years.