Soft Balancing against the United States

Abstract

The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has wrongly promoted the view that the United States, as the leader of a unipolar system, can pursue such a policy without fear of serious opposition. The most consequential effect of the Bush strategy will be a fundamental transformation in how major states perceive the United States and how they react to future uses of U.S. power. Major powers are already engaging in the early stages of balancing behavior against the United States, by adopting “soft-balancing” measures that do not directly challenge U.S. military preponderance but use international institutions, economic statecraft, and diplomatic arrangements to delay, frustrate, and undermine U.S. policies. If the Bush administration continues to pursue aggressive unilateral military policies, increased soft balancing could establish the basis for hard balancing against the United States. To avoid this outcome, the United States should renounce the systematic use of preventive war, as well as other aggressive unilateral military policies, and return to its traditional policy governing the use of force-a case-by-case calculation of costs and benefits.

BRICS: Sovereignty power and weakness

“…At the same time-and this is what makes them original -they are in a way the product of September 11 and the war in Iraq. The latter highlighted the superpower of the United States along with the inability of the rest of the world to oppose it (Pape, 2005). The first Gulf War in 1991 had already made this imbalance evident, but the stakes were different at the time.…”

The Politics of Contestation in Asia: How Japan and Pakistan Deal with Their Rising Neighbors

“…Binding (Ikenberry 2003;Rock 2000) Blackmailing (Lapp 2012;Walt 2005) Buck-passing (Chan 2010;Christensen and Snyder 1990;Mearsheimer 2001;Mochizuki 2007) Buffering (Gries 2005) Chain ganging (Christensen and Snyder 1990) Delegitimation (Walt 2005) Economic prebalancing (Layne 2006) Evasion (Bobrow 2008) Everyday and rightful resistance (Bobrow 2008;Destradi 2010;Ikenberry 2003;Ikenberry et al 2009;Prys 2010;Schweller and Pu 2011) Hedging (Goh 2005(Goh , 2008(Goh , 2011aHeginbotham and Samuels 2002;Kuik 2008;Medeiros 2005) Leash-slipping (Layne 2006) Log rolling (Ikenberry 2003) Niche diplomacy (Cooper 1997) Modification (Bobrow 2008) Omni-balancing (David 1991) Omni-enmeshment (Goh 2008) Pulling and hauling (Ikenberry 2003) Soft and indirect balancing (Goh 2008;Pape 2005;Paul 2005a)…”

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics

“…Yet the shifting nature of world order is reflected in a trend towards 'soft balancing' as proto-peers and regional powers seek to counter US leadership in global institutions without challenging the US directly (Pape 2005;Bobrow 2008). This has caught the Anglosphere by surprise, no less than Russia's willingness to use 'hard balancing' to limit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) encroachment into the post-Soviet space of Eurasia, which has led the US in turn to retaliate with economic sanctions and pressure on Saudi Arabia to depress the market price of Russia's primary export and source of hard currency.…”