Balancing (international Relations) - Balancing Today: Soft-Balancing Argument

Balancing Today: Soft-Balancing Argument

Kenneth Waltz proposed that unipolarity is the most unstable and the “least durable of all international configurations”, since even if the dominant power acts benevolently, secondary powers will need to remain cautious about its future intentions and actions in the absence of checks and balances and an equal power to balance and restrain it. Historical instances of great unbalanced power, such as Louis XIV and Napoleon I’s rule of France or Adolph Hitler’s rule of Germany, saw aggressive and expansionist motives with aims to conquer and dominate, hence provoking the crucial need for balancing in an instance of a single dominant state in order to bring the international distribution of power into balance.

In today’s unipolar world, given the problems and difficulties associated with both internal and external forms of hard balancing, soft balancing has surfaced as a more favourable option for secondary powers to, through non-military tools, attempt to ‘delay, frustrate and undermine’ actions, strategies and unilateral decisions of the unipolar leader, the United States. Advocates of soft balancing have proposed a number of mechanisms through which states engage in this form of balancing, including diplomacy, diplomatic coalitions, international institutions and agreements, statecraft mechanisms such as territorial denial, as well as economic initiatives and multilateral and regional economic endeavours that exclude the superpower in the process.

The U.S. pre-eminence has not been balanced against over the last decades mainly because the superpower exhibited non-aggressive approaches without seeking to dominate or challenge the sovereign existence of others but rather promote security and autonomy of all. However, it is argued that increasing U.S. unilateralism, especially under the Bush administration, has changed its image of a benign superpower and made foreign governments uneasy regarding its ambitions. A number of aggressive and unilateral foreign policies, most significant ones being the abandonment of Kyoto Protocol, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and most importantly the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 despite great opposition from other states have led secondary powers to pursue indirect, soft-balancing strategies towards constraining the U.S. power and preventing it from becoming an “unrestricted global hegemon”.

The Iraq invasion is often used as one of the key incidents that provoked major states to rethink their own security and resort to soft balancing against the unipole since it proved not simply a strategy aimed at stopping proliferation of nuclear weapons by rogue states but rather a challenge to the norm of territorial integrity – an aggressive U.S. intervention into a region outside of its own that demonstrated the U.S. commitment to taking any necessary actions to assure that their superiority and primacy is not challenged by anyone.