If Not Soft Balancing, Then What?
--Reconsidering Soft Balancing and U.S. Policy towards China
The absence of substantive/hard balancing against the U.S. in the form of military
alliances among the secondary powers has been a research puzzle for realism, especially
structural balance of power theory (e.g. neorealism) since the end of the cold war. While
Kenneth Waltz suggests that we still need to “wait-and-see” and balancing against the
U.S. will form eventually, other scholars such as William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks
claim that balancing has been outdated under American primacy because of “the stability
of unipolarity.”
The U.S. preemptive national strategy after the September 11 tragedies and its
war with Iraq in 2003 worried Waltzian scholars that “the world is pushing back” or that
balancing against the U.S. had been under way.
primacy by non-military means, is coined as a signal or preparation for future military
alignments against U.S. hegemony. The coordination among major/great powers, such as
France, China, and Russia in the Security Council against the U.S. war with Iraq was
seen as evidence of such soft balancing behavior in constraining and undermining U.S.
power in the current unipolar world. The soft-balancing argument is also not absent of
criticisms. Brooks, Wohlforth, Keir Lieber and Gerard Alexander all claim that the soft-
balancing argument is conceptually flawed and empirically unwarranted.
1
See Kenneth Waltz, "Structural Realism after the Cold War," International Security 25, no. 1 (2000): 5-41; and
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth. "American Primacy in Perspective." Foreign Affairs July/August (2002): 20-
33; and William Wohlforth, "The Stability of a Unipolar World." International Security 24, no. 1 (1999): 5-41.
2
Robert Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” International Security Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 7-45; T.V.
Paul, “Soft Balancing in the Age of U.S. Primacy,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2005), pp. 46-71. Robert Art,
Stephen Brooks, William Wohlforth, Keir Lieber, and Gerard Alexander, “Correspondence: Striking the Balance,”
International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2006), pp. 177-96.
3
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “Hard Times for Soft Balancing,” International Security, vol. 30, no. 1
(2005), pp.72-108; Keir Lieber and Gerard Alexander, “Waiting for Balancing: Why the World Is Not Pushing Back,”
2
Convention