the mere fact of military transfers from Russia to China was still an automatic balancing
behavior against U.S. primacy because it increases China’s military capabilities against
the U.S.
Second, Brooks and Wolhforth commit the same fallacy they accuse of the soft-
balancing theorists—confusing rhetoric with reality. They charge that the pledges of
Russia, China, India, and even France to build a multipolar world are only rhetorical in
nature, and in reality these countries do not intend to balance against the U.S. However,
to what extent are they confident that the Russian arms sales to China are only due to
economic interests, without harboring any “balancing” consideration? Under
unprecedented unipolarity, no country intends to challenge the U.S., the sole superpower,
directly and militarily. Therefore, it is rational for states, such as Russia and China, to
cover their real strategic intentions, e.g., balancing U.S. power by some less provocative
means such as economic cooperation. By the same token, though the official goal of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is anti-terrorism, Russia and China carried out
joint military exercises that worried many neighboring states. It is even more disturbing
to many outside states when Iran was invited to attend this year’s SCO.
Furthermore, Brooks and Wolhforth confuse balancing behavior with the state of
balance. While the former indicates a behavior, the latter refers to the outcome of
behavior. One of their anti-soft-balancing arguments is that Russia, China, and India’s
10
Colin Elman suggests that there are two types of balance of power in the system, the manual balance of power and
the automatic balance of power. While the former needs clear intentions of balancing from a major power in order to
form the balance of power in the system, the latter depends on negative feedback in the system to resume the defaulted
balance of power in the system even though some states do not balance against the powerful states. I extend the
application of automatic versus manual balance of power to account for the unintended outcome of state balancing
behavior, i.e. manual balancing and automatic balancing. On manual balance of power and automatic balance of power,
see Colin Elman, “Introduction,” in John Vasquez and Colin Elman, eds. Realism and the Balancing of Power (Prentice
Hall, 2002), pp. 10-13.
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Convention