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power politics, determined by weakness. While this is certainly true in some cases, it is also
true that many very weak states enter wars willingly rather than try to hide and ride it out.
Because the decision to remain neutral can have tremendous consequences for the fate of
belligerents, it can be a source of power for those states that are able to signal that neutrality
is a choice not an immutable condition. Imagine what Britain’s attitude toward Spain would
have been if Churchill believed in 1940-41 that no matter what, Spain would not enter the
war. In the real world of international politics it is not so hard for neutrals to convince
others of the contingency of their position, because it is a fact of life in war-time that
neutrality and non-belligerency are, as often as not, about timing one’s entry into war rather
than running from it. Thinking actively about the role of wedge strategies helps us to shake
the theory-induced illusion that neutrals are passive participants in the power politics of
dangerous times. It helps us to remember that the neutrality of some countries is the
intended and hard won result of other countries’ wedge strategies—and that in the absence
of those policies the neutrals would have been fighters not a “hiders”.
Soft Balancing
The importance of wedge strategy has been overlooked in the recent debate over the
usefulness of “soft balancing” as a concept for understanding opposition to recent U.S.
foreign policies. This oversight is not trivial since soft balancing is conceived of as “actions
that do not directly challenge [the] military preponderance [of a threat] but that use
nonmilitary tools to delay, frustrate, and undermine [its] aggressive…military policies.”
One of the most obvious nonmilitary ways to weaken a threatening power is to undermine
its military alliances. By failing to identify this type of behavior, and assess its prevalence,
partisans on both sides of the debate have missed an opportunity to sharpen their claims and
predictions.
Pape alludes to the role of wedge strategies when he states that as soft balancing
against the U.S. intensifies, it will “reduce the number of countries likely to cooperate with
future U.S. military adventures.” But his accounting of soft balancing mechanisms, “which
include territorial denial, entangling diplomacy, economic strengthening, and signaling of
resolve to participate in a [hard] balancing coalition” leaves wedge strategies out.
Similarly,
Paul argues that soft balancing “involves the formation of limited diplomatic coalitions or
217
Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” p. 10.
218
Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” p. 36.
Convention