9
Likewise, for Walt, the target of balancing is first identified as “states or coalitions
whose superior resources could pose a threat.”
Yet, as the discussion proceeds, threat
becomes unitary: states will balance against “the most threatening power”; they “may balance by
allying with other strong states, if a weaker power is more dangerous for other reasons.”
And when he sets out to detail the factors that, beyond power, may determine threat, they
are all, in logical terms, strongly associated with single actors (proximity, offensive
capabilities, and offensive intentions). Likewise, the larger discussion of balancing vs.
bandwagoning, and supporting anecdotes, all point to policies reacting to a single actor,
typically referred to as “the threatening power” (e.g., “Spain under Phillip II, France under
Louis XIV and Napoleon, and Germany under Wilhelm II and Hitler”).
These are just some prominent examples of a pervasive tendency in the literature to
think about balancing as a response to a single-actor threat or “aggressor.”
This tendency,
as well as the “alliance-only” view of external balancing, and the notion that state balancing
behavior should mimic the logic of systemic balancing, is captured neatly in Lieber and
Alexander’s concise statement: “External balancing occurs when states seek to form military
alliances against the predominant power.”
The three tendencies by leading theorists have
combined to create a strange world of modern realist theory in which wedge strategies have
little role in balance of power politics.
The habits of overlooking wedge strategies are not merely driven by the conceptual
limitations of deductive IR-theorizing, for we find that they can be ignored even by those
who tend to approach power politics more concretely. Paul Schroeder’s stinging critique of
narrow “neorealist” conceptions of balancing, for example, proposed a richer of menu state
responses to threat that failed to include wedge strategies.
Colin Gray, a scholar not known
34
Walt, “Alliance Formation,” p. 5
35
Walt, “Alliance Formation,” p. 9.
36
Walt, “Alliance Formation,” p. 15
37
For this tendency in a critic of balance-of-power theorizing, see: John A. Vasquez, “The New Debate on
Balancing Power,” in Vasquez and Elman, eds., Realism and the Balancing of Power, pp. 90-93.
38
Kier Lieber and Gerard Alexander, “Waiting for Balancing: Why the World is Not Pushing Back,”
International Security, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Summer 2005), p. 119. They lose some of the concision when they later
argue that “using widely accepted criteria, experts agree that external balancing against the United States would
be marked by the formation of alliances (including lesser defense agreements), discussions concerning the
formation of such alliances or, at the least, discussion about shared interest in defense cooperation against the
United States” p. 123. But still, it is quite clear that by their standard, attempts to weaken or undermine U.S.
alliances by causing members to defect and go neutral would not count as external balancing against the U.S.
39
Paul Schroeder, “Historical Reality vs. Neorealist Theory,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Summer
1994), pp. 108-148.
Convention