Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era

256 Pages·2018·1.962 MB·English

by  Thazha V. Paul

Restraining
Great Powers
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Restraining
Great
Powers
Soft Balancing from
Empires to the Global Era
T. V. PAUL
Published with assistance from the foundation established
in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907,
Yale College.
Copyright © 2018 by T.V. Paul.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934742
ISBN 978-0-300-22848-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
one Balance of Power Today, 1
two Restraint by Other Means, 20
three Soft Balancing from Concert to the Cold War, 46
four Balancing during the Cold War, 74
five The Post–Cold War Era: Restraining the United States, 97
six Rising China and Soft Balancing, 119
seven Balancing Resurgent Russia, 146
eight The Future of Balance of Power, 164
Notes 193
Index 227
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Preface
B
alance of power is one of the most enduring themes in inter-
national politics. Its antecedents go back to antiquity, to the
classical era of warring Greek city-states, and it has been con-
sidered the bedrock of great-power stability since the seven-
teenth century. Yet it is also arguably the most contested concept and
strategy in world politics. The pivotal question of whether it promotes
peace or war has yet to be fully answered.
In this book, I argue that balance of power is not an immutable
strategy, as some scholars and policy makers believe, but a concept
shaped by the international politics of the day. Countries have used dif-
ferent techniques in different epochs to balance and restrain powerful or
threatening states. It is often assumed that during much of the European
imperial age, great powers balanced one another with formal alliances
and arms buildups. But they also used international institutions and
economic sanctions as means of soft balancing to restrain the power
and threatening behavior of other states. The Concert System among
European powers in the nineteenth century is a prominent example.
Soft balancing continued into the twentieth century. The League
of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, became arenas of
great-power contestation and balancing. During the Cold War, lesser
powers under the rubric of the Non-Aligned Movement also engaged in
vii
viii preface
a weak form of soft balancing against superpower dominance. Econom-
ic sanctions, often with the approval of an international institution,
were used as a soft-balancing instrument to restrain or punish a threat-
ening power. With the end of the Cold War, the traditional instruments
of balancing, such as arms buildups and formal alliances, became less
salient. For about two decades—approximately from 1991 until 2010—
the United States as the preponderant power faced a surprising absence
of balancing efforts against it. The U.S. outshone others not only in its
aggregate power but also in using that power to initiate wars against
secondary states in restive regions such as the Middle East. Similarly,
China became the world’s second most powerful economy with rapidly
growing military might and began a program of territorial expansion in
the Pacifi c, especially in the South China Sea. But it has faced only lim-
ited balancing by the affected states. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has received
limited hard-balancing responses, especially from the U.S. and its NATO
allies, to its aggressive actions toward Ukraine and Baltic states.
All of these cases remain anomalies for balance-of-power theory.
Why is this so? Is it because traditional instruments of power have be-
come less effective than they used to be? My contention in this book is
that states have increasingly relied on international institutions, limited
ententes, and economic instruments to balance power and restrain
threatening behavior. Military capabilities remain important, but they
are not the only feasible instruments of balancing in the contemporary
world. The availability of less threatening instruments allows states to
resort to nonmilitary means more often than before because these in-
struments change the cost-benefi t calculations about balancing.
This trend toward using less coercive instruments of balancing can
continue only if globalization advances and states become more inter-
connected through economic links and improving technologies. A mas-
sive failure of globalization to bring sustained growth and prosperity, or
the resurgence of expansionist or nativist nationalism in key countries,
could alter this pattern and make military power once again the balanc-
ing instrument of choice. Globalization has brought greater prosperity to
almost all nations, making zero-sum competition for resources
less bitter than in previous eras, when European great powers fought
massive wars in an effort to add to their material wealth and power. If
preface ix
globalization and resulting economic interdependence fail to foster sus-
tained cooperation, competitive international politics could reemerge
with a vengeance. The inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president
in 2017 and the possibility of other right-wing leaders coming to power
in Europe have brought a return of hard balancing as a topic of discus-
sion. However, restraining the forces seeking the comeback of geopoliti-
cal competition and isolation may require greater use of soft balancing.
After the Cold War, the twin forces of globalization and global
norms against aggressive territorial expansion restrained but did not pre-
vent the U.S. from intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan. To some extent,
these same forces simultaneously encouraged rising powers such as Chi-
na and Russia to mellow their behavior. Since 2009 or so, however, China
has actively expanded into contested waters such as the South China Sea
and, increasingly, the Indian Ocean, and in most cases the responses of
affected states have been less assertive than expected. India, a third rising
power, is globalizing in every key dimension, especially economically,
and is being quickly integrated into the global order. It has formed lim-
ited strategic ententes with the U.S., Japan, and some Southeast Asian
countries such as Vietnam.
We should not assume that the United States or rising powers will
never use military power or asymmetric strategies to achieve their goals.
Since 2010, Russia and China have both employed military means to as-
sert dominance in their immediate neighborhoods. The affected states
have responded with limited hard balancing in addition to soft-balanc-
ing efforts. A massive economic decline or the imposition of protection-
ist trade barriers in key countries could reignite the competition for
resources and wealth.
Prudent statecraft grows ever more important in preventing the
world from sliding into intense rivalries and potential military confl icts.
Balance-of-power strategies relying on traditional military means alone
cannot guarantee long-term peace and stability in an interconnected
world. A hybrid approach that includes both hard and soft balancing,
relying on adequate defensive military capabilities to provide a deter-
rent, is necessary to preserve peace in the coming decades. The success
of these approaches will depend heavily on how great powers, both
established and rising, view the legitimacy of the international order