Theories of Balancing and US Grand Strategy: Unpacking the Europe vs. East Asia Tradeoff

Abstract

Much of the scholarly debate on US grand strategy revolves around the question of whether the United States should adopt a forward-leaning global military posture or rather leverage its quasi- island status to let the world’s great powers balance against one another. Such debate is often held in relation to Europe and East Asia, for those are the only two regions with the wealth and military- industrial potential needed to credibly challenge the United States. However, the reality of US forward presence since WWII means that this debate has been fought primarily on prescriptive ground. In fact, a more relevant question – one with which policymakers have to grapple with on a daily basis – is which region matters most under which circumstances. It is surprising that the issue of resource tradeoffs between regions in US grand strategy has not received much attention in the IR literature yet, especially since the US 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy identity both Russia and China as “long-term strategic competitors.” Therefore, in this paper we present a theory of US balancing behavior in Europe and East Asia to elucidate which factors account for the prioritization of one region over the other. We hypothesize that, in a permissive environment, the United States balances against elements of power of competitors in both regions simultaneously. Yet, once a single competitor reaches an advantage across many elements of power, scarcity of US resources compels Washington to set regional priorities and to prepare for balancing against that single competitor across all elements of power. This is because the fungibility of the competitor’s power resources – through spill-over effects and issue linkage – logically increases as its overall amount of power increases. To illustrate the plausibility of our hypothesis, we select two case studies: The Cold War and the Pivot to Asia.

Panel: The Past, Present and Future of Transatlantic Security

All papers

EISS 2019 programme

@inproceedings{eiss-2019-theories-of-balancing-and-us-grand-strategy-unpacking-the-europe-vs-east-asia-tr,
  author = {Linde Desmaele and Luis Simón},
  title = {Theories of Balancing and US Grand Strategy: Unpacking the Europe vs. East Asia Tradeoff},
  booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
  year = {2019},
  url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-theories-of-balancing-and-us-grand-strategy-unpacking-the-europe-vs-east-asia-tr.html}
}