I must agree that this strange Russo-Sino-Steppe-Indo-Pak-Perso creature looks to be far from a meaningful counterweight to American power even in a distant future. Agreed too that soft balancing sounds like a bit of a fuzzy concept.
Still, the basic point seems to me to hold: power often breeds resentment and resistance, hegemony often provokes counter-balancing, and attempts at balancing may take a variety of different forms.
Dan, you describe hard or traditional balancing as finding allies and spending more on the army. I would say that there is a harder form than that: the hardest of hard balancing means making an appeal to heaven, on the battlefield, sinking the hegemon's fleet, and destroying its armies. Thusly were sundry Hapsburgs, Frenchmen, and Germans balanced.
This suggests to me that instead of a duality (hard-vs-soft), there may well be a spectrum of balancing from the hardest ("Diamond"?) to the softest ("Talc"?); just as balancing itself is part of a spectrum of anti-hegemonic phenomena. What forms (if any) prevail at any time varies considerably according to circumstances.
Why do we even need a "spectrum of balance"? IMHO balancing is balancing, granted some more effective than others. But in some situations so-called "soft-balancing" is a way to balance without inviting instantaneous counterbalance. In other words, until SCO countries can find a way to properly balance US power (if that is their intention), they will have to do their best without attracting any smackdown.
Paul and YH: a number of people are working on this issue of fleshing out a "spectrum of balancing." I've seen some good preliminary work and some less compelling preliminary work.
What most intrigues me these days about the balancing debate is this notion that calling something "balancing" is a way of legitimating it to domestic audiences. This would accord well with a world in which balancing isn't really possible, but people think that balancing is what states ought to be doing.
I think most people wouldn't describe the "appeal to heaven" as balancing, since the normal goal of balancing is to prevent war. However, given the origins of European balance-of-power notions in the justification of preventative war against the "imperial ambitions" of the Habsburgs and Bourbons, Paul may be onto something.
As usual, much food for thought in this post and comments.
Can't agree that the normal goal of balancing is to prevent war. (If normal means what went on in Europe over the last several centuries.) Its main goal is/was to prevent imperium, I would say, if need be by means of war.
As for balancing nowadays existing more in the realm of legitimation than anywhere else, it's an intriguing thought. I haven't seen much of it myself, ie much appeal to the value of balance in itself, but maybe I'm reading the wrong newspapers. Sometimes the French try to legitimize European unity as a counterbalance to American hyperpuissance. But that's only really the French, as far as I know, and there are other more popular and probably effective ways to try and legitimate the EU. In liberal democracies the "balance of power" has had a bad name ever since WWI. As for Asian countries, that may be a different story. Historically the balance of power idea is, I think, exclusively European. Whether it has travelled abroad I know not. It seems to me, though, that in most of Asia there's now a language of anti-hegemony legitimation that owes more to nationalist anti-colonialism, "anti-hegemonism" as the Chinese used to say, and anti-imperialism. In short, I see realism (including balancing) as the sort of discourse that is whispered in rulers' ears by crafty advisors, not as the sort that leaders use for public legitimation. But I stand to be corrected ...
Younghusband: you are right, of course. Ultimately, there are only two kinds of balancing: the successful and the failed. I do think though that it is fun sometimes to enter the realm of philosophical chopping to see just how finely one can dice a concept.
Paul - this may be a matter of semantics, but I think there's an important point of clarification that needs to be made.
1. "Balancing" usually refers to defensive alliances and internal military buildups.
2. "Preventative war" is a war fought to maintain or restore the balance of power.
On the semantics, thanks Dan for the clarification. A quick and dirty bit of internet searching leads me to think that the usual meaning of balancing appears to derive from Kenneth Waltz. The "soft balancing" idea and my earlier comments on (what shall we call it?) "offensive balancing" both raise the issue of whether a bit of semantic stretching is in order. Perhaps not.
On the substance, if it's true that no real balancing is happening right now, this might be because America is quite nice, rather friendly, and unthreatening to all but the odd rogue. But it might also be because US power - even its military power - is not all that great. I'm thinking here that thanks to things like cheap guerilla weapons, more and more nukes, and fewer and fewer American combat troops, there may be more of a military balance of power in the world than often thought.
In realist theory, balancing is basically defensive. That was certainly the case with NATO.
Does anyone seriously think that China or Russia believe that the U.S. intends to invade either of them in the foreseeable future? Yes, I know that the governments of both states tell their respective publics that the U.S. is an imperialist run amok. But I really doubt either government actually believes it. And if they don't then SCO can't be an an case of balancing, or even a step toward it.
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