BY STEPHEN M. WALT
If you took an introduction to international relations course in college and the instructor never mentioned the “balance of power,” please contact your alma mater for a refund. You can find this idea in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the ancient Indian writer Kautilya’s Arthashastra (“Science of Politics”), and it is central to the work of modern realists like E.H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Robert Gilpin, and Kenneth Waltz.
Yet despite its long and distinguished history, this simple idea is often forgotten by America’s foreign-policy elites. Instead of asking why Russia and China are collaborating, or pondering what has brought Iran together with its various Middle East partners, they assume it is the result of shared authoritarianism, reflexive anti-Americanism, or some other form of ideological solidarity. This act of collective amnesia encourages U.S. leaders to act in ways that unwittingly push foes closer together, and to miss promising opportunities to drive them apart.
The basic logic behind balance of power theory (or, if you prefer, balance of threat theory) is straightforward. Because there is no “world government” to protect states from each other, each has to rely on its own resources and strategies to avoid being conquered, coerced, or otherwise endangered. When facing a powerful or threatening state, a worried country can mobilize more of its own resources or seek an alliance with other states that face the same danger, in order to shift the balance more in its favor.
In extreme cases, forming a balancing coalition might require a state to fight alongside another country it previously regarded as an enemy or even one it understood would be a rival in the future. Thus, the United States and Great Britain allied with the Soviet Union during World War II, because defeating Nazi Germany took precedence over their long-term concerns about communism. Winston Churchill captured this logic perfectly when he quipped “if Hitler invaded hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment when he said he “would hold hands with the devil” if it would help beat the Third Reich. When you really need allies, you can’t be too choosy.
Needless to say, “balance of power” logic played an important role in U.S. foreign policy, and especially when security concerns were unmistakable. America’s Cold War alliances (i.e., NATO and the hub-and-spoke system of bilateral alliances in Asia) were formed to balance and contain the Soviet Union, and the same motive led the United States to back an array of authoritarian regimes in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Similarly, Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 was inspired by fears of rising Soviet power and the recognition that closer ties with Beijing would put Moscow at a disadvantage.
Yet despite its long pedigree and enduring relevance, policymakers and pundits often fail to recognize how balance of power logic drives the behavior of both allies and adversaries. Part of the problem stems from the common U.S. tendency to assume that a state’s foreign policy is mostly shaped by its internal characteristics (i.e., its leaders’ personalities, its political and economic system, or its ruling ideology, etc.) rather than by its external circumstances (i.e., the array of threats it faces).
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
From this perspective, America’s “natural” allies are states that share our values. When people speak of the United States as “leader of the free world,” or when they describe NATO as a “transatlantic community” of liberal democracies, they are suggesting that these countries are supporting each other because they share a common vision for how the world should be ordered.
Shared political values are not irrelevant, of course, and some empirical studies suggesting democratic alliances are somewhat more stable than alliances between autocracies or between democracies and nondemocracies. Nonetheless, assuming that a state’s internal composition determines its identification of friends and enemies can lead us astray in several ways.
First, if we believe shared values are a powerful unifying force, we are likely to overstate the cohesion and durability of some of our existing alliances. NATO is an obvious case in point: The breakup of the Soviet Union removed its principal rationale, and herculean efforts to give the alliance a new set of missions have not prevented repeated and growing signs of strain. Matters might be different if NATO’s campaigns in Afghanistan or Libya had gone well — but they didn’t.
To be sure, the Ukraine crisis arrested NATO’s slow decline temporarily, but this modest reversal merely underscores the central role external threats (i.e., fear of Russia) play in holding NATO together. “Shared values” are simply insufficient to sustain a meaningful coalition of nearly 30 nations located on both sides of the Atlantic, and all the more so as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland abandon the liberal values on which NATO supposedly rests.
Second, if you forget about balance of power politics, you’re likely to be surprised when other states (or in some cases, nonstate actors) join forces against you. The George W. Bush administration was taken aback when France, Germany, and Russia joined forces to block its efforts to get Security Council approval for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a step these states took because they understood that toppling Saddam Hussein might backfire in ways that would threaten them (as it eventually did). Yet U.S. leaders couldn’t grasp why these states weren’t leaping at the opportunity to remove Saddam and transform the region along democratic lines. As Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice later admitted, “I’ll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn’t understand it.”
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