Joshua Byun
Can the United States check the expansion of powerful adversaries in distant regions while shedding the military and political costs of doing so? An influential group of intellectuals argues that the answer is a resounding “yes.” Although the United States holds a vital interest in thwarting the rise of a peer competitor in Europe or Asia, their argument runs, it could achieve this aim on the cheap by devolving the task to regional allies and withdrawing its military commitments. As Christopher Layne argues, when U.S. allies are no longer able to “free ride on the back of U.S. security guarantees,” they will surely “step up to the plate and balance against a powerful, expansionist state in their own neighborhood.” This is eminently feasible, the analysis continues, since allies such as Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea are among the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world and could surely acquire the military wherewithal to check aspiring hegemons if they chose to do so.1 Some of the most prominent international relations scholars in American academia have long voiced support for adopting this grand strategy of retrenchment in key regions.2 They have been joined by a chorus of sympathetic policymakers and think tanks in recent years, representing an “alliance of domestic libertarians, balance-of-power realists and the anti-imperialist liberal left” disillusioned with the excesses of U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War era. As Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry observe, the “restraint-realists” have thereby secured “the resources to weigh in assertively and authoritatively on American foreign-policy choices” over the coming decades.3
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