Offshore balancing fails – signals weakness and uncertainty
Robert Kaplan, Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics @ the Foreign Policy Research Institute, 30-years reporting on foreign policy @ the Atlantic, member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy's Executive Panel, "The Downside of Imperial Collapse", Foreign Affairs, 10-4-2022. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/downside-imperial-collapse. Accessed 6-27-2023 by NT-JJ
A more restrained U.S. foreign policy might be the recipe for the long-term survival of American power. “Offshore balancing” would at first glance serve as Washington’s guiding strategy: “Instead of policing the world, the United States would encourage other countries to take the lead in checking rising powers, intervening itself only when necessary,” as the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt put it in Foreign Affairs in 2016. The problem with that approach, however, is that the world is so fluid and interconnected, with crises in one part of the globe migrating to other parts, that restraint may simply not be practical. Offshore balancing might be simply too restrictive and mechanical. Isolationism thrived in an age when ships were the only way to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and took days to do so. Presently, an avowed policy of restraint might only telegraph weakness and uncertainty.