Shifting Strategy: Offshore Balancing as the Way to American Security

Jared Bulla IAFF 1005(33): Intro to International Affairs April 7, 2017

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During the transition to the new administration, there has been increasing debate about what America’s in the World should be. President Trump has often advocated in favor of positions that would be a radical shift in American in the last seventy years. His comments spark conversation about what America’s role in the larger world community should be. Should we continue to lean into our role as global hegemon and defender of the world order, or should we take a more restrained positon thorough offshore balancing? As many new actors have entered the World Stage since the end of the Cold War, skepticism has grown over how effective the current strategy of American hegemony in the global order really is. Offshore balancing is built on the idea that the United States should take less of a hegemonic role and re-evaluate its position in global affairs. Proponents argue that the country should focus on maintaining order and stability in three regions that are vital to American interests: ,

Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf. To achieve this stability, the United States should work through regional allies to maintain security instead of providing for the security itself. I will address both sides of this argument utilizing relevant and current scholarship before I recommend policy actions that the new administration should take to put America on the Grand

Strategy path of offshore balancing that will allow the nation to remain a secure and prosperous superpower for generations to come.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States remained the only power with the ability to project significant force around the globe in almost any region. The economic system and ideology of the United States had prevailed as the new global order. After the incursion into

Kuwait, the United States “was the ‘indispensable nation,’ as Bill Clinton would proclaim— Bulla 2 indispensable, that is, to the preservation of a liberal world order.”1 This military intervention saw swift victory for the United States and its allies, which led to an inflated sense of ability in easily upholding the international order that the US now defended. From that time on the United States has intervened to promote and defend the American hegemonic order in all corners of the globe.

This intervention evokes an image of the United States as an Atlas holding up the liberal order of the world alone.2 During the 1990s there was no nation with the power or economy to challenge the United States in any region. Consequently, the policy of hegemony and intervention was effective in dealing with threats to the international system. But this short time period, dubbed the unipolar moment, has come to pass in the 21st Century as a growing China and a resurgent Russia have increased their ability to project power globally, while the United States has been bogged down diplomatically and militarily in a string of international missteps. Having this historical context in mind, I will now turn to why the United States should take an offshore balancing approach to accommodate this new and still evolving international environment.

Offshore Balancing: Readjusting America’s Global Role

The United States has been extremely blessed by geography in terms of security and political interactions with the rest of the world. Our secure location between two oceans, a desert, and an arctic forest means that any invasion with conventional forces would be destined to collapse from the logistical nightmare of supplying armies across any of these approaches.3 This security affords the US the opportunity to maintain a relatively small military to defend the heartland of the nation, which is the area of highest national interest. While this is not the only area of national

1 Robert Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” May 26, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/117859/superpowers-dont-get-retire. 2 Ibid. 3 Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: 10 Maps that Explain Everything About the World (New York: Scribner, 2015), 66. Bulla 3 interest to offshore balancers, we need to recognize that this is the core security interest for the country. Alternatively, the current grand strategy is built “on the assumption that every nook and cranny of the globe is of great strategic significance and that there are threats to U.S. interests everywhere.”4 This approach may offer a sense of pride in considering America as the pre-eminent authority on all international political matters, but in reality this is not a responsible conclusion to the question of where America’s vital interests lie.

Offshore balancing is politically responsible because it rests on the fact that America has three regions of national interest outside of the Western Hemisphere: Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf. The US should focus on politically engaging and empowering its allies to maintain balance in these regions by checking rising powers, only stepping in if allies cannot achieve this balance.5 This allows US allies the ability to act as regional leaders under the watchful eye of the United States. In addition, the United States would be viewed as less intrusive in potential rivals’ political interests, which reduces the perceived security threat of the US in the eyes of these rivals. Just as in physics, every action creates an equal but opposite reaction, “left unbalanced, hegemonic power threatens the security of the other major states in the international system.”6 There is greater likelihood for stability when states feel secure, and if the US adopts a more reserved strategy, it could halt the trend of being viewed as a threat to regional rising powers, in turn making them feel more secure. Offshore balancing would reassure these powers of our friendly intentions, while giving our allies the opportunity to lead in their neighborhoods as defenders of the international order in their own right.

4 John J. Mearsheimer, “America Unhinged,” The National Interest 129 (2014): 9. 5 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 95 (2016): 71. 6 Christopher Layne, “Offshore Balancing Revisited,” The Washington Quarterly 25 (2002): 248. Bulla 4

The liberal hegemonic order is also not a cheap affair, costing the US many billions of dollars in defense spending. Since 2001, the US has spent $4-6 trillion on several conflicts that it has gotten itself into contributing heavily to the US national debt.7 These economic costs are also opportunity costs that could have been spent elsewhere in the United States improving our domestic situation. If the US had achieved strategic goals or secured some kind of victory in these recent wars, the costs could be partially overlooked. But “if you look at America’s performance over the past twelve years in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria, it is batting

0 for 5.”8 Effectively throwing away trillions of dollars attempting to uphold some strategy that is built on an outdated worldview in the midst of recession and increasing domestic costs is inexcusable. Looking at the Middle East today, where much of this money has been spent, you would conclude that it is more unstable than it was before the US got involved. State and non- governmental actors have clashed in the wake of regime collapses from Iraq to Libya.

The average American is capable of seeing these costs, as “an April 2016 Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans agree that the United States should ‘deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs the best they can.’”9 This is a clear mandate to roll back our involvement in foreign conflicts and to focus on the domestic issues we swept aside in order to pay for our military incursions. Additional costs are the human lives that have been lost in combat and post combat related incidents, including “that the suicide rate in the U.S. military increased by 80 percent from 2002 to 2009.”10 The government is failing to help combat veterans with issues such as physical and mental healthcare upon their return, while it instead continues to spend more on defense. An offshore strategy would eliminate the need for increased defense

7 Mearsheimer, “Unhinged,” 23. 8 Ibid., 22. 9 Mearsheimer and Walt, “Case for Offshore Balancing,” 70. 10 Mearsheimer, “Unhinged,” 24. Bulla 5 spending because America would be taking a less intrusive role in global conflict. Spending less on defense would also encourage our allies to boost their own defense spending instead of blindly free riding off of US spending. They would realize that they have to step up to the plate in defending the economic order, instead of completely outsourcing that role to the United States.

In turn, our allies would be more effective at helping deter any local aggression by flexing their own military muscle.

American soft power in international affairs has been one of its strongest assets in the past, and the present time is no different. The draw of democracy, classical liberalism, and liberty remains a major asset in helping fight authoritarian regimes abroad. America has wasted many of the benefits of this asset by overexerting its military presence. Unsurprisingly, many

“foreign peoples react with hostility to outsiders trying to control their lives.”11 This kind of involvement relies far too heavily on military power when the power of ideas would be far less expensive and also give people the same sense of self determination that Americans demanded in the Revolutionary War. Particularly in the Middle East, “the self-perception among both elites and the general public that the region has long been a victim of ‘Western imperialism’ is widespread.”12 Offshore balancing has the potential to reverse the perception of the United States as the newest perpetrator of this foreign intervention precisely because it falls back on America’s vast soft power potential rather than the kind of constant military involvement that has been the norm since the end of the Cold War.

In this same vein of soft power is how American Grand Strategy is intertwined with the threat of terrorism in the modern world. Terrorist organizations are born in instability and fear of

11 Barry R. Posen, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013): 120. 12 Layne, “Revisited,” 240-241. Bulla 6 domination, which runs rampant in “the United States’ current grand strategy [because it] entails open-ended confrontation with nationalism and other forms of identity that insurgents and terrorists feed off of.”13 By prolonging conflict in regions like the Middle East, the United

States is feeding terrorist organizations the narrative that drives their recruitment numbers up.

These small groups in rural terrain are able to be so effective because “they know they are in a war for hearts and minds around the world, and they work hard at developing and disseminating a message that will place America in the worst possible light.”14 The current grand strategy paints a massive target on the US for terrorists via this twisted side effect of playing global hegemon. It is time that America’s leaders realize this threat to national security that they have created over the past quarter century. By implementing offshore balancing, the US can help diminish this side effect by leading with a good example and focusing on improving the situation at home rather than blindly rushing into every global conflict because it ‘threatens’ national security.15

Many scholars argue that the US would be wise to maintain its current strategy of domination for the sake and safety of people and economies around the world. I will now give a charitable argument for why this would be preferred to offshore balancing.

US Hegemony as the Arbiter of Global Peace and Prosperity

Those opposed to offshore balancing argue that the economic benefits are over exaggerated due to the commitments that the US would still maintain under offshore balancing.

The country would still require a military “capable of intervening decisively in regional conflicts,

13 Posen, “Pull Back,” 120. 14 Stephen M. Walt, “In the National Interest,” February 1, 2005, http://bostonreview.net/walt-national-interest. 15 Mearsheimer, “Case for Offshore Balancing,” 80. Bulla 7 and fighting its way back onshore if the balance breaks.”16 Since offshore balancers argue that the US must still be capable of intervening if necessary, Hal Brands believes that this would imply a capability to quickly and decisively deploy military assets. To do this the US would also have to maintain its current force sizes in order to sustain credible threats and deter enemy action. Any military reductions, even considerably large ones, would be small in comparison to the national deficit spending “because defense’s share of that budget is just 18 percent and falling, and because current and projected deficits are driven primarily by rising entitlement costs.”17 Utilizing bases around the world staffed by American deployments is a small price to pay to retain the ability to project power and presence all around the globe. Furthermore, the costs cited by offshore balancers are based in the past 15 years or so, which is merely an abnormality in terms of spending that “has already begun to fall back to earth as the United

States winds down its two costly wars and trims its base level of non-war spending.”18 Just as in any wartime nation, costs are going to go up, but they historically return to lower levels following conflict. The defenders of the global order agree that reductions could provide benefits to the American economy, but the benefits do not outweigh the costs of abandoning the top post

America enjoys.

Offshore balancers are incorrect when they point out that America’s allies will be able to hold their own against regional rising powers. Many assume that US allies are the wealthiest nations aside from the United States itself, but as recent US incursions have shown, “US allies have already become less capable of contributing meaningful” forces and resources to upholding

16 Hal Brands, “Fools Rush Out? The Flawed Logic of Offshore Balancing,” The Washington Quarterly 38 (2015): 14. 17 Ibid., 15, doi:10.1080/0163660X.2015.1064705. 18 Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement,” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013), 133. Bulla 8 the liberal world order.19 Their inability to perform only makes it more likely that the US will have to intervene under the offshore methodology of stepping in only when the regional balance of power is thrown off. In addition the United States “dampens competition in the world’s key areas, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse in which countries would grow new military capabilities” by always reassuring allies that they have no need for large military forces because the United States maintains this role for them.20 This strategy works directly against regional powers which seek to dominate regions of the world. By being able to respond promptly, the US is also utilizing the strategy of deterrence to its maximum potential.

Maintaining the present strategy is more stabilizing because of these reassurances. Without them,

“long-dormant security competitions might reawaken as countries armed themselves more vigorously” and states might even pursue nuclear weapons, which would spark arms races with both conventional and nuclear forces.21 These arms races and heightened sense of competition between regional neighbors would only increase the chance of conflict, and threaten to unravel the economic progress created under US protection since the early 1990s.

The threat of terrorism in the United States and abroad would also not be decreased should the US adopt an offshore balancing strategy. Offshore balancers take a far too narrow approach in their analysis of terrorism and its causes because “while stationing U.S. troops in

Muslim countries has historically been one cause of anti-American terrorism, it has never been the only one.”22 Once again, it appears that the benefits of offshore balancing have been over exaggerated. Not only is the argument over exaggerated, but it is completely false because “the

19 Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, “Stress-Testing American Grand Strategy,” Survival 58 (2016): 101, doi: 10.1080/00396338.2016.1257199. 20 Brooks, “Lean Forward,” 139. 21 Brands, “Fools Rush,” 20. 22 Ibid., 16. Bulla 9

United States cannot cure the pathologies that cause terrorism and so will never eliminate the threat.”23 Terrorism is in reality the result of changing conditions which exist in the world due to dissatisfaction with the status quo in some way or another. Precisely because of this constantly changing, multidimensional threat, the current strategy is the best way to help deal with the terror threat because of the ability to act quickly and from almost anywhere in the world.

Recommendations for the New Administration

First and foremost, the Trump Administration would do a lot of good for the security of

US interests by reassuring our allies in Europe and Northeast Asia of the United States’ unwavering commitment to their security against anyone who would threaten their sovereignty.

With that being said, we should remove all ground forces from those two regions with the exception of the forces stationed along the volatile DMZ. This drawback could be utilized as a show of good faith to potential rivals in exchange for drawing these nations closer to the United

States through economic and soft power means such as increased aid or more favorable trade agreements. In order to stem concerns that current allies might have surrounding these moves, the US should increase weapons technology and arms sales to help our allies bolster their own forces to become effective regional deterrents.

The United States should also decrease defense spending in an effort to help realign budgetary priorities. I would propose cutting ground forces by half, while cutting air and naval forces by around a third. By forcing the Pentagon to be more fiscally responsible and more efficient with a smaller budget, the nation can refocus to maintain security in the areas that are truly of national interest. This will bring to an end the liberal hegemonic notion that it is the duty

23 Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, “Trump and Terrorism: U.S. Strategy After ISIS,” Foreign Affairs 96 (2017): 33-34. Bulla 10 of the US to defend the world order everywhere. While this alone is obviously not going to solve

American budgetary woes, it is a step in the right direction that is more aligned with our interests.

President Trump has also expressed concern that our many allies have not been paying their fair share. By cutting our own defense spending and retracting our forces from their land, they will feel a need to increase their own security by increasing their military spending. This is a more practical, realist way to address the issue of free riding than the President’s current plan to increase defense spending. By refocusing our resources in our country, we will also improve our national standing at home, which would add to the soft power which the US projects around the world. We should also increase our economic relationships in these regions with our allies and our potential rivals in order to show our willingness to cooperate in the international system.

The Persian Gulf/Middle East region represents a much larger challenge for the merits of offshore balancing. Since there are currently thousands of US troops directly involved in conflict in the region at this time, the drawback of forces will inevitably be much slower. Even though this progress will be slower, the United States should still commit itself to removing all ground forces and military assets with the exception of two or three bases which are the most strategically important. As I am not a military strategist, I am not in a place to decide exactly which bases to maintain, but the naval base in Bahrain and the air base in Qatar come to mind.

The US needs to accept that it may not be the hegemon in a region that is thousands of miles from its shore. It would be much better served by ensuring a balance of powers in this region.

Diplomatically, the United States should reconsider its strategic alliances and defensive pacts in the region. “The United States must be resolute in its commitment to the security and survival of the state of Israel,” but should not allow unlawful actions by the Israeli government in Bulla 11

Palestinian territory to become an acceptable norm.24 This would be a good show of support for the possibility of finding a two state solution, which for now is the best we can hope for. On the other hand, America should consider ending the alliances with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.

While these states are key regional players and are important in maintaining balance, the US currently receives little to show for its support of these often repressive regimes. By maintaining security contracts with these countries, the United States is interfering in the balance of power in the region. Additionally, the US should restrict arms sales to the entire region through the UN as a way to help dampen the many conflicts that have erupted violently. By distancing itself from the conflicts, the US will be better suited to utilize economic and aid incentives to bring opposing sides to the discussion table.

By adopting these policies, the Trump Administration would be implementing a more restrained grand strategy that puts America first. The US needs to take a hard look at what our long term goals and strategic interests truly are, because in a world where other nations are growing more powerful, the US needs to realize that it needs to help incorporate these powers into the world order by making them stable and secure. Offshore Balancing achieves this while also improving America’s soft power through refocusing our efforts to shore up increasingly worsening domestic issues. Building a stronger country internally is what allowed America to obtain such an impressive global presence, and it is what will allow the country to maintain this standing in the future. In the quickly changing world, the United States needs to recalibrate its grand strategy to ensure a prosperous future for all Americans and a more stable world.

24 Bruce W. Jentleson, “Strategic Recalibration: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 37 (2014): 130, doi: 10.1080/0163660X.2014.893178. Bulla 12

Bibliography

Brands, Hal, and Feaver, Peter. “Stress-Testing American Grand Strategy.” Survival 58 (2016): 93-120. doi:10.1080/00396338.2016.1257199.

Brands, Hal, and Feaver, Peter. “Trump and Terrorism: U.S. Strategy After ISIS.” Foreign Affairs 96 (2017): 28-36.

Brands, Hal. “Fools Rush Out? The Flawed Logic of Offshore Balancing.” The Washington Quarterly 38 (2015): 7-28. doi:10.1080/0163660X.2015.1064705.

Brooks, Stephen G., Ikenberry, G. John, and Wohlforth, William C. “Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement.” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013): 130-142.

Jentleson, Bruce W. “Strategic Recalibration: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy.” The Washington Quarterly 37 (2014): 115-136. doi:10.1080/0163660X.2014.893178.

Kagan, Robert. “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.” May 26, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/117859/superpowers-dont-get-retire.

Layne, Christopher. “Offshore Balancing Revisited.” The Washington Quarterly 25 (2002): 233- 248.

Marshall, Tim. Prisoners of Geography: 10 Maps that Explain Everything About the World. New York: Scribner, 2015.

Mearsheimer, John J. “America Unhinged.” The National Interest 129 (2014): 9-30.

Mearsheimer, John J., and Walt, Stephen M. “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy.” Foreign Affairs 95 (2016): 70-83.

Posen, Barry R. “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 92 (2013): 116-128.

Walt, Stephen M. “In the National Interest.” February 1, 2005. http://bostonreview.net/walt- national-interest.