Perhaps someday, American power

will have eroded to the point where

the United States has no choice but
to accept those risks and retrench as
fundamentally as Mearsheimer and
Walt suggest. But until then, U.S.
officials should resist the siren song
of offshore balancing. Assistant Editor
HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distin-
guished Professor of Global Aairs at Johns Foreign Affairs is looking for
Hopkins Universitys School of Advanced
International Studies.
Assistant Editors to join our
editorial team.
PETER FEAVER is Professor of Political
Science and Public Policy at Duke University.
The Assistant Editor position
is a full-time paid job offering
exceptional training in serious
Mearsheimer and Walt Reply journalism. Previous Assistant

I
Editors have included recent
n The Case for Offshore Balancing,
graduates from undergraduate and
we argue that if a potential hegemon
masters programs. Candidates
emerges in Europe, Northeast Asia,
should have a serious interest in
or the Persian Gulf, Washington should
international relations, a flair for
commit resources to preserve a favorable
writing, and a facility with the
balance of power and, if necessary, fight
English language.
to defend it. If no potential hegemon is
present, however, the United States should
Assistant Editors work for one year,
remain offshore and let regional powers
starting in July or August.
uphold the balance.
Hal Brands and Peter Feaver reject
For more information about how
this recommendation and contend that
to apply for the 201718 Assistant
the United States should continue its
Editor position, please visit:
failed pursuit of its existing grand strat-
egy, liberal hegemony. But they repeat-
edly misrepresent our argument and www.foreignaffairs.com/Apply
offer a dubious account of the relevant
historyunwittingly underscoring the Applications will be due
superiority of offshore balancing. February 6, 2017.
Brands and Feaver begin by claiming
that we want the United States to remain
offshore in Europe, Asia, and the Gulf,
intervening in those regions only after
war has broken out and a hegemon is
about to win. This assertion allows them
to accuse us of wanting to roll back

169
Mearsheimer and Walt and Their Critics
current U.S. alliances in all three areas and
to suggest that had U.S. policymakers
adopted our approach in the late 1940s,
there would have been no nato, no
strategy of containment, and no Cold
War victory.
This predictable attempt to make us
sound like isolationists is wrong. In our
article, we make it clear that the United
States should deploy forces onshore before
war breaks out if the regional powers
cannot check a rising hegemon, and we
describe the United States Cold War
alliances as a clear-cut example of this
policy. Moreover, we recommend the
continued deployment of U.S. forces
in Asia to counter any future Chinese
attempt to dominate that region. Con-
trary to what Brands and Feaver say,
Washingtons alliances and force pos-
tures during the Cold War and in Asia
today are wholly consistent with off-
shore balancing.
In effect, Brands and Feaver portray
U.S. policy in much of the first half of
the twentieth century as textbook offshore
balancing but claim that Cold War
containment represented the reverse
of that policy. Not so: the United States
followed the core logic of offshore balanc-
ing from 1900 to 1990 and embraced
liberal hegemony only after the Soviet
Union collapsed.
Under offshore balancing, the United
States exploits its favorable location and
calibrates its overseas commitments
according to what is happening in key
regions. Under liberal hegemony, by
contrast, those factors hardly matter.
The United States is supposed to deploy
forces around the globe under any and
all circumstances, whether it faces a single
peer competitor, a complex multipolar
world of contending great powers, or no
170 f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
serious enemies at all. No matter what
the world looks like, the recommendation
is always the same: the United States
should try to run it. But as the past 25
years have shown again and again, this
approach leads to costly quagmires and
repeated foreign policy failures.
Indeed, it is telling that Brands and
Feaver never say what U.S. interests are
or attempt to specify priorities among
them. Instead, they justify the deploy-
ment of U.S. forces almost everywhere by
assuming that doing so guarantees peace.
Again, Brands and Feaver are mistaken.
They suggest that the United States could
have prevented World War II had it
committed troops to Europe before the
conflict started. But Europe was a sim-
mering cauldron of great-power rivalry in
the interwar period, and in all likelihood,
even an enormous U.S. military presence
there would not have calmed the conti-
nent. Its hard to believe that U.S. troops
would have proved sufficient to deter
Hitler or put an end to the suspicions
between Berlin and Moscow. Moreover,
committing a large army to Europe would
have ensured that the United States was
involved in the bloodbath of World War
II from the beginning. From an American
perspective, it was better to enter that
conflict as late as possible and let others
bear the brunt of the fighting.
Events since 1945 provide abundant
evidence that a large U.S. military pres-
ence does not always ensure peace. Such
a presence in East Asia failed to keep the
United States out of two bloody wars
there during the Cold War (Korea and
Vietnam), and despite the tens of thou-
sands of troops in the region today, few
would deny that there is a serious possibil-
ity of military clashes between China and
the United States over the East China and

South China Seas, Taiwan, or the Korean
Peninsula. Nor did a major U.S. military
presence in Europe prevent the Balkan
wars in the 1990s or the current war in
Ukraine, which could escalate into a
broader conflict involving the United
States. And in the Middle East, repeated
U.S. military engagement since the end
of the Cold War has not kept the region
from becoming engulfed in warsand
in fact caused many of those wars.
This is no accident, because pursuing
liberal hegemony, as Brands and Feaver
advocate, not only fails to guarantee
peace around the world; it also leads to
foolish wars. The belief that the United
States should be committed all over the
world produced the Vietnam War, a clear
departure from offshore balancing. That
same thinking lay behind the disastrous
2003 invasion of Iraqwhich Feaver
supported and we opposedas well as
the failed U.S. interventions in Afghani-
stan and Libya. The United States has
also interfered in Somalia, Sudan, Syria,
and Yemen, among other places, with
little to show for it. Brands and Feaver
trivialize these costly failures as a few
undeniable setbacks, but they were in
fact an inevitable consequence of the
misguided attempt to garrison the world
and spread democracy by force.
Brands and Feaver also reject off-
shore balancing by saying that although
the right moment for intervening can
sometimes be seen in hindsight, identify-
ing it in real time, amid enormous
uncertainty, is far harder. But deciding
whether and when to intervene is much
easier under our strategy, since offshore
balancers, unlike liberal hegemonists
such as Brands and Feaver, provide clear
criteria to inform that decision. But if
the United States has vital interests
Should America Retrench?
everywhere and U.S. intervention
guarantees peace, as they maintain, then
it should have intervened to prevent
every Arab-Israeli war, all three Indo-
Pakistani wars, the Iran-Iraq War, the
First and Second Congo Wars, and so on.
By their logic, Washington should keep
expanding its overseas military presence
until the entire world is at peace.
Lastly, Brands and Feaver write that
offshore balancing makes the United
States more dependent on morally
bankrupt regimes, insisting further that
Americans expect their allies to abide
by minimum humanitarian standards.
History shows otherwise. The United
States allied with Joseph Stalin in World
War II and tacitly with Mao Zedong in
the 1970sboth of whom murdered
millions of their own citizens. Washing-
ton has also propped up numerous Latin
American dictators, today backs a military
regime in Egypt and a harsh theocracy
in Saudi Arabia, and continues to turn a
blind eye to, if not support, Israels brutal
treatment of the Palestinians.
International politics is a dangerous
business, and moral tradeoffs are some-
times necessary. By committing U.S.
power more selectively, however, offshore
balancing requires such compromises only
when the United States faces imminent
threats to its vital interests. By encourag-
ing the U.S. military to get involved
everywhere, Brands and Feavers approach
often forces Washington to rely on
dubious allies in far-flung regions. Once
committed to defending them, of course,
it has little leverage over their behavior.
Given liberal hegemonys many flaws,
it is no wonder U.S. foreign policy has
failed so often in recent years. One
does wonder, however, why Brands
and Feaver continue to defend it.
November/December 2016 171
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