|
Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the absence of balancing against the United States has led to further studies on the traditional theory of the balance of power and the balancing behavior itself. With respect to the interpretations on the absence of balancing, there have been various arguments related with power gap, threat balancing, regime, freedom and security community, norm and identity, dilemma of collective action and domestic factors of potential balancer. Based on these arguments, this paper attempts to reinterpret them from aspects of balancing behavior itself—conditions of balancing, origin of balancing, obstacles to balancing, and American counter balancing strategies. For conditions of balancing, we focus on the degree of power imbalance in traditional theory on the balance of power. With regard to origins of balancing, we argue that the object of balancing is not against the power itself, but the threat it might impose. In the discussion of obstacles to balancing, we argue that the study on the dilemma of collective action has revealed limits of the rational assumption about the balancer and that the study on domestic factors reveals limits of the unitary assumption on balancer. Discussion on counter balancing strategies concentrates on how the United States has taken advantage of a for mention mechanisms that give rise to the absence of balancing to evade being balanced.
|
|
|
|
|
|
