Balance of Power — Meaning and Assumptions

Working definition A system ensuring that no single state becomes strong enough to dominate the others. It is operational in multipolarity.

• Traceable to the War of Spanish Succession and the Congress of Vienna (1815) → the Concert of Europe gave Europe roughly a hundred years of peace — the “golden age” of the balance of power.
• Assumptions → no international authority; anarchy; states are rational and pursue national interest; the security dilemma; states are power maximisers ready to wage war; none permits another’s preponderance.
• Classical realists (Morgenthau) → the balance of power is a deliberate policy choice.
• Neorealists (Kenneth Waltz) → it arises automatically from the anarchic structure.

“Balance-of-power politics prevail wherever two, and only two, requirements are met: that the order be anarchic and that it be populated by units wishing to survive.”

Kenneth Waltz

Types of Balancing, and the Techniques

• Internal balancing → building one’s own military and economic capacity. External balancing → forming alliances; also asymmetrical and soft balancing.
• When threatened, a state may balance (ally against the threat) or bandwagon (align with it); other tactics → buck-passing, chain-ganging.
• Techniques → alliances and counter-alliances (NATO, the Warsaw Pact); arms race and disarmament; compensation (territorial annexation or division); partition (Germany after 1945); demilitarisation; reparations (Versailles); the creation of buffer states.
• Indian strategic tradition → Kautilya’s Shadgunya Niti as an indigenous balancing doctrine.

The Problem of Definition, and the Modifications

• Martin Wight → the notion is “notoriously full of confusion.”
• Inis Claude → the trouble “is not that it has no meaning, but that it has too many meanings.”
• Morgenthau gave four meanings → a policy; an actual state of affairs; equal distribution; any distribution. Ernst Haas gave eight → from equilibrium, to power politics, to a universal law of history, to a guide for policy-makers.
• Sidney B. Fay → a “just equilibrium… as will prevent any one of them from becoming sufficiently strong to enforce its will upon others.” David Hume → the balance of power is “common sense.”
• Sources of the confusion → power is hard to measure, interpretations differ, and relations between states are unpredictable.

Relative and Absolute Gains

• John Mearsheimer → states think in relative gains — military advantage over others matters more than absolute capability.
• Joseph Grieco → survival requires a “proportionate advantage,” so even allies may not cooperate.
• Robert Keohane (neoliberal institutionalism) → cooperation presumes the pursuit of absolute gains.
• The pay-off → a preference for relative gains makes balancing more likely; a preference for absolute gains favours deep institutions and security communities (Duncan Snidal, Robert Axelrod on the dynamic interaction).

Criticism, Appraisal and Contemporary Relevance

• Liberals → it legitimises and entrenches rivalry, breeding instability; Woodrow Wilson wished the “great game” of balance of power “forever discredited.”
• Constructivists (Alexander Wendt) → it overlooks norms and values. Feminists → it encodes a gendered conception of power.
• It may produce the stability-instability paradox — deterrence prevents high-intensity war but encourages proxy and low-intensity conflict. And it stops operating in unipolarity: after 1991 no counter-coalition formed against the USA.
• As a basis for peace it is inadequate → it failed to prevent two world wars; war itself becomes a means of conflict resolution within the system, producing “unnecessary war and the unnecessary extension of war.”
• Not relevant, say the critics → globalisation and interdependence, global-governance institutions, non-state actors and transnational threats (terrorism, pandemics, climate) all defy power balancing.
• Yet realists hold it durable → Waltz: unipolarity is the least durable structure because dominant powers overstretch and weaker states fear them. Mearsheimer → the Cold War “long peace” rested on bipolarity, rough US–Soviet equality and nuclear weapons.
• Present scenario → US–China rivalry; NATO expansion and the Russia–Ukraine war; the Quad and Indo-Pacific alignments; the EU’s collective bargaining; small states pursuing nuclear weapons (North Korea); technology empowering small and non-state actors.

“As nature abhors a vacuum, so international politics abhors unbalanced power.”

Kenneth Waltz

Deterrence — Meaning, Basis, MAD

• A psychological and relational concept resting on the rationality of actors → an adversary is dissuaded by the credible threat of unacceptable cost.
• Bernard Brodie → a credible nuclear deterrent “must be always at the ready, yet never used.”
• Thomas Schelling → strategy is now the art of coercion and intimidation, not the science of military victory; the power to hurt is bargaining power, most effective when held in reserve.
• Developed by game-theory and strategic thinkers → Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, John Mearsheimer, Thomas Schelling. Evolution → from conventional to nuclear deterrence, offered as an alternative to the balance of power.

Mutually Assured Destruction

• Nuclear-armed adversaries avoid war for fear of catastrophic, mutual destruction → the emphasis falls on second-strike capability; some advocate a first strike (NUTS — Nuclear Utilization Target Selection).
• It drove arms races; the USA adopted “flexible response” under Kennedy. Tactical nuclear weapons (Pakistan and India — HATF, Prahar); extended deterrence for Japan and South Korea.
• Stability-instability paradox (Schelling) → nuclear weapons confer large-scale stability between nuclear states but push competition into smaller-scale instability — proxy wars and minor conflicts.

Advantages, Limitations and the Proliferation Debate

A second strike usually needs a nuclear triad (USA, Russia, China, India); the UK and France hold only sea- and air-based weapons.

More may be better — or worse

• Kenneth Waltz → “more may be better”; MAD makes nuclear war irrational and states become “exceedingly cautious.” John Mearsheimer agrees → nuclear weapons are “a superb deterrent.”
• Scott Sagan → organisational pessimism — weapons are controlled by organisations with parochial biases, not by rational statesmen.

“Nuclear weapons do not produce perfect nuclear organisations; they only make their inevitable mistakes more deadly.”

Scott Sagan

• National prestige theory → some authoritarian regimes seek weapons for status and regime survival.
• Frank Zagare → deterrence theory is logically inconsistent and empirically inaccurate; rational-choice scholars propose perfect deterrence, varying states by the credibility of their threats.
• In 2007, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn reversed their position → in a world of many new, poorly safeguarded nuclear states and the risk of nuclear terrorism, the weapons had become a source of extreme risk.
• India–Pakistan → India’s credible minimum deterrence and No First Use against Pakistan’s tactical weapons compensating for conventional asymmetry. It has prevented full-scale war since 1998; restraint held in the 2019 Pulwama–Balakot crisis. But it does not stop sub-conventional conflict — Pakistan’s use of non-state actors below the nuclear threshold complicates India’s calculus. Manoj Joshi → strategic-level stability still requires strong conventional capability and diplomacy.
• Contemporary challenges → resurgent Cold War dynamics (US–China), diminished inter-state trust, the risk of inadvertent escalation, rogue states (North Korea), and the failure of deterrence against actors who do not follow state-based calculations.