John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs making the case for offshore balancing. In many respects, it is a familiar argument. Both men have been full-throated advocates for offshore balancing for years, and they make a very strong case. Walt previewed the argument at last month’s Advancing American Security conference, which drew a large crowd.

Indeed, the case for offshore balancing is not new, but the foreign policy elite remains as committed as ever to fixing the world’s problems. That requires an active foreign policy and frequent military interventions. The public harbors deep doubts about such an ambitious grand strategy, with 57 percent of Americans in a recent Pew poll agreeing with the idea that the United States should “deal with its own problems and let others deal with theirs the best they can.” At a recent dinner meeting that I attended, a number of the elites lamented the public’s reluctance to get involved in distant disputes, with one complaining that Iraq seemed to cast too long a shadow. “Can’t we just get over it?” he seemed to be saying. Another placed the blame squarely on Barack Obama who had, she said, failed to make the case for global leadership.

It took the only elected official in the room to bring the discussion back down to earth. This rising star explained that there were only two cases in recent memory that he would characterize as “supermarket moments”, when his constituents were so exercised about an issue that they came up to him in the supermarket to make their opinions known: the debate over Obamacare, and Obama’s proposal to intervene in the Syrian civil war in August 2013. In the latter instance, the message was crystal clear—the United States should stay out. (This anecdotal evidence is corroborated by similar stories and polling data at the time.)

I consider myself an offshore balancer of sorts, though Mearsheimer and Walt might disagree. Without getting too cute about it, our differences revolve around how much balancing is necessary, and how far offshore one can be in order to satisfy offshore balancing requirements. For example, does over-the-horizon count as offshore? I think so. And does the international system resemble a game of Jenga, when even the slightest false move threatens to topple the whole edifice? Or is it generally stable and resilient, able to withstand the occasional small skirmishes and disruptions?

Mearsheimer and Walt imply the latter, and fix on a narrow conception of when active balancing is required. Under offshore balancing, they explain in the Foreign Affairs article, “Washington would forgo ambitious efforts to remake other societies and concentrate on what really matters: preserving U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and countering potential hegemons in Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.” The need for balancing, therefore, depends upon the behavior of a few potential rising regional powers, and the other countries in the region who should take the lead in checking them. If such a challenger seems poised to upset the regional order, and if others are unable to prevent it, then the United States could come in to tip the scales back to the status quo ante.

The implication in their article is that such instances are rare. “The aim,” they continue, “is to remain offshore as long as possible, while recognizing that it is sometimes necessary to come onshore.” This is not rare enough for my tastes. There are very few instances in which it is necessary for the United States to behave this way to restore regional balances. The exceptions to the rule of nonintervention are worthy of serious discussion.

The United States—“the luckiest great power in modern history”—is in a particularly strong position to act as an offshore balancer, considering the advantages afforded by geography and the world’s largest economy and the American public seems inclined to stay out of distant disputes. Why, then, haven’t we adopted an offshore balancing approach? At Cato’s “The Case for Restraint” conference earlier this month, William Ruger pointed to the “bootleggers and Baptists” explanation. For those unfamiliar with Bruce Yandle’s iconic article and recent book, two quite distinct interest groups were needed to sell and sustain prohibition during the 1920s. True believers made the case of moral grounds: demon rum and family breakdown. Bootleggers, those who benefited materially from the prohibition on alcohol sales, were anxious to preserve their ill-gotten gains. Legalizing alcohol sales would open the door to new competitors, cutting into the former law-breakers’ profits. The bootleggers and the Baptists, therefore, served as perfect (though uncomfortable and generally unacknowledged) allies.

A similar dynamic exists today. Some scholars make the case for primacy (also known as liberal hegemony or deep engagement), because they believe it is the best approach for maintaining relative global peace and stability. The individuals and firms, mostly inside the Beltway, who benefit from providing goods and services to the vast military required to execute such an ambitious grand strategy, join them. Indeed, primacy’s goals are so grandiose as to justify a nearly unlimited amount of military spending.

The key to breaking the foreign policy consensus, or at least prying it open enough to allow for consideration of competing grand strategies, might be a similar alliance between true-believer scholars such as Mearsheimer and Walt, and the taxpayer advocates and other interest groups who would like to see the nation allocate its resources differently (either in the form of less government spending and lower taxes, or different government spending).

Such temporary alliances of the willing have coalesced before, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the unsettled political environment—in which an experienced liberal interventionist faces off against a mercurial amateur who has occasionally questioned the wisdom of the nation’s foreign policy—creates new unlikely bedfellows breathing life into a much-needed strategic debate.

 

Christopher A. Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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