Perspectives on the Pivot

To the Editors (Nicholas D. Anderson writes):

In “The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia,” Nina Silove provides an illuminating history of U.S. policy in Asia since 2001.¹ She argues that, with the goal of preserving the balance of power in the Asia Pacific, the George W. Bush administration undertook a substantial “reorientation strategy” in the early 2000s, combining internal balancing, external balancing, and expanded engagement. Three problems, however, weaken Silove’s argument that the Bush administration engaged in internal and external balancing in Asia.

First, Silove fails to provide a clear and coherent definition of balancing, both internal and external. To be fair, Silove does provide a few cursory definitions. She defines balancing as a strategy in which a state “aims to match the rate of growth of the rising power to maintain the power balance.” She then defines internal balancing as efforts to “increas[e] the power of the hegemonic state,” and external balancing as steps to “increas[e] the power of the alliance led by the hegemon” (p. 66). Silove’s definitions lack specificity, however, including a cataloguing of the sort of behaviors one would expect to observe if balancing were taking place.² Without this necessary specificity, Silove can use a variety of different behaviors, which may or may not constitute balancing, to bolster her claims.

Second, because Silove does not provide a clear definition of balancing, a great deal of the evidence that she uses to argue that the Bush administration pursued a policy of balancing in the Asia Pacific is unconvincing. There are two issues here. First, much of the evidence Silove draws upon begins in 2004, the year she claims that the United States implemented its “pivot before the pivot” (pp. 67–73). But because she does not describe what the United States was doing in Asia before 2004, it is difficult to evaluate whether this strategic “reorientation” represented a substantive change from what preceded it. Second, some of Silove’s indicators of balancing do not well reflect traditional understandings of this behavior. For instance, in discussing U.S. troop withdrawals from the region, Silove notes that “U.S. officials believed that South Korea and Japan had the capacity to assume more responsibility for their own defenses and for regional security” (p. 75). This sounds more like burden-shifting—even buck-passing—than balancing. She also points out that the United States took measures to encourage its regional allies and partners “to forge new formal security relationships with one another” (p. 78). Again, encouraging allies and partners to work together to do more to contribute to regional security does not sound like external balancing as it is traditionally understood. Although some of her evidence certainly could constitute balancing behavior, what is necessary to properly evaluate her claims is a broader temporal context and a clearer, more systematic definition of balancing.

Figure 1.

U.S. Military Personnel in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East, 1990–2015

SOURCES: The Asia Pacific here includes Alaska and Hawaii. Tim Kane, “Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950–2005,” Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis Report, 06-02 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 2006), http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/05/global-us-troop-deployment-1950-2005; and Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center, “DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports & Publications” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 2016), https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/dwp_reports.jsp.

Third, an alternative set of indicators suggests that the United States did not initiate the material commitments to the region that calling a policy “balancing” should reasonably require. In terms of internal balancing, the United States did boost its defense expenditure, annually averaging $451.6 billion from 1990 to 2000, then rising to $587.9 billion from 2001 to 2009.³ There are also sharp increases in the key years of interest, with increases of 12, 13, and 9 percent from 2002 to 2004. Although it is difficult to know precisely where these increases took place, it seems...