By James R. Holmes
With America facing fiscal constraints, are lawmakers absentmindedly adopting offshore balancing?
Is America slouching toward offshore balancing? Maybe so, if columnist Lee Smith has it right. Writing over at Tablet, Smith claims that Harvard professor Stephen Walt is this generation’s George F. Kennan, a foreign-policy intellectual whose appraisal of the geopolitical landscape, and of the proper methods for managing it, captures the attention and allegiance of top policymakers.
Smith refers mainly to Walt’s commentary on Israel. To oversimplify, Walt maintains that the “Israel lobby” wields outsized influence in Washington. Such influence, quoth he, deforms U.S. foreign policy in favor of a small, beleaguered ally that contributes little to the alliance while ensnaring the United States in disputes remote from its interests. To make decisions that truly suit the national interest, then, officialdom should afford Israel no more deference than any other small Middle Eastern country.
But this is about more than Israel. Walt extrapolates his logic to all American allies under his doctrine of “offshore balancing.” Taken to extremes, international relations’ “realism” is all about big powers. Small fry mainly just get in the way. Though he doesn’t couch it in such Clausewitzian terms, Walt proclaims in effect that the United States attaches too much value to its overseas alliances. By exaggerating the value of alliances, it takes on efforts of magnitude and duration far disproportionate to its interests. In other words, it invests too heavily, and for too long, in arrangements that provide dubious returns.
Read the full story at The Diplomat