Offshore Balancing:New Exploration On U.S. Grand Strategy After The Cold War

After the Cold War, the fundamental goal of U.S. Grand Strategy is to pursue the primacy or leadership in the world, which we can find from American Government’s foreign strategy. After suffering from two wars after September11and financial crisis, the Obama Administration still insists on reviving the world’s leadership by domestic construction and shaping the world. However, the National Security Strategy of Obama Administration shows a series of new features, such as abandoning unilateralism gradually, taking advantage of allies, partnerships, multilateral international institutions, especially the strategic contraction to promote the national security. Along with the U.S. goals of global leadership strategy, the characteristic of offshore balancing strategy is very obvious.Although American governments emphasize the Grand Strategy of leadership after the Cold War, this strategy is lack of solid social basis. And in the process of practice, it constantly encounters difficulties. After the Cold War, there are two different schools about US principle strategy,"expansion" or "shrinking". People who believe in expansion think that the United States should be more actively involved in the affairs of the world, and shape the global order after the Cold War. From the practice of the United States after the Cold War, the concept of the "expansion" has achieved great success, but has not brought the United States and the world democracy, freedom and prosperity. Global leadership strategy not only has great strategic risk and high cost, but also not certainly promise unnecessarily to achieve the proposed strategic objectives. As John Ikenberry said, firstly, hegemony strategy is unsustainable; secondly, the burden after military action is huge; third, it’s difficult to cooperate with other countries; forth, it may fall into the trap of big country hegemony and self-siege.The "shrinking" school thinks the decline of the United States is inevitable. As the representative of the "decline school", Paul Kennedy believes that the United States will suffer from the depression resulted from the excessive expansion of empire. Kennedy thinks Grand Strategy in fundamental political character must pay high attention to the balance between purpose and means. The United States now faces too much in its own defense, extending excessively and multi-polarization situation. It is not easy to establish the strategic balance between purpose and means after the Cold War. Charles Krauthammer predicted the gap between the regional superpowers and the United States will be narrowed; smaller, secondary and backward countries will threaten the regional security, even the international situation. In a short time, the United States may have the incomparable advantage over other big powers. But in the long run, the decline of America and the rise of other big powers are inevitable. It is difficult for the United States to continue the strategy of hegemony. Hence, the grand strategy will be gradually going toward the regional offshore balance strategy.This thesis consists of five parts. The first part briefly introduced the research condition on the U.S. Grand Strategy, and its classification on its research organizations and scholars. The second part analyzes the key concept, main content and features of Offshore Balancing Strategy. This part first defines its concept as "combination of passing the buck and balance strategy". The content tightly enchains with shirk responsibility and balance, demands non-frontier involvement. The Offshore Balancing Strategy has three features:multi-polar, hedge bets and burden sharing. The third part analyzes the background and motive of Offshore Balancing Strategy. This part offers three factors as follows:the absence of U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War, the dilemma of the hegemonic strategy and the rebirth of isolationism in U.S., and the three factors serve as the realistic ones that the Offshore Balancing Strategy was able to be put into practice. The fourth part is about the reasons of the success of the strategy in U.S., and the practice in Northeast Asia and Europe. The fifth part comes to the conclusion. Based on the summary of the above analysis, and combined the advantages of, this thesis aims to analyze the possibility of the Offshore Balancing strategy being the U.S. leading strategy pattern.