Balance of Power

I

Introduction

Balance of Power, doctrine of international relations maintaining that aggressive tendencies on the part of a state or an alliance of states can be discouraged by the formation of another alliance of equal or greater strength. Thus, in a system where one party is more powerful than any other single party, peace may be preserved by an alliance of the weaker parties.

II

Evolution of Doctrine

One of the earliest examples of the practice, if not the formulation of this doctrine, was the creation of the Peloponnesian League in ancient Greece. None of its members could restrain Athens without the others, but together they thought they might dissuade the Athenians from aggression, or, if that failed, defeat them in battle. The various competing Chinese states of the Period of the Warring States (403-221 bc) also practised balance of power tactics.

The balance of power doctrine was first clearly enunciated in the 16th century by Francesco Guicciardini, who observed in his Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) that the goal of Florentine policy was to prevent the domination of the peninsula by any single Italian state.

In the 16th and early 17th centuries, the struggle to retain the balance of power in Europe became one of avoiding Habsburg dominance; subsequent equilibrium was retained by the efforts of several alliances. After that, the major challenge to the balance came from King Louis XIV of France, who eventually provoked an alliance involving most of the rest of Europe, thus frustrating his designs of hegemony.

A new development of the 18th century was the formation of blocs of states that endangered the balance in the same way as single states had done before. This took full form in the wars of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Initially, Prussia was allied with France and Bavaria against Britain and Austria, but later Britain and Prussia fought against Austria, France, and Russia. The American War of Independence caused a reversion to the earlier style, when Great Britain, then seen to be growing too powerful, was challenged and humbled by an alliance of France, the Netherlands, Spain, and the rebelling American colonies.

Revolutionary France and Napoleon forced the states of Europe into a series of alliances to preserve the balance of power. France's might at the time was so great that it took four such coalitions and 20 years of war to restore the balance. The exhaustion that followed was enough to preserve the peace, until the unification of Germany and Italy led to a realignment of powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The result was alliances of such equal strength that, when the two sides clashed in World War I, the issue was decided only by the intrusion of an outside power, the United States.

III

Axis and Allies

Ensuing weariness in Europe, the inward turn of revolutionary Russia, and the isolationism of the United States meant that it was unnecessary to attend to the balance of power, for no state was strong enough to challenge the results of the war. The revival of Germany, however, as well as the expansionist aims of Italy and Japan in the 1930s, led these states to form a worldwide alliance, the so-called Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. This alliance was only broken during World War II by the fullest exertions of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, and a host of other nations. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union sought to extend its power and succeeded in frightening the nations of Western Europe and the North Atlantic into forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This was followed by a series of other defensive alliances on the periphery of the Communist bloc and in turn led to the creation of the East European Warsaw Pact.

IV

The Nuclear Age

The development of nuclear arsenals in the 1950s and 1960s led to a condition known as the balance of terror, in which the decisive deterrent to war between the United States and the USSR—the two superpowers—was the enormous destruction a nuclear conflict could wreak on both sides. Although the two superpowers involved themselves in numerous so-called limited wars—notably in Korea, Indochina, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Central America, and the Persian Gulf—they generally avoided direct confrontation, to keep tensions below the nuclear threshold. A major exception to this pattern was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which the United States launched a blockade to stop the USSR from establishing a missile base in Cuba. Subsequently, the United States and the USSR sought through negotiation to limit or reduce their nuclear arsenals.

Rapid political changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, culminating in the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, left the United States and its NATO allies as the world's pre-eminent military power. The political crises in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union were among the most serious challenges to this one-sided “balance of power” at the end of the 20th century. At the start of the 21st century the potential threat had mainly become the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and its links to international terrorism, as well as the possession of weapons of mass destruction by so-called rogue states.