Institutional balancing

Institutional balancing is a form of soft balancing. A distinction is made between inclusive and exclusive institutional balancing. Inclusive institutional balancing can be defined as “an institutional strategy of binding and constraining a target state within the rules, agendas, and practices of institutions.” He and Feng provide the example of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), a consultation forum for security that includes China, which may help to constrain China’s foreign policy behavior. Exclusive institutional balancing amounts to “working to exclude a target state from a specific institution so that the target state will be isolated or pressured by the cohesion and cooperation of institutional grouping.” A striking example was President Obama’s project (shelved by Trump) to conclude the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment deal among the US and 11 other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, which explicitly excluded China (He & Feng, 2020). This way the US either attempted to weaken China or pressure it to converge to US economic norms. Like soft balancing in general, institutional balancing is rewarding in a globalizing world where military balancing is often deemed too risky and too costly (He, 2008).