Soft balancing

T.V. Paul defines soft balancing as “restraining the power or aggressive policies of a
state through international institutions, concerted diplomacy via limited, informal
ententes, and economic sanctions in order to make its aggressive actions less legitimate in the eyes of the world and hence its strategic goals more difficult to
obtain” (Paul, 2018). Balancing does not require military means as in hard balancing. The concept gained currency in the context of growing contestation against US dominance in the beginning of the years 2000. Examples include the voting behavior of China, Russia, but also France and Germany in the UN Security Council against the 2003 US invasion in Iraq. A variant of soft balancing is ‘institutional balancing’, which involves balancing through institutions.