argues that Southeast Asian balancing is “soft” because it falls short of military alliances, a reflection of strict realist definitions of balancing—for example, Randall Schweller’s qualification that “balancing requires that states target their military hardware at each other in preparation for a potential war.” Southeast Asian balancing behavior should not, however, be conflated with the kind of “soft balancing” attributed by Robert Pape and others to some West European states against the United States since 2003.