Yuen Foong Khong argues that Southeast Asian balancing is “soft” because it falls short of military alliances, a reบection 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. The latter refers to actions by states that are too weak to build up their own armed forces or form countervailing military alliances, and so choose instead to use nonmilitary tools to “delay, frustrate, and undermine,” and increase the costs of the threatening state’s use of military power.
Most Southeast Asian states, in contrast, could form strong military alliances with the United States and their neighbors if they wished, but instead they pursue a more subtle balancing strategy.