Abstract
This master thesis examines the United States of America’s balancing towards China after
the 2011 “pivot to Asia” announcement, relating it to the expected behavior in John
Mearheimer’s theory of offensive realism. The purpose has been to establish what level of
balancing behavior occurred and how this behavior can be explained.
The thesis draws on offensive realism, where a hegemon such as the US lacking other
viable options will balance against a rising power such as China. This will happen through
three elements, diplomatic signaling, internal balancing and external balancing. In order to
explain the actual behavior, the thesis takes a neoclassical approach and uses Randall
Schweller’s work, which describes variables that determine how a state’s actual balancing
behavior is determined.
The outcome of the analysis shows that the main component of the balancing behavior
was a focus on diplomatic signaling and especially external balancing, while internal
balancing was not employed to a wide extent. The key observations explaining this
behavior were the overall threat assessment that China was not a major systemic threat to
the US and could be a partner in amongst other things the economic recovery after the
financial crisis, and overall reductions in the defense budget as well as inefficient use of
available resources due to increased polarization in both the population and Congress.