Americans’ frustration with recent failures abroad, combined with looming challenges in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, have inspired a search for a new framework for American foreign policy. The suggestion has emerged that the United States could learn from the guiding principle of British foreign policy for several centuries until 1945 – offshore balancing.
Great Britain had three major interests: the security of its home islands; the maintenance of an increasingly far-flung empire; and trade with the rest of the world, on which the country’s prosperity heavily depended. The British had no territorial designs on the European continent, yet it was from Europe that the potential threat to its three main interests came. If a single power were to achieve dominance there, it could seek to exclude British trade from Europe and even attempt an invasion of Britain itself.
Over the centuries, the British repeatedly faced such a danger: from Spain in the sixteenth century, from France in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, from Germany in the first half of the twentieth century and from the Soviet Union in the second half. To meet that recurrent threat, the British made sure to sustain their dominance at sea. In addition, they supported the countries opposing any power seeking to dominate the continent and threaten the British Isles. British policy was to help create a military balance in Europe by supporting a “counterhegemonic” coalition, preferably without putting its own troops on the continent. On several notable occasions, to be sure – during the War of the Spanish Succession in the eighteenth century, the war against Napoleon in the nineteenth, and the two world wars in the twentieth — British troops did fight on European soil; but balancing from offshore continued to be the preferred method.
The world in which Britain carried out this policy differed in major ways from the international order of 2025 in which the United States must conduct its foreign policy; and experience in one historical period does not offer a road map for success in another. Still, in its goals and challenges now, the United States does exhibit certain similarities to Britain’s circumstances in the past. Like the British, America today has far-flung and diverse national interests, confronts aggressive powers that seek to dominate their home regions, and would prefer not to deploy American troops to check the threats to its allies and its interests. While not providing specific guidelines for the present-day foreign policy of the United States, Britain’s historical role as an offshore balancer does shed light on five features of America’s current role in the world.
The United States has already engaged in successful offshore balancing – in the Middle East
America, and the world, have a major interest in the free flow of oil in the Middle East. In 1990 and 1991, the United States organized a multinational coalition, mainly with American troops, that prevented Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from establishing a dangerous sway over the region’s oil reserves after it had occupied Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. In the last two years, by contrast, it was a Middle Eastern country, with American support but without American troops, that performed the same service for the region. Israel inflicted severe damage on Iran and its proxies, setting back the Iranian drive for regional dominance and thereby protecting a vital interest of the United States and the other countries of the world. From far offshore, and by supplying technical assistance to Israel but not – with the exception of a brief bombing attack on Iranian nuclear weapons facilities – employing its own forces, the United States helped to restore a favorable balance of power in a crucial region. Since October, 2023, Israel has shown itself to be a most effective on-shore partner in an American Middle East policy of offshore balancing.
The United States attempted British-style offshore balancing in Europe several times but has not managed to remain offshore
Three times in the twentieth century, Europe confronted an aggressive power seeking to dominate the continent. On all three occasions, the United States sought to check that power by providing assistance of various kinds, but not ground troops, to the coalition opposing the aggressor. In World War I, from its outbreak in August, 1914 until April, 1917, America aided Britain in its fight against Germany with loans but not soldiers. In World War II, between its beginning in September 1939 and December 1941, the United States supplied weaponry, first to Britain and then to the Soviet Union, for their war against Nazi Germany but stayed out of the fighting. In 1949, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, under the terms of which it promised to come to the aid of Western Europe as it had in the two world wars, but without committing itself to major military deployments on the European continent. On all three occasions, it acted as an offshore balancer.
Offshore balancing in Europe thus qualifies as a tradition of American foreign policy; but in each of the three instances the United States ultimately sent troops to the continent, despite its strong initial inclination not to do so: in World War I, after unrestricted German submarine warfare convinced the American public, the Congress, and President Woodrow Wilson that their country could no longer afford to stay out of the actual fighting; in World War II, after Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941 and the German dictator Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States four days later; and in the Cold War, when the North Korean attack on South Korea on June 25, 1950 persuaded the American government that the Soviet Union might well follow that precedent by attacking westward in Europe, where, in the wake of World War II, the continental democracies lacked the military strength to repel such an attack without direct American assistance on the ground.
Offshore balancing in Europe is a plausible and attractive policy for the United States now, but faces obstacles
After 1950, the North Atlantic Treaty became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an integrated military force stationed on the continent to which the United States contributed more troops than any other country. American military dominance in NATO has persisted to the present. Early on, however, the American government did not intend for it to persist. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy both believed that the European NATO members should, and, they hoped, would, do far more to defend themselves. Indeed, every American president from Eisenhower to Donald Trump has, in different ways, urged the Europeans to spend more on their own defense. This, too, counts as a tradition of American foreign policy.
Europe certainly has the resources to spend more. The countries of the continent are far wealthier now than before 1945, when they had serious military establishments. Moreover, one reason they failed to do more at the outset of the Cold War no longer has the force it did then. A more European NATO would require a more heavily armed Germany. When memories of the German aggression that had plunged the continent into the Second World War were fresh, Western Europeans regarded a far more powerful Germany with trepidation. Eighty years later, that fear has diminished.
Still, obstacles to a major expansion of Europe’s role in its own defense remain. Over the decades, the countries there have abandoned the military traditions and military expertise they had built up over the centuries. Since 1945 they have equipped themselves with large and costly welfare states, which make major increases in defense spending politically difficult. In addition, the Western Europeans confront a nuclear-armed Russia and thus, to stand on their own, would need a substitute for the present American nuclear guarantee. Britain and France have small national nuclear arsenals, but these have never been regarded as adequate to protect all the other European NATO members. A strategically independent Europe would require new nuclear arrangements, which would be neither simple nor easy to create.
The United States is practicing a form of offshore balancing in East Asia
While maintaining a small force on the Korean peninsula, the United States has no soldiers on the Asian mainland dedicated to balancing the power of the People’s Republic of China. Protecting American interests in the region requires preventing China from seizing Taiwan, which, being an island, must be defended by naval and air forces rather than ground troops. Taiwan presents an interesting parallel with a particular feature of nineteenth century British policy in Europe, namely Belgium’s strategic importance to London. Specifically, control of the Scheldt Estuary near Antwerp would have given a European country an ideal launching point for an amphibious assault on the British Isles. The British government thus bent every effort to ensuring that no hostile power gained possession of it. Similarly, if China took control of Taiwan, it would be in a position to exercise military dominance in the Pacific, enhancing the threat it would pose to other Asian countries, notably Japan.
The other countries of Asia also have an interest in balancing Chinese power, but for two reasons have made more modest contributions to this effort than, from the American perspective, is optimal. First, all have extensive trading relations with the People’s Republic, which they are loath to jeopardize. Second, military balancing requires sophisticated weaponry – submarines, aircraft, and precision munitions in particular – that the countries of Asia do not produce on any scale– although Japan and South Korea could certainly do so if they desired.
As a further complication, the Asians, like the Europeans, depend on American nuclear weapons to offset the nuclear arsenal of mainland China. Without the American nuclear “umbrella,” they would need a substitute, which would likely take the form of the creation of several national nuclear-weapon forces. This, however, is a contribution to the common defense that the United States has historically opposed. Since the 1960s, Washington has considered nuclear proliferation to be a grave threat to global peace and has tried to limit it.
Offshore balancing has financial implications
Keeping government expenditures as low as possible was an integral part of the British policy of offshore balancing. Fiscal restraint in turn kept the London government’s credit sound, so that it could borrow money during wartime at reasonable rates. The support it provided to its on-shore European allies came mainly in the form of monetary loans and grants, which, through the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, the recipient governments used to recruit troops to fight on their behalf. In the twenty-first century American version of offshore balancing, by contrast, what America’s allies need from the United States is not money but sophisticated weaponry.
In this respect, the United States in 2025 comes up short. The decline of its military-industrial base after the end of the Cold War has deprived the country of the capacity to manufacture advanced munitions on the scale and at the speed that security in an increasingly dangerous world demands. In this particular way, therefore, the imperatives of a successful American policy of offshore balancing depart sharply from the British pattern. For the foreseeable future, the United States should be spending more rather than less money on defense.
