System Structure and State Strategy: Adding Hedging to the Menu

This paper presents “strategic hedging” as a way to conceptualize much of the strategic behavior currently employed by second-tier states like China, Russia, Brazil, and France. Hedging is an alternative to strategies like balancing, bandwagoning, and buck-passing. Like those other strategies, hedging is driven by structural incentives associated with the current polarity of the international system and power concentration trends within it. Hedging will be most prevalent in international systems that are defined by a leading state that, while in a position of power preponderance, is also in the process of relative decline. Strategic hedging behavior is effective for second-tier states in such deconcentrating unipolar systems because it avoids outright confrontation with the system leader in the short term, while still increasing the hedging state's ability to survive such a direct military confrontation should it occur in the long run. Strategic hedging behavior can also be used to insure the hedging state against security threats that might result from the loss of public goods or subsidies that are currently being provided by the system leader. In this article, I define strategic hedging behavior, present a mechanism for identifying empirical evidence of strategic hedging, and apply that mechanism to three case studies: the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, Brazil's approach to regional leadership, and French opposition to the 2003 us invasion of Iraq.