Recent scholarship has also focused on the behavior of secondary powers. Shifts in the distribution of power among great powers are among the most significant events in international security, given that both realism and power-transition theories anticipate an increase in the probability of war during such times ( Thucydides 1984 Morgenthau 2006 Gilpin 1981 Mearsheimer 2006 Little 2007 Organski 1968 Tammen et al. The rise of China, the relative decline of the United States, Russia's rising geopolitical assertiveness, and the European Union's political and economic confusion all contribute to the increased importance of an in-depth understanding of inter-state relations in each region and the world. Ongoing global power shifts have made the balance of power theory the cynosure of international relations (IR) scholarship. Hedging, power shift, Japanese foreign policy Introduction In this sense, while concurring with the realists’ argument that Japan's current behavior is characterized as balancing, the argument differs from that of realists who believe that Japan's policy shift to balancing toward China only began with China's rise in the late 2000s or 2010s.
Yet, the periods from 1997 to 2005 and from 2010 on represent an aberration because Japan engaged one type of hedging-security hedging-vis-à-vis the risk of US commitment reduction to East Asia. This behavior also aimed both to illustrate Japan's efforts related to alliance burden-sharing and to enhance its external balancing with the United States. In addition, while Japan's behavior vis-à-vis the United States is considered to be bandwagoning, Japan made political efforts to strengthen its own military capabilities-internal balancing-which began in the 2010s when Japan relaxed its political constraints on use of its military. The use of this conceptual framework reveals that Japan's foreign policy behavior has not involved “hedging” vis-à-vis China instead, Japan's behavior is consistently associated with “balancing” against the risks of China's rise. To identify states’ strategic behavior, it is important to first examine their economic and military capabilities, and if these indicators are not decisive enough to identify balancing, bandwagoning, or hedging behavior, diplomatic factors should be taken into account, although those are a relatively weaker indicator. States, particularly secondary powers, attempt to calculate the risk of balancing, bandwagoning, and hedging, adopting an optimal strategy. Although polarity- unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar-largely determines the likelihood of hedging behavior, during a period of power shift, strategic uncertainty emerges. This article argues that the concept of “hedging” should be understood in the context of the “balancing-bandwagoning” spectrum within the “balance of power” theory, in which hedging is located between balancing and bandwagoning as the state's third strategic choice.
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