The proposition that states balance against power or threats is a cornerstone of international relations theory, but very little work has been done on exactly what constitutes an act of "hard balancing". This paper distinguishes between four types of hard balancing behavior and argues that the United States tends to balance against, and contain, threats from peer competitors or near peer competitors differently than other great powers in history. In particular, whereas 19th and early 20th century European great powers were inclined to see their adversaries as legitimate actors with legitimate interests regardless of the way they are organized, the United States—only the world's second ever democratic great power—equates legitimacy with regime type and a state's internal behavior. Thus, while most great powers have sought to stabilize and preserve the basic contours of a balance of power and spheres of influence, the United States, on those occasions when it has chosen to engage the world rather than isolate itself from it, has tried to collapse the power base of its non-democratic rivals and transform the international system.
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