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Beyond Trending: What is hedging?
In response to US President Donald Trump's threats to annex Greenland, many European countries have sent small contingents of troops to the Arctic island, while Russia has threatened to take military “countermeasures” if the West boosts its own military footprint there. The concept of hedging helps understand such dynamics in international relations.
US President Donald Trump’s claim to seek control over the territory of Greenland has complicated matters in the Arctic region. (File Photo/AP)
The ongoing debate about the post-war order has redirected attention to the balance of power theory in international relations. The US’s recent military operation in Venezuela, threats to acquire Greenland, and weaponisation of trade and economic dependencies hint at changing dynamics of international relations.
During such situations, secondary or middle powers weigh balancing, bandwagoning, and hedging to deal with risks and uncertainties. But what is balancing, bandwagoning, and hedging?
Hedging, balancing, and bandwagoning
The concept of hedging in international relations is located between balancing and bandwagoning within the spectrum of the balance of power theory. Although there is no all-agreed definition of hedging, scholars largely agree that hedging features “mixed elements of selective engagement, limited resistance, and partial deference”.
In other words, “through hedging, the state conducts a counteracting policy—strengthening economic cooperation while preparing for diplomatic and military confrontation by increasing military capabilities—to temporarily avoid an explicit confrontation with a potentially adversarial state,” explains Kei Koga in a journal article titled “The Concept of “Hedging” Revisited: The Case of Japan’s Foreign Policy Strategy in East Asia’s Power Shift”.
The concept was introduced into the international relations lexicon in the 1990s to explain states’ behaviour in the post-Cold War order. In contrast, the concepts of balancing and bandwagoning developed during the Cold War to explain states’ behaviour towards a dominant power. Stephen M. Walt, in The Origins of Alliances (1987), defines balancing “as allying with others against the prevailing threat; bandwagoning refers to alignment with the source of danger”.
However, hedging seeks to address several key questions that emerged in the post-Cold War order, such as how states respond to rising powers threatening their security, and while allying with a friendly great power, how they guard against the possibility of abandonment.
How and why states hedge against allies and adversaries
Hence, the basic motivation behind hedging is to address risk in the form of potential security-related threats. US President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, presents an interesting case in point, with America as the most powerful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pursuing its territorial ambitions against another member.
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In recent weeks, many European countries have sent small contingents of troops to Greenland, while Russia has threatened to take military “countermeasures” if the West boosts its own military footprint on the Arctic island, according to media reports.
In addition to security risks emanating from military action, scholars of hedging have also engaged with risks coming from nonmilitary sources, such as economic crises. For instance, Darren Lim and Rohan Mukherjee argue that in the absence of security threats, small states may hedge to optimise between economic gains and autonomy costs flowing from their relations with a major regional power.
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