In for a penny, in for a pound: The trouble with offshore balancing and why it matters that “1917” was <i>not</i> “1941”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past couple of decades, students of American grand strategy have debated the merits (or lack thereof) of an orientation toward the global balance of power that has come to be known as “offshore balancing.” Its critics hold offshore balancing simply to be another way of expressing the dangerous allure of strategic “restraint,” or even “isolationism.” Its enthusiasts, by contrast, see in it nothing other than the best conceivable grand strategy for America, enabling Washington to avoid the pitfalls of either too little or too much interventionism in global affairs. This article challenges both positions, and argues that the historical record of offshore balancing as an American strategic orientation leads to the conclusion that, far from being a crypto-isolationist grand strategy, it actually betrays close affinities with the so-called “maximalism” to which its champions believe it to be superior.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".