My understanding is that it does exert a force everywhere, even locally. It’s just so incredibly weak that other local forces dominate and overpower it. Take the classic example of expansion as ants on a balloon as it’s inflated. The expansion wants to pull them apart, but if they were tied to each other by thread, the thread would be stronger and they would stay together. The thread represents the inter molecular forces. Also remember that the expansion force is in every direction, without an origin, so from an atom’s perspective the force seems to push outward,not from the side, so there would be no “offset”.