President Obama used the backdrop of the November 2011 APEC summit in Honolulu to unveil his foreign policy ‘pivot’ to the Asia-Pacific region, then traveled to Australia where he announced the expansion of U.S. military exercises and bases there. Recently, Secretary of State Clinton wrote an article in Foreign Policy entitled “America’s Pacific Century”, where she articulated the same policy.
At the Moana Nui peoples’ conference in Honolulu and at the Japan Peace Conference in Okinawa, many speakers discussed the U.S. pivot as a policy of simultaneously containing and engaging China. It is a tango of ‘competitive interdependence’.
Dr Jian Junbo, an assistant professor of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, echoed this theme in an op ed in the Asia Times “Rivals Under the Same Heaven”. However, Professor Jian sees recent U.S. moves as a shift towards a more aggressive containment of China, which could have dire consequences for peace and prosperity:
US policy toward China in past three decades could be summarized as seeking a balance between containment and engagement.
The diplomatic offensives launched by the administration of US President Barack Obama in past weeks are evidence that Washington is quickly tipping the balance in favor of containing China, frustrated by its failure to engage that country into US-led international order.
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Hawaii in mid-November, Obama demanded that China play by international rules, and be more responsible in the international community, since it had grown up. He said China should continue to revalue its currency against the US dollar, narrow the Sino-US trade deficit and better protect intellectual-property rights. Even more aggressively, Obama has kicked off negotiations on forming a Trans-Pacific Partnership, a US-led free-trade zone in the Asia-Pacific area that would exclude China – the second-largest economy in the world.
Right after the APEC Summit, Obama visited Australia, a political and military ally of the US, where he declared that 2,500 American troops would be stationed in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. This is widely viewed as a new deterrence to China’s navy.
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Taking into consideration all of this and other actions by the US administration in East Asia in recent years after Obama proclaimed the ”return to Asia” strategic shift, it’s easy to see that a new containment policy toward China is in formation, although Obama and his top officials have publicly denied it.
And U.S. bases play a key role in this strategy now that America’s ‘tender trap’ failed to capture China in a U.S. dominated world system:
All this is not to mention that the US has many military bases in countries and regions neighboring China – South Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – and it has military cooperation with Mongolia, Indonesia, Malaysia and others.
All in all, it seems Washington is now seeking comprehensively to contain China with both hard and soft approaches after its adoption of the ”return to Asia” strategy and its failure to frame China in the US-led international system despite the efforts of each US administration in the past three decades. When Obama visited China in 2009, he tried to sell the new idea of a Group of Two – a US-China convergence in geopolitical interests – but Premier Wen Jiabao straightforwardly told Obama that Beijing didn’t like such an idea.
Originally, Obama hoped in this way to ”tame” China – not by containment or engagement alone but with what some called a ”tender trap”. But he failed. After that, we can see Washington has been readjusting its policy toward China, and the readjustment should not be considered only as temporary ”election rhetoric” by Obama to please the Republicans and common voters. Rather, this is a systemic and strategic readjustment of China policy, in coordination with Washington’s ”return to Asia” strategic shift.
China’s response has been subdued. This has puzzled some Asia watchers including Richard Halloran, a contributor to the Civil Beat and former columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser, who writes:
Surprisingly, China’s response to President Obama’s plan to “pivot” American attention and military power from the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan to East Asia has been remarkably mild.
Dr. Jian attributes China’s restraint to “domestic affairs”, such as preparations for the 18th National Congress next year to reshuffle the Chinese Communist Party’s top leadership, as well as China’s culture and history and its national strategy of “peaceful rise”. Unfortunately, the U.S. continues to follow the script of western imperialism, as expressed by Joseph Nye, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He asserts that the two world wars were the result of the failure by the dominant powers to integrate a rising power into the existing order. Therefore, he counsels applying greater pressure on China to conform to and integrate into the U.S. dominated order:
The Pentagon’s East Asia Strategy Review that has guided our policy since 1995 offered China integration into the international system through trade and exchanges, but we hedged our bet by simultaneously strengthening our alliance with Japan. Our military forces did not aspire to “contain” China in a cold war fashion, but they helped to shape the environment in which China makes its choices.
So it is a policy of containment, not ‘Containment’. However, Jian advises:
It is important that the US should not treat China like those rising powers in history, and Beijing should seek more flexible and functional ways to deal with Washington’s challenges.
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Containment is the worst and stupidest way to deal with or manage China’s rise.
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