This view is wrong. Containment was US policy toward the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. The USSR was a rival ideology, a competing anti-capitalist economic system aimed at expanding the Soviet empire. Indeed, fear of Soviet hegemony was a major factor that led President Nixon and Chairman Mao to open US–China relations in 1971.
Containment was an effort to isolate Moscow economically; undermine its ideology; and contain its military power with a robust US nuclear arsenal, alliances such as NATO to its West and Japan to its East, and an integrated global trade and financial system. Containment meant minimal social or economic interaction with Russians.
The United States also pursued such a policy toward Iraq under Saddam Hussein and toward Iran known as ‘dual containment’. This meant economic sanctions and, in the case of Iraq, a no-fly zone limiting Saddam’s ability to control Iraq outside Baghdad.
This is decidedly not US policy toward China. Eight US Presidents from Nixon to Obama have pursued a policy of facilitating China’s economic modernisation and integration into the international system. The United States has pursued a consistent policy of cooperating with China where interests overlap and seeking to manage differences.
No country has benefited more than China from the security role that the United States has played in East Asia, underpinning stability and economic globalisation over the past four decades. As China launched its reform and opening policies, its economy grew from some US$202 billion in 1980 to roughly US$7 trillion by 2012, as it joined global institutions from the WTO to the IAEA.
The United States became China’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade in 2012 reaching US$536 billion. US investment has helped fuel China’s astonishing economic growth over the past three decades, and China holds more than $1 trillion in US treasury bonds. Cultural ties have also grown: some 200,000 students — including the daughter of President Xi Jinping — attend US universities.
This reflects an economic relationship of deep interdependence. This is also why the TPP is not a device to contain China but rather a means of furthering economic integration in the Asia Pacific. Though the Obama administration has not explained it well, China could decide to join the TPP if and when it is willing to adopt the agreement’s trade rules. As China’s new leadership pursues a new wave of economic reforms, Beijing will likely find that better protections for its intellectual property rights and other standards serve its interests.
As China has developed its increasingly sophisticated military capabilities, Washington has also pursued a geopolitical posture of hedging against strategic uncertainty. So too has China. This duality of economic integration and strategic competition is the prevalent geopolitical reality in the Asia Pacific. It is why nations from India to Vietnam have increased security cooperation with the United States and, increasingly, with each other. This is counterbalancing, a time-honoured approach to the game of nations, and not to be confused with containment. Long before the US ‘rebalancing’ was proclaimed, the United States has been strengthening alliances and security partnerships in East Asia for over two decades. The current US posture is the accumulation of those efforts.
Counterbalancing means mobilising resources and partners to offset a perceived challenge to the existing strategic balance. The danger is that this can create a dynamic known as a ‘security dilemma’ in international relations theory. One state increasing its military strength because it feels vulnerable may produce an unintended reaction in another state which feels threatened, leading to a spiral of increased tensions and conflict.
This is evident in US–China relations. The US ‘rebalance’ reflects a response to a growing Chinese military power, a concern that a longtime core US interest — maritime access — may be at risk. And as prominent strategic thinker Dr Wu Xinbo of Fudan University has written, ‘China has responded by continuing to develop its “area-denial” and “anti-access” capabilities so as to maintain a reliable deterrent against US forces within the so-called first island chain’. From the US perspective, this may have cause and effect backwards, but it captures the action–reaction dynamic at play.
This Pentagon–PLA mirror-imaging and reflexive competition lies behind the strategic distrust in US–China relations. It is also why Presidents Obama and Xi agreed on the need to create a new type of relationship at the recent US–China Summit in California.
The challenge to the US–China relationship, and more broadly to stability in East Asia, is how to move from strategic distrust to strategic reassurance. The reality is that mutual vulnerabilities, from economic and financial to cyberspace, outer space and climate change, are shared interests. At the end of the day, whether US–China relations become more cooperative or competitive will be a major factor shaping the international order in the 21st century.
Robert A. Manning is a senior fellow of the Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security at the Atlantic Council. He served as a senior counselor from 2001 to 2004 and a member of the US Department of State Policy Planning Staff from 2004 to 2008.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Global Times.
Seems like mere semantics… whether one calls it containing or “re-balancing”, the USA does now have an undeniable strategy of blocking the expansion of Chinese power and influence in the region… which from the perspective of the Chinese is hard to see as anything other than containment.
Maybe not to the extent that a trade blockage or embargo would be employed, however containment none the less.
Take the example of the TPP, it is unlikely that other parties to the TPP who share America’s desire to contain China would welcome China into the TPP talks (not to name any names, but lets say – Japan).
Thank you, Mr Manning. I’m curious what practical steps you would recommend the parties take to move from “strategic distrust to strategic reassurance.” Three suggestions based on a short, medium and long-term time horizon would add specificity to your argument.
It is curious that Mr Manning should acknowledge America’s containment of the Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran while ignoring its identical strategy towards China that lasted from 1949 until the Kissinger visit in 1971. One can accept that the US gave up seeking to contain China during the 1970s. If, however, Mr Manning’s goal is to persuade Chinese today that it is not his country’s current goal to contain China, it would probably be better tactics to admit what America’s ambitions undoubtedly were until 1971. Why, for example, did it take what used to be called ‘Red China’ or ‘Chicom’ so long to take away China’s seat at the United Nations from the Republic of China if it wasn’t US policy to contain the Reds? One would think that a Republican like Mr Manning would praise Nixon and Kissinger for ending the China containment strategy that had begun under the Democratic administration of President Truman rather than merely credit them with the rather blandly expressed ‘opening’ of diplomatic relations with China. Similarly, one wonders how persuasive it will be to Mr Manning’s Chinese readers for him to tell them that their country has been the greatest beneficiary of the US security role in East Asia. This is a role that has been imposed on China, not negotiated with it, which is one reason that it will probably require somewhat more elaborate argument to be convincing for the happy beneficiaries. It is surely one thing to say that China has adapted very successfully to America’s role in East Asia, and entirely another to claim that it has gained more than, say, Japan or South Korea. They have not lost any territory because of America’s security role, whereas China has, in its own eyes and at least for the time being, lost Taiwan.
many thanks for sharing Robert Manning’s excellent commentary on US-China security dynamics, and on several misperceptions regarding these, that are prevalent, to be fair, on both shores of the Pacific. His elucidation is one of the most purposive and illuminating among those that I have read in recent months. I hope both Chinese and American readers will take heart from his assurances.
Dr Manning does, however, neglect to mention the core of the Sino-US insecurity dilemma (a phrase that might, I suspect, better reflect reality than does the well-known “security dilemma” formulation) although he seems to hint at it. At the heart of the dilemma is the fact that as the pre-eminent power in the post-Soviet world, the USA has been exercising virtually pan- systemic autonomy with vigorous, usually robust military and intelligence-based, responses to any real or perceived challenges to its hegemony. Only a few states have overtly challenged America’s dominant status and domineering stance. Given the profound mutual interdependencies linking China to the USA that the author describes, Beijing has not joined the ranks of those actors. However, of the “emerging” powers steadily multipolarising the global power-architecture, only China appears to possess the potential capacity – if and when combined with appropriate political will – to meaningfully challenge US systemic primacy.
This is not something that I, as a student of Sino-US relations, am uniquely privileged in discerning. Myriad US commentaries, especially many originated by federally-funded, DoD-commissioned research establishments such as the RAND Corporation, CNA and CSBA, have said this since the turn of the century. There is a significant and authoritative body of officially sponsored and sanctioned analytical literature which identifies China as the only likely challenger to US systemic primacy in the 21st century. To the extent that substantial federal funds have financed the development of this literature, influencing policy – especially since Andrew Marshal’s Office of Net Assessment began the process, it is difficult to suggest that official US policy towards China has been entirely benign, and that the insecurity dilemma has been a function of China’s economic-military growth alone.
Of course, Beijing has contributed in full measure to the dynamic and can no longer claim to be a hapless victim or an innocent bystander. But as the foremost power leading a covert coalition seeking to help China build up its national comprehensive power portfolio since 1971 until 1989, the USA would be hard put to now question the consequences of its rather self-interested action over those two decades. And Washington did not stop permitting, or even encouraging, Israel from transferring military-capable technology to China until July 2000. I cannot imagine Dr Manning does not know this.
It is this context that I would respectfully suggest that while Deng Xiaoping might have led China’s revival anyway, even if US support was unavailable in the 1970s-1980s, China would be unlikely to have achieved its current economic-scientific-technological, and hence diplomatic, stature without the measure of US-led support and endorsement it then received. Now that divergent tactical interests across East Asia are generating tensions between China on the one hand and the USA and its allies and strategic-partners on the other, blaming China for revisionist aggressive conduct has become quite fashionable. However, ignoring the origins of the process would detract from the efficacy of efforts to address, if not resolve, the tensions generated by China’s existential challenges to the US-led systemic dispensation.
As a post-script, it might be apposite to mention the diplomatic storm raised by the Obama Administration in early 2013 over China’s cyber indiscretions. Very senior US officials, from the President on down, accused China of committing serious offences in the cyber realm. There is no reason to suppose that they were making false accusations. Only when the Snowden disclosures demonstrated that Washington and its British allies themselves were conducting cyber-collection operations on a global scale which dwarfed any Chinese efforts did the China-bashing campaign calm down somewhat. Selective interpretations of history and a multipolarity of standards might assuage sentiment and opinion, but they cannot be a sound foundation for fashioning a new systemic equilibrium.
Kind regards
mahmud