The Rise and Descent of “Strategic Reassurance” in the Obama Administration* Emily Szu-hua Chen** Keywords: US-China Relations, Strategic Reassurance I.
Introduction
American policy options toward China are often delineated as an alternative between “containment” and “engagement,” with containment focusing on coercive policies designed to keep China from developing and diminishing American influence in Asia and engagement as strategic adjustment to legitimate Chinese intentions to establish an East Asian order that is both conducive to US interests and distinguished by peaceful resolution of conflicts of interests.1 Throughout years with the change of its government, the United States has continually shifted its China policy by ongoing re-evaluation of Chinese behaviors and objectives in order to serve the US interests. During the Bill Clinton administration, U.S. pursued a “moving toward” strategic partnership policy. When George Walker Bush took over the presidency, there was a clearly divided difference in U.S.’s perception of China before and after the 911 incidents. In the early period, U.S. positioned China as its “strategic competitor,” while after the 911 attack, China was encouraged to be a “responsible stakeholder” to put collaboration ahead of competition. When Barack Hussein Obama took office in 2009, in the face of rising China, the Obama administration was apt to regard China as “anything but an enemy” with the tendency to adopt the “engagement” policy instead of “containment.” In fact, U.S.’s containment policy toward the Soviet Union after World War II was no longer plausible. China has gradually integrated into the global economy and had been overtly urged by the United States to move in this direction since the Nixon administration. * Part of this essay has been developed into a co-authored article, published by New Asia, a bilingual (Korean and English) quarterly journal issued by the New Asia Research Institute (NARI), under the name of “The Ties That Bind: The Emerging Asia-Pacific Regional Order and Taiwan-Korea Relations” in Summer 2012. ** Emily Szu-hua Chen is a graduate student in the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University. 1 Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 176. 1