By Ted Galen Carpenter

June 21, 2016

"The United States has taken a number of actions in recent years to sustain its strategic primacy in East Asia and the western Pacific. Many of those actions look suspiciously like a containment policy directed against China's growing economic and military capabilities - and, hence, its growing regional influence. The return of U.S. military forces to the Philippines after a two-decade absence, combined with the Obama administration’s rather unsubtle tilt in favor of Manila's stance regarding its territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea, is perhaps the most visible manifestation.

But Washington's efforts to strengthen its bilateral security alliances with Japan and South Korea and broaden their scope beyond their traditional focus on self-defense to deal with broader 'regional contingencies' also fall into that category. So, too, do the efforts of the Bush and Obama administrations to foster greater strategic cooperation with India, a campaign that has produced a growing volume of U.S. arms sales to that country. Finally, the latest diplomatic signal of a containment policy came last month with President Obama's visit to Vietnam and the lifting of the long-standing arms embargo against that country."

Read more:
http://www.chinausfocus.com/foreign-policy/how-beijing-is-countering-u-s-strategic-primacy/

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