By Michael Auslin
After a while, an undertone creeps into discussions with Chinese counterparts on regional and global issues. Whether meeting with Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials, academics and policy analysts, or the media, an American soon begins to sense that part of the conversation is missing. What’s absent is not boilerplate about values, opportunities, or common interests, but rather a sense of China’s broader set of relationships. Ultimately, as one European diplomat put it to me, when it comes to China’s foreign policy, it’s all about the United States. This monofocus on America tells us a great deal about China’s worldview, but it also reveals the degree to which Washington is hampered in forging a better working relationship with Beijing.
Unlike the United States, which has had a complex, yet robust set of alliances and more informal partnerships in Asia since the 1950s, China has not formed deep ties with any Asian state. There is no analogue in Chinese foreign policy to America’s relationship with Japan or its initiatives with Singapore. While there is always skepticism abroad about Washington’s true intentions towards it’s Asian partners, and a resignation about the inherently unequal power relationship between America and any of its smaller allies, there is also recognition that the United States usually seeks some type of mutually-beneficial status. Although a superpower (or perhaps because of it), American diplomats have a basic predisposition towards equality in their negotiations and agreements. The U.S. military, for its part, has spent decades helping to train foreign armed forces, provide humanitarian aid, and of course serve as an ultimate guarantor of regional stability, at least theoretically.
Read the full story at The Diplomat