US' rhetoric of reassurance needs supporting with actions as its strategic rebalancing to Asia-Pacific has damaged trust

Whichever candidate wins the presidential election in the United States, how they handle relations with China over the next four years will be critically important.

For the last four years, the Obama administration's China policy has been a combination of two contradictory approaches, namely strategic reassurance and strategic rebalancing.

The concept of strategic reassurance, initiated by former deputy secretary of state James Steinberg, is designed to mitigate China's suspicions about US intentions by encouraging China to cooperate with the US agenda and countering the lack of trust that blocks the two countries cooperating on their mutual interests. The US rhetoric of "welcoming a China that takes on a responsible leadership", "China's peace and prosperity is in accordance with US interests" and "keeping a neutral stance toward China's territory disputes" are all manifestations of this approach.

The concept of strategic rebalancing originated with the US Department of Defense. It is explained as a response to China's increasing military power. Though the Obama administration frequently claims that the strategic rebalancing is not targeted at China, coping with Beijing's growing influence is obviously one of its top priorities. By strengthening its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, actively participating in multilateral institutions, and consolidating its relations with its allies, the Obama administration is determined to counter China's anti-access and area-denial capability, shape the environment for China's rise, manage China's pace of "going out" and dissuade China from challenging US leadership in the Asia-Pacific region.

There is an obvious contradiction between the US' strategic reassurance and strategic rebalancing. The goal of strategic reassurance is to ease China's suspicions of the US' presence in the Asia-Pacific region, while strategic rebalancing not only gives China further reason to doubt the US, it also encourages China to better protect its territory, security and development interests.

As a result, the credibility of reassurance has been dramatically weakened by the rebalancing, and even worse, could be considered some kind of deception.

As China's military power grows, more must be done to eliminate the prospects of a military conflict between the US and China.

The contradiction between strategic reassurance and strategic rebalancing has caused friction and damaged mutual trust. Consequently, the willingness of the two countries to cooperate with each other on many urgent regional and global issues has been badly weakened. Furthermore, cooperation on economic and trade issues has also been jeopardized. The investment by Chinese companies in the US, which could be mutually beneficial and become the basis for increasing the two countries' economic ties, has been hindered by unnecessary security concerns.

It seems, however, that the Obama administration and US foreign policy experts alike have realized that a gap exists between reassurance and rebalancing, and started to think seriously about how this gap can be bridged.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that "new answers" should be applied to the "old question" of relations between established and rising powers; Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he welcomed closer cooperation between the two countries' militaries during his recent visit to China; and some experts in US academic circles are calling for a "re-rebalancing" of the US' Asia-Pacific strategy, all of which suggest the US side wants to increase the coherence between strategic rebalancing and strategic reassurance.

China has responded to this by advocating establishing a new type of major power relationship and actively pursuing dialogue with US and more concrete cooperation on a wide range of regional issues.

The US should take concrete actions to make its strategic reassurance more than just rhetoric, and make its strategic rebalancing less provocative by establishing greater cooperation with the Chinese military. China's responsibility, as a rapidly rising power, is to transparently exert its growing power by contributing to regional security and development with cooperative and constructive involvement in the Asia-Pacific region.

The author is deputy director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. www.chinausfocus.com

(China Daily 11/01/2012 page8)