Brent Scowcroft Center Resident Senior Fellow Robert A. Manning writes for Nikkei Asian Review on why US China strategy should be based on counterbalancing, not containment:
China is at the center of both US and, as seen in a recent defense white paper, Japanese national strategy. Since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, US foreign policy thinkers of all stripes have been frantically trying to figure out: What is the grand strategy that will succeed containment? Where is the next George Kennan, author of “Mr. X,” the 1947 Foreign Affairs essay that led to the containment policy toward the USSR?
That nobody has won the Kennan sweepstakes reflects the extraordinary complexity of a world of increasing disorder and uncertainty, one where threats are many but none rise to the level of the existential threat posed by the USSR.