I once believed the Beltway Mandarins when they said US wasn't trying to contain China, not because I trust them, I don't, but because I gave them too much credit for being rational and geopolitical realists. I was wrong.
Wow, this Clinton email: Blumenthal: "Have a good trip building the de facto China containment alliance."
That's hardly news to anyone who has been paying attention to modern events or history.
The US is top dog, and will do anything and everything in its power to remain so, or at least factions within its military and political machine will. Its what top dogs have always done in history.
However, America is going about it in a very illogical, disjointed, uncoordinated, and sometimes downright self-contradictory way. I think that is mainly because there are conflicting views and beliefs between successive administrations, and often between departments and elements within the same administration.
The first and most unforgivable strategic mistake American governments keep making is automatically thinking China is out to get them, and that everything China plans or does is ultimately designed to undermine and harm American interests.
Thus, rather than try to find out what China's real strategic aims and ambitions might be, by allowing China the room to make choices and base their assessments, analysis and strategic choices on how China acts and behaves, America seems terrified of the idea of allowing China to do anything of its own choosing, and feels like it has to micromanage and/or counter everything China does.
A great big part of the reason why western analysis cannot get a clear reading on Chinese strategic aims and objectives is because they have had almost no opportunity to observe what China would do when given the freedom to choose any course it wants. Almost always, Chinese choices and actions are constrained and/or influenced by something America or one of its regional allies has done or said.
That, and the fact that they automatically treat any and everything the Chinese government says with instinctive distrust.
So, if you cannot observe what someone does if allowed to choose and automatically discounts everything they say, is it any wonder you cannot get a good feel for their character and intentions?
Rather than give China the space and freedom to make choices and only reacting to the "bad" ones and rewarding the "good" ones as a means of influencing and shaping Chinese intentions and future choices, America is pretty much trying to slap China down every time it does anything.
The only belief and behaviour that kind of (mis)treatment encourages is not favourable to America or the world order it stands for.
It is still not too late to pull back from that precipice, but time is surely running out.
