President Barack Obama, right, welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, Friday, June 7, 2013, in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
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Top officials in Beijing regard the pivot as something more sinister: a containment strategy reminiscent of the one the U.S. practiced against the Soviets during the Cold War, which featured a major military buildup and efforts to pry away satellite states from the Soviet sphere of influence. China's Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan, hinted at this view during a summer visit to Washington. "We hope the rebalancing strategy can bring peace to the Pacific region instead of seeking to weaken China," Chang said.
The Chinese have a point. "I do not know how one reassures our allies that we are responding to China's assertiveness and then tries to reassure China that it is not about them," says Daniel Blumenthal, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "China should expect a reaction to its 20-year peacetime buildup of forces. It's very destabilizing." After years of Chinese muscle flexing, Blumenthal argues, "We had to respond to remain credible to our allies and reassure them that we are reliable partners."
The Obama team itself is divided on whether China represents an opportunity--a growing economic giant and lucrative trade partner--or a challenge to U.S. power and interests. In the first term, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton took a warier view of China's intentions than did Donilon, whom one official jokingly calls a "panda hugger." Whatever their private views, Obama officials determined to avoid Chinese hostility have worked hard to explain that the pivot is about cooperation. "We welcome China's peaceful rise ... [We] believe that a strong and prosperous China is one that can help bring stability and prosperity to the region and to the world," Obama said before a 2012 meeting with Xi, who was then China's Vice President. U.S. officials argue that U.S.-backed security has enabled Asia's post--World War II boom.
And behind the scenes, top U.S. national-security officials have spent hours assuring the Chinese that the pivot has nothing in common with America's Cold War strategy of containment, whose goal was the total collapse of the Soviet Union. "When we have these conversations with the Chinese, we make it very clear that we know what containment looks like," Donilon says. "We know how to do it. We did it. This doesn't look anything like it."
To drive home the point, then Deputy Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy visited Beijing in December 2011 to meet with the Chinese military's then deputy chief of the general staff, General Ma Xiaotian. Ma and his colleagues had been complaining about American air and sea information-gathering missions, known as strategic-reconnaissance operations. Flournoy treated him to a short slide show that featured declassified data about equivalent surveillance missions the U.S. had conducted around the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At the time, Soviet-oriented reconnaissance amounted to "something like 80% to 90%" of all U.S. missions, Flournoy recalls. "And we told the Chinese that if you look at the percentage today around China, it is a single-digit percentage."