How should the USA deal with China should they contain or not contain China - Research Paper Example

This year featured spats between China versus Philippines; China versus Vietnam; and China versus Japan. The disagreements are loudly triggering diplomatic tensions as Chinese government send forth their marine vessels in shores that are within the territorial jurisdictions of other Southeast Asian countries. The situation alarmed the international community, especially United States of America, because this Chinese territorial aggression also strategically affects its geographic control in the Pacific regions and with allied countries.

This brought us the core issue, must US contain China or not? What is Containment? Before variegated positions are explicated, let us define first what containment all about is. Containment is a foreign policy strategy of the United States at the height of cold war which was prominently used by George F. Kennan in 1947 against communist nation to isolate and marginalize it to lessen it influence or remove its political clout from allied countries.1 Experts posit, by experience, that the containment theory of US resulted to the intervention of United States in Vietnam, Central America and in Grenada.

2 This was also adopted by US President Truman as part of the Truman doctrine and is also widely discussed in US and Iraq conflict.3 Containment is historically started in a long telegraph sent by George Kennan from Moscow to Washington in 1946 about the Soviet’s refusal to join the International Monetary Bank and World Bank which detailed the practices of the country and anent recommendation to use the policy of containment—which ultimately led to that historic Cold War.4 From a psychological vantage, containment is a control theory aiming at establishing internal and external factors to develop a law-abiding behaviour which could be considered as a defence or a protective insulation against potential conflict or delinquency.

5 Shouldn’t Contain Some political analysts argued that US shouldn’t contain China albeit the reactions of other countries who presumed that US intervention will help balance the power amid incessant aggression of Chinese soldiers to Hanoi, Philippines and Japan. Chinese however demanded from US, which was sought for intervention by aggrieved parties to refrain from getting involved asserting that the conflicting parties can resolve maritime and territorial disputes through bilateral consultations.

6 This call generated political mass actions by peoples who rallied in the streets and in Chinese embassies or even conducted live-fire drills (e.g. Vietnam) to demonstrate their disagreement with China’s two-face diplomatic strategy in relating with them: offering a hand for bilateral consultations but at the same time, aggressively sending marine soldiers within sovereign states’ shores to claim ownership or prior rights thereof.7 Affected countries wanted to internationalize the issue while Chinese opposed this effort to bring the international community to multilateral discourse on this problem arguing