Chapter 1 The outlook for US–China relations

At some point in the past 60 years, US–China relations have occupied nearly every imaginable niche on the spectrum: allies against Japan, bitter adversaries in Korea and de facto allies against the Soviet Union (after a period in which China could not decide which of the superpowers it feared the most so it elected to view them as conspiring to harm China). Since the end of the Cold War, the relationship has been more stable but only relative to the gyrations during the Cold War. It has still been an inherently turbulent relationship. It is instructive to note that there is one niche on the spectrum that the relationship has never appeared to occupy: relations that could reasonably be labelled as easy or comfortable. It is of some interest to ask when the United States first ‘saw ’ China as a player of consequence. In 1991–92, then Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney, was casting about for a new road-map, some coherent guidance for how the United States, and the Pentagon in particular, should approach a world without the Soviet Union. H