U.S. anxiety over the ‘rise of China’ is nothing new

It has been more than three years since the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton announced the Obama Administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’, with subsequent comments from President Obama affirming U.S. interests in the region. Ben Coulson argues that this pivot to Asia should be seen against the background of more than six decades of U.S. anxiety and tension over the role of China in the region. He writes that for the U.S., China still represents a challenge to the ‘conventional’ narrative that the U.S. has a pre-eminent role to play in world politics, and in East Asia.