Research On Obama Administration’s Asia

It has been seven years since Obama assumed office in 2008. During Obama’s term of office, the American global geopolitical strategy has undergone significant changes and its strategic focus has gradually shifted from Europe and the Middle East to the area of Asia-Pacific. Marked by the year of 2010, senior USG officials made frequent visits to Asia and officially launched the regional strategy, from “ Pivot to Asia” to the “Rebalancing”, aiming to tighten the control of Asia-Pacific region from aspects of diplomacy,military,economy and politics. The obvious assumption behind the strategy adjustment is to check and balance China in case it continues to rise. No matter in the “2010 National Security Strategy” released by the White House, or in the report released by DOD in 2012 and 2015, China was all labeled as “ potential threats” or “ultimate opposing force”. Thus, Obama’s China strategy has departed from the moderate policy with idealism and finally marched into the new circle of “realism balancing”. U.S toughly implemented “Rebalancing Strategy” in Asia-Pacific, expanded and strengthened its forward-deployed military force, preached “ Air Sea Battle” and contrived to draw countries in this region over to its side. What’s more, U.S deeply involved in the regional conflicts and tried to dominate the regional mechanism and create a posture of geopolitical encirclement and block towards China, thus maximized its Asia-Pacific hegemony by postponing China’s rise. This paper starts with the interactions between geopolitics and U.S China strategy, conducts a systematical analysis on U.S geopolitical strategy towards China, following a classical strategic thinking pattern in sequence, from interest estimate to threat evaluation, then target selection, finally strategic measures, hopefully to provide some hints for China to make its own strategic selections.This paper consists of four major parts. In the first part, the author explores to discuss the influence of classical geopolitics theory on American’s strategic thinking of China. The second part studies the history development skeleton of US geopolitical strategy towards China and the realistic causes of Obama administration’s strategic adjustment towards China through interest analysis and threat evaluation. The third part conducts concrete research on the goal and measures of Obama’s geopolitical deployment towards China. The last part focuses on the strategic limitations of Obama’s geostrategy and tries to offer some advices for China to make strategic responses.