Abstract
Princeton professor Aaron Friedberg has made a valuable contribution to the debate on how the United States should respond to a rising China. He argues that the United States should build military forces capable of overcoming China’s emerging anti access/area-denial (A2AD) capabilities in the western Pacific. Failule to do so, he says, may lead to Chinese control of East Asia’s resources, which in turn will enable China to “project power into other regions, much as the United States was able to do from the Western Hemisphere throughout much of the twentieth century.”
Before coming to his conclusions and recommendations, Friedberg provides an informative survey of several relevant subjects. First, he places China’s rise in historical context and shows how and why the wealth and power concentrated in the West for the past two hundred years are increasingly shifting to Asia. Next, he provides a useful overview of U.S. relations with China. From 1950 through 1969, U.S. policy sought to isolate and contain China. For the next twenty years, China and the United States developed a much more open relationship and became aligned to offset the power of the Soviet Union.
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