Sino-US Engagement in Asia-Pacific: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Asia Pacific is a global growth engine and remaining cognizant to this fact, the US is striving to maintain its regional supremacy. China has achieved a remarkable growth in last two decades while the US was involved in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current transformation of China at global landscape forced the US policy makers to revisit and review their strategic priorities in Asia Pacific to harness the China’s expanding political clout. Thus, Sino–US strategic engagement in Asia-Pacific is quite significant under the prevailing geo-political landscape and deems thorough research. The US-China strategic engagement in Asia-Pacific is a blend of cooperation and competition simultaneously. In keeping with the core realist theories and postulates of power transition, the US is and will remain as a dominant power. However, economically the US is giving away its some influence which is taken over by China. The US think tanks consider China as a competitor and hence managing China’s rise is a test case for the US diplomacy in Asia-Pacific. China as a rising power has posed a substantial challenge to the US led global order. The research concludes that contrary to the US approaches the China is currently focusing on soft power approach and pursuing a peaceful rise to extend its economic signature across the globe to economically influence the regional geo-political order. US-China clash of geo-strategic interests in Asia-Pacific has led to regional polarization and the phenomenon is quite devastating in South Asia with two nuclear armed arch rivals India-Pakistan. Thus, the developing global scenarios merits visibility of both powers strategies so that the world may not witness another catastrophe owing to great powers engagement. Pakistan also needs to put its house in order and keep its policy open instead of aligning any power.

      Keywords:      US, China, Asia-Pacific, regional and global Order