Description
China’s increasingly assertive behaviour in the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and its Belt and Road Initiative has so far produced a lacklustre response from the United States. Through the course of his presidency, the Obama administration began to reflect the limits of US power in the Asia-Pacific given the tepidness of the ‘pivot’ to Asia and the failed Tran-Pacific Partnership. More recently, the Trump administration's unilateral focus on trade with China has come at the cost of challenging China’s more assertive foreign policy and domestic Sinification of its peripheral territories. Taking into account the economic and social transformations stemming from the 2008 financial crisis this paper compares and evaluates the approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations in how they have understood and responded to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and regional territorial disputes. In short, this paper addresses how the US interprets Chinese regional geopolitics. The comparisons are orientated around the examination of how, discursively, spatially, and materially, the US is encountering new found limits to its ‘hegemony’ in Pacific Asia. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this for US foreign policy today.
