America's Doomed China Strategy (Ted Galen Carpenter, The National Interest)

Two developments in the past month indicate that Washington’s mixed policy of engagement and containment (or “congagement”) toward China has begun to tilt more toward containment. The first development was the visit of Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to India in mid-April and the signing of a bilateral cooperation agreement on military logistics. The other episode is President Obama’s just-completed trip to Vietnam and the announced lifting of the long-standing arms embargo on that country. As usual, American officials insist that the marked change in U.S. policy toward Hanoi is not in any way directed against China. But such statements strain credulity, especially when viewed in the larger context of U.S. warships conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea and bluntly reminding Beijing of America’s security obligations to the Philippines under a bilateral defense treaty

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/americas-doomed-china-strategy-16365