Joseph Nye: Power shift in Asia but China is not a new Soviet Union

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Henry Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing, which launched the process of mending a 20-year breach in diplomatic relations between the United States and China.

That trip, and president Richard Nixon's subsequent visit, represented a major Cold War realignment. The US and China put aside their intense hostility in a joint and successful effort to contain an expansionist Soviet Union.

Today, the Soviet Union has vanished and Chinese power is growing. Some Americans argue that China's rise cannot be peaceful, and that the US, therefore, should now adopt a policy of containing the People's Republic. Indeed, many Chinese officials perceive that to be the current American strategy. They are wrong.

After all, Cold War containment of the USSR meant virtually no trade and little social contact. Today, by contrast, the US not only has massive trade with China, but also extensive social contact, including 125,000 Chinese students attending American universities.

With the end of the Cold War, the containment of the Soviet Union ushered in by Mr Kissinger's visit could no longer serve as the basis for US-China relations.

When I was supervising the Pentagon's East Asia Strategy Review in 1994, we rejected the idea of containment of China for two reasons. If we treated China as an enemy, we were guaranteeing an enemy in the future. If we treated China as a friend, we could not guarantee friendship, but we could at least keep open the possibility of more benign outcomes.

In addition, it would have been difficult to persuade other countries to join a coalition to contain China unless China resorted to bullying tactics, as the Soviets did after the Second World War.

Instead of containment, the strategy that the Clinton administration devised could be termed "integrate but hedge" - something like Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" approach to strategic agreements with the Soviets.

On the one hand, the US supported China's membership in the World Trade Organisation and accepted Chinese goods and visitors. On the other hand, the Clinton-Hashimoto Declaration of April 1996 affirmed that the US-Japan security treaty, rather than being a Cold War relic, would provide the basis for a stable and prosperous East Asia.

The Bush administration continued to improve bilateral relations, while deepening the economic dialogue with China. Then deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick made clear that the US would accept the rise of China as a "responsible stakeholder". That policy continues to guide the Obama administration, which has broadened the annual economic consultations with China to include security issues.

As I argue in my new book The Future of Power, one of the major power shifts of the 21st century is Asia's revival.

This is a natural and welcome evolution, as it enables hundreds of millions of people to escape from poverty. At the same time, however, it has given rise to fears that China will become a threat to the US.

Such fears appear exaggerated, particularly when one considers that Asia is not one entity. It has its own internal balance of power. Japan, India, Vietnam, and other countries do not want to be dominated by China, and thus welcome a US presence in the region. Unless China develops its "soft power," the rise in its military and economic power is likely to frighten its neighbours into seeking coalitions to balance its rise.

Over the past two years, China has worsened its relations with Japan, India, South Korea, Vietnam, and others - quite a remarkable record that confirms the US strategic premise that "only China can contain China".

If power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants, it is important to remember that sometimes our power is greater when we act with others rather than merely over others. This important dimension of a "smart power" strategy for the 21st century is not captured by the concept of containment.

When Mr Kissinger landed in Beijing four decades ago, he ushered in not only a Cold War transformation, but also a new era of US-Chinese engagement.

l Joseph Nye was assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, and is currently a professor at Harvard University. He is the author of The Future of Power.