ABSTRACT
The record of US-China relations in the past decade is too recent to offer a complete or persuasive view of the motivations and intentions of US and Chinese leaders. Why international leaders make the decisions they do remains a key question for debate among historians and international relations specialists, and the US and Chinese leaderships’ moves regarding one another are no exception to this pattern. Chinese decision making toward the United States and major international questions remains opaque.1 The George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy decision making on China and other key issues also is often hard to discern. For example, even regarding the Bush administration’s critical decision to militarily invade Iraq in 2003, there appears to be no definitive assessment of exactly why the US administration leaders decided to launch the invasion.
