ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the key developments in US-China relations throughout the two-term presidency of Barack Obama, along with the approaches adopted in Washington designed to manage that relationship. It argues that the lack of significant deviation in post-Cold War US China policy points to the overall lack of a discernible Obama Doctrine towards China. The chapter explores that China recaptured a more prominent place in American imaginations around the time of Obama's election in 2008, as attention was purposefully diverted away from the Bush administration's 'War on Terror'. It then explains the broad absence of an Obama Doctrine and continuation of cautious engagement in part by the pragmatic need for Washington to retain cooperative relations with an increasingly wealthy and powerful state actor. The path of cautious engagement Obama soon found with China was already well trodden by Bush and Clinton, and it led directly into his second term.