The roots of US policy toward China are laid in the geopolitical thinking mode of its strategic culture. This mode of thinking first originated in Britain and later evolved into geopolitics. Bearing such thoughts, the United States sees China as a country at the southeastern rim of the Eurasian continent, and the rise of China is a threat to its dominance as a maritime state in the Eurasian continent. No matter the rotation of governing parties in the United States, containing the development of China is not merely an expedient for electoral politics but an inevitable choice for maritime states to contain continental states and an objectively necessary national security strategy aimed at retaining the global hegemony of the United States. As China further develops, such intention will become more and more apparent. In order to achieve the goal of slowing down China’s development pace and maintaining US’s political dominance over Eurasia, it seems that the United States has to build a maritime alliance system. The alliance between Japan and the United States will be further strengthened since Japan is a strategic pivot of this system. However, Japan’s perception of interests and strategic thinking are not fully aligned with those of the United States, and as a result, Japan will choose strategies with a certain degree of autonomy, thus eventually limiting the implementation of US’s geopolitical strategies. From the viewpoints of power transfer, geopolitics and ideology for the confrontation between maritime and continental states, this paper focuses on the limitations of the geopolitical thinking behind US’s policy-making toward China and the relatively autonomous strategy of Japan to analyze the status quo and underlying trends of China–US–Japan relations.
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