Continued strong commitments to progress in the Four Party Talks among Seoul, Pyongyang, Beijing, and Washington are critical, as would be policies in support of improved security and military contacts, both governmental and nongovernmental, among China, Japan, and the United States. In short, our alliance relationships in East Asia should put every effort toward shaping China's integration as a stabilizing influence for regional security. The challenges of our economic and security interactions with China at once share commonalities and illustrate deepening divisions in the U.S. approach to China. For both economic and security relations, the next administration will find that China should consume a far greater amount of time and hard thinking, requiring more energy than in the past at bilateral, multilateral, and domestic political levels to manage the relationship in constructive ways. This is a function of China's growing importance in regional and world affairs, and the next administration will need to give China and East Asian matters the greater weight they command.
Most indicators point to a rocky road ahead, with many potential detours into even worse conditions.
At best, a challenging period of contentious, cautious cooperation with China awaits the next administration. Bates Gill and Nicolas Lardy are senior fellows in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program. The Press Page has information on other periodicals and books published by the Brookings Institution.