A new face to US-China ties By Peter Lee, Asia Times

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The Barack Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond the unilateralism of the George W Bush years, and reassert America's global influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based multilateralism. With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of "strategic reassurance".

However, the policy has not yielded the systemic breakthroughs that the Obama administration hoped to achieve on climate change, non-proliferation, Middle East security, still less on US-China relations.

Instead, increasingly acrimonious exchanges between Beijing and Washington reveal the contradictions inherent in attempting to shoehorn an authoritarian, mercantilist and suspicious nation into a refurbished world system that ostensibly promotes democracy, open markets, multilateralism, while forcefully advancing American interests.