Structural realism and Dulles's China policy

Abstract

AbstractThe Eisenhower administration's tough containment policy toward China has been conventionally viewed as an unsensible policy resulting from domestic political pressures or ideology. Refuting the conventional explanations, this article argues that during the early Cold War, the US superiority in bipolarity drove China to balance the United States in Asia. Dulles, the architect of the China policy, made accurate assessments of the power structure in Asia and the inevitable enmity with China. Driven by structural imperative, he decided to pursue containment to maintain the favourable balance of power in Asia by retarding the relative power growth of China allied with the Soviet Union and secondarily by accelerating their conflict through harder pressure on a weaker China. This case long considered as a prime anomaly to balance of power theory actually demonstrates how powerfully distributions of power shape alliance behaviours of states in the anarchic international system.