“Suddenly Washington is talking tough about China. But what exactly has changed?” Drake Bennett writes on The Boston Globe (free registration required):
“China has never been a country you have the luxury of not thinking about,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution. Indeed, what now looks like a change of course on China, says Richard Haass, who retired as director of policy planning at the State Department in June 2003 and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is in fact a long-running administration debate making its way to the surface. “The Bush administration has always been of more than one mind on China,” said Haass in a recent interview. “There’s always been a view within the administration . . . that China is a threat, or at a minimum, a potential threat.