In 2011 Hillary Clinton, then the American Secretary of State, wrote a controversial article in Foreign Policy in which she announced that Washington would be focusing its foreign and defence policy more on Asia. The American ‘pivot’, or rebalancing, had been prompted not only by an increasingly strong China, but also by the need to cut the American defence budget due to the economic crisis. In August 2011 President Obama and Congress agreed to a 500-billion dollar reduction of the defence budget over the following ten years. Bases were closed, troops were pulled out of Europe, and ordnance and weapons projects were cancelled. For the first time since the Second World War, the United States was retracting and focusing its remaining military capabilities on the region where its geopolitical interests were most at risk. As a result, for the first time in history Europe was no longer the defining factor in American foreign policy. Also under Obama, the United States put less emphasis on military power and more on diplomacy for the first time.

Despite this, China saw the rebalancing as a threat. This was logical, because concentrating increasingly scarce resources automatically results in this perception. The Switzerland-based professor of international history, Lanxin Xiang, has questioned why a country that is so heavily indebted and so financially interwoven with China would want to quarrel with that country. Other academics have even speculated whether America is aiming for a military confrontation, so as to let the country go bankrupt and become independent from a much weaker China. Kai Liao of the Institute for Strategic and Defence Studies in Beijing has concluded that in China, the American discussion about the ‘pivot’ or rebalancing is seen as an attempt to contain Chinese power. He bases his argument on numerous American government documents that back up his view of this strategic aim. According to him, this strategy was first formally introduced in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review. In his view, America's policy on China was based on a strategy of ‘dissuasion, deterrence and defeat’. According to Kai Liao, the first shift in power to China's benefit was already visible at the beginning of the 1990s.