The key to regional stability and security seemed to turn on Chinese-American relations. The question of how the United States could accommodate china’s surge to ever greater power status has been made difficult by more pressing Chinese demands for acceptance of it’s ‘core interests’ in sovereignty claims over Taiwan, and maritime Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) stretching from its immediate coast to cover most of the South China Sea. The acceptance of these demands would transform the distribution of power in the region as a whole and it would undermine the American position as the stabilizing power in East Asia. It could throw into jeopardy more than a century of American strategic policy in the Western Pacific to prevent the emergence of a major power capable of dominating the region. At the same time China and America strategic policy in the Western Pacific to prevent the emergence of a major power capable of dominating the region. At the same time China and America had become interdependent economically, both in terms of trade and in finance. China’s mercantilist economic strategy depended on America to continue to provide the public goods in the Asia-Pacific and the United States required cooperation from China if it were to address a whole rang of issues from the nuclear questions involving North Korea and Iran to more global problems of climate change and other transnational problems. China and America differed greatly in terms of their history, their modern experience, their societies and their political systems to the extent that it was difficult to build trust between them. The two powers tended to carry out hedging strategies against the possibility that the other might carry out policies damaging to its major security interests. But gnawing at the American position was that most Asian countries, including all its allies, had come to depend on the Chinese economy even as they still looked to the United States as their security guarantor. But given the growing interdependence between China and the United States, doubts necessarily arose about American willingness or ability to come to the aid of allies threatened by China.