General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Snowden's revelations: thumbs up or down? [View all]pnwmom
(108,977 posts)We trade with them, but we'd be nuts to trust them. And the CIA and NSA are supposed to be spying on them.
Japan and South Korea are our allies. We are not at war with China, but it is not our ally. It's an ally of North Korea, and it is a country whose power we are trying to contain.
http://news.msn.com/world/obama-seeks-to-ease-asian-allies-doubts-during-visit-to-japan
The difficulty of Obama's balancing act was underscored hours before he arrived on Wednesday night when Chinese state media criticized U.S. policy in the region as "a carefully calculated scheme to cage the rapidly developing Asian giant".
Obama told Japan's Yomiuri newspaper that while Washington welcomed China's peaceful rise, "our engagement with China does not and will not come at the expense of Japan or any other ally."
Leaders who will meet Obama on his Asia trip - which will also include stops in South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines - are also keeping a wary eye on the crisis in Ukraine through the prism of their own territorial disputes with Beijing.
Some of China's neighbors worry that Obama's apparent inability to rein in Russia, which annexed Crimea last month, could send a message of weakness to China.