“Over the last two and a half years,” then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Policy , “one of my top priorities has been to identify and expand areas of common interest, to work with China to build mutual trust, and to encourage China’s active efforts in global problem-solving.” Clinton’s essay, a major statement of the Obama Administration’s so-called pivot to Asia, should of course not be read in good faith. It’s vapid in the ways such documents are typically vapid (“our most potent asset as a nation is the power of our values”) and ominous in the ways they are typically ominous (“a more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantages”). And still, a text like “America’s Pacific Century” marks an already bygone moment. The China described by Clinton was a rising but not yet threatening power, a challenger who might still be made a (junior) partner.…