US/china relations stuck at stalemate–small fluctuations, but won’t trigger significant deterioration or progress—empirics prove
Watson Institute 12 (Watson Institute of international and public affairs at Brown University, “The cyclical us-china military relationship,” Watson Institute at Brown, 2/21/2012, http://watson.brown.edu/news/2012/cyclical-us-china-military-relationship) KC
According to US Army Colonel Randy Lawrence, the US-China military relationship has been "stuck in a cyclical nature of starting and stopping, with no real improvement over the past 25 years." Lawrence is currently a student at the US Naval War College. From 2008 to 2011, he served as the Executive Officer to the US Defense Attaché in China. On February 16, Lawrence gave a talk at the Watson Institute's Joukowsy Forum titled "The Future of U.S.-China Relations: Cooperation or Competition?" US-Chinese relations began as a coldwar alliance opposed to the Soviet Union. This culminated in Washington agreeing to sell Black Hawk helicopters to Beijing in 1985, in what is now considered a high point of the bilateral military relationship. The Tiananmen Incident in 1989, however, brought the relationship to a screeching halt. In the 1990s, the White House again sought to engage China. The Clinton administration believed that the best way to ensure that China act responsibly was to make sure it had a stake in the international community. Relations between the two countries warmed somewhat, only to cool rapidly after it emerged that the US had mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. Relations went further downhill in 2001. In April of that year, a US intelligence aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet off Hainan Island in Southern China, causing outrage in China. Later that year, following 9/11, the Pentagon began a decade-long shift in attention towards the Middle East at the expense of East Asia. As the War on Terror winds down, the Obama administration has promised a "pivot" back towards East Asia. Despite this, Lawrence is not optimistic that military relations will improve significantly.
