The US’s foreign policy “pivot” to Asia is designed to balance China’s influence in the region. However, it has so far caused more agitation than calm.
Until the mid-2000s, the byword of US policy towards China was “engagement”. Even the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 and the end of the cold war did not change this policy. The expectation behind it was that China would “become more like us” if the country was brought into the international community.
Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University believes that the US had a pivot-like strategy of “integrate but hedge” even in the 1990s. He might be right (he served in Bill Clinton’s administration) but no American official at the time openly talked about this strategy.