"...America bids to remove Myanmar from China?s sphere of influence and intervenes in the Spratly Islands dispute. Whilst not totally out of the blue, the visit to Myanmar by Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State, in November 2011, came as a surprise to many Chinese leaders. Notwithstanding the quasi-democratic election of Myanmar?s new president, Thein Sein, supported by the military junta, the country had in fact failed to make much headway on humanitarian issues. The dissident Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was still under house arrest and a true democratic system, which for 20 years had been the official reason for American hostility towards Myanmar, had not yet been implemented. So why did the United States rush to support a junta which for decades it had heavily berated? In 1972, with Richard Nixon?s Beijing visit, the Chinese had had first-hand experience of such political gyrations. In that period, the Americans had rehabilitated China in order to isolate Vietnam and at the same time strike a formidable blow against the Soviet Union, which would find itself with one more declared adversary on its southern border, and, what is more, an adversary supported by the United States. Just as in the 1970s when the United States used China to isolate the USSR, now they were going to play the Myanmar card in order to complete the encirclement of China. This was the logical conclusion that the Chinese leaders came to in light of their past political experience. In reality, this paradigm change was not totally unexpected. At the beginning of his presidency, in 2009, in his dealings with the Chinese, Barack Obama had gone out on a limb, quietly downplaying human rights issues and even offering to sell them sensitive technology..."