What we support and defend

[Entropy]

I don't have time to lay out the post WWII history of US policy in the Pacific, nor to explain the latest defense strategic guidance to you line by line.

It's a simple question, I'm not asking for regional history nor a monograph. Here's the DSG:

Over the long term, China’’s emergence as a regional power will have the potential to affect the U.S. economy and our security in a variety of ways. Our two countries have a strong stake in peace and stability in East Asia and an interest in building a cooperative bilateral relationship. However, the growth of China’’s military power must be accompanied by greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region. The United States will continue to make the necessary investments to ensure that we maintain regional access and the ability to operate freely in keeping with our treaty obligations and with international law. Working closely with our network of allies and partners, we will continue to promote a rules-based international order that ensures underlying stability and encourages the peaceful rise of new powers, economic dynamism, and constructive defense cooperation.

The containment strategy for the USSR was designed to limit the spread of communism. The underpinning assumption behind Soviet containment was the belief that the USSR was an expansionist power. As Kennan said about the Soviets:

Its political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power."

Containment was:

...designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.

And here's how you've described containment of China:

The recent shift to the Pacific may not be a physical containment in name, but it is certainly being approached as a defacto physical containment by the US and China alike.

and

Any US strategy in the Pacific that is designed to work against China rather than with China is a form of containment, in fact if not in name.

I think the question of containment hinges on whether or not China is an expansionist power. I don't think it is, not like the Soviets were.

Additionally, our East Asia strategy contains two main themes:

1. Maintain our alliances in the Pacific.
2. Ensure freedom of the seas.

With an expansionist China these policy options will be a de facto policy of containment, but as I said, I don't subscribe to that view. I subscribe to the alternative of peaceful coexistence with a non-expansionist China. In that case there is no containment.