Ya. V. LEKSYUTINA Candidate of Political Sciences, Associate Professor of St. Petersburg State University US-China relations Keywords:, USA. China, Southeast Asia. ASEAN, the new US military strategy The strengthening of China's integrated power over the past decade has been accompanied by an intensification of its foreign policy. Beijing's foreign policy and foreign economic activities in various regions are based on the task of expanding its presence. Beijing's active, offensive line of behavior often leads to open or latent competition for regional spheres of influence with other world powers. First of all, this concerns rivalry with the United States, which has extensive interests around the globe and does not want to give up its position not only on a global but also on a regional scale. It seems that the most acute US-Chinese rivalry is manifested in Southeast Asia (SE). This is due to the growing contradiction between the special position of the United States, which has been established since the end of the Cold War, as a state that claims to be the dominant force in all of East Asia, and China's desire to establish itself as a regional leader. At the same time, the southern part of this region - Southeast Asia, around which almost all the integration processes currently taking place in East Asia-can play a key role in such a confrontation. Washington's characteristic distancing from Southeast Asia in the 1990s, which followed the disappearance of the only serious regional competitor, the Soviet Union, after the end of the Cold War, allowed China to temporarily freely build up its foreign policy and foreign economic positions in the region. But Washington's anti-terrorist campaign, which was launched after the events of September 11, 2001, intensified US ties with a number of Southeast Asian countries where Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations operated. During the Obama administration, it was replaced by the characteristic of the period of the presidency o ... Read more