Interests, Cooperation, Confidence, and Trust
There has been a lot of study on trust-building between national states. However, analysts defined the term trust in various ways. What makes things more complicated is the fact that people tended to use a number of related terms – such as trust, confidence, cooperation, and shared interests – in the same line without differentiating their different meanings and without discussing their relationships relative to each other. This makes the task of understanding trust and the mechanism for trust-building even more difficult. This section will try to define and differentiate these terms, and more importantly, to analyze their relations with one another. This will serve as a base for further analysis on trust-building between the U.S. and China on nuclear security.