The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2022 23 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine— following its previous military operations in Georgia and Crimea, as well as intervention in Syria— serves as a useful “wake-up call” for the United States and its allies in Asia. In this article, I will reflect on U.S. policy toward China over the past 50 years and briefly offer my thoughts on the lessons we should have learned that will, hopefully, be useful in addressing the growing challenges we will face from China. In this I draw partly on my own experiences during a 32-year Foreign Service career that has been focused pri- marily on U.S.-China relations. Was U.S. Engagement Policy a Mistake? In the November/Decem- ber 2021 Foreign Affairs , John Mearsheimer called U.S. engagement policy toward China “a colossal strategic mistake,” arguing that in recent history “there is no comparable example of a great power actively fostering the rise of a peer competitor. And it is now too late to do much about it.” Mearsheimer wrote: “Washington promoted investment in China and welcomed the country into the global trading system, think- ing it would become a peace-loving democracy and a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led international order.” Nonetheless, he pos- ited, “China has always had revisionist goals” that were opposed to this order, and “the mistake was allowing it to become powerful enough to act on them.” In a subsequent rebuttal, G. John Ikenberry pointed out that U.S. engagement policy toward China had been part of a largely successful effort to create a postwar order in which “the United States pushed and pulled the international system in a direction that broadly aligned with its interests and values, promulgat- ing rules and institutions to foster liberal democracy, expand- ing security cooperation with European and East Asian allies, and generating international coalitions for tackling the gravest threats to humanity.” In this process, he noted, “Washington built counterweights to Chinese power through an invigorated and deepened alliance system” and “regional institutions in the broader Asia-Pacific region.” Ikenberry concluded: “The major failure of U.S. strategy toward China was to not make the country’s integration into the liberal capitalist systemmore conditional.” And he called on the United States “to work with its allies to strengthen liberal democracy and the global system that makes it safe—and to do so while looking for opportunities to work with its chief rival.” As I see it, to accept Mearsheimer’s basic thesis would essentially be to disavow the fundamental objectives of U.S. postwar foreign policy that we in the Foreign Service have worked to advance, even if often unsuccessfully. Even during my posting in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989, when we witnessed and offered assistance to the flood of political refugees coming out of the mainland, we retained hope that keeping China’s door open would eventually lead to its transformation into a more open and just society. We continued to work to promote bilateral ties during my tours in Shanghai in the mid-1990s, and then in Beijing in the early 2000s when China entered the World Trade Organization, and a decade later even as China began to assert and expand its regional presence and global reach. At the same time, it also became increasingly clear to me, especially during my last tour in Beijing (2011-2013) and over the past decade, that U.S. engagement policy had failed to alter China’s autocratic political system or to transform Beijing into a “responsible stakeholder” in the international arena, while propelling its rapid economic and military rise and enabling it to pursue an increasingly assertive foreign policy. Nonetheless, I continue to maintain that while this policy has not succeeded thus far, its long-term objectives remain valid and achievable. As Richard Nixon himself wrote in a prescient article in the October 1967 Foreign Affairs : “Taking the long view, we simply From the 1960s Cultural Revolu- tion, this Chinese propaganda poster reads: “Long live Chair- man Mao, the reddest sun in our hearts.” The crowd holds aloft his Little Red Book . SHAWSHOTS/ALAMY