“When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, Sir?”
This famous John Maynard Keynes quote opens the fifth chapter of David Shambaugh’s new book, Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America, but in many ways it sums up the central theme for the entire book. Shambaugh’s subject is the recent, and continuing, sea change in the US-China bilateral relationship, which has included the historic transformation of a fifty-year-old US foreign policy of building closer ties with China.
As Shambaugh describes, American interest in developing a relationship with China dates to the latter years of the Chinese empire, and it grew after the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China. After the Communists took power in Beijing in 1949, Dean Acheson’s State Department wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the new People’s Republic of China, but theirs was a minority position inside Washington; that option was closed off by the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. Lack of US domestic political support and international political conflict over Taiwan, and then Vietnam, kept the US and Chinese governments apart in the 1950s and 1960s, though contact was made as needed through their respective embassies in Poland.
Kissinger’s and Nixon’s trips to China in 1971–72 restored official government interaction, and the diplomatic relationship was fully normalized in 1979, inaugurating what Shambaugh calls “the period of ‘high engagement’” that lasted until 2016. There were challenges to the bilateral relationship during the era of engagement, and some moments—such as the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown—were deeply fraught. Each US administration brought its own nuances to engagement with China. During Obama’s presidency, however, serious fissures began appearing between the two governments. The first Trump administration abandoned engagement entirely—starting as early as the spring of 2017—in favor of “competition.”
Anyone interested in world politics or American politics will sooner or later encounter the question of how and why this transformation is taking place. Here, Shambaugh offers his answer: The facts have changed. He presents two guiding questions, or “puzzles,” up front, and they are perhaps two of the most important questions guiding US policy moving forward. First, what explains the apparent instability in the US-China relationship over the long term? Second, what explains the recent collapse in support inside the United States for “engagement with China”? The two are intimately related. He points out that there has been a cycle “regularly back and forth from amity to enmity over many decades and centuries.” The current fraught moment is a microcosm of this longer-term trend. The tensions expressed in the short term must have long-term roots.
Shambaugh sets the stage with an analysis defining the substance and boundaries of “engagement as process and Engagement as strategy” (emphasis in the original). He then explores the origins, rise, and consolidation of engagement in part two, before exploring the weakening, collapse, and replacement of engagement in part three. The final section of the book analyzes what Shambaugh calls “The Great American China Policy Debate” and concludes with a presentation of his own policy recommendations for Washington. An intriguing appendix seeks to give the view from Beijing, so to speak, by reviewing the scholarship of Chinese experts on the United States as it pertains to US engagement policies and recent trends in US politics and policy.
Engagement was not simply a government policy; it was a coalition.
In a nutshell, Shambaugh argues that the long-term roots of instability in the relationship are found in the potential for a mismatch between US objectives and Chinese behavior. The United States has had a consistent goal of liberalizing China—and not just since the 1970s, but “since the 1780s.” The relationship has been warm when Chinese policy has coincided with US goals; the relationship has cooled when Chinese policy has diverged and even become confrontational. The contemporary expression of that (potential for) instability, he argues, runs deeper than simply policy change in the United States. Rather, the political “coalition” underpinning engagement has itself collapsed.
It is a crucial piece of Shambaugh’s argument that engagement was not simply a government policy; it was a coalition. He thus takes a broad view in assembling his cast of characters. Over the course of the book, his analysis incorporates several spheres: government, policy experts, civil society, and business. That approach is one of the book’s useful contributions to understanding our current political moment, and how policy works in a more general sense. He pays attention not just to the policy (or “strategy”) itself but also pays attention to the broader political environment in which policy emerges and operates, and how the two shape each other.
A second contribution of the book is Shambaugh’s subsidiary argument that the collapse of support for engagement in the United States has really unfolded over two separate “debates.” The first, which he dates from 2016 to 2021, was over whether engagement “had failed.” The second began in 2021, and asked: now what? This distinction is helpful for elucidating what we have been witnessing in Washington over the last two presidential administrations: it explains the sheer complexity of disagreement over the United States’ China policy. Consensus that engagement has indeed failed does not imply consensus on what should be done instead.
Shambaugh, in fact, explicates five distinct “schools of thought” on US-China policy. (Fascinatingly, his appendix discusses an analysis of the US policy debate by a Chinese scholar who also divides US thinkers into five groups, although his five groups are much different than Shambaugh’s.) “The Stealthy Rival School” has as its core proposition that China “possess[es] a coherent, multifaceted, long-term conspiratorial strategy and plan” to replace the United States as a world leader. Michael Pillsbury and Rush Doshi are two representatives of this school. Next is “the Comprehensive Competition School,” which Shambaugh calls “the largest and most complex to parse,” and it is the most institutionalized. It is widely held by government officials—in both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration; Shambaugh identifies himself with this school. It is complex because it views the bilateral relationship as a competition across many dimensions of international relations, including political, economic, and military dimensions.
“The Strategic Empathy School” rests on a more general proposition: it is important for US policymakers to understand the thinking and the worldview of Beijing. Its representatives include H. R. McMaster, as well as David Lampton and Thomas Fingar. These experts draw different conclusions from assessments of Beijing’s view of the relationship: McMaster and his allies, for instance, seek to inform US policy for competition with China; Lampton and Fingar, on the other hand, see an understanding of Beijing’s views as a warning against a too-aggressive China policy.
“The Re-Engagement School” describes those who argue that the long-standing engagement policy remains the best course of action. This group includes former officials such as Henry Paulson, Stephen Hadley, Charlene Barshefsky, J. Stapleton Roy, and Susan Thornton, as well as David Lampton. Finally, “the Managed Competition School” accepts many of the propositions of those who advocate for competition with China, but seeks to mitigate and limit the “risks” of competition via diplomatic engagement. Shambaugh associates this school with certain former Biden administration officials, including Jake Sullivan and Nicholas Burns, as well as China experts Scott Kennedy and Ryan Hass. Shambaugh associates himself with this school as well.
Each school implicitly rests on a different diagnosis of the problem: namely, why did engagement fail? Or, we could say, who is responsible? Readers may notice the contrast between the references in the title and in the analysis to how China “lost America” and the study’s focus on US politics and policy. The apparent disconnect derives from the tension that Shambaugh highlights between US expectations and Chinese behavior. The readers might ask themselves, is the United States primarily responsible by holding unrealistic expectations, or is China primarily responsible by pursuing aggressive policies? Shambaugh himself draws a nuanced conclusion. Essentially, he posits that the combination of US objectives and Chinese behavior “has produced an action-reaction dynamic in the US-China relationship.”
The question of responsibility, as I have put it, for the collapse of the US-China relationship, and especially Shambaugh’s treatment of it, echoes earlier scholarly debates over whether US or Soviet policy was more responsible for the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s. It is a question that Melvyn Leffler sought to resolve using the idea of the “security dilemma.” What Shambaugh offers is in some ways a companion argument about a security dilemma at the heart of US-China relations.
What is the purpose of dwelling on the question of responsibility for the breakdown in the relationship? It is an opportunity to take this exercise not as a form of assigning blame, but as an invitation to “strategic empathy” with both Beijing and Washington. That is, an invitation to understand how each side perceives the challenges, and shape policy accordingly. Shambaugh has delved deeply into the US debate. His argument shifts the reader’s attention back to China.
The implication is that engagement did not only fail, but it was counterproductive.
In fact, his argument suggests several new questions that others seeking to contribute to the United States’ China policy debate ought to consider. First, why the apparent change in Chinese policy around, roughly, 2008–12? Shambaugh suggests that expanding US engagement triggered a counter-reaction, which is plausible. But how do we explain the timing and the nature of the intensification of Chinese opposition to the United States? Were there at any time alternative courses of action on offer in Beijing? The implication is that engagement did not only fail, but it was counterproductive. Why has US policy failed to influence Beijing? Has it? Do we really know, or indeed, can we know? Shambaugh points out that one of the changes in the bilateral relationship has been how difficult academic work in China has become for foreign scholars. To what extent can we develop “strategic empathy” if we know relatively little about China’s policy-political environment?
The final intriguing piece of Shambaugh’s argument I want to consider is whether there is a definable range of how far US expectations and Chinese behavior need to diverge before the relationship begins to break down. Mapping the oscillations that Shambaugh traces in the relationship can help with this question. At the broadest level, Shambaugh describes a first era of engagement lasting until 1949–50, followed by a period of containment lasting until Nixon’s famous trip to China, a transitional period continuing through the Reagan administration, and a second era of engagement that lasted until approximately 2016. The first era of engagement was brought to an end by the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and by the Korean War. The dramatic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 did not bring an end to the second era of engagement; however, there does not appear to be any comparably dramatic event that precipitated the collapse of engagement in the mid-2010s. Shambaugh also points out that the importance of ideology within the bilateral relationship has waxed and waned over time. Those oscillations generally map onto the waxing and waning of the strength of the relationship, but not necessarily to the fortunes of engagement.
Despite their importance in shaping the nature of the bilateral relationship, neither dramatic events nor ideology appears to have determined the fate of engagement between the two countries. Instead, the relative power balance between them appears to be the defining external feature shaping when the divergence between Chinese behavior and US expectations grows wide enough to overturn engagement. In 1949–50, during the collapse of the first version of engagement, China could be seen as part of the growing communist bloc during the emerging Cold War. What was different in the mid-2010s compared with the early 1990s was that China was then a major military power.
In this way, one might argue that it is the US perception of Chinese behavior in global context as much as the practicalities of Chinese behavior that push the two countries apart. If it is correct to conclude that the relative power imbalance is the primary external condition that shapes the bilateral relationship, then Shambaugh’s argument seems a complement to Graham Allison’s famous “Thucydides’s Trap” thesis: changes in the balance of power that might produce a new hegemon put the relatively rising and established powers on “a collision course,” in Allison’s phrase.
All in all, Shambaugh offers an argument worth considering. The United States’ China policy moving forward will require practical wisdom and pragmatic judgment on behalf of policymakers. He sees the two countries entering an era which, in some ways, will echo the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but in others will be far more complex. He believes US officials ought not to shy away from “competition” with China, and even “decoupling” in certain areas, but he also argues there are appropriate limits to that competition. The book’s scope may prove overwhelming to readers less familiar with the history and current state of the US-China bilateral relationship. It is perhaps not the best first book to read for an introduction to the subject. But for the student interested in writing a thesis on some aspect of the US-China relationship and searching for a research question, this is a good place to start searching for a new puzzle.