Newly declassified documents contain important lessons for U.S. China policy.

APRIL 29, 2023, 6:00 AM Foregn Policy

By Michael J. Green, the CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, and Paul Haenle, the director of Carnegie China.

As U.S.-China relations transition from an era of engagement to one of strategic competition, some in the Biden and former Trump administrations have claimed to be abandoning four decades of naive American assumptions about Beijing. Past U.S. policy, they say, was based on a futile view that engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China. This, however, is not only a misreading of past U.S. policies but also dangerous analytical ground upon which to build a new national security strategy.

The fact is that no administration since that of Richard Nixon has made U.S. security dependent on Chinese democratization. Every administration has combined engagement with strategies to counterbalance China through alliances, trade agreements, and U.S. military power. Throwing out all previous U.S. approaches to China would mean throwing out some of the most important tools the current administration relies on to compete with China. And the Biden administration will not get its China strategy right until it is clear about what has worked in the past.

Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama; Stephen J. Hadley, Peter D. Feaver, William C. Inboden, and Meghan L. O’Sullivan (eds.); Brookings Institution Press, 774 pp., $39, February 2023

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