The beginning of China’s rise as a global power can be dated to the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. Throughout the next 16 years of the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States engaged in intensive bilateral diplomacy with China with the aim of getting ever-greater Chinese support on issues ranging from security to the economy to the environment. The Bush administration launched a Strategic Economic Dialogue with China, and a separate Security Dialogue. President Obama combined these into a single Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). But the change in form was not important; the dialogues represented a continuous effort to draw China into the global system.
Diplomacy is the art of trying to get other countries to do what you want. In the case of the United States, we wanted China to support the economic and security institutions that were established under our leadership at the end of World War II. It is fashionable now to argue that the whole strategy of engaging China and inviting it into our global institutions has failed; but this assessment is too negative. In a recent essay, I identify eight specific issues on which we engaged intensively with China. The scorecard of these results is quite mixed. By my assessment:
- In three areas, China’s actions have gone beyond what reasonably could have been expected: currency and global imbalances, climate change, and nuclear non-proliferation (especially regarding Iran and North Korea)
- In two areas, the outcomes are about what should have been expected: intellectual property rights protection and development assistance; and
- On three issues, China has failed to do what we want: market access, militarization of the South China Sea, and democracy and human rights.
It is interesting that these successes and failures do not map onto particular arenas—economic or security.
It is this mixed record of diplomacy that makes it difficult to decide what to do next. Some voices call for decoupling and isolating China through a new Cold War, which would be very costly and is too hostile a response to the record. The objective here would be to prevent China from rising to be a co-equal power and is likely to fail. By 2017, there were 144 countries that had more trade with China than with the United States, including 50 countries in Africa and all countries in Asia except Afghanistan and Bhutan. If we try to isolate China, our partners are not likely to follow us, with the result that we isolate ourselves instead. I argue that, alternatively, we can draw on these lessons of failure and success to tailor an engagement strategy going forward that would be effective in getting Chinese cooperation in more areas, though probably not in all areas.
