BOOK REVIEW: Breaking the Engagement: How China Won and Lost America
By David Shambaugh / Oxford University Press
Reviewed by: Paul Heer
The Reviewer — Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
REVIEW — David Shambaugh’s newest book Breaking the Engagement: How China Won and Lost America chronicles the rise and fall of US “engagement” with the People’s Republic of China over the past five decades. It’s a well-told story, based on Shambaugh’s comprehensive and even encyclopedic research (as exhibited in his previous books) and in this case his own fifty years of personal interaction with scholars, officials, and countless others involved in the U.S.-China relationship. (Full disclosure: I have known Shambaugh for three decades and consider him a friend and mentor.)
The book recounts the origins of U.S. engagement with China during the Nixon administration—its rationale and its objectives, and the many American constituencies that made up what Shambaugh calls the “Engagement Coalition.” It then tells how “engagement as process and Engagement as strategy” evolved under successive U.S. presidents. This culminated circa 2017, when debate emerged over whether the strategy had been ill-conceived and proven a failure. Although that debate has never been fully resolved, Shambaugh asserts that it has been supplanted by the “Counter-China Coalition” and a new debate over how the United States should respond to the threat that China now poses to America.
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Shambaugh identifies five cohorts in that debate among America’s China-watchers, none of which are mutually exclusive: (1) the “Stealthy Rival School,” which embraces the most alarming view of the China threat; (2) the “Comprehensive Competition School,” where Shambaugh primarily places himself; (3) the “Strategic Empathy School,” which emphasizes the importance of understanding China’s mindset and perceptions; (4) the “Reengagement School,” which basically believes that the original strategy should be revived; and (5) the “Managed Competition School,” which was essentially the Biden Administration’s approach to China.
Shambaugh makes his own position very clear: “Engagement strategy has failed miserably” and is “D-E-A-D.” In his view, it was based on American naiveté about China’s strategic intentions and an idealistic belief that the United States over time could shape China into a liberal democracy. Both of these were fatally undermined by the rise of Xi Jinping, who instead has made China more repressive at home and more illiberal and coercive abroad. Shambaugh thus welcomes the eclipse of the engagement debate by the debate over how to deal with Xi’s China.
But he does not address an intervening but no less important debate over what Beijing’s strategic intentions actually are. Shambaugh appears to subscribe to the assessment of the “Stealthy Rival School” that China aspires to replace America as the global hegemon—quoting former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns that “they want to overtake the United States as the dominant country globally.” However, this is still subject to argument, including from others (like me) who judge that Beijing aspires instead to maximize its power and influence in a multipolar world, partly because it recognizes that global hegemony is probably unachievable and unsustainable. This fault-line is crucial to the debate over how the United States should be confronting the challenge from China, because it matters very much what the nature and scope of that challenge is. This also relates to Shambaugh’s admonition, in his critique of the “Strategic Empathy School,” that anticipating Beijing’s response “should not be a reason to not undertake a given action against China” because the United States “must act in its own interests.” But it might not be in U.S. interests to antagonize China on the basis of an inaccurate or flawed understanding of Beijing’s motives and objectives.
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Notwithstanding that unresolved issue, Shambaugh’s policy recommendations are generally sound and reasonable, and likely to draw support from across all five “schools.” They include developing a coherent and comprehensive China strategy, reinvigorating America’s competitiveness, coordinating China policy with allies and partners, and maintaining dialogue with Beijing—as long as it is a vehicle for addressing substance (and presumably is not called “engagement”). Although he judges (accurately, in my view) that the U.S. and China are facing an “indefinite comprehensive competitive rivalry,” he allows for the possibility of “some limited areas of important potential cooperation” and “a kind of equilibrium” that is “comparable to the détente phase of the Cold War.” But the bottom line, alas, is that “there is no realistic prospect or false nirvana of returning to an amicable and cooperative bilateral relationship.”
Is this a premature or fatalistic judgment? It may depend on how one assigns blame for the downward spiral in U.S.-China relations. Although Shambaugh acknowledges “an action-reaction dynamic in the U.S.-China relationship” and notes that “a significant cohort” of U.S. observers assign “at least some blame on the U.S.” for the end of engagement and the advent of strategic competition, he clearly holds Beijing primarily if not quite exclusively responsible. Although he criticizes those American engagers who had unreasonable expectations of China, he asserts that Beijing—and Xi in particular—has been “the dependent variable” determining the course of the U.S.-China relationship.
This is reflected in a very thought-provoking appendix in which Shambaugh surveys Chinese assessments of the U.S.-China relationship and the reasons for its deterioration. He repeatedly emphasizes that China’s America-watchers never acknowledge any Chinese accountability: “It was the United States that was 100 percent to blame” and “it is always the other side’s fault.” But it’s worth asking how different this really is from the prevailing narrative in Washington, which despite a greater “capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism,” nonetheless also tends to conclude that “it is always the other side’s fault.”
Shambaugh’s book is a valuable survey of the history of U.S. engagement with Beijing and the subsequent—and ongoing—China policy debate. But it also stimulates contemplation of a companion piece that transposes his subtitle and examines how America won and lost China.
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