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97 Foreign Aff. 60 (2018)
The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied American Expectations

handle is hein.journals/fora97 and id is 278 raw text is: The China Reckoning How Beijing Defied American Expectations Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner Ihe United States has always had an outsize sense of its ability to determine Chinas course. Again and again, its ambitions have come up short. After World War II, George Marshall, the U.S. special envoy to China, hoped to broker a peace between the Nationalists and Communists in the Chinese Civil War. During the Korean War, the Truman administration thought it could dissuade Mao Zedong's troops from crossing the Yalu River. The Johnson admin- istration believed Beijing would ultimately circumscribe its involve- ment in Vietnam. In each instance, Chinese realities upset American expectations. With U.S. President Richard Nixon's opening to China, Washington made its biggest and most optimistic bet yet. Both Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, assumed that rapprochement would drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow and, in time, alter Chinas conception of its own interests as it drew closer to the United States. In the fall of 1967, Nixon wrote in this magazine, The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change. Ever since, the assumption that deepening commercial, diplomatic, and cultural ties would transform Chinas internal development and external behavior has been a bedrock of U.S. strategy. Even those in U.S. policy circles who were skeptical of Chinas intentions still shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States' liking. KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman of the Asia Group and was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013. ELY RATNER is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and was Deputy National Security Adviser to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017. 60 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

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