On July 23, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proclaimed a final sentence on the policy of constructive engagement with China: “We must not continue [the policy] and we must not return to it.” He made that announcement at the presidential library of Richard Nixon, the U.S. president who kicked off the policy nearly five decades ago.
The sentence came as no surprise. The policy of engagement with China had been called into question even before President Donald Trump took office. Since 2010, the ascendance of China as the world’s second largest economic power, in conjunction with its bursting nationalist and sometimes revisionist policy rhetoric, has fed into an emerging narrative that China represents a formidable and threatening adversary. As early as mid-2015, David Lampton of Johns Hopkins University noted that the bilateral relationship was at a tipping point with the erosion of some “critical underlying supports for predominantly positive U.S.-China ties.”
