China Rejects America's World Order

The thinking is that China will realize it has the same general interests as the U.S.—that it will become a “responsible stakeholder” to borrow Bush-era lingo—so it too will support the institutional framework created after the Second World War. Washington’s policy presumes the U.S. can engage the Chinese and enmesh them into that system. It not only can happen, we think, it must happen. “We simply cannot afford,” Nixon wrote in his landmark 1967 Foreign Affairs article, “to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” To avoid the horrible prospect of more than a billion hateful and threatening Chinese, America’s enlightened engagement of China has become more than just a policy or doctrine; it has attained the status of geopolitical religion, a paradigm.