A Twenty Years’ Crisis? Rethinking the Cases for U.S. Economic Engagement with China

Abstract

Structural realists accuse U.S. economic engagement with China as a mistake driven by liberal idealism and lack of realism. I suggest that this increasingly popular narrative reflecting the traditional idealism-realism distinction is misplaced. First, liberal approaches to international relations can clash with each other when a democratic state engages with an authoritarian state, and engagement is justified by one strand of liberalism—economic interdependence liberalism—whereas a different liberal perspective—democratic peace liberalism—opposes economic engagement with an oppressive regime. Second, realism—in particular, structural realism—posits that important state behaviors reflect the need to attain more relative power than others. Then, if economic engagement better serves a state’s relative capacity vis-à-vis other states, economic exchanges with a potential strategic contender would be an unavoidable choice. The liberal case for economic engagement is much more restrictive than it is often articulated, while a structural realist case for engagement can be convincingly made. For about two decades since the mid-1990s, U.S. administrations defended economic engagement with China not only with economic interdependence liberalism but also by utilizing an argument in line with the structural realist case for engagement. Blaming one foreign policy idea as responsible for today’s strategic difficulties is misleading.