January 19, 2026
How America Can Stop Getting Played by China
This article was originally published in Foreign Affairs.
In May 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton tested whether economic leverage could be converted into political influence over China. Having campaigned on a promise to link trade to human rights, he signed an executive order conditioning the annual renewal of China’s “most favored nation” trading status on “substantial progress” across a set of human rights benchmarks. The initiative immediately met resistance: U.S. businesses warned that the order would harm American economic interests, while China threatened to obstruct U.S. diplomatic and trade priorities if its status were withdrawn. Over the following year, Beijing largely ignored Washington’s conditions, making few, if any, meaningful improvements on human rights. When renewal came due in 1994, Clinton granted China’s most favored nation status unconditionally, conceding that the strategy had “reached the end of its usefulness.”
Stability with a communist dictatorship is a fantasy.
Washington apparently concluded that confronting China was not worth the cost. Over time, accommodation became the default, and policymakers sought to align China with U.S. interests by embedding it more deeply in the global economic system. That familiar logic guided the decision to support China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and to grant permanent normal trade relations in 2002, institutionalizing the policy of engagement. Even as China’s economic power grew, this orientation proved remarkably durable. Successive American administrations offered dialogue and cooperation as a framework for managing ties, often treating stability as an end in itself.
Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.
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