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American economic interests, while China threatened to obstruct U.S. diplomatic and trade priorities if its status were withdrawn.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.”

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.

Stability with Beijing, however, remains elusive. As with Clinton and the most favored nation status, China has consistently exploited American overtures, toggling between conciliatory rhetoric and threats of retaliation to shift the burden of stabilizing ties onto Washington. All the while, it has continued to accumulate coercive power as it actively works to displace the United States as the world’s preeminent power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made this much explicit: the country’s goal, he declared at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, is to become the world leader “in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century.”

The October 2025 summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi in Busan, South Korea, is but the latest example of the engagement illusion. In the run-up to the meeting, Trump signaled he could bring a bazooka to the bargaining table, threatening to impose sweeping software export controls. In the end, however, the administration yielded in the face of Beijing’s rare-earth export controls, and the meeting yielded only a fragile truce: a one-year freeze on new punitive trade measures in exchange for nonbinding commitments from China to cooperate on curbing fentanyl flows and to resume limited purchases of U.S. agricultural products. Beijing, on the other hand, emerged emboldened, with Chinese state media openly boasting about Beijing holding Washington’s “core industrial lifeline” in its hands.

Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.