FP This Week: What the Bush-Obama China Memos Reveal

Netflix takes on the State Department MAY 1, 2023  |  [VIEW IN BROWSER](  |  [SUBSCRIBE](     Chinese President Jiang Zemin greets U.S. President George W. Bush prior to a leaders' meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shanghai on Oct. 21, 2001. Stephen Jaffe/AFP via Getty Images “The Biden administration will not get its China strategy right until it is clear about what has worked in the past,” argue Michael J. Green and Paul Haenle in [What the Bush-Obama China Memos Reveal](. The memos challenge current thinking about the trajectory of the American-Chinese relationship. Most notably, that past U.S. policy “was based on a futile view that engagement would lead to a democratic and cooperative China.” Read on for more about what the recently declassified memos [reveal](—and why misconceptions about past policy make for “dangerous analytical ground upon which to build a new national security strategy.” Netflix knows who will eat up its new production about the U.S. State Department: seemingly every bus shelter in Washington, D.C., is currently running an ad for the show, brought to you by the brains behind The West Wing and Homeland. What does The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell, get right about the foreign service? And what does it get comically wrong? 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Co-hosts of [Ones and Tooze]( Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi explore what levers are still available to the United States and its EU partners to exert influence, and why in the end, the existing world powers may need to completely rethink China's role in global institutions. Cameron Abadi: What could be the economic fallout from Chinese hostilities against Taiwan? Could the United States apply sanctions on China of the sort it has imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine—and how much greater would the exposure of the Western economy be to those kinds of sanctions? Adam Tooze: If you believe U.S. President Joe Biden’s repeated utterances, if there’s an actual invasion, then America is committed to a military response. I mean, can we just pause for a second to just contemplate what we’re doing here? It’s an absolutely extraordinary state of affairs when these kinds of questions are posed with the regularity and sort of almost everyday matter-of-factness as they are. Congress apparently is running its own little war game. The think tanks around D.C. are doing them almost on a daily basis. Shooting-war scenarios are being actively contemplated, and that’s, of course, our side, with no real way of knowing the extent of the conversations on the Chinese side. And I think we really do need to pause and sort of reflect for a second on what this implies. The opening up of the possibility of this worst case as a real contingency—and if you speak to businesspeople around the world, shooting-war scenarios are being actively incorporated into business decision-making—this changes reality in the present moment, whether or not we end up in that situation. It’s a huge qualitative shift. But let’s get down to it. It’s difficult to really grasp, to be honest. Some outfits have attempted to scheme this out, but as soon as you do, you just get dizzy very quickly because, sure, I think you’re right that there would be an immediate fallout in the financial system. I mean, probably our best way of thinking about this by way of analogy is the COVID shock. It started in China. It took China out of the world economy. It took about four or five weeks in that case for the financial markets to get really scared. And by early March, they were in complete freefall. But I have to say, I think the financial side of it is the easy bit. This is the least of your problems, because essentially those are balance-sheet operations. So we know what to do: The central banks would simply provide liquidity, buy up financial assets—that’s the way that you stabilize a bank balance sheet… Continue reading this excerpt from Adam and Cameron’s conversation [here]( or listen to the full conversation in the latest episode of [Ones and Tooze](.   Most Popular on FP [French President Emmanuel Macron attends a meeting with the leaders of various French unions and employers’ associations after he signed into law a pension reform that raises the retirement age from 62 to 64, at the Élysée Palace in Paris on April 18.]( [How Macron Can Save His Presidency]( The French president is bound to provoke outrage if he continues to govern like a king. 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