BOOK REVIEW

“The End of Engagement: America’s China and Russia Experts and U.S. Strategy Since 1989”
By David McCourt
Oxford University Press, September 2024

David McCourt has produced an interesting book analyzing the “knowledge communities” shaping U.S. policy toward China and Russia. It comes at an opportune time, when the world is waiting to see what policies the Trump administration will actually pursue toward these two U.S. competitors. McCourt argues that U.S. policy is shaped to an important degree by the dynamics of the professional policy community, which for both Russia and China is split between protagonists of engagement (from which both sides can benefit) and competition (in which one side gains at the expense of the other).

McCourt, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, interviewed 170 experts—mainly think tankers, academics and former officials, about the forces shaping U.S. policy toward China and Russia. He does not name the officials or provide a more detailed demographic breakdown; though he does mention that he interviewed six of the ten post-1991 U.S. ambassadors to Russia. The interviews were conducted between 2018 and 2022. He supplements extracts from the anonymous interviews with quotes from public speeches, policy statements and the secondary literature, such as Josh Rogin’s “Chaos under Heaven. Trump, Xi and the Battle for the Twenty First Century” (2021). The project began as a study of the China case, and then expanded to include Russia. 

McCourt seeks to explain the tectonic shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Russia and China that has taken place over the past decade. Chapter 1 lays out the policy of Engagement that the U.S. pursued with both countries in the 1990s, based on the belief that entry into world markets would eventually lead to regime change and the emergence of market democracies that would join the U.S.-led “rules based international order.” Despite the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, China was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Russia joined the G-7 in 1998, and the WTO in 2012.

Chapter 2 shows that by the 2010s, the optimism had faded, and the U.S. came to see Russia and China as “strategic competitors” that threatened U.S. security and economic interests. In the case of China, there was a sharp and radical paradigm shift, initiated in the first Trump administration but maintained under President Joe Biden. With Russia, there was what McCourt describes as “a more gradual slide into frozen relations and policy stasis,” settling in after the failure of President Barack Obama’s attempted “reset” with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2009. 

Chapter 3 tracks the evolution of the China-watching community since the 1970s, and their eventual polarization into rival teams of “dragon slayers” and “panda huggers” (a division that cut across party lines). Chapter 4 delves deeper into the professional expertise of the China policy community, contrasting experts with deep cultural exposure or economic ties to those from a security background. Chapter 5 profiles some of the individuals involved in these rival teams in the China debate. 

Chapter 6 sets up the division between what McCourt calls the “Russia-we-have” camp (which includes Thomas Graham, Rose Gottemoeller, Fiona Hill and Matthew Rojansky) and the “Russia-we-want” camp (Alexander Vershbow, Dan Fried, Celeste Wallander and Michael McFaul). The “Russia-we-have” camp advocates pragmatic bargaining with Putin, while the “Russia-we-want” camp favors containing Russia in the hope that a more cooperative regime will emerge in the future. Chapter 7 drills down into the policy debates in the Russia-watching community, which in contrast to the China group has been shrinking in size over the past two decades. McCourt suggests the “Russia-we-have” advocates are generally more interested in academic nuance, while the “Russia-we-want” folks are more ideological. Chapter 8 discusses the way professional training and personal experience shape the policy inclinations of the Russia watchers. 

McCourt is a Constructivist, which means he sees security threats as socially constructed, to be analyzed through the discourse of key actors. The book is written for a general, policy-oriented audience, so McCourt does not get bogged down in methodological debates with rival Realists (who focus on economic and military capacity of competing states) and Liberal Institutionalists (who see states benefiting through cooperation in international institutions). McCourt’s approach is similar to that of Mark Blyth, who tracked the rise of the neoliberalism paradigm in his book “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea”(2013). I am not aware of similar work on the foreign policy community, though McCourt is building on historian David Engerman’s study of Sovietologists during the Cold War, “Know Your Enemy. The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts.”  

As a Constructivist, McCourt is keen to show that policy is shaped by the dynamics of “epistemic communities” and is not simply a reflection of developments in the outside world. The paradigm shift from Engagement to Competition was a result of polarization in the expert community, in part fueled by professional status competition and personalization. Once a new frame is established, most experts abandon their previous positions and scramble to be accepted as members of the new ruling policy community. 

Divisions within the expert community were exemplified by dueling open letters in 2019–20. One hundred China experts wrote an open letter to the Washington Post in July 2019 expressing concern at the “growing deterioration in U.S.-China relations,” entitled “China is not an enemy.” It produced a response from 100 China hawks, published in the less prestigious Journal of Political Risk. 

On Aug. 5, 2020, 103 Russia experts published a letter calling for “deterrence and détente,” arguing that “we must deal with Russia as it is, not as we wish it to be,” and drawing a distinction between the Russian regime and the Russian people. It drew a reply on Aug. 11 from 33 hawks, including former assistant secretary of state David Kramer, opposing a “new Russia reset.” McCourt does not mention the unfortunate timing: Alexei Navalny was poisoned on Aug. 20, 2020, and narrowly escaped death. “Russia as it is” was suddenly looking less attractive. 

China watchers were alarmed by Beijing’s military expansion in the South China Sea from 2012 on, the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative and the hollowing out of American manufacturing, which critics attributed to intellectual property theft, currency manipulation and other unfair trade practices. Trump’s election for the first term broke the “epistemic hegemony of the elite China hands,” with China hawks like Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro entering the White House. McCourt himself prefers not to use the terms “hawks” and “doves”—although these are standard categories of analysis in the international relations community. National Security Council Asia director Matthew Pottinger was a key figure crafting the new strategy, along with CIA director Mike Pompeo. Pottinger was a fluent Mandarin speaker who had served as a Wall Street Journal reporter in Beijing, so he had the kind of country expertise which critics argue security hawks typically lack. There were still some “panda huggers” in the Trump administration who favored economic engagement with China, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. 

Engagers evolved into “Competitive Coexisters,” while some hardline anti-Engagers became the “New Cold Warriors.” Some of the old China hands felt “a sense of betrayal, as if lives and careers have been wasted.” By 2018, even the leading Democratic expert on Asia, Kurt Campbell—himself a former Engager—was declaring that America “got China wrong.” Biden kept the Trump tariffs on China, and launched a massive investment program to rebuild U.S. manufacturing in key technologies. The Biden administration stepped up the rhetoric on democracy and human rights, and Biden even twice claimed the U.S. would intervene to defend Taiwan. 

McCourt finds that “The Russia community is smaller, more collegial, and less polarized than the China field.” There was policy stasis after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, with relations at a low ebb, and no great sense of urgency. “Russia remained an afterthought, tacked onto descriptions of Beijing as America’s major geopolitical challenge.” The scandal around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election meant that many Democrats shifted from the “Russia-we-have” to the “Russia-we-want-camp,” advocating for tighter sanctions and regime change. He profiles Fiona Hill, who served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2006 to 2009, and as the deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council in the first Trump administration. McCourt concedes that Hill does not fall neatly into either camp: although she signed the 2020 “Russia as it is” letter, she had been strongly critical of Putin. He also analyzes the failed nomination to the Biden White House of “Russia-we-haver” Matthew Rojansky.

McCourt argues that there was a relative lack of business stakeholders interested in pushing engagement with Russia. Russia is a smaller market than China, to be sure, but many U.S. businesses made a lot of money there—most notably, the oil majors Exxon and Chevron, but also companies from McDonald’s to Boeing. Things soured after the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003—a key turning point that is absent from McCourt’s account. 

There are some problems with relying on anonymous sources. Anonymous respondents may be inclined to exaggerate and speculate, and there is no way for the reader to fact-check. Thus for example in Chapter 7, McCourt quotes an anonymous academic and “Russia-we-haver” saying of former ambassador Michael McFaul that “He speaks shitty Russian.” That is not true: McFaul has professional fluency in Russian, as can be seen in this interview he conducted last year. (He would have been even more fluent when living in Russia in years past.)

Several times McCourt quotes the aphorism “to study Russia, is to hate it.” I have never heard that phrase, and in Chapter 8 McCourt himself concedes “no interviewees agreed with the common saying in the Russia field that ‘to study Russia is to hate it.’” Claiming that Western experts hate Russia is a standard trope in Kremlin propaganda. There are people who hate Russia, to be sure, but that is not connected to studying it. More commonly, it stems from people living in countries that Russia has invaded.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia was suddenly a top priority for U.S. security policy. The expert community was deeply polarized—between those who blamed the U.S. for the war (because of NATO expansion) and those who blamed Putin. Unfortunately, apart from a few brief references, McCourt chose not to incorporate the post-invasion developments into his analysis. (He stopped writing in August 2023, and the book was published online in July 2024.) The book’s relevance would have increased if he had waited and done a second round of Russia interviews to capture the debates after the invasion. 

Today, there are very few people who expect to see the “Russia-we-want” anytime soon. Post 1992, the polarization is over the nature of the “Russia-we-have”: is Putin an aggressive imperialist, or is he a security-conscious pragmatist, with whom “we can do business” (as Margaret Thatcher famously said of Mikhail Gorbachev)? And when Putin leaves power, will the new leader and new regime in Russia be any different? To what extent is the war the product of Putin’s personal idiosyncrasies, or the result of deep structural forces in the Russian state and society? McCourt’s reduction of the debate to that of “Russia-we-have” versus “Russia-we-want” papers over these divisions. 

McCourt declines to give his own opinion about the relative merits of engagement and competition, and whether a shift from one paradigm to another is a good or bad thing. Presumably he welcomes a pluralism of opinions in the market place of ideas, but he implies that such debates are driven by internal factors that do not truly represent the situation in the outside world.

This book is an interesting and timely contribution to debates over the course of U.S. foreign policy. It is unlikely to convince readers of the Realist disposition that the evolution of U.S. policy was driven by endogenous shifts in the way the expert community perceived the world and not by objective changes in the challenges that the U.S. faced from an economically ambitious China and a newly aggressive Russia. And with Trump’s return to the White House, it looks like a confrontational approach will be driving U.S. policy toward China and Russia over the next few years. 

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)