ASIN: B0F1G3SJ3W, The Wire China, March 2025, 592 pages, $9.99 (Kindle)
Reviewed by: Mark Grzegorzewski, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, United States
How did the United States and China arrive at the current moment of strategic and irregular competition? To understand the present, we must look to the past, and that is precisely what Broken Engagement does, drawing on interviews with key actors across six consecutive U.S. administrations, from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. The interviews span the full range of figures found in any administration, from traditional policymakers such as Robert Zoellick to unconventional thinkers such as Steve Bannon. Of note, Broken Engagement includes an interview with former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. It would be his last interview before he died unexpectedly. This breadth of views gives readers a variety of interpretations of the present, each shaped by the interviewee’s own experiences in the past. Some subjects are candidly self-critical about their role in history, while others seem intent on justifying decisions that were, in retrospect, objectively poor. For this reason, while Broken Engagement is a solid contribution to our understanding of U.S.-China relations, readers should not expect it to shake U.S.-China policy out of its entrenched assumptions. As the book itself demonstrates, some in the policymaking community remain more committed to defending past mistakes than to rethinking their views on China.
The book’s authors, Bob Davis and David Barboza, have long covered China. Davis comes from The Wall Street Journal, where he reported on China from within the country from 2011 to 2014. Earlier in his career, he covered the Clinton administration’s negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Barboza is the co-founder of The Wire Digital and a longtime business reporter and foreign correspondent at The New York Times, where he served as the paper’s Shanghai bureau chief from 2008 to 2015. Given their deep familiarity with the subject, they ask the right questions, never letting an interviewee skate by on an ill-informed or outdated assumption. It is exactly this kind of hard-hitting interviewing that U.S. foreign policymaking circles need to confront, both to shake the United States from its past strategic missteps and to guide it toward a more informed, clear-eyed China policy.
Starting with the George H.W. Bush administration, the reader observes the assumptions of a different era. This was a period in which many believed that an economically liberalized China would eventually become a politically liberalized one. There was a time and place for that belief, and the interviews from this period leave the general impression that these subjects were acting in good faith at the time. Moving through the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, one sees how the policymaking community clung to that assumption, perhaps hoping that if they believed it hard enough, it would become true. By the Obama administration, however, it had become inexcusable to hold onto that outdated assumption when the data clearly pointed in the other direction. It is here that the reader sees an executive branch trying to reorient China policy but unable to turn the leviathan of the U.S. government. With the first Trump administration came the first real rupture with the past: significant, but uneven in its effort to answer the call. With the Biden administration, one finds an executive branch that mostly preserved the changes brought by its predecessor, but at times harbored misplaced desires for a return to engagement with China. I hope a future edition of this title adds a section of interviews with policymakers from the second Trump administration. It will be interesting to see whether the decoupling/de-risking strategy begun under the first Trump administration has started to pay dividends, or whether it was empty rhetoric never seriously followed by concrete action.
One thing I appreciated, and I am sure readers even less knowledgeable about China than I am would as well, was the editors’ notes on specific, at times niche, topics raised by the interviewees. The interviews go into depth, and to truly appreciate the content, the reader must understand the context and meaning of particular acronyms and bilateral agreements. With this background provided succinctly within the text, readers never miss a beat while following the larger conversation. This title would make an excellent addition for a variety of readers, from foreign policy scholars to China watchers to general readers trying to understand the world today, or why the U.S. policymaking community made such poor decisions on China. I recommend it across all audiences.
While there is much to like about the book, it perhaps tries to fit too much in. This is understandable given the intentional effort to capture a range of views. Even so, a handful of interviews do not seem central to the book’s theme: how the United States made China policy over the years. At times, interviewees drift into related, and often interesting, topics that nonetheless stray from that core focus. Given that the book runs 28 chapters, this reader occasionally wished for a more tightly wrapped narrative. It is perhaps unavoidable in open-ended interviews that subjects will take the conversation in new and unanticipated directions, but more tightly edited interviews might have made the volume more focused. Although I raise this concern about the book’s length and the sheer volume of material, it does not detract from the book’s overall value. I would much rather have a book with a little too much content than one that leaves me wishing the authors had given me more.
Unfortunately, after reading this title, I question whether the U.S. government can overcome the entrenched interests and outdated assumptions of past policymakers. The hard questions were not posed to policymakers in the past. For this reason, anthologies such as Broken Engagement are critical historical artifacts for holding U.S. policymakers’ feet to the fire. We must continue to ask hard questions, as it has become clear that unquestioned, deferential treatment of policymakers can nearly lead a country to ruin.
