The End of Engagement: America’s China and Russia Experts and U.S. Strategy Since 1989

After the Cold War, America’s leaders hoped Russia and China could be integrated into the rules-based international order and might even become more like the West. By the late 2010s, their optimism was dead. In The End of Engagement, David M. McCourt traces the intense personal, professional, and policy struggles over China and Russia in U.S. foreign policy since 1989. Drawing on 170 original interviews with America’s China and Russia experts--from former policymakers and diplomats to prominent think tankers and academics--McCourt chronicles the rise and recent fall of ＂engagement＂ with Beijing and Moscow. While there are numerous explanations for why America moved away from engagement with China and Russia in the last decade, McCourt shows that none consider how important foreign policy knowledge communities have been in impacting policy. Adopting a unique, sociological perspective, this book offers an intimate look into the world of America’s national security experts as they have struggled to make sense of changes in China and Russia and the remaining question of what comes next.

David M. McCourt is an international political sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. His primary research interests lie with the social sources of state action in international politics, with an empirical focus on the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. He completed his graduate work at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Between 2012 and 2014, he was a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Sheffield (UK). He is the author, among other works, of Britain and World Power Since 1945 (2014), American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953-54 (2020), and The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory (2022).