The deeper the engagement and presence of each country in the other's society, the deeper the suspicions and the greater the frictions that emerged—a counterintuitive finding that contradicts the liberal assumption underlying engagement that deeper interaction would produce stronger cooperation.

The engagement strategy should be distinguished between capital-E engagement (engagement with the regime) and small-e engagement (engagement between the two societies), and while capital-E engagement with the CCP regime has run its course given the regime's securitization and Xi's reversal of liberalization, small-e societal engagement through dialogue and connectivity remains vital and should continue despite increased obstacles.

Deng Xiaoping's 1989 decision to use military force to suppress the Tiananmen demonstrations was not surprising because the CCP had experienced four decades of brutal internal repression before 1989, and Deng perceived the student movement as a repeat of the Cultural Revolution and an existential political crisis requiring coercive rather than dialogue-based responses.

National security has become the number one national priority of Xi Jinping himself, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese government, and has overtaken development as the primary goal of the Chinese state, with Xi laying out a comprehensive concept of security (zongti anquan) that includes no fewer than 22 categories of national security with several sub-elements within each category.

The 2018 Hoover Task Force report on Chinese Influence and American Interest, co-led by Larry Diamond with participation by Liz Economy and Shambaugh himself, was the first serious investigation of Chinese influence operations and is now considered commonplace in policy discourse.

The American government has securitized the U.S.-China relationship in response to Chinese securitization, and mutual securitization has definitely contributed to the downward trajectory of the relationship over the last 10 years, with both sides bearing some responsibility.

Over the past decade, Xi Jinping has broken the engagement; China's side has broken the engagement, and this argument echoes Susan Shirk's own recent book 'Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise,' with both authors analyzing the same phenomenon and arriving at similar conclusions.

There is no classified master document in the National Archives that explicitly lays out the engagement strategy; instead, it must be reconstructed from reading declassified documents from successive administrations, each with their own internal classified documents, but the core elements and tactics are discernible across all administrations from the 1970s onward.

American liberalism has run into Chinese Leninism, and the Chinese have stubbornly resisted American attempts to change the system because from the CCP's perspective, the engagement strategy and its tactics are subversive to their political system and their power and control.

Trump, in contrast to all previous presidents, does not appear to possess the impulse to change China politically or bring it into the international system, representing an aberration from the consistent American desire to transform China

The American approach to China over several centuries is rooted in a longstanding and deeply embedded paternalistic missionary impulse to mold and shape China, with American attempts to change China far predating President Nixon's opening and dating back to the 1800s and the first two American ambassadors, Anson Burlingame and J. Ross Brown.

Even during the pre-engagement era during the Cold War height under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, there were those who advocated for relaxing containment and opening ties to China, with President Kennedy, eight days before his assassination on November 14, 1963, declaring that the U.S. was not wedded to a policy of hostility to China and would reappraise policies if China indicated a desire to live at peace.

In the 1960s, there were grassroots activist efforts in American society advocating for opening to communist China, including the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the UN Association of the United States, the League of Women Voters, the American Chamber of Commerce, and notable academics including Robert Scallopino, John King Fairbank, Alexander Eckstein, Doak Barnett, and Alan Whiting.

There has been no 'who lost America' debate in China, and Chinese America-watchers and participants in domestic Chinese discourse accept zero blame for the deterioration of the U.S.-China relationship over the last decade, believing instead that the deterioration is 100% the fault of the American side.

Shambaugh characterizes the U.S.-China relationship as one of indefinite comprehensive competitive rivalry (ICCR), which is intrinsically competitive, comprehensive in scope, represents a classic great power rivalry, and is indefinite in temporal duration, meaning it will be with the United States and China for a very long time.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a deep, granular understanding of China, with a distinguished track record and being arguably the member of Congress with the best understanding of China during his service, having spent extensive time and effort educating himself on China policy, though some of his tactical approaches may be inappropriate.

The banning or aggressive enforcement of restrictions on Chinese student visas to the United States is very mistaken, inappropriate, and counterproductive, as American educational exchanges represent one of the country's greatest soft power assets, and the U.S. has the wherewithal to monitor espionage on its campuses without resorting to blanket restrictions.

The U.S.-China relationship is best understood as a bad marriage where divorce is not an option, and thus the two countries must figure out a way to coexist rather than pursuing either complete decoupling or conflict, because war over Taiwan or more broadly in the Indo-Pacific would be absolutely catastrophic.

American engagement strategy was not naive or a mistake but rather a gamble with reasonable strategic logic that could have gone either way depending on how Chinese politics evolved; it was a good strategy that simply did not produce the hoped-for outcomes due to Chinese political choices rather than fundamental flaws in the strategy itself.

The British and European responses to Tiananmen differed significantly from the American response; while Americans wanted to 'slap them down' and punitive measures, the British and Continental Europeans preferred to keep diplomatic doors open and maintain engagement despite the massacre, viewing this as a means to stability.