Did Bush get it right on China?

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek seems to think so. While he's no fan of the current president, Zakaria gives him credit for engaging the People's Republic in last week's cover story, What Bush Got Right:

The bilateral relationship between China and America will be the most significant one in the 21st century. Bush began his term poorly on the subject. During the campaign, when asked by Larry King for the single most important area where he would depart from Clinton foreign policy, he cited China. "The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership," Bush said. "I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor." The initial months of the administration suggested that Bush would adopt a confrontational approach to Beijing, just as many neoconservatives and Pentagon strategists hoped.

And while Bush talked tough, those in his administration were taking a harder line, especially on the Taiwan issue, as James Wilkenson told CQ last year:

While Bush publicly continued the one-China policy of his five White House predecessors, Wilkerson said, the Pentagon "neocons" took a different tack, quietly encouraging Taiwan's pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian. "The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on," Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, "essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing." (More on that at Cup o' Cha)

So, what changed?

In 2001, an American surveillance aircraft collided in midair with a Chinese fighter plane, killing the pilot and crash landing on Hainan island. Bush chose to negotiate with Beijing and to publicly express regret over the death of the Chinese airman. Bush eventually took an uncharacteristically internationalist line with China, including admonishing Chen Shui-bian against any movement away from the status quo. While he criticized the Communist Party over China's human rights record, Bush resisted calls to boycott any part of the Olympic Games.

Further, engaging China led to engaging India and Japan, to balance the Middle Kingdom's rising clout with others'.

Zakaria also points to US efforts to give China more influence in the International Monetary Fund, with the hope that "China will have a greater sense of responsibility for the institution's mission," treasury undersecretary Timothy D. Adams told the New York Times in 2006.

All in all, it's a far different picture of the outgoing president. As with Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, Zakaria says these shifts in policy were driven by an administration that finally gave in to a reality that wouldn't match the prescriptions of its most hardened ideologues.

"It doesn't reflect a change of heart so much as an admission of failure," Zakaria writes, "the old way simply wasn't working."

Before: We'll watch how we want to | After: The harder questions