LOS ANGELES — Let's not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Congressional grumblings about currency and balance-of-trade issues, and equal grumps from the U.S. Democratic Party's leftwing (over human-rights issues), could leave the impression that U.S. policy toward China has been a dismal failure.
On the contrary, viewed with even a smidgen of historical perspective, U.S. foreign policy toward the People's Republic of China has been on the whole an amazing success.
Look at what China was just a few decades ago: the world's most monumental example of a failed authoritarian Marxist economy. But look at China today: It's increasingly becoming a living monument to what the great Adam Smith proclaimed to be the one and only winning economic formula: capitalism.