As they look over the Asia-Pacific region, U.S. policy makers have much to be proud of and much to worry about. On the one hand, the U.S.-centered “San Francisco system” put into place in the wake of the Second World War has been a great success, fostering economic and institutional growth across the region, dispelling the last legacies of European colonialism in the region and encouraging a neoliberal approach to institution-building. While enlightened elites and cultural attitudes certainly played their part, U.S. trade and security guarantees allowed many states to focus exclusively on economic growth with superb results.

But there are serious weaknesses in the values-based approach taken by American policy makers to the Asia-Pacific that should be considered. And though this piece does not argue against values-based policy—which is, after all a source of soft power—it does argue for a hardheaded examination of the consequences of U.S. values-based decisions.

The rebirth of Chinese power this century is inextricably linked with postwar U.S. policy making. Americans may look to the policy as both their greatest success and, paradoxically, their greatest failure. U.S. normalization with China eventually led to the liberalization of trade relations, and emboldened economic reformers like Deng Xiaoping, who wished to revitalize China’s feeble economy. The 1979 Carter-Deng Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations put China at the top table of the United Nations, replacing with a stroke Taipei’s control of that seat. Preferential U.S. treatment towards Beijing continued in 1980, with the return of China to Most Favored Nation status, made permanent in 2000, and ultimately led to China’s accession to the WTO in December 2000. Since then, Chinese growth has averaged 9 percent a year. It is now the largest trading nation in the world.

America’s China policy has been a remarkable success in raising China, and yet, it has been marked by a complete failure to truly understand that country or the indirect consequences of empowering it. Emboldened and strengthened by its capital gains, its technological prowess and its burgeoning defense capabilities, Beijing has begun to project its military power into the region, threatening regional stability and prosperity in the East China and South China Seas. Rather than respond in kind to a quarter-century American policy of inclusion, China appears to want to dispel U.S. power from the region, excluding Washington from the regional order. Utilizing a band of technologies, collectively called Anti-Access/Area Denial, Beijing openly targets U.S. defense capabilities and threatens sea lanes. Furthermore, sensing the potential for global hegemony, China seems to pursue various strategies to depose the dollar as the reserve global currency, possibly in favor of the renminbi.

So what can American policy makers learn from this? One answer is to reconsider the use by American policy makers of ideologically driven assumptions in the analysis process. For example, take the working assumption that the growth of middle classes leads to political liberalization. This is a seemingly tried and tested theory of international political economy, bolstered by various case studies. However, tested against the variable of a strong political elite determined to resist it, the assumption does not hold up. This is how generations of American politicians and policy makers came to believe that they should empower China economically. Did it work? Well, naturally there are arguments on both sides of the ledger. China is a freer place than it was in 1972, many Chinese citizens can travel outside the country and there is more of an exchange of ideas and capital between China and the rest of the world. However, the unintended consequences remain just as significant, with China rising as perhaps the key challenger to American regional and global interests. Knowing what we know now, this raises the question: Could we have approached China more cautiously?

This “assumption fault” reveals a disturbing trend in how policy makers learn their trade in the United States and in the West in general. Rather than testing potential policies through the prism of unintended consequences, liberal societies insist on certain truths, which then guide the overall framework of policy making. Because of the universal aspirations of liberalism, these assumptions often guide policy making in ways that are harmful to the overall strategic mission. One example of this was the way in which European donor nations contributed to reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, often prioritizing culturally Western projects like the expansion of women’s rights, the development of a free press and other liberal projects over the more culturally neutral areas of state-building, irrigation and other institutions. Still yet another well-known example of an ideologically driven mistake in U.S. foreign policy making was the neoliberal assumption that when liberated from authoritarianism, people will choose democracy. Such an assumption flies in the face of the preference for security, which usually trumps democracy. This assumption guided the U.S. policy in Iraq to disband the Baathist regime and military as a precursor to building democracy in Iraq. As we now know, the absence of institutions and sudden influx of unemployed, military-trained men fed the growing insurgency in Iraq, and unintentionally doomed the state-building exercise from the very start.

It is not to say that these assumptions are always wrong. Sometimes they are right for a given moment, but in learning their art, American policy makers should not assume that principles are infallible. When working assumptions are not tested rigorously, and become accepted by foreign policy bureaucracies and business communities, they can lead to the type of blind policy processes described above. That is not to say that the United States should have enacted a policy of containment of China until now, or that the Baathist regime should have been maintained. However, since we know in both situations that culture and context trumped the assumptions, we know how best to avoid future mistakes.

The United States now faces the dawn of a multipolar age, riddled with complexity and potential dangers. Though China’s hegemonic ambitions are likely to be halted by its demographic challenges, it will remain a predominant power in tomorrow’s world. American policy makers must up their game and learn to understand the ideological and values-based assumptions that drive policy, and learn to adjust accordingly when empirical conditions fail to match expectations. If the age of American unipolarity is behind us, then what lies before us is likely to be more difficult and to raise the stakes for national interests. American foreign policy makers must sharpen their game and learn to develop a consequences-based approach to the world. The future of American power depends on it—something we can ill afford to give up in tomorrow’s world.

John Hemmings is an Adjunct Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS and a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he is working on US alliance strategy in the Asia-Pacific. Follow him on Twitter: @johnhemmings2.

Image: Flickr/Yiannis Theologos Michellis