In the spring of 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked his staff to prepare a document known as the China White Paper , which was intended to explain how this had happened and to provide a history of US policy toward China. A model of objective analysis, the thousand-page study portrayed the Nationalist forces as corrupt and incompetent in the face of a determined, disciplined Communist challenge. Its deeper message was that there are limits to American power. Unfortunately, that lesson had to be learned again a generation later in Vietnam. And the US experience with Russia in the past decade has taught it yet again.
Few people dispute the outline of that latest engagement.
In the best tradition of Wilsonian diplomacy and the Marshall Plan, the US also sent an army of well-intentioned policy experts to Russia to transform the country into a Eurasian version of America. Events quickly went awry. As an unexpectedly difficult transition eroded Yeltsin's popular support, Washington increasingly tilted toward the Russian president as the chief guarantor of reform and as insurance that Russia would not return to its communist past. The US acquiesced when Yeltsin bloodily suppressed an insurrectionist parliament and welcomed a constitutional referendum that gave him strong presidential powers. Washington offered only lukewarm criticism of Moscow's brutal campaign to rein in secessionist Chechnya and helped Yeltsin defeat a strong Communist Party challenger to win reelection in 1996.