Arthur, I surmise from knowing him and knowing something of his China background, had as well a sense of the dignity and the hardships of the ordinary people of China that undergirded his judgment and his instincts in representing the American nation to China. Democracy, including rights for workers, is an evolutionary process. Isolation and containment will not promote improved rights for a people. Rather, working together and from within a society will, over time, promote improved conditions. But neither of those conclusions by itself is right, and neither is the basis for a confident steering of the American ship of state in relation to China.
Time moves on.
Fresh faces appear. Barely half of all US Senators have been in office longer than five years. Put another way, more than a third of the members of the present Congress have been in their posts for four years or less. With new arrivals come energy, enthusiasm, and a particular kind of fire that helps the American political system to retain its vitality, on domestic and foreign policy issues alike. But a sense of how today's decisions rest in a larger temporal framework is harder to come by.