Politics & Power Quote by Jennifer Dunn

Urgency is doing most of the persuasion here. Jennifer Dunn’s “must act quickly” isn’t a policy detail so much as a pressure tactic: treat the decision as time-sensitive, narrow the space for moral hesitation, and frame delay itself as damage. “For our part” quietly assigns roles in a bilateral drama. China is a given; the United States is the variable that could bungle its own interests through dithering. The phrase flatters Washington’s agency while preemptively scolding any impulse to slow-walk engagement.

“Most Favored Nation” status sounds like a compliment, almost an award. In reality it’s trade normalization, a technical label with a warm glow. That’s the subtextual genius: the euphemism launders a hard-edged economic argument through diplomatic niceness. Dunn’s intent is to make the pro-trade position feel like the default grown-up stance, not an ideological choice with winners and losers.

The context is the long, contentious era when Congress repeatedly debated whether to renew China’s MFN treatment, with human rights advocates pushing to condition trade on political reform and business interests arguing that market access would pull China toward liberalization. Dunn’s sentence stakes out the latter camp without naming the trade-off. It implies that speed and stability matter more than leverage, and that American prosperity hinges on being present in China’s rise rather than trying to police it from outside.

It also reveals an early version of a now-familiar American argument: engagement as strategy, commerce as diplomacy, and hesitation as self-sabotage.