Description
For this assignment, your role is theEast Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) Assistant Secretary. You will be the Secretary’s ‘back-bencher’ — the person who sits behind him in the White House Situation Room — and note-taker for the PC.
Review the materials from the module and your lecture notes, paying particular attention to the Cambell-Doshi paper of January 12, 2021.
Write a Briefing Memorandum, in your role as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, to prepare the Secretary for a Principals Committee Meeting on China. Your memo should describe the three elements of U.S.-China policy you believe to be the most important bilateral issues and succinctly argue why. The ‘To’ line for the memo should read: ‘To: S — The Secretary.’ The ‘From’ line should be: ‘From: EAP — Your Name, e.g. Joseph Smith’
While there is no need to include a clearance page, clearances for such a memo would be extensive, likely including staff clearances from: S (the Secretary of State’s staff), D (the Deputy Secretary of State’s staff), P (the Under Secretary for Political Affairs’ staff), E (the Under Secretary for Economics’ staff), S/P (the relevant member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff), L (the Legal Advisor’s office), EAP (your Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for China), EAP/C (the Country Director for China), and probably several more. The memo’s drafter would almost certainly be one of the China desk officers (EAP/C).
Include the following:
Identify weaknesses in your arguments of which the Secretary should be aware.
Identify likely views of the Secretaries of Defense and Treasury, the Attorney General and the DCI on your ideas.
State whether the National Security Advisor is likely to be able to achieve a consensus around any of your policy ideas.
Support your recommendation with information from the Learning Materials and/or from your own readings, giving credit where appropriate.
Very Important: This memo is to be dated March 2, 2021 for a meeting scheduled to take place on March 5, 2021. You have the benefit of hindsight in your recommendations, but you are making them based on material available at the beginning of March 2021.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Strategic Countries and Regions
of the Future—China in Asia
Ambassador David J. Scheffer
ASU Professor of Practice
The Making of U.S. National Security Policy
Module 2
How Does the ‘National Security Enterprise’ Craft a
Policy Towards China? What are Such a Policy’s
Elements?
• Much USG policy development focuses on issue-specific challenges:
conflict, emergency migrant flows, negotiations with other countries,
preparation for event, or Presidential travel.
• NSC work on ‘China’ policy is different: the NSC’s elements dealing
with this issue seek to fashion a multi-faceted, over-arching policy
framework to guide engagement with China across the board.
• This kind of policy process is among the most challenging and
important.
Why is Policy towards China Important?
• Seeks to address every aspect of USG’s engagement.
• Unbounded: no time limits, no geographic limits, no subject matter
limits, no primacy of one agency’s interest over another’s.
• No accepted clarity as to what is, indeed, most important objective to
preserve nation’s long-term survival and prosperity.
• Inherent conflict between ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ frames of reference.
• USG’s ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ interests bound together.
• Breadth of subject matter complicates organizational effort to address
issues: Who has the pen? What’s in and what’s out?
How Does White House/NSC Organize this
Effort?
• How to start?
• Formal ‘National Security Memorandum’, like NSM-2.
• National Security Advisor could task an IPC or group of them.
• Could be subsumed in process to draft USG ‘National Security Strategy.’
• Who gets to play? What courts call ‘standing’ matters; no standing can mean no
influence.
• State: quintessential foreign policy challenge.
• Defense: physical protection of USG national allied, and territorial interests.
• Treasury: largest trading partner, second largest economy, largest holder of dollar reserves.
• Commerce/USDA/USTR: largest trading partner, biggest threat to U.S. technological edge
• IC: hardest target, greatest cyber threat.
• Energy: biggest emitter, biggest consumer, growing nuclear threat
• Justice and DHS: cyber criminality, drug precursors, IP theft, espionage.
• Potentially More: USAID, HHS, DoL, etc.
How Does NSC Deal with This?
• Two Policy Frameworks in Readings
• Campbell: Establish a balance of power that preserves the status quo. Is
recognized as legitimate by all participants, and is supported by a coalition of
U.S. Allies.
• Anonymous: Return China’s ambitions to that of a status quo power by driving
a wedge between Xi and the CCP.
• Objective the same: preserve peace and stability in the region. Preserve territorial
integrity and political independence of all participants.
• There are big distinctions derived from how goals are made, their order of merit, and the
tactics to achieve those strategic goals.
How Does NSC Deal with This?
• Other elements in the readings tend to be cautionary:
• Don’t assume your adversary’s omnipotence.
• Don’t use tactics that won’t accomplish your objectives nor pursue goals that
are unachievable.
• Recognize demography’s impact on your adversary’s aspirations.
This Week’s Paper
• Kurt Campbell is the senior NSC staffer for the Indo-Pacific, assume the PC will base its
China policy deliberations as an updated, inter-agency-reviewed but not necessarily
approved version of the paper.
• To support the Campbell approach, PC participants can add/drop elements from it.
• So your own research on the positions that agencies, and individuals within them, might
take.
• You’re the EAP Assistant Secretary, the Secretary of State’s “back=bencher” and the PC’s
note-taker.
• Your briefing memo will:
• Describe and agree those elements of U.S.-China policy you believe are essential.
• Note weaknesses in your arguments of which the Secretary should be aware.
• Note likely views of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury, and Attorney General, and the DCI
on your ideas.
• Say if the National Security Advisor could achieve a consensus on your policy ideas.
This Week’s Paper
• Please note: This is not a course on China policy. It’s about how the
policy process works. Lay out your ideas, show how to advance them
through the NSC-led process and surface obstacles they may
encounter from other participants and the support you might gain
from them. In short, this is about the ‘how’ more than the ‘what’.
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