For this assignment, your role is theEast Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) Assistant Secretary.

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.