Arms Control and International Security Papers 

Volume 11 Number 6 

May 11, 2020 

Competitive Strategy 

vis-il-vis China and 

Russia: A View from the 

''T Suite'' 

by Christopher A. Ford 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 6 I May 11, 2020 

Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: 

A View from the "T Suite" 

by Christopher A. Ford1 

In this latest part of the series, Assistant Secretary Ford outlines the approach 

being taken in the \\T" family of bureaus at the Department of State in support 

of U.S. competitive strategy vis-a-vis the People's Republic of China and the 

Russian Federation, as inspired by the U.S. National Security Strategy. 

This edition of the AC/5 Papers outlines how the "T" 

family of bureaus at the Department of State2 manages 

functional and technical programs in order to provide the 

most robust and effective support possible to U.S. foreign 

and national security policy. In particular, this paper will 

focus upon T-family support to U.S. competitive strategy 

vis-a-vis the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, 

as outlined in the landmark U.S. National Security Strategy 

(NSS) that was published in December 2017. 

I. The National Security Strategy 

The NSS stresses, in particular, the critical national 

security challenge the United States faces in dealing with 

what some call its "near-peer" competitors, the PRC and 

Russia, and provides some key concepts and principles that 

have helped guide our approach to supporting U.S. 

strategy. The NSS' focus on inter-state competition signals 

the United States' steadfast commitment to push back 

against PRC or Russian attempts to shape a world 

antithetical to U.S. values and interests. 

In the T family, we discern four key principles from the 

National Security Strategy to guide our contributions to 

U.S. competitive strategy in these respects: 

1. The PRC and Russia present distinct strategic 

challenges to the prevailing rules-based international 

order, and we must find robust and creative answers to 

the myriad competitive challenges their behavior 

presents; 

2 . The PRC and Russia present the United States with 

"whole-of-government" or even "whole-of-system" 

challenges, and our responses must be analogously 

broad wherever possible, and must include vigorous 

public diplomacy and messaging, promoting our values 

and approaches in order to help us meet the political 

and economic aspects of this challenge; 

3. Across multiple domains, we must limit the revisionist 

threats our competitors pose to international security 

and stability. This includes impeding our competitors' 

efforts to steal or force transfers of advanced 

technologies that facilitate the modern military power 

1 U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, and presently performing the Duties of the Under Secretary for 

Arms Control and International Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director WMD and 

Counterproliferation on the U.S. National Security Council staff 

2 The so-called "T" family consists of the Bureaus of International Security and Non proliferation (ISN), Political-Military Affairs (PM), and 

Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance (AVC)- as well as, for functional purposes, the Office of the Coordinator for Cyberspace Issues 

(S/CCI), which is slated to become the key element of the new Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) that 

Secretary Pompeo is working to create as part of the T family. 
 

Arms Control and International Security Papers Volume I, Number 6 I May 11, 2020 

Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

that they seek in their drive to dismantle the existing 

liberal international order; and 

4. We must vigorously build and lead coalitions of allies 

and partners and ensure they contribute effectively to 

successfully meeting these challenges. We must also 

encourage burden sharing and help expand our allies' 

access to the capabilities and partnerships that they 

will need to stand with us in challenging the PRC and 

Russia's global ambitions. 

Yet despite our determination to compete effectively, 

we must simultaneously remain open to diplomatic 

engagement. The United States will thus continue to seek 

cooperation on shared interests with Beijing and Moscow 

where possible - including on arms control and 

peacekeeping measures that meet our security interests 

and those of international peace and security. 

II. The Competitive Challenge 

These critical elements of guidance inform the 

approaches the T family of bureaus take, and that we are 

working to refine on an ongoing basis. 

Over the past 20 years, both Beijing and Moscow have 

made considerable strides in building up their geopolitical 

strength vis-a-vis the United States, empowering them to 

act with increasing aggressiveness against U.S. interests 

and the postwar international system. Although the United 

States did not always recognize this challenge, we are now 

aware and responding. 

In the early post-Cold War years, Russia did not initially 

seem - or act- like a direct threat to the United States or to 

the democracies of the West. Nevertheless, Moscow made 

its revisionist intentions visible in 2008 when Russian forces 

overtly crossed an international border to seize parts of the 

country of Georgia - a presaging of its aggression against 

Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. 

Similarly, the PRC tried to keep its own ambitions 

concealed following Deng Xiaoping's famous "24-character 

strategy" that China should "hide its capabilities and bide 

its time" by building its strength quietly while awaiting 

future opportunity- a maxim that hewed so closely to the 

advice of the late-19th century Japanese diplomat Hayashi 

Gonsuke in the wake of Japan's wars against China3 that 

one wonders whether Beijing had looked to Japanese 

imperialism of that period for lessons. 

Under Hu Jintao and then Xi Jin ping, however, the PRC 

seems to have abandoned Deng's "hide and bide" approach 

in favor of increasingly barefaced geopolitical revisionism. 

Led by Xi, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) now quite 

openly seeks to seize a dominant position in Asia, at the 

very least, and to acquire military capabilities stronger than 

those of any other state by 2049 - the centenary of the 

CCP's founding of the PRC. 

Although these Chinese and Russian governments' 

trajectories have long been examined, and have been 

becoming increasingly obvious, it took the insight and the 

historical contribution of President Trump's National 

Security Strategy to call U.S. foreign and national security 

policy back to a focus on great-power competition. 

A. People's Republic of China 

The PRC seeks to have a military more capable than 

any other in the world by 2049, hegemony in the Asia 

Pacific region (and one that implicitly erodes U.S. 

presence), leading positions within international 

organizations, and a dominant position in the advanced 

technologies essential to military power. With these 

achievements, the PRC hopes to claim what it sees as its 

natural hegemonic place at the center of a world system 

that generally defers to Beijing's interests. 

To these ends, the PRC seeks to expand its so-called 

"comprehensive national power" (CNP) through a mix of 

political, economic, military, and "soft power" initiatives. It 

approaches this effort on a whole-of-system basis capable 

of, and dedicated to, mobilizing every aspect of Chinese 

society via the coercive power of the CCP police state. 

The PRC's effort to expand its CNP includes a 

significant expansion of the capabilities of the People's 

Liberation Army (PLA), including its nuclear forces, with an 

emphasis upon high-technology tools that can help disrupt 

or completely deny U.S. access to key areas of the lndoPacific in a crisis. In this respect, however, Beijing still 

3 Baron Hayashi had advised his countrymen to be patient and not too quickly reveal Japan's imperialist objectives: "At present Japan must 

keep calm and sit tight, so as to lull suspicions nurtured against her; during this time the foundations of national power must be 

consolidated; and we must watch and wait for the opportunity in the Orient that will surely come one day . ... When this day arrives, Japan 

will decide her own fate." Quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, Random House: 1987), at 208. 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

remains dependent upon Western technology inputs to fill 

gaps as it seeks to indigenize domestic capabilities and 

reduce this dependence. 

Access to advanced Western technology is thus a 

critical part of PRC strategy. Through its "Military-Civil 

Fusion" (MCF) strategy, state-subsidized and -coordinated 

commercial and industrial outreach, and traditional and 

nontraditional espionage, the PRC aggressively targets key 

Western technology sectors for both licit and illicit 

acquisition, and then systematically diverts technology 

from civilian entities to the PLA and the PRC security 

services. These efforts to buy and steal Western 

technology are essential to the PRC's ability to take 

geopolitical advantage of what it sees as a coming 

"Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) based upon such 

technologies. 

The PRC uses aggressive political and economic 

engagement- including state-subsidized efforts to acquire 

a dominant market share in advanced-technology sectors 

such as telecommunications and civil-nuclear power-to 

build relationships with a growing array of foreign 

governmental and non-governmental partners around the 

world. The PRC exploits these relationships for political 

ends, including through the manipulation of trade and 

economic ties. The CCP is able and willing to use its tools 

of domestic political compulsion and overseas influence to 

coerce cooperation in pursuit of regime political and 

propaganda objectives, as well as to elicit or compel 

support for or facilitation of espionage, from private-sector 

Chinese and Chinese-influenced entities and persons. 

The CCP hides its all-consuming desire to remain in 

power behind propaganda narratives that claim to the 

Chinese people that: (i) Party leadership is essential to 

China achieving "national rejuvenation" and reclaiming its 

proper status in the world after what PRC leaders claim was 

a "century of humiliation" that it believes was inflicted 

upon it by Western powers, Russia, and Japan beginning in 

the mid-19th century; (ii) without the steady hand 

represented by centralized CCP leadership and control, 

China itself would fall into chaos; (iii) malign foreign powers 

with "ulterior motives" of harming the Chinese people lie 

behind all unrest and dissatisfaction with CCP power in 

China; and (iv) any criticism of the CCP' policies only helps 

foreign efforts that threaten China's destiny. 

In support of its global ambitions, moreover, the CCP 

seeks to persuade foreign audiences to believe, specifically, 

that: (i) the PRC's rise is not to be feared, and that its 

rapidly expanding military power is merely for defensive 

purposes; (ii) the PRC's model of technology-facilitated 

authoritarian state capitalism is better and more successful 

than Western approaches; (iii) Western political and 

economic systems are corrupt, decadent, erratic, and 

dysfunctional; (iv) any criticism of the PRC's policies or 

geopolitical ambitions, and any efforts to mobilize against 

its moves to achieve these objectives, represent retrograde 

"Cold War thinking"; and (v) other countries should put 

aside any concerns about what Beijing will do with its 

geopolitical power and join cooperative relationships led by 

the PRC for mutual benefit and increased global harmony. 

B. The Russian Federation 

For its part, Russia feels that it suffered humiliating 

weakness in both the Soviet Union's fall and the early postCold War period, and it now seeks to seize status and 

influence in the world akin to what it imagines itself to have 

enjoyed in late tsarist days or in the heyday of the Soviet 

Union. Russia desires a multi polar world managed by a 

concert of major powers that can counterbalance what it 

perceives as unilateral U.S. power. 

To this end, Russia seeks to restore its sphere of 

influence, both in the countries of its so-called "nearabroad" (e.g., Ukraine and Georgia) and by acquiring client 

states farther afield (e.g., Syria) through the use of blatant 

military aggression, proxy forces, political and military 

subversion, and the manipulation of political, economic, 

energy, and military relationships. It is also essential to 

Russia's strategy to weaken U.S. alliance relationships with 

Europe and elsewhere, as well as undermining and 

discrediting U.S. global leadership. 

Russia's tactics in pursuit of these objectives tend to be 

destructive rather than constructive: it seeks to force the 

United States to engage with Moscow to manage Russian 

misconduct, rather than entice it to engage cooperatively 

with Russia by providing positive value in return. The 

Kremlin is also notably risk-tolerant in its policy choices, 

not shying away from reckless gambles and extravagant 

provocations (e.g., its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, 

overseas expeditionary warfare in Syria, the deployment of 

"private" military contractors to hotspots around the world, 

interference in Western elections, and assassinations or 

assassination attempts against defectors in the West using 

radioactive poisons and illegal chemical weapons). Except 

insofar as Russia seeks to construct a sphere of influence 

for itself in which other powers must defer to the Kremlin's 

wishes, Moscow's geopolitical objectives are in these 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

respects fundamentally negative: the purpose is to 

undermine global order and to capitalize upon the ensuing 

disorder to allow Russia to acquire what it desires. 

Russia is working to expand the capabilities of its 

armed forces, including its nuclear forces, in order to give it 

more tools with which to accomplish these objectives - and 

also to support its subjective sense of itself in the world as a 

great power notwithstanding its relative economic 

backwardness, corruption, and demographic problems. 

This qualitative build-up emphasizes technologically 

advanced capabilities, but Russia still remains dependent 

upon certain Western technological inputs. It recognizes 

this dependency, but is having trouble producing its own 

cutting-edge technology in key areas. 

In support of its objectives, Russia seeks to build 

strategic relationships with foreign partners through arms 

sales, energy-supply relationships, and the provision of civil 

nuclear technology and reactor services. These 

relationships provide Moscow with revenue (e.g., since 

arms sales help defray development and procurement 

costs for the Russian military) and help create relationships 

that Moscow leverages for political purposes. Hightechnology military exports are a highly important source 

of money and influence for the Kremlin. 

In its domestic messaging, the Russian regime 

encourages Russians to believe that: (i) Russia is beset by 

enemies, led by the United States, which continually try to 

subvert Russia's conservative values and undermine its 

power and dignity; (ii) a strong, centralized, authoritarian 

national state - buttressed by, and dedicated to, protecting 

traditional Russian values and the Russian Orthodox 

Church - is essential to Russia's success against these 

malign foreign forces; (iii) only such a state can lead the 

Russian people in their destiny of heroically resisting these 

depredations and ensuring proper recognition for Russia as 

a great power; and (iv) Russians who object to the policies 

or power of this centralized authoritarian state are 

degenerate subversives who threaten Russia's future and 

who play into the hands of (or simply work for) malign 

foreign powers. Not unlike the PRC, moreover, the Russian 

Federation maintains tight state controls over domestic 

media, and taking positions disfavored by the regime can 

be dangerous. (Dangers to journalists in Russia are welldocumented, and both countries rank near the bottom of 

the annual "Press Freedom Index" ratings.) 

In its external messaging, Russia seeks less to drive 

agreement with any particular narrative about itself or the 

world than simply to sow dissension and confusion in other 

countries. Indeed, Russian propaganda to some extent 

even seeks to question the very idea of objective truth itself 

in ways that undermine others' socio-political cohesion, 

particularly in Western democracies, and that weaken the 

geopolitical strength and position of the United States and 

its allies and partners. Russia undertakes such propaganda 

and messaging through both overt and covert means, 

including cyber-facilitated information warfare. 

Ill. TheT-Family Approach 

A. Implementing Lines of Effort 

In contrast to how the United States has traditionally 

approached threats from the proliferation of weapons of 

mass destruction, we in the T family find it less useful to 

think of great-power competition in terms of absolute 

advantage or of absolute capability "denial." We face 

today's challenges of competition, in fact, precisely 

because those competitor powers have already grown into 

"near-peers" of considerable stature and capability; this 

degree of growth is already afait accompli and cannot 

simply be "denied" as one might try to keep a terrorist from 

acquiring nuclear weapons. 

In addressing the challenges of near-peer competition, 

it is thus more useful to emphasize efforts to affect relative 

rates of progress. Competitive advantage, in this context, is 

measured not by any given capability per se- or by its 

absence - but rather by the degree to which each power's 

aggregated capabilities (which one can imagine as a 

summation of its various strengths and weaknesses) confer 

geopolitical advantage vis-a-vis the other powers' own 

aggregated capabilities. 

Because competitive power is a relative rather than an 

absolute value, effective U.S. strategy can approach the 

competitive race in either or both of two complementary 

ways, the elements of which are foreshadowed in the 

strategic guidance offered by the National Security 

Strategy. Specifically, we must work to help the United 

States and its allies "run faster" in that competition, as it 

were, and we must also help make those who seek to 

compete with us "run more slowly." 

For so long as there is a competition with these 

countries threatening our security interests and those of 

our allies and partners, these two prongs represent our T 

family lines of effort. 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

1. In the "run faster" prong, the United States must: 

create national prosperity and help expand our 

economy; maintain or increase the attractiveness of 

our values and ideals, government, and society; build 

mutually supportive and empowering relationships 

with a wide range of relevant international partners 

and other stakeholders; innovate and lead across 

critical arenas of cutting-edge technology that 

contribute to national power; and leverage 

technological advances into the national security arena 

to deter- and if necessary defeat- aggression and 

promote American security. 

2 . In the "make competitors run more slowly" (or 

"impede progress") prong, acting both on our own and 

with as many supportive allies and partners as possible, 

we must take steps that slow our competitors' rates of 

advance in relevant areas, such as the aforementioned 

ones, yet without precluding our ability to collaborate 

with these competitors on shared interests and take 

advantage of mutually beneficial engagement where 

possible to manage competition and reduce risk. 

B. Missions 

The T bureaus are well postured, and are working to 

improve their capabilities, to contribute to both of these 

prongs. We help the United States and its allies "run 

faster," for example, through: 

• Advocating for sales, when in our foreign and national 

security policy interests, of U.S.-manufactured or U.S.-

designed items that help sustain crucial U.S. 

technology and industrial sectors, as well as what the 

NSS described as our "National Security Innovation 

Base" - such as in our Defense Industrial Base, the 

aerospace industry, or the civil nuclear power sector; 

• Providing unmatched value to partners that purchase 

U.S. defense articles, by exporting high quality, 

cutting-edge defense technology. When partners opt 

to purchase U.S. defense technology via Foreign 

Military Sales (FMS), we provide a comprehensive 

defense capability, including the training required to 

use, maintain, and integrate purchased items and 

equipment into their doctrine and operations, and 

including the parts and components required for longterm maintenance support; 

• Promoting burden sharing, including undertaking 

capacity-building programming to help allies and 

partners become net exporters of stability, to 

strengthen their ability and willingness to integrate 

with us operationally, and to resist and push back 

against malign PRC and Russian influence, pressure, 

provocations, and intimidation; 

• Working together with allies and partners to 

strengthen our combined capability and willingness to 

deter aggression and, should deterrence fail, to 

strengthen our collective ability to prevail against 

aggressors; and 

• Working bilaterally and through leadership in 

multilateral fora and other international institutions to 

protect U.S. interests and to shape evolving rules and 

norms in ways that are conducive to continued 

American prosperity, security, and values vis-a-vis our 

competitors. 

When it comes to helping make our competitors "run 

more slowly," the T-family bureaus work through: 

• Executing arms sales to improve and support our 

partners' capabilities to directly counter PRC and 

Russian malign influence and aggression; 

• Engaging in capacity building, interoperability training, 

and burden-sharing to partners in efforts to help them 

resist intimidation and aggression with us; 

• Impeding dangerous technology transfers by properly 

implementing and supporting national security export 

controls, foreign investment reviews, visa screening, 

and other approaches to help impede those 

competitors' efforts to acquire foreign technology and 

divert it into military and security applications; 

• Engaging diplomatically to raise awareness among 

relevant stakeholders around the world about the role 

that technology transfers play in PRC and Russian 

strategy, to share "best practices" with like-minded 

partners in preventing dangerous transfers without 

stifling salutary commercial intercourse, and to 

increase coordination among such partners as we build 

"coalitions of caution" to make the development of 

adversary threat capabilities as difficult, slow, 

expensive, and unreliable as possible; 

• Ensuring that transfers of U.S. defense equipment or 

technology do not undermine the security of other U.S. 

allies or partners, nor their ability to contribute to our 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

common interests in resisting PRC or Russian 

influence, pressure, provocations, and intimidation; 

• Implementing sanctions against destabilizing, illegal, 

or otherwise problematic competitor behavior; 

• Engaging bilaterally and through leadership in 

multilateral fora and other international institutions to 

counter our competitors' growing influence and 

disinformation campaigns, as well as defeat their 

efforts to distort or hijack such mechanisms and skew 

evolving rules and norms in ways disadvantageous to 

the United States; 

• Developing effective and verifiable arms control 

frameworks and norms of responsible behavior that 

help to contain potential adversary threats, increase 

strategic transparency and predictability, reduce the 

risk of unwanted escalation or accident, and deter 

provocative and destabilizing actions; and 

• Leveraging the PM Bureau's established State and 

Defence Department planning structures and 

arrangements, as well as the exchange of foreign 

policy and military advisors, to better synchronize 

efforts related to great power competition in both 

departments. 

Any serious strategy implicitly or explicitly prioritizes. 

At least to the extent that one does not bring additional 

resources and manpower to the table, after all, the act of 

prioritization is necessarily also to some degree an act of 

de-prioritization -that is, of making choices between 

actually or potentially competing goals all of which have at 

least some merit. Such choices are neither easy nor 

pleasant, especially for a policy community that grew 

accustomed to dealing with national security and foreign 

policy issues during a post-Cold War "singularity" that 

seemingly allowed us to do "everything, everywhere, all the 

time." Nevertheless, especially in an era of revived 

interstate competition, such tough choices are inescapable. 

As the T family has increased its focus on support for 

U.S. competitive strategy, we have thus de-emphasized 

other missions -though without abandoning any. Within 

the ISN Bureau's programming work, for instance, we have 

made capacity-building efforts more threat-responsive, 

and more keyed to the foreign and national security policy 

priorities identified in the NSS. 

Specifically, in response to threat assessments from 

the U.S. Intelligence Community, we have augmented ISN 

Bureau export control-related capacity-building directed 

against chemical and biological threats while reducing 

spending on nuclear-related matters. We have also 

focused programming more upon closing threat pathways 

associated with the state competitors identified in the NSS: 

the PRC, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Across the T 

family, we understand the challenges of balancing equities 

and ensuring rational prioritization in a time of constrained 

resources, and we are working to ensure that our choices in 

balancing such equities are as clear and as thoughtful as 

possible. 

C. Resources 

In accomplishing our missions and emphasizing our 

support to U.S. competitive strategy, the T family's most 

important resource is its people. Our components have an 

experienced reservoir of human capital to draw upon in 

order to accomplish their missions. This includes a cadre of 

civil servants, who provide enormous experience in a range 

of technical fields, including many staff members with 

advanced degrees and highly specialized expertise in the 

sciences, and others with decades of experience with 

bilateral and multilateral engagement focused upon issues 

such as weapons of mass destruction, space security, 

cybersecurity, ballistic and cruise missile technology, dualuse items, and national security export controls. 

T family personnel, however, also include Foreign 

Service Officers employed in the Department of State and 

as Foreign Policy Advisors (POLADS) with U.S. military 

commands around the globe, additional staff such as 

American Association for the Advancement of Science 

Fellows, a large number of highly experienced contractors, 

and a number of civil servants and locally employed staff 

forward-deployed abroad as part of efforts such as the 

Export Control and Border Security program. 

In terms of financial resources, the T family 

administers funds that we use, inter alia, for capacitybuilding and other programming efforts that contribute to 

U.S. competitive strategy. The PM Bureau, for instance, 

manages various programs designed to provide American 

defense items and technology to partners and Allies. 

In Fiscal Year 2019, in fact, PM managed $55 billion in 

FMS and authorized $115 billion in Direct Commercial Sales 

of arms and munitions to U.S. allies and partners around 

the world, as well as nearly $7 billion in Title 22 security 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

sector assistance funding, including $71 million in 

peacekeeping capacity building efforts. PM also 

coordinated the Defense Department's implementation of 

nearly $9 billion in Title 10 funding for security sector 

assistance. Much of this directly contributes to the NSSderived priority of helping U.S. allies and partners be better 

allies and partners, and to contribute more effectively to 

the shared challenges we face from PRC and Russian 

revisionism. Through the 2019 Joint Security Sector 

Assistance Review, State and the Defense Department 

coordinated at various levels to ensure that our assistance 

authorities were synchronized to support our national 

security and foreign policy interests. 

The ISN Bureau administers about $250 million in 

annual programming, which is used for a variety of 

nonproliferation and international security-related efforts, 

but which the Bureau has increasingly directed towards 

programs that build capacity while also contributing to 

competitive strategy vis-a-vis the PRC and Russia. The 

Bureau is working to adeptly align funding to current 

strategic priorities, and has been going through a multiyear reform effort to increase the degree to which 

programming decisions are made on the basis ofthreatprioritized criteria reflecting the United States' top foreign 

policy and national security objectives. This has resulted in 

a greater stress upon projects such as support for border 

security and related efforts to help countries around 

Russia's contested periphery control their frontiers in this 

current era of "grey zone" and "hybrid" warfare threats, as 

well as support for export control and international 

sanctions enforcement capacity-building to augment 

partner countries' ability to prevent Chinese entities from 

engaging with the Iranian or North Korean missile 

programs. 

D. Structure 

Large portions of the T family have long been 

structured in ways conducive to supporting U.S. 

competitive strategy vis-a-vis Russia and the PRC. The PM 

Bureau, for instance, has essentially always been organized 

in large part around providing American defense items and 

technology to partners and allies - and to facilitating 

military training and capacity-building work- in order to 

increase these countries' interoperability with U.S. military 

forces in time of conflict, enhance their ability to contribute 

to United Nations peacekeeping missions, and augment 

their overall military effectiveness. 

Similarly, the AVC Bureau is organized around 

supporting arms control negotiations and managing 

competition and risk reduction activities with Russia and 

the PRC. For some years AVC has also played the lead 

State Department role in efforts to strengthen extended 

deterrence, and works closely with other bureaus in the 

Department to use assurance measures to empower U.S. 

allies to act with us collectively in deterring aggression, 

from the grey zone to the nuclear arena. AVC also focuses 

on marshaling cooperative responses to threats that the 

United States and its allies and partners face from both the 

PRC and Russia. Such threats include Russian ands PRC 

efforts to develop dangerous and destabilizing capabilities 

in various domains, and to advance hypocritical 

disarmament proposals, policies, and agreements that 

threaten the current rules-based international order. 

Recently, moreover, T family components have 

worked to increase their focus upon supporting U.S. 

competitive strategy vis-a-vis the PRC and Russia. The ISN 

Bureau, for instance, has been realigned to increase the 

effectiveness of the support it provides in this respect, 

including through the creation of a new Competitive 

Strategy Office (ISN/CSO) to serve as a State Department 

liaison point with elements and efforts elsewhere in the 

U.S. Government that are focused upon technologycontrol and counterintelligence issues vis-a-vis great power 

competitors. 

A further new and exciting development is the planned 

creation of an entirely new Cyberspace Security and 

Emerging Technologies (CSET) Bureau, to be located in the 

T family. In June 2019, the Department notified Congress 

of its plans. This new CSET Bureau is intended to bring 

under one roof the Department's current diplomacy related 

to cyberspace security, to expand these capacities, and to 

add to this critical work a dedicated cadre of professional 

staff focused upon understanding and ensuring the 

development of coordinated diplomatic responses to the 

ongoing national security challenges presented by 

emerging technologies in areas such as Artificial 

Intelligence. CSET would represent a critically important 

new aspect ofT-family efforts to support U.S. national 

security strategy. 

IV. Conclusion 

At present, we are working to refine and improve our 

support to U.S. competitive strategy vis-a-vis the PRC and 

Russia, and to find additional pathways to success as we 

address our policies to the competitive challenges 

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Competitive Strategy vis-a-vis China and Russia: A View from the "T Suite" 

presented by those powers. We are also working to 

support the State Department's larger efforts to step up 

enterprise-wide coordination of PRC-related policy under 

the supervision of the Deputy Secretary and the Enterprise 

Governance Board. To this end, we have initiated a T-wide 

review of our support to U.S. competitive strategy, of 

which this document is merely an initial product, and we 

have assigned a senior executive from ISN to the "T" front 

office to help coordinate all efforts across the four bureaus. 

* * 

Arms Control and International Security Papers 

We are excited by the prospect of finding ways to do more, 

and to do it better. We hope that in the months ahead we 

will be able to share more with you about how we are living 

up to these aspirations. 

* 

The Arms Control and International Security Papers are produced by the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control 

and International Security in order to make U.S. State Department policy analysis available in an electronically-accessible 

format compatible with "social distancing" during the COVID-19 crisis.