Draft an “Article X” strategy document on China

Partially done

Printed page 179 6. Department of State

“The U.S. government needs an Article X for China, and it should be a presidential mandate. Along with the National Security Council, the State Department should draft an Article X, which should be a deeply philosophical look at the China challenge.”

What has happened

Dec 5, 2025 Partially done
A presidentially issued strategy with a substantial argumentative China section exists; a dedicated “Article X” does not, and the strategy explicitly declines the doctrine an Article X would supply. The National Security Strategy dated November 2025 and released in the first week of December 2025 devotes its Asia section to the China challenge, arguing that three decades of American assumptions about opening markets to China were wrong and setting out a rebalancing agenda. But it is a whole-of-world strategy, not the deeply philosophical China document the Quote asks for; commentators noted that it names no pacing threat and offers no framework of great-power competition, and its own framing is that the goal is not to dominate China and that no existential struggle is required — the opposite of the containment doctrine an Article X models. Nothing from the State Department's Policy Planning Staff answering this description has been published.
- National Security Strategy of the United States of America (November 2025), section IV.3.B, Asia: Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation
  Primary Executive branch Dec 5, 2025
- NPR: Trump's security strategy slams European allies and asserts U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere
  Secondary Executive branch Dec 5, 2025

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Negative search: a search for “national security strategy” across the Federal Register, White House presidential actions, public laws and bills in Congress returns one unrelated bill — the NSS is not filed as a presidential action, which is why it had to be found and read directly on whitehouse.gov. No State Department China strategy document appears in the Department’s 2025-2026 press index (2,313 releases) or in its reports collection.
Boundary: partial on the National Security Strategy as “a different instrument covering only some of it”. A reviewer could reasonably hold this at not started on the ground that the Quote names a distinct genre of document and the NSS is not it.
Related: #478 (China House), the institutional half of the same page.

Action: issue
Object: An “Article X” for China
ID: 485