The US needs a tech doctrine
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Loading... - Clint Pickford
- 11 Apr 2022
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Reflecting on the nearly 40 pieces we’ve published over the last few months, I can’t help but see a few common threads emerge: Tech industrial policy is increasingly in favor. Emerging tech is top of mind. And where China isn’t setting the pace, it isn’t far behind.
While the U.S. has made remarkable strides in meeting these challenges (see my piece on the State Department’s new cyber bureau), it still lags on perhaps the most important one: navigating the increasing fusion of geopolitics and technology. If the U.S. is to succeed in the contest for the 21st century, it needs more than new agencies or investments in infrastructure (however large they may be). Even an industrial strategy is insufficient.
What America needs is a geopolitical technology doctrine.
What do I mean by a doctrine? Well for the most part, technology policy can be seen in two ways. The first is as a new security domain. The public and private sectors have spent billions of dollars improving our cyber capabilities to both protect our civil and military networks and acquire the ability to strike our adversaries. While many of our networks are still woefully vulnerable, we generally know the challenges and are making strides to shore up our defenses.
The second follows the thesis that the future will be won by whichever country controls (and integrates into its economy) the most advanced technologies. Thus tech policy becomes a function of broader economic competition. This is the ground on which much of our current debate is held — are we on the right track on emerging tech like 5G, quantum or artificial intelligence? Are our supply chains secure? What regulatory edge can we give American tech companies? How can we work with allies to jump-start those efforts?
These two facets of technology policy are incredibly important — and well worth the attention paid to them in this series and elsewhere. Look only to Russia, which has found itself cut off from Western tech supply chains and software updates as a result of its invasion of Ukraine.
But they shortchange a significant element of tech’s role in geopolitics that I hope we’ve raised here as well. That yes, tech is an asset. But like other economic resources (ahem, the U.S. dollar), tech can also be a leverage point that gives policymakers clever ways to further broader foreign policy interests. Yet for the most part, we have not thought systematically about how to wield this power — or protect it.
Our rivals aren’t so diffident. As with many asymmetric capabilities, it’s the authoritarian regimes, unconcerned by scruples over such things as human rights or the rule of law, that have pioneered creative and effective — if odious and unethical — geopolitical tech strategies. Read More…
