US Tech Competition Efforts Lack Coherent Strategy, Expert Says
There isn’t a “coherent” strategy among the various bills in Congress to address international technology competition, said Jon Bateman, a technology policy expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Bateman, speaking during a June 23 event hosted by Foreign Policy magazine, said the lack of coherence isn’t “altogether surprising, partly because the government is “classically plagued with coherence problems.”
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“People like me who work at think tanks have spent decades rapping Washington's knuckles over not being coherent or strategic on whatever the issue is,” Bateman said. “And so, to some extent, we need to grade on a curve. I think we're not there yet.”
Part of the problem, he said, is that the U.S. is only about 10 years into an “intellectual shift toward China-oriented techno-nationalism,” and only about five years into developing policy to address those technology competition issues. A coherent strategy here, Bateman said, takes time.
But he also pointed to the seemingly wide strategic differences between some bills being considered in Congress. While some measures are focused on investing in domestic research and development for semiconductors, lawmakers are also making a “continued push toward intensifying restrictive measures,” Bateman said.
Some lawmakers are specifically hoping to include a provision in the bipartisan China package that would introduce a new regime to screen certain outbound investments, similar to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., but in reverse (see 2206140048 and 2205130036). While Bateman said some type of outbound investment screening regime is likely necessary, “the ideas floating around are often kind of formless, amorphous, potentially much more sweeping than is really necessary.”
The problem doesn’t lie only in Congress. He said the U.S. government and its various sanctions authorities may be too fragmented to support technological innovation and competition efforts because “so many different silos” may not be working together as well as they should.
Some of the silos are “industry-specific,” such as U.S. efforts to improve the semiconductor supply chain, which is a “very technical field” and “hard for outsiders” to understand “how it all works.” He also pointed to the different export control and sanctions authorities managed by the Commerce, Treasury and State departments, which may be contributing to the “fracturing of regulatory and political authority in the United States.”
“You've got, let's say, the Commerce Department, which is overseeing export controls,” Bateman said. “Then on the other hand, you've got the State Department, which has its own export control list, which is distinct from the Commerce list. You've got the Treasury Department, which is overseeing financial sanctions.” He also mentioned CFIUS, which is often “very opaque” and doesn’t “let the public in on the rationales behind its decisions.”
Because there are so many silos, “many of the loudest voices driving China tech or tech policy in general in the United States are from the national security community, less so from the economic community,” Bateman said, even though business leaders “have a huge stake in what's going on.”
“I think a lot of business leaders are just trying to keep their heads down,” Bateman said, “meaning that the loudest voices in the room are those in the military intelligence community and their allies on Capitol Hill, who are critical voices on national security threats but may not be best positioned to integrate the whole complexity of a technological innovation.”