Washington’s New China Tech Strategy

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. I'm here in Sydney, Australia, where it's about 28 degrees, and I'm joined by Emily Kilcrease in Washington, DC, where it's about 28 degrees. It's just that one's Fahrenheit and the other Celsius. Thanks, Emily. You're a return guest, and we have a lot to catch up on on tech and chips and Rare Earths. So really going to pick your brain for the next half hour.

**Emily Kilcrease** (0:40)
Sounds great. I'm delighted to be back.

**Mike Green** (0:42)
We normally start by asking people a bit how they got into this, but I'll just remind people of the most important parts. You went to Georgetown, Hoya Saxa. And then Maya Montserrat-Fais. So that pretty much tells people what they need to know, I guess.

**Emily Kilcrease** (0:53)
That's right.

**Mike Green** (0:55)
And Emily, just to remind people, was the Deputy Assistant US. Trade Rep overseeing development, negotiation, coordination of foreign investment policy. So strategic level decisions about investments and economic and technology competition. And she's at the Center for New American Security where she directs the Energy, Economics and Security Program. Looking at economic security, we do a lot with the US. Studies Center with Haley Channer and John Kunkel with Emily. She's one of the best in the field. And we had you on in February 2023 to explain the Biden administration's approach to technology competition with China. And everything from the CHIPS Act to Jake Sullivan's small yard, high fence approach, how to compete without catastrophe. It was all very disciplined. It was all very thought through. It seems like with the Trump administration, a lot has really changed. But before we get to that and trying to explain that change, let's rewind to a different day when we met in 2023 What was the logic of focusing so much of the US government regulatory apparatus and intelligence apparatus on competition over AI with China? What was at stake and what was the theory of the case? Yeah.

**Emily Kilcrease** (2:08)
First, you have to remember that the Biden administration's approach was really driven by their view that we were in a broader strategic competition with China. You heard the line over and over from them that China was the only competitor in the international system with the intent and potentially capability to challenge the US in the rules-based order. They very much viewed China across all dimensions as a strategic competitor, and they were viewing their actions as being things that they needed to do to protect US security interests and national interest in the context of that strategic competition. And then when they boiled it down to the next level, technology and economics were always a really critical part of that. A lot of the emphasis in the Biden administration was on what they called these force multiplier technologies. So here, you're talking about supercomputing, you're talking about AI, you're talking about quantum. It's the technologies that in some respects are still nascent today, but that they viewed as being critical to winning future military battles down the line, and they viewed the next couple of years in the development of those technologies as absolutely critical in determining which country was going to have that advantage. And you can particularly think about that in the AI space, where if anybody has played with the models or has been using these LLMs and chatbots for the last couple of years, you can actually see that there's been just a huge amount of change. So that was their mindset. There's a bigger competition and the technology field is moving so fast that we need to win this competition in the next couple of years.

**Mike Green** (3:36)
And I think it's fair to point out that the urgency around this competition on AI really started, as I recall, in the Pentagon. And it was the joint staff in particular in the Obama years, in the second Obama turn, where war games and future warfare studies showed how important AI would be. So the push came from the Pentagon mainly around, frankly, war fighting scenarios and military strategy. And then, credit where credit is due, the Trump administration put a lot of those people who had been in uniform into key posts in the NSC, in commerce, and state and began with their national security strategy, a strategy based on the predicate that China's revisionist power set and undermining American leadership and security. So, it wasn't a disciplined approach, I think it's fair to say, but it was driven by strategy and strategic objectives. And then, I'd say there was more continuity than change on this front from Trump to Biden.