Defense and National Security

A growing number of countries have banned TikTok for alleged security threats. If the threat from China is real, a TikTok ban alone is too limited, but if the threat is overstated, these bans are a wasteful exercise in security theater. Either way, these bans are misguided.

At the height of the Cold War, perhaps the most important U.S. national mission was to drive military innovation to ensure that the Soviet Union’s numerical superiority (in terms of soldiers and weapons) would not translate into superiority on the battlefield. The current geopolitical landscape presents a similar challenge in the United States’ rivalry with China, which is investing heavily to surpass the United States in technological capabilities to gain a global economic advantage and at least military parity in the Indo-Pacific region.

In responding to China’s growing efforts to influence standards, the United States should not copy its approach to standards setting in closing off participation to foreign enterprises. Instead, the Biden administration and its like-minded trading partners in Australia, Japan, Singapore, and beyond should revert to first principles as agreed at the WTO and double down on their support for open, transparent, and industry-led standards development, which together demonstrates good governance for standards setting.

China’s aspiration to become the new global hegemon calls into question the “Washington Consensus” that free markets and unfettered globalization maximize U.S. and global welfare. But for true believers, that is unacceptable. So, the idea China is a threat must be destroyed intellectually.

While intended to protect national security, the updated American Security Drone Act would still do little to bolster drone security and would limit government agencies from using some of the best-in-class drones.

The United States can no longer afford to trade U.S. market access for geopolitical alignment, and other nations can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines as the United States does the hard work of limiting China’s economic, technological, and foreign-policy aggression alone.

Putin’s attack should galvanize real foreign policy, defense policy, and industrial policy cooperation among democratic, allied nations.

Rob and Jackie sat down with John Zysman, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and co-founder/co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, to discuss why U.S. semiconductor production has dropped so far down, what it portends, and how America can regain its footing in the industry.

The Biden administration and its “Neo-Brandeisian” supporters in Congress are seeking to break up large tech companies, but national-security-minded advisers warn it would strengthen America’s biggest ad­versary, China. They're right, just as an earlier generation of national security advisers was right to warn the Eisenhower administration against breaking up AT&T.

Acting against Chinese IP theft is a rare area of bipartisan support in U.S. trade policy, and the SECRETS Act provides a chance for U.S. policymakers and the Biden administration to take a stand against such parasitic practices by enacting a new law.