Good morning, everyone.  It’s a pleasure to be able to contribute to this important conference on cybersecurity for digitized national security and the potential for global public-private partnerships in advanced technology. 

I am able to offer you only my personal opinions here, of course.  Nevertheless, I have become firmly convinced that multilateral partnerships are an essential ingredient in whether the sovereign democracies of the West will be able to meet the challenges they face in today’s (and tomorrow’s) security environment.

I am sorry I can only join you virtually today.  I was in Japan two weeks ago on a delegation from the American Foreign Policy Council, however, which met with a variety of Japanese officials from the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, chambers of the National Diet, and national-level research institutions.  And I am pleased to say that, in contrast to the mess we Americans have recently made of our relationships with some important allies elsewhere, the U.S.-Japan alliance still seems quite strong – and indeed to be becoming steadily more effective and more serious as just the kind of partnership both our peoples need in a threatening world.

With that comparatively optimistic backdrop, I would like to say a few words today about the multilateral relationships we need in order to pull like-minded partners more closely together and make their cooperation as effective as possible as a tool of strategic competition and mutual security.

The Strategic Context 

One of the things I am most proud of from my last period of service in the U.S. Government is the opportunity I was privileged to have to be a part of reorienting American foreign and national security policy toward strategic competition after decades of inattention that resulted first from post-Cold War complacency and lazy triumphalism and then from a preoccupation with counterterrorism and conflicts in the Middle East.  When running the WMD directorate at the National Security Council staff, I had the honor of contributing to drafting the United States’ 2018 National Security Strategy inaugurating that shift, and I was also able to help lead the implementation of that readjustment when I moved to the State Department as an Assistant Secretary shortly thereafter.

In particular, I’m proud of the work we did at State in leading the charge to pivot the United States into a much more serious strategy for technology competition.  This shift began with policies of technology denial for our strategic adversaries that my team inaugurated in 2018 with our push to revise national security export controls on civil-nuclear energy cooperation with China, and then continued with the U.S. Government’s technology-restriction campaign against China’s technology sector when my team nominated the company Huawei for the Commerce Department’s export control restriction “Entity List” in 2019. 

From those early seeds a great deal subsequently grew.  In fact, the Biden Administration followed our lead and moved into what I had described at the time as a competitive strategy of “technology denial” by limiting semiconductor exports to China even more extensively.

To be sure, the Second Trump Administration has steered a more volatile course, and backtracked on some of these policies in ways that have been very helpful to China and its Chinese Communist Party rulers.  After initially restricting key semiconductor exports to Beijing, for instance, President Trump decided, in effect, to go into business with the company Nvidia in providing high-end Artificial Intelligence chips to China, agreeing to lift national security export control restrictions in return for a 15 percent cut of Nvidia’s profits in the Chinese market.  Far from following the approach we pioneered in the First Trump Administration, this made the United States again into a major supplier of what our strategic competitor needs.  The president even subsequently took Nvidia’s Jensen Huang with him on his trip to China last May to ask Xi Jinping to let more U.S. companies sell high technology to the People’s Republic.

Nevertheless, at least something of the competitive technology control framework we began to craft when I was in government still remains in place, and I am pleased to have played such a role in getting modern U.S. technology competition strategy off the ground.

But you’ll notice that I described my work in those regards as relating to “technology denial,” and I’d be the first to admit that such denial is only part of a good strategy.  We worked hard to put obstacles in the way of our strategic competitors’ own technology strategies, but the much more important factor was always going to be not how much we could slow the other guy down but rather how fast we could ourselves “run” in such a competitive race.  As I repeatedly told my colleagues at the State Department, I saw my technology-restriction role as really doing no more than buying time in which the U.S. technology sector could figure out how to “run faster.”  “Running faster” is the central element of the game.

And what I’d similarly like to stress to you this morning listening to me in Tokyo is how essential it is to that “run faster” project that we in the United States work ever better together with our friends. 

As I see it, the national security policy community in Washington got too arrogant and complacent about multilateral cooperation in the years of unquestioned U.S. global primacy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War.   In fairness, the politics and rhetoric of the period did prize cooperation.  But the collaboration our leaders tended to have in mind in those years was rather unfocused and generalized – a kind of airy, good-governance-for-the-world weaving of transnational connective tissue, which was intended to tie nations increasingly together in some kind of ersatz global commonwealth at the “End of History.”

Now, I don’t mean to speak too harshly of those efforts and aspirations, for in their own way they were noble and uplifting, aimed not at specific advantage but rather at vague ideals of the common good.  But they weren’t strategic.  And, unfortunately, while we worked at weaving all that post-competitive global societal connective tissue, our adversaries – Russia eventually, but China consistently and doggedly all along – were playing a different game entirely. 

Our adversaries’ project, to put it bluntly, was to break our project.  Their aim was to drive the global environment back in the direction of competitive rivalries, and to promote power distributions that would favor their authoritarian projects.  They worked to advance their power and status in the system at the expense of the law-governed global regime of rights and freedoms that we had convinced ourselves would never seriously be threatened again.  This was their agenda for years, but it took us until 2017 to refocus upon competitive strategy. 

The Need for Cooperative Competitive Strategy

I recount all this simply to emphasize how important it is for us to figure out how to use multilateral partnerships among like-minded powers to meet this strategic competitive challenge.  Given how relatively successful our adversaries’ strategies have been so far, the challenge is not one that the United States can meet alone.  We no longer stand astride the world like the colossus we discovered ourselves to be after the Cold War ended, and we cannot succeed by ourselves. 

This is true in many ways, of course.  But it is certainly so with respect to competition in advanced technologies – an arena that has been of extraordinary importance ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late 18^th and early 19^thCenturies first demonstrated how asymmetrically-distributed technological change can utterly transform global power balances and create massive and transformative geopolitical disruptions.

Today, this means that we need to work with our friends and partners rather than dividing ourselves from them through beggar-thy-neighbor policies of whimsically transactional short-term self-aggrandizements.  We need to build “run faster” policies that work in the aggregate, pulling like-minded powers together to out-compete the authoritarian revisionists and to elevate all those peoples who share an interest in preserving and advancing the ordered freedoms of classical liberalism against that authoritarianism.

Lines of Effort

So how should we work together better with friends such as Japan in technology-related strategic competition with China?  I would suggest three main lines of effort. 

Create New Value

First, we need to create new value – by which I mean doing better in collaborating to create new technological innovations, develop new technologies and incorporate them into how we do business, produce products and services for our citizens, heal the sick and keep the well healthy, fight wars, and grow our understanding of the world.  We also need to work together better to figure out how to govern such new technologies safety and effectively, to manage and mitigate whatever disruptions and challenges may be attendant to their introduction and uptake, and to take advantage of whatever competitive benefits such innovations give us. 

In a time of growing economic isolationism, mercantilist trade policies, and hostility to transnational openness, this will mean getting over such narrow perspectives enough to be able to collaborate effectively with like-minded partners.  Such openness is essential among friends if we are to prevail vis-à-vis our enemies.  In today’s world – confronted as we are by adversaries of such formidable size, wealth, and sophistication – successful competitive strategy is a collective endeavor, and go-it-alone economic nationalism represents a dead end of decay and decline.

Protect and Preserve

Second, we need to cooperate more to protect and preserve our own economies, political systems, and societies, making them more resistant and resilient in the face of adversarial threats.  This means giving resolute and sustained attention to things like critically de-risking supply chains essential to our own (and our friends’) prosperity and security.  It also means weaving our defense industrial bases together better – through improvements in technology sharing, licensing and co-production, and joint ventures, for example – so that they can actually meet the qualitative and quantitative requirements of high-end, high-intensity, high-technology warfare if called upon to do so. 

Furthermore, it means building, maintaining, and improving the institutions, technologies, methods, and practices needed to secure these capabilities in the face of adversary threats – including through augmented cybersecurity methods and safeguards against both espionage and intellectual property theft.  And it means providing effective intelligence collection, analysis, information fusion, and decision-support capabilities to the national leaders we entrust with leading us in strategic competition.

Fend Off Threats

Third, we need to hone our techniques of working together in pushing back against our adversaries where we can, denying them advantage and using mutually-reinforcing instruments of statecraft to blunt their advance and problematize their strategies.  This doesn’t just mean developing national technology control regimes that deny the benefits of our cleverness to the bad guys.  It also means doing what I and my State Department colleagues termed “technology-control diplomacy,” in which like-minded partners work together to coordinate national security export controls so as to keep dangerous capabilities out of the hands of our adversaries.  It may even include efforts at collaborative counterproliferation-type work to counteract and disrupt adversary efforts to work around such controls. 

We also need to get better at coordinating our tools and techniques of coercive economic statecraft, figuring out better ways to put pressure on our competitors and punish reckless and destabilizing behavior and other moves that threaten our interests.  We need to develop better ways together to impose costs and risks upon them in ways that slow their competitive progress or shape their behavior in more congenial directions, and that exact a price for their own moves against us.  Moreover, since economic statecraft isn’t just a “negative” game, we also need to do better at coordinating how we use positive incentives and rewards to shape the behavior of third parties and nudge the security environment into safer, more secure, and more stable forms.

Conclusion

There is, in other words, a lot to do.  And this means that what you’re talking about at this conference is very important indeed – in fact, it is world-historically so.  I have no crystal ball capable of predicting whether we will together get this recipe right.  But I do know that it is fantastic to be working on this great project together. 

So thank you for listening, and for attending this conference.  I wish you Godspeed in your discussions and explorations.

—Christopher Ford