Anyone who still doubts that the US is economically decoupling from the rest of the world should take a look at a proposal the commerce department put forward last week. This would allow its secretary Wilbur Ross to prevent imports of any new technology deemed a “national security threat”. The broad language could apply not only to Huawei chips or Chinese dot-coms, but to European hardware, software and data services, too, if they are deemed to be linked to a “foreign adversary”.
Such a link is very possible now Europe is being pulled into China’s technology orbit via the 5G standards and technologies that make up part of the Belt and Road Initiative. I spoke recently to a senior executive at a strategically important US technology company who told me it is becoming legally tricky for him even to speak to his counterparts in Europe, because of the various restrictions that the Trump administration has put in place.
That’s scary, because one of the most important things the US could do right now to ensure both national security and its own position in the 21st-century digital economy would be to work with allies on transatlantic standards for emerging technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence and so on. In fact, that was a key recommendation in a recent Council on Foreign Relations task force report entitled “Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge.”