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2024年10月美國安全助理傑克 ·沙利文 布魯金斯學會講話
美國國家安全事務助理傑克 ·沙利文在布魯金斯學會的講話摘譯
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. Oct 23, 2024
華盛頓特區， 布魯金斯學會（Brookings Institution）2024年10月23日
（……）
我想首先反思我聽到的一些問題，然後就如何鞏固我們的進展提出一些建議。
一個首要問題是許多其他問題的核心：我們的新方針是否意味著我們正在放棄一種正和（positive-sum）世界觀，即美國可以置其他所有國家的利益於不顧而僅僅尋求其自身利益？
總體而言，不，不是這樣。事實上，我們正在回歸於一種使美國的國際領導力成為持久力量的傳統，即亞曆克西斯·德·托克維爾（Alexis de Tocqueville）所說的“正確理解的利益”。這種觀念認為，加強我們的合作夥伴並維持一個有助於我們所有人繁榮的公平經濟體係符合我們自身的利益。
（……）
我們現在看到大國競爭的回歸。但與冷戰時代不同的是，我們的經濟緊密相連。我們正處於人工智能帶來的技術革命的前沿，這種變化也將帶來經濟和地緣政治影響。新冠病毒疫情暴露了全球供應鏈中數十年來逐步累積的脆弱性。隨著每一次颶風和熱浪來襲，氣候危機都變得更加緊迫。
因此，我們需要再次闡明德托克維爾提出的“正確理解的利益”這一概念。對我們來說，這意味著遵循一種從根本上來說是正和的戰略，它適合當今的地緣政治現實，植根於美國的根本利益——有利於美國工人、美國社區、美國企業以及美國的國家安全和經濟實力。
我們仍然堅信國際貿易和投資的互惠性，並通過對關鍵領域進行有魄力的公共投資增強及推動國際貿易和投資；在罕見但必要的情況下，我們對關鍵的國家安全技術實施有原則的管製；針對有害的非市場行為、虐待勞工、破壞環境以及經濟脅迫采取保護措施；並與廣泛的合作夥伴進行關鍵的協調。
我們麵臨的挑戰並不是我們獨有的，也不是我們能夠獨自解決的。我們希望並且需要我們的合作夥伴與我們共同努力。鑒於我們從他們那裏聽到的需求信號，我們認為，在未來十年中，美國的領導力將取決於一種能力，即能否幫助我們的合作夥伴實施類似方針並在我們的所有政策和投資之間建立協同性和互補性。
如果我們做到這一點，我們就能證明國際經濟一體化與民主和國家主權是相容的。我們也將借此擺脫丹尼·羅德裏克的三難困境（Dani Rodrik’s trilemma）。
那麽，這在實踐中意味著什麽？這種正和方針對貿易政策意味著什麽？我們是否正在放棄貿易作為國際經濟政策核心支柱的地位？
美國的進出口已從疫情期間的低迷中恢複，過去兩年美國貿易的實際價值每年都遠高於2019年的水平。我們也是世界上最大的外國直接投資（FDI）來源國。
因此，我們不會放棄國際貿易和投資。我們目前所做的是放棄某些具體政策，坦率地說，這些政策沒有考慮到我們麵臨的緊迫挑戰：氣候危機；脆弱而集中的關鍵礦產和半導體供應鏈；對工人權利的持續壓製；不僅是更多的全球競爭，而且是與一個全麵采行非市場政策和做法來扭曲及主導全球市場的國家進行競爭。
忽視或淡化這些現實無助於我們確定一條可行的前進路線。我們的貿易方針旨在應對這些挑戰。
氣候問題是一個很好的例子。美國製造商是清潔鋼鐵生產的全球領先者，但他們必須與生產成本更低但排放強度更高的鋼鐵公司競爭。因此，白宮在今年早些時候成立了氣候與貿易工作組（Climate and Trade Task Force），該工作組一直在開發正確的工具來促進脫碳，並確保我們從事清潔生產的工人和企業不會因海外從事不清潔、掠奪性生產的公司而處於不利地位。
關鍵礦產是另一個例子。該行業的特點是價格極度波動、腐敗盛行、對勞動力和環境的保護薄弱，並且高度集中在中華人民共和國，它們人為地壓低價格，將競爭對手攔截在市場之外。
如果我們和我們的合作夥伴不進行投資，中華人民共和國對這些供應鏈和其他供應鏈的主導地位隻會增強，這將使我們越來越依賴一個被事實證明有意將這種依賴性用作脅迫手段的國家。我們不能接受這種結果，我們的合作夥伴也不能接受。
因此，我們正在與他們合作創建一個高標準的關鍵礦產市場，使我們的供應鏈多樣化，為我們的生產商創造一個公平的競爭環境，並促進強有力的工人權利和環境保護。我們將在接下來的幾周內推動就這一想法取得切實進展。
在對我們的未來很重要的多個領域——不僅是關鍵礦產，還有太陽能電池、鋰離子電池、電動汽車——我們看到了一種廣泛的模式正在出現。中華人民共和國正在生產的產品遠超國內需求，以人為低價向全球市場傾銷過剩產能，迫使世界各地的製造商倒閉，並對供應鏈進行卡脖子。
為了防止第二次中國衝擊，我們必須采取行動。
這就是我們今年早些時候做出301關稅決定的原因。
我們知道，不分青紅皂白的、廣泛的關稅將損害美國和我們的夥伴國家的工人、消費者和企業。這方麵的證據是明確無誤的。這就是為什麽我們不走這條路，而是選擇對戰略領域的不公平做法征收關稅；在這些戰略領域中，我們和我們的盟友正在投資數千億美元來重建我們的製造業和複原力。
關鍵的是，我們看到發達經濟體和新興經濟體的夥伴都對產能過剩得出類似的結論，並采取類似的舉措來避免他們自己的產業遭到損害，其中包括歐盟、加拿大、巴西、泰國、墨西哥、土耳其以及更多國家。這事關重大。
由此回到我剛才提到的一點：我們正在與我們的合作夥伴共同尋求這種新的貿易方式。他們還認識到，我們需要現代貿易工具來實現我們的目標。這意味著考慮基於特定經濟部門的貿易協定。這意味著在更有效的情況下基於標準創建市場。這還意味著重振國際機構以應對當今的挑戰，包括真正改革世貿組織以應對我所概述的挑戰。
這意味著更全麵地思考我們的經濟夥伴關係。這就是為什麽我們創建了印太經濟框架（Indo-Pacific Economic Framework，IPEF）和美洲經濟繁榮夥伴關係（Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity，APEP）。這也是為什麽我們給它們起了這樣順口的名字。
在IPEF內，我們與13個合作夥伴達成了三項協議，以加速清潔能源轉型、推廣高勞工標準、打擊腐敗以及在供應鏈脆弱性造成廣泛破壞之前進行修複。在APEP內，我們正在努力使西半球成為具有全球競爭力的半導體、清潔能源等行業的供應鏈中心。
由此引出我在過去一年半裏經常被問到的下一個問題：國內投資在所有這些舉措中發揮怎樣的作用？我們的正和方針如何與我們的現代工業戰略相一致？
（……）
最初，當我們全麵推出這些舉措時，我們的外國合作夥伴擔心這是為了削弱他們的利益，擔心我們試圖將世界各地所有的清潔能源投資和生產轉移到美國。
但事實當時並非如此，現在也並非如此。
我們知道我們的合作夥伴需要投資。事實上，我們希望他們投資。全世界都將受益於這些投資所帶來的清潔能源進步的溢出效應。
我們遠未達到實現清潔能源部署目標所需的投資飽和點，僅靠市場也無法生成必要的資源。
因此，我們鼓勵合作夥伴投資於自己的產業實力。我們通過引導美國外交政策使美國成為這一努力中更有幫助的合作夥伴。我們的合作夥伴已經開始加入我們的行列。看看日本的綠色轉型政策、印度的生產激勵措施、加拿大的清潔能源稅收抵免、歐盟的綠色協議（Green Deal）。
隨著越來越多的國家采行這種方針，我們將繼續擴大必要的合作機製，以確保我們共同行動，擴大全球投資總額，而不是在一組固定的投資領域相互競爭。
投資於我們的高科技製造實力也是如此。我們認為，一個失去製造能力的國家就有可能失去創新能力。所以，我們正在恢複製造業。
由於《芯片和科學法》（CHIPS and Science Act）的實施，美國有望擁有五家大規模生產領先邏輯和存儲芯片的工廠。世界上沒有其他經濟體擁有超過兩個此類工廠。我們正在繼續鞏固美國在人工智能領域的領先地位，包括通過我們正在最終確定的一組措施，以確保訓練下一代人工智能模型所需的實物基礎設施在美國建造。
但所有這些高科技投資和開發並沒有以犧牲合作夥伴的利益為代價。我們和他們共同發展。
我們正在利用《芯片和科學法》批準的資金對從哥斯達黎加到越南的整個半導體供應鏈進行補充投資。
我們正在世界各地（從加拿大到新加坡再到日本）建立一個人工智能安全機構網絡，以負責任地運用人工智能的力量。
我們還成立了一個新的量子開發小組（Quantum Development Group），以深化這一在未來幾十年至關重要的領域的合作。
簡言之，我們正在考慮如何與我們的盟友和合作夥伴共同管理這一問題，這將使我們所有各方更具競爭力。
這一切引出了另一個經常提出的問題：你們的技術保護政策何去何從？它如何適應正和方針？
長期以來，美國和我們的盟友及夥伴都在對軍民兩用技術出口進行限製，這合乎邏輯且無可爭議。一些國家有可能利用先進技術來獲得對美國及我們的朋友的軍事優勢，允許公司企業將這些技術出售給這些國家有悖常理。
試圖回到地緣政治對手之間幾乎沒有貿易（包括技術貿易）的冷戰範式將是錯誤的。但正如我所指出的，我們當今處於一個根本不同的地緣政治背景，所以我們必須選擇一條中間道路。
這意味著我們實行限製是有針對性的，僅僅對影響國家安全和戰略競爭的最敏感技術實行管製。我們說：去風險，而不是脫鉤。就包含了這一層意思。
為了達到適當的平衡，確保我們不會以任意或本能的方式實施管製，我們有一個為我們的決策提供依據的框架。我們至少向自己提出四個問題：
第一，哪些敏感技術目前或未來可能涉及美國國家安全的基礎？
第二，就這些敏感技術而言，我們在哪些領域中具有明顯的優勢，並且我們的競爭對手可能盡最大努力來縮小差距？反之，我們在哪些領域中落後，因此最容易受到脅迫？
第三，我們的競爭對手在多大程度上可以通過本土開發或第三國引進來直接替代美國敏感技術，從而削弱我們的管製？
第四，我們能夠圍繞一項特定管製建立和維持的聯盟的廣度和深度如何？
是的，當涉及到一小部分敏感技術時，圍牆很高，理應如此。
從更廣泛的商業背景考慮，院子很小，我們無意不必要地擴大。
除了出口管製和投資審查領域之外，我們還將采取行動保護敏感數據和我們的關鍵基礎設施，例如我們最近對來自受關切國家的網聯汽車采取的行動。
我猜想這個會場中幾乎沒有人會認為我們應該與華為一起打造我們的電信架構或數據中心基礎設施。
數以百萬計采用中華人民共和國的技術的汽車在路上行駛，每天從中華人民共和國獲取軟件更新，將大量信息發送回中華人民共和國，這些做法不合常理，特別是當我們已經看到中華人民共和國對我們的關鍵基礎設施構成網絡威脅的證據時。
坦率地說，我們必須以過去未曾采用的方式預測係統性網絡和數據風險，包括對未來物聯網的影響，並且我們必須采取深思熟慮、有針對性的必要措施來應對。
由此引出最後一個問題，也是在某種程度上具有根本性的問題：這一方針是否反映了對美國和我們的固有利益的某種悲觀主義看法？
恰恰相反。它反映了一種持久而雄心勃勃的樂觀精神。我們深信，我們能夠采取明智而有魄力的行動，我們有能力競爭並將獲勝，我們能夠應對當今時代的各項巨大挑戰，我們能夠為全體美國人民帶來他們應得的利益。
雖然現在還言之過早，但我們已經有了一些成功的證據，包括我們在世界上所有發達經濟體中實現了最強勁的疫情後複蘇。還有更多工作要做，但通貨膨脹已經下降。與在這個十年或下個十年內中華人民共和國的國內生產總值將超過美國的預測相反，自拜登總統上任以來，美國的領先幅度擴大了一倍多。去年，美國吸引的外國直接投資是排名第二的國家的五倍多。
我們再次展示了我們的複原力和重塑能力，其他國家也注意到了。上個月發布的歐盟德拉吉報告（Draghi Report）與我們的戰略的關鍵方麵具有一致性。
現在，當我們繼續實現這一願景時，我們需要嚴格地堅持原則。例如，我們需要果斷地進行所需的投資，但不能轉向排擠私營部門或與我們的合作夥伴過度競爭的毫無效用的補貼。
我們清楚地知道，我們的政策將涉及選擇和取舍。這是所有政策的本質。但套用薩特（Sartre）的話來說，不選擇也是一種選擇；我們對挑戰置之不理的時間越長，在取舍中付出的代價就會越高。
斷言達成適當的平衡具有很大難度並不構成滿足於現狀的理由。
我們已經開始為實現新的正和願景並證明其價值而努力，但我們仍然有大量工作要做。
（……）
下麵這段話可以作為我的結束語：
第二次世界大戰結束以來，美國一直倡導一個公平開放的國際經濟體係；倡導通過加強全球聯係推動創新；倡導通過善用貿易和投資的力量創造良好的就業機會；倡導讓托克維爾所說的“正確理解的利益”展現力量。
我們麵臨的任務是利用這種力量來應對當今地緣政治的現實，不僅要保持美國持久的優勢，還要將其延續到子孫後代。我們需要進行更多這樣的對話，並經曆一次又一次的迭代，才能形成新的共識，完善一套新的政策和能力，從而成功地應對時代的挑戰。
Remarks by APNSA Jake Sullivan at the Brookings Institution
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. Oct 23, 2024
Good morning, everyone. And thank you so much, David, for that introduction and for having me here today. It’s great to be back at Brookings.
As many of you know, I was here last year to lay out President Biden’s vision for renewing American economic leadership, a vision that responded to several converging challenges our country faced: the return of intense geopolitical competition; a rise in inequality and a squeeze on the middle class; a less vibrant American industrial base; an accelerating climate crisis; vulnerable supply chains; and rapid technological change.
For the preceding three decades, the U.S. economy had enjoyed stronger topline aggregate growth than other advanced democracies, and had generated genuine innovation and technological progress, but our economic policies had not been adapted to deal effectively with these challenges. That’s why President Biden implemented a modern industrial strategy, one premised on investing at home in ourselves and our national strength, and on shifting the energies of U.S. foreign policy to help our partners around the world do the same.
In practice, that’s meant mobilizing public investment to unlock private sector investment to deliver on big challenges like the clean energy transition and artificial intelligence, revitalizing our capacity to innovate and to build, creating diversified and resilient global supply chains, setting high standards for everything from labor to the environment to technology. Because on that level playing field, our logic goes, America can compete and win. Preserving open markets and also protecting our national security and doing all of these things together with allies and partners.
Since I laid this vision out in my speech at Brookings last year, I’ve listened with great interest to many thoughtful responses, because these are early days. Meaningful shifts in policy require constant iteration and reflection. That’s what will make our policy stronger and more sustainable.
So, today, I’m glad to be back here at Brookings to reengage in this conversation, because I really believe that the ideas I’m here to discuss and the policies that flow from them are among the most consequential elements of the administration’s foreign as well as domestic policy, and I believe they will constitute an important legacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.
I want to start by reflecting on some of the questions I’ve heard and then propose a few ways to consolidate our progress.
One overarching question is at the core of many others: Does our new approach mean that we’re walking away from a positive-sum view of the world, that America is just in it for itself at the expense of everyone else?
In a word, no, it doesn’t. In fact, we’re returning to a tradition that made American international leadership such a durable force, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “interest rightly understood.” The notion that it’s in our own self-interest to strengthen our partners and sustain a fair economic system that helps all of us prosper.
After World War Two, we built an international economic order in the context of a divided world, an order that helped free nations recover and avoid a return to the protectionist and nationalist mistakes of the 1930s, an order that also advanced American economic and geopolitical power.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we took that order global, embracing the old Eastern bloc, China, India, and many developing countries. Suddenly, the major powers were no longer adversaries or competitors. Capital flowed freely across borders. Global supply chains became “just in time,” without anyone contemplating potential strategic risk.
Each of these approaches was positive-sum, and each reflected the world as it was.
Now, the world of the 1990s is over, and it’s not coming back, and it’s not a coherent plan or critique just to wish it so.
We’re seeing the return of great power competition. But unlike the Cold War era, our economies are closely intertwined. We’re on the verge of revolutionary technological change with AI, with economic and geopolitical implications. The pandemic laid bare the fragilities in global supply chains that have been growing for decades. The climate crisis grows more urgent with every hurricane and heat wave.
So we need to articulate, once again, de Tocqueville’s notion of interest rightly understood. To us, that means pursuing a strategy that is fundamentally positive-sum, calibrated to the geopolitical realities of today and rooted in what is good for America — for American workers, American communities, American businesses, and American national security and economic strength.
We continue to believe deeply in the mutual benefits of international trade and investment, enhanced and enabled by bold public investment in key sectors; bounded in rare but essential cases by principled controls on key national security technologies; protected against harmful non-market practices, labor and environment abuses, and economic coercion; and critically coordinated with a broad range of partners.
The challenges we face are not uniquely our own and nor can we solve them alone. We want and need our partners to join us. And given the demand signal we hear back from them, we think that in the next decade, American leadership will be measured by our ability to help our partners pull off similar approaches and build alignment and complementarity across our policies and our investments.
If we get that right, we can show that international economic integration is compatible with democracy and national sovereignty. And that is how we get out of Dani Rodrik’s trilemma.
Now, what does that mean in practice? What does this kind of positive-sum approach mean for trade policy? Are we walking away from trade as a core pillar of international economic policy?
U.S. exports and imports have recovered from their dip during the pandemic, with the real value of U.S. trade well above 2019 levels in each of the last two years. We’re also the largest outbound source of FDI in the world.
So, we are not walking away from international trade and investment. What we are doing is moving away from specific policies that, frankly, didn’t contemplate the urgent challenges we face: The climate crisis. Vulnerable, concentrated, critical mineral and semiconductor supply chains. Persistent attacks on workers’ rights. And not just more global competition, but more competition with a country that uses pervasive non-market policies and practices to distort and dominate global markets.
Ignoring or downplaying these realities will not help us chart a viable path forward. Our approach to trade responds to these challenges.
Climate is a good example. American manufacturers are global leaders in clean steel production, yet they’ve had to compete against companies that produce steel more cheaply but with higher emissions intensity. That’s why, earlier this year, the White House stood up a Climate and Trade Task Force, and the task force has been developing the right tools to promote decarbonization and ensure our workers and businesses engaged in cleaner production aren’t disadvantaged by firms overseas engaged in dirtier, exploitative production.
Critical minerals are another example. That sector is marked by extreme price volatility, widespread corruption, weak labor and environmental protections, and heavy concentration in the PRC, which artificially drops prices to keep competitors out of the marketplace.
If we and our partners fail to invest, the PRC’s domination of these and other supply chains will only grow, and that will leave us increasingly dependent on a country that has demonstrated its willingness to weaponize such dependencies. We can’t accept that, and neither can our partners.
That’s why we are working with them to create a high-standard, critical minerals marketplace, one that diversifies our supply chains, creates a level playing field for our producers, and promotes strong workers’ rights and environmental protections. And we’re driving towards tangible progress on that idea in just the next few weeks.
In multiple sectors that are important to our future, not just critical minerals, but solar cells, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, we see a broad pattern emerging. The PRC is producing far more than domestic demand, dumping excess onto global markets at artificially low prices, driving manufacturers around the world out of business, and creating a chokehold on supply chains.
To prevent a second China shock, we’ve had to act.
That’s what drove the decisions about our 301 tariffs earlier this year.
Now, we know that indiscriminate, broad-based tariffs will harm workers, consumers, and businesses, both in the United States and our partners. The evidence on that is clear. That’s why we chose, instead, to target tariffs at unfair practices in strategic sectors where we and our allies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild our manufacturing and our resilience.
And crucially, we’re seeing partners in both advanced and emerging economies reach similar conclusions regarding overcapacity and take similar steps to ward off damage to their own industries, from the EU to Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Mexico to Türkiye and beyond. That’s a big deal.
And it brings me back to my earlier point: We’re pursuing this new trade approach in concert with our partners. They also recognize we need modern trade tools to achieve our objectives. That means considering sector-specific trade agreements. It means creating markets based on standards when that’s more effective. And it also means revitalizing international institutions to address today’s challenges, including genuinely reforming the WTO to deal with the challenges I’ve outlined.
And it means thinking more comprehensively about our economic partnerships. That’s why we created the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. That’s why we also gave them such catchy names.
Within IPEF, we finalized three agreements with 13 partners to accelerate the clean energy transition, to promote high labor standards, to fight corruption, and to shore up supply chain vulnerabilities before they become widespread disruptions. And within APEP, we’re working to make the Western Hemisphere a globally competitive supply chain hub for semiconductors, clean energy, and more.
And that leads to the next question I’ve often been asked in the last year and a half: Where does domestic investment fit into all of this? How does our positive-sum approach square with our modern industrial strategy?
The truth is that smart, targeted government investment has always been a crucial part of the American formula. It’s essential to catalyzing private investment and growth in sectors where market failures or other barriers would lead to under-investment.
Somehow, we forgot that along the way, or at least we stopped talking about it. But there was no plausible version of answers on decarbonization or supply chain resilience without recovering this tradition. And so we have.
We’ve made the largest investment ever to diversify and accelerate clean energy deployment through the Inflation Reduction Act. And investments are generating hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment all across the country; rapid growth in emerging climate technologies like sustainable aviation fuels, carbon management, clean hydrogen, with investments increasing 6- to 15-fold from pre-IRA levels.
This will help us meet our climate commitments. This will advance our national security. And this will ensure that American workers and communities can seize the vast economic opportunities of the clean energy transition and that those opportunities are broadly shared. And that last part is crucial.
The fact is that many communities hard hit in decades past still haven’t bounced back, and the two-thirds of American adults who don’t have college degrees have seen unacceptably poor outcomes in terms of real wages, health, and other outcomes over the last four decades.
For many years, people assumed that these distributional issues would be solved after the fact by domestic policies. That has not worked.
Advancing fairness, creating high-quality jobs, and revitalizing American communities can’t be an afterthought, which is why we’ve made them central to our approach.
In fact, as a result of the incentives in the IRA to build in traditional energy communities, investment in those communities has doubled under President Joe Biden.
Now, initially, when we rolled this all out, our foreign partners worried that it was designed to undercut them, that we were attempting to shift all the clean energy investment and production around the world to the United States.
But that wasn’t the case, and it isn’t the case.
We know that our partners need to invest. In fact, we want them to invest. The whole world benefits from the spillover effects of advances in clean energy that these investments bring.
And we are nowhere near the saturation point of investment required to meet our clean energy deployment goals, nor will markets alone generate the resources necessary either.
So, we’ve encouraged our partners to invest in their own industrial strength. We’ve steered U.S. foreign policy towards being a more helpful partner in this endeavor. And our partners have begun to join us. Look at Japan’s green transformation policy, India’s production-linked incentives, Canada’s clean energy tax credit, the European Union’s Green Deal.
As more and more countries adopt this approach, we will continue to build out the cooperative mechanisms that we know will be necessary to ensure that we’re acting together to scale up total global investment, not competing with each other over where a fixed set of investments is located.
The same goes for investing in our high-tech manufacturing strength. We believe that a nation that loses the capacity to build, risks losing the capacity to innovate. So, we’re building again.
As a result of the CHIPS and Science Act, America is on track to have five leading-edge logic and memory chip manufacturers operating at scale. No other economy has more than two. And we’re continuing to nurture American leadership in artificial intelligence, including through actions we’re finalizing, as I speak, to ensure that the physical infrastructure needed to train the next generation of AI models is built right here in the United States.
But all of this high-tech investment and development hasn’t come at the expense of our partners. We’ve done it alongside them.
We’re leveraging CHIPS Act funding to make complementary investments in the full semiconductor supply chain, from Costa Rica to Vietnam.
We’re building a network of AI safety institutes around the world, from Canada to Singapore to Japan, to harness the power of AI responsibly.
And we’ve launched a new Quantum Development Group to deepen cooperation in a field that will be pivotal in the decades ahead.
Simply put, we’re thinking about how to manage this in concert with our allies and partners, and that will make all of us more competitive.
Now, all this leads to another question that is frequently asked: What about your technology protection policies? How does that fit into a positive-sum approach?
The United States and our allies and partners have long limited the export of dual-use technologies. This is logical and uncontroversial. It doesn’t make sense to allow companies to sell advanced technology to countries that could use them to gain military advantage over the United States and our friends.
Now, it would be a mistake to attempt to return to the Cold War paradigm of almost no trade, including technological trade, among geopolitical rivals. But as I’ve noted, we’re in a fundamentally different geopolitical context, so we’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle.
That means being targeted in what we restrict, controlling only the most sensitive technologies that will define national security and strategic competition. This is part of what we mean when we say: de-risking, not decoupling.
To strike the right balance, to ensure we’re not imposing controls in an arbitrary or reflexive manner, we have a framework that informs our decision-making. We ask ourselves at least four questions:
One, which sensitive technologies are or will likely become foundational to U.S. national security?
Two, across those sensitive technologies, where do we have distinct advantages and are likely to see maximal effort by our competitors to close the gap? Conversely, where are we behind and, therefore, most vulnerable to coercion?
Three, to what extent do our competitors have immediate substitutes for U.S.-sensitive technology, either through indigenous development or from third countries, that would undercut the controls?
Four, what is the breadth and depth of the coalition we could plausibly build and sustain around a given control?
When it comes to a narrow set of sensitive technologies, yes, the fence is high, as it should be.
And in the context of broader commerce, the yard is small, and we’re not looking to expand it needlessly.
Now, beyond the realm of export controls and investment screening, we will also take action to protect sensitive data and our critical infrastructure, such as our recent action on connected vehicles from countries of concern.
I suspect almost no one here would argue that we should build out our telecommunications architecture or our data center infrastructure with Huawei.
Millions of cars on the road with technology from the PRC, getting daily software updates from the PRC, sending reams of information back to the PRC, similarly doesn’t make sense, especially when we’ve already seen evidence of a PRC cyber threat to our critical infrastructure.
We have to anticipate systemic cyber and data risks in ways that, frankly, we didn’t in the past, including what that means for the future Internet of Things, and we have to take the thoughtful, targeted steps necessary in response.
This leads to a final, kind of fundamental question: Does this approach reflect some kind of pessimism about the United States and our inherent interests?
Quite the contrary. It reflects an abiding and ambitious optimism. We believe deeply that we can act smartly and boldly, that we can compete and win, that we can meet the great challenges of our time, and that we can deliver for all of our people here in the United States.
And while it’s still very early, we have some evidence of that. This includes the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any advanced economy in the world. There’s more work to do, but inflation has come down. And contrary to the predictions that the PRC would overtake the U.S. in GDP either in this decade or the next, since President Biden took office, the United States has more than doubled our lead. And last year, the United States attracted more than five times more inbound foreign direct investment than the next highest country.
We are once again demonstrating our capacity for resilience and reinvention, and others are noticing. The EU’s Draghi report, published last month, mirrors key aspects of our strategy.
Now, as we continue to implement this vision, we will need to stay rigorous. We will need, for example, to be bold enough to make the needed investments without veering into unproductive subsidies that crowd-out the private sector or unduly compete with our partners.
We’re clear-eyed that our policies will involve choices and trade-offs. That’s the nature of policy. But to paraphrase Sartre, not to choose is also a choice, and the trade-offs only get worse the longer we leave our challenges unchecked.
Pointing out that it’s challenging to strike the right balance is not an argument to be satisfied with the status quo.
We have tried to start making real a new positive-sum vision, and we have tried to start proving out its value. But we still have our work cut out for us.
So I’d actually like to end today with a few questions of my own, where our answers will determine our shared success:
First, will we sustain the political will here at home to make the investments in our own national strength that will be required of us in the years ahead?
Strategic investments like these need to be a bipartisan priority, and I have to believe that we’ll rise to the occasion, that we won’t needlessly give up America’s position of economic and technological leadership because we can no longer generate the political consensus to invest in ourselves.
There is more we can do now on a bipartisan basis.
For example, Congress still hasn’t appropriated the science part of CHIPS and Science, even while the PRC is increasing its science and technology budget by 10 percent year on year.
Now, whether we’re talking about investments in fundamental research, or grants and loans for firms developing critical technologies, we also have to update our approach to risk. Some research paths are dead ends. Some startups won’t survive. Our innovation base and our private sector are the envy of the world because they take risks. The art of managing risk for the sake of innovation is critical to successful geostrategic competition.
So, we need to nurture a national comfort with, to paraphrase FDR, bold and persistent experimentation. And when an investment falls short, as it will, we need to maintain our bipartisan will, dust ourselves off, and keep moving forward. To put it bluntly, our competitors hope we’re not capable of that. We need to prove them wrong. We need to make patient, strategic investments in our capacity to compete, and we need to ensure fiscal sustainability in order to keep making those investments over the long term.
The second question: Will we allocate sufficient resources for investments that are needed globally?
Last year, here at Brookings, I talked about the need to go from billions to trillions in investment to help emerging and developing countries tackle modern challenges, including massively accelerating the speed and scale of the clean energy transition.
We need a Marshall Plan-style effort, investing in partners around the world and supporting homegrown U.S. innovation in growing markets like storage, nuclear, and geothermal energy.
Now, trillions may sound lofty and unachievable, but there is a very clear path to get there without requiring anywhere near that level of taxpayer dollars, and that path is renewed American leadership and investment in international institutions.
For example, at the G20 this fall, we’re spearheading an effort that calls for the international financial institutions, the major creditors in the private sector, to step up their relief for countries facing high debt service burdens so they too can invest in their future.
Or consider the World Bank and the IMF. We’ve been leading the charge to make these institutions bigger and more effective, to fully utilize their balance sheets and be more responsive to the developing and emerging economies they serve. That has already unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars in new lending capacity, at no cost to the United States. And we can generate further investment on the scale required with very modest U.S. public investments and legislative fixes. That depends on Congress taking action.
For example, our administration requested $750 million — million — from Congress to boost the World Bank’s lending capacity by over $36 billion, which, if matched by our partners, could generate over $100 billion in new resources. This would allow the World Bank to deploy $200 for every $1 the taxpayers provide.
We’ve asked Congress to approve investments in a new trust fund at the IMF to help developing countries build resilience and sustainability. Through a U.S. investment in the tens of millions, we could enable tens of billions in new IMF lending.
And outside the World Bank and the IMF, we’re asking Congress to increase funding for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which we launched at the G7 a couple of years ago.
This partnership catalyzes and concentrates investment in key corridors, including Africa and Asia, to close the infrastructure gap in developing countries. It strengthens countries’ economic growth. It strengthens America’s supply chains and global trusted technology vendors. And it strengthens our partnerships in critical regions.
The private sector has been enthusiastic. Together with them and our G7 partners, we’ve already mobilized tens of billions of dollars, and we can lever that up and scale that up in the years ahead with help on a bipartisan basis from the Congress.
We need to focus on the big picture. Holding back small sums of money has the effect of pulling back large sums from the developing world — which also, by the way, effectively cedes the field to other countries like the PRC. There are low-cost, commonsense solutions on the table, steps that should not be the ceiling of our ambitions, but the floor. And we need Congress to provide us the authorities and the seed funding to take those steps now.
Finally, will we empower our agencies and develop new muscle to meet this moment?
Simply put, we need to ensure that we have the resources and the capabilities in the U.S. government to implement this economic vision over the long haul. This starts by significantly strengthening our bilateral tools, answering a critique that China has a checkbook and the U.S. has a checklist.
Next year, the United States is going to face a critical test of whether our country is up to the task. The DFC, the Ex-Im Bank, and AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, are all up for renewal by Congress. This provides a once-in-a-decade chance for America to strengthen some of its most important tools of economic statecraft.
And think about how they can work better with the high-leverage multilateral institutions I just mentioned. The DFC, for example, is one of our most effective instruments to mobilize private sector investments in developing countries.
But the DFC is too small compared to the scope of investment needed, and it lacks tools our partners want, like the ability to deploy more equity as well as debt, and it’s often unable to capitalize on fast-moving investment opportunities. So, we put forward a proposal to expand the DFC’s toolkit and make it bigger, faster, nimbler.
Another gap we need to bridge is to make sure we attract, retain, and empower top-tier talent with expertise in priority areas.
We’re asking Congress to approve the resources we’ve requested for the Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security, Treasury’s Office of Investment Security, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.
If Congress is serious about America competing and winning, we need to be able to draw on America’s very best.
Let me close with this:
Since the end of World War Two, the United States has stood for a fair and open international economy; for the power of global connection to fuel innovation; for the power of trade and investment done right to create good jobs; for the power, as Tocqueville put it, of interest rightly understood.
Our task ahead is to harness that power to take on the realities of today’s geopolitical moment in a way that will not only preserve America’s enduring strengths, but extend them for generations to come. It will take more conversations like this one and iteration after iteration to forge a new consensus and perfect a new set of policies and capabilities to match the moment.
I hope it’s a project we can all work on together. We can’t afford not to.
So, thank you. And I look forward to continuing the conversation, including hearing some of your questions this morning.
