The ‘Tech War’ With China Is More of a Great Race

If historians someday look back to the moment when the US and China surmounted the “foothills” of a cold war and climbed to the frosty peaks, they may land on Oct. 7, 2022. That’s the day President Joe Biden announced a strict set of export controls to choke off the flow to China of high-tech semiconductors and the machinery to make them. Allies such as Japan and the Netherlands followed suit, and the “tech war” was on.

Tech, in particular artificial intelligence and quantum computing, looks to be Cold War II’s equivalent of nuclear weapons in the previous one. But can the US really hope to stifle China’s progress any more successfully than it did the Soviet Union’s fast march to The Bomb? Trade sanctions are unlikely to hold off Beijing for long — the West is having enough trouble using them to smother Vladimir Putin’s third-rate Russian economy. And what Beijing can’t make or buy it steals, treating intellectual property law with all the respect it gives Uyghur culture.

So, beyond subsidizing fabs and piggybacking off gamers, how does the US keep its advantages — or, in some instances, catch up? On these and a wide range of other questions, I had a chat recently with Anja Manuel, a ubiquitous figure in foreign policy circles and a partner in the advisory firm Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC. (Yes, those other three partners are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.) Manuel’s relationship with Rice goes back to her undergraduate days at Stanford: Not only was she fortunate to take a course from the future secretary of state, she met her husband in it. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

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