A Silicon Curtain Descends

Trump escalated America’s war against Huawei and China. Biden should beware burgeoning technonationalism.

- By Eric Boehm

In a speech delivered almost exactly one year before the 2020 election, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the stakes of a potential tech cold war between the United States and China.

China had “smashed the barriers between civilian and military technological domains,” Pence said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, just around the corner from the White House. “By law and presidential fiat, companies in China—whether private, state-owned, or foreign—must share their technologies with the Chinese military,” Pence said. Those technologies, in turn, were being weaponized by the Communist regime in Beijing to hone its authoritarian conduct at home—and, Pence added ominously, were being increasingly exported “to countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.”

Pence went on to say that America did not seek a technological “decoupling” from China. But other parts of that speech— and some of the actions taken by the Trump administration in the months since—conjure images of a silicon curtain descending across the world.