To what extent will the U.S.-China struggle take the rest of the world along with it? Recent developments in the technology sector suggest that containment of China has a long way yet to run, regardless of who becomes the next U.S. president. At the same time, China is showing no signs of abandoning its core strategy of using state policy to control citizens at home, build Chinese companies that can crush competition abroad, and exert maximal autarkic control of its domestic market. However, the great success of globalization has been the creation of a global middle class with incomes, educations and expectations all on an unprecedented scale. There is now a generation or two in adulthood that has grown up watching the West destroy itself and slowly abandon the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and people that was the premise of globalization. This generation, outside the West and (perhaps) China, does not think it is helpless. SIG’s view is that the global generation in its late 20s and early 30s is already pivoting away from attachment to the world of their parents and the disastrous end-game that appears to be their parents’ legacy.
U.S. policy for the technological isolation of China has been steady and focused since about halfway through the first Trump administration. It has expanded in breadth and sophistication under the Biden administration. Technology companies have integrated this into their strategies, giving what began in the government sector strong private momentum. Consider a project with the very Bondian acronym HEIST. It is a private-public-academic partnership now backed by NATO. Its goal is to create ways for Internet traffic to be switched from undersea cables to networked outer-space satellites in the event an ocean cable is disrupted. (Students of Internet history will recall that the Internet itself was developed out of private-public-academic programs for ensuring continuity of communications in the event that land-based systems were disrupted.) HEIST is just one example of how the private and academic sectors are factoring in a long-term tech conflict between the U.S. and China. Another is OpenAI’s decision to clamp down on use by Chinese developers of ChatGPT. China was never on OpenAI’s list of “supported countries and territories,” but the move is nonetheless significant.
Of course, moves like this all call forward responses from China and Chinese companies. China’s GPS alternative, BeiDou, has had this problem set firmly in view for over 20 years. Coverage of the OpenAI decision has emphasized how quickly — measured in days if not hours — Chinese tech companies offered “moving packages” to OpenAI customers on the mainland whose VPN and other outward connections to OpenAI would no longer work. Huawei has retooled itself to deal with the expanding bans on its use overseas. It is too much to say that U.S. tech containment of China has been a good thing for Chinese businesses but it has been a spur, if of a peculiar kind.
The Trump policies on China that Biden kept and developed were guided by people such as Robert Lighthizer (Trump’s trade representative) and Matt Pottinger (Trump’s deputy national security advisor), who are expected to be part of any second Trump administration. There is every reason to anticipate policy consistency, in this particular field, regardless of the victor in November. The same is true in China.
In a real Cold War, this bifurcation between two hostile major powers would extend itself to the rest of the world. There is an element of that today. Germany, for example, after years of U.S. pressure, has decided to take Chinese technology (from Huawei and state-owned ZTE) out of its 5G networks. However, most states and national economies with any choice in the matter have opted either to blend U.S. and Chinese systems or, better yet, to develop their own.
To opt out of a forced choice between major-power antagonists while opting in to the cross-border platforms that are being shaped by that antagonism is a characteristic move for the generation that is now starting its first companies and reaching the lower rungs of government. Chinese autarky and U.S. industrial policy alike have made it clear to the rest of the world that its interests are not of lasting concern to the major powers. At the same time, the spread of middle-class wealth, education and expectations has empowered people around the world to feel they have options. Their politics is shaped by the possibilities for identifying and exercising those options. Ironically, perhaps, for a generation formed by borderless globalization, the chosen venue for exercising those options is not a transnational one but the nation and national or regional economies.
This should not be surprising. Neither the U.S. nor the EU is in any mood to guarantee the sanctity of the global public sphere. China, despite its protestations, is even less globally minded. The fact that addressing global climate change, the signature challenge of the coming generation, is being hobbled by electric-vehicle and solar-panel legislation is truly telling. The major powers that are alone in a position to see through global solutions to global problems are now the very powers making them impossible.
In such a situation, for the world outside the West and China (plus Russia), nationalism and regionalism are the least-worst solutions. The coming generation will be elderly by the time COP75 rolls around and the U.S., EU, Russia and China all bury their many hatchets and rediscover globalism. Meanwhile, away from the current agon, a busy world is identifying problems and designing solutions with no expectation of rising to the universal plane. Globalization has lost its teleology. But it has created a world in which ambitious people can remain anchored and protected in national economies while also staying closely connected to the world outside, steering their diverse courses with as little reference as possible to great-power conflict.