Evolution of United States Technology Alliance Strategy and Reshaping of International Strategic Landscape

Building a technology alliance is the main strategy for the United States to maintain its scientific and technological hegemony under its technopolitical strategic framework. After Joe Biden took office, the United States implemented “small yard with high fences” strategy for scientific and technological competition, as the first step toward building a technology alliance. The main goal is to restrict the flow of strategic emerging technologies and factors of innovation to rival countries. To this end, the United States has issued and updated the Critical and Emerging Technologies List, supplemented and revised the Export Administration Regulations, expanded the Application of Foreign-Direct Product Rules, and advanced the legislation process of the Export Control Enforcement and Enhancement Act. The key elements of the “small yard with high fence” policy are the positions of allies, concerted actions and interoperability. However, the United States and its allies face conflicts of multiple interests in terms of cross-border data flow, technology and trade markets as well as technology security and development. The depth and stability of transatlantic digital connectivity are severely restricted by such structural conflicts as asymmetric cross-border data flows, competition for digital market subsidies, economic security dilemmas, challenges to the interoperability of zero truest networks and fragmentation of digital ecosystems. Over the past few years, the United States has consumed enormous diplomatic resources to coordinate the positions of its allies to advance its “small yard with high fences” strategy, which is proving to be costly, difficult and unstable. In this context, the United States is gradually pivoting its strategic path toward forging a “multipolar technology alliance”, that is, to unite traditional allies, rope in nontraditional allies and draw in emerging market countries and regions. Instead of controlling the flow of factors of innovation to its competitors, the main goal is to strive for hegemony in new technologies by laying out structural technological power in the context of major-power competition.

Multipolar Technology Alliance Shapes Structural Technological Power

In the era of technopolitics, technological power has become the core pillar of state-to-state power relations and the competition for power of new technologies is the fundamental objective of technopolitical strategies. The technological power involves supply chains of advanced technologies, technological infrastructure, algorithms and computing power, technological standards and norms, and technological ecosystems. The technological power is rapidly expanding with the integration of emerging technologies in multiple domains. The technological power system is now at a critical stage of aggregating and taking shape, and the structural technological power is a key variable for shaping the international power system and international landscape in the era of technopolitics and also the foundation for controlling future strategic space.

Viewing from the logic of technology application, the elements that determine structural technological power include critical technological infrastructure, technological supply chain systems and technological ecosystems. These represent the key areas the United States-led multipolar technological alliance is focusing on.

I. Reconstructing Technological Infrastructure

At the June 2022 G7 Leaders’ Summit, the United States and the other G7 members formally launched the “Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment” (PGI), which strategically aims to build and strengthen coalitions of partners from Asia to Africa to the Western Hemisphere to improve technology infrastructure in key economic corridors. The 2023 G7 Summit proposed the construction of the “India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor” and the “Lobito Corridor”, focusing on new types of infrastructure such as submarine cables, clean energy grids, and next-generation telecommunication networks to promote connectivity from Europe to Asia. To crowd out infrastructure investment in rival countries, the G7 has also strengthened the formulation of security rules for critical infrastructure. The 2023 G7 Summit emphasized the need to strengthen the security and resilience of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure in the digital sphere. It stressed that such infrastructure requires a rigorous evaluation of equipment and its security standards to ensure consistency with existing measures such as those outlined in the “Prague Proposals”, and the European Union’s toolbox on 5G. The physical and cyber security risks of critical infrastructure are underlined by the European Union as major risks to its “economic security” and many European countries are reassessing their “dependence” on China in critical ICT infrastructure. In June 2023, the European Commission urged member states that have not yet fully moved away from high-risk vendors to implement divestment measures immediately.

Multipolar technology alliance is accelerating the layout of new types of future and strategic infrastructure. With the awareness that undersea infrastructure layout will directly influence the dominance in future deep-sea strategic space, the NATO has endorsed the “Digital Ocean Vision”. Within the framework of the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), the United States has negotiated with Japan, Australia and other allies and partners in the region on submarine cable standards, with a focus on screening and certifying supplier. They also continue to weaken the submarine cable networks in the South China Sea and Hong Kong, by on the one hand, excluding Chinese enterprises from engaging in international submarine cable projects, and on the other hand, accelerating the construction of new submarine cable projects worldwide. In January 2024, the United States and Chile launched the Humboldt subsea cable route, which is the first-ever subsea cable connection between South America and the Indo-Pacific region. The United States, together with Finland and Japan, also plans to build a submarine fiber-optic cable network to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific.