Welcome to The Nixon Seminar. I’m Hugh
Hewitt, President of the Nixon Foundation. We're pleased to welcome tonight three new
members of The Seminar – Dr. Monica Crowley, Dr. Nadia Schadlow, and Congressman Michael Waltz.
We are joined by our twelve other members and our co-chairmen – former Secretary of State Michael
Pompeo and former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Ambassador O’Brien and Secretary
Pompeo are joined by a special guest tonight, entrepreneur and author Peter Thiel. And I turn
it over to you Mr. Secretary. Alright Hugh, thank you. Peter, thanks for joining us. It’s great to
be with everyone this evening. I look forward to a wide open discussion on a range of things that
impact high tech America and national security, and we will spend a lot of time talking about
China and the Chinese Communist Party, I am sure. Peter, I thought I’d start things off tonight
with just a general question. You spend a lot of time – and I’ve read most of what you have
written – you spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the technology fight between the
west and the ideas that the Chinese communist party puts forward – whether that’s disinformation
or capacity to move digits around the world. They now have a full-on digital currency that
they are deploying. Give us all your sense of where we sit today, if we were to
draw up the assets and liabilities for the west and for the Chinese Communist Party –
how would you evaluate the relative positions across various technology spaces? Well,
it’s a pretty broad question. I think that in many ways we are, in most
areas we are still ahead of China, and we are still far more innovative. I
think innovation happens in the west, and shockingly little innovation happens in China.
But they have been very good at copying things, stealing things, and to some extent if China is
able to just catch up, there is a way in which it will become a more powerful country. You know,
China has four times the population of the US, and so if you converge and China gets to parity
on productivity, on technology, will you have four times the GDP and maybe 4 times the
military and will be the dominant power. So, Parity means the west is losing, it means the
U.S. is losing at parity. Of the technology, if you took AI or machine learning or block chain –
how much of that did they create and how much have they stolen from the west? Do you have a sense for
those? Well I think, again those aren’t the only two possibilities, I don’t think they created
very much, I think a lot of it was just handed over from the west so it wasn’t even stolen.
You know, I criticized Google a few years ago for refusing to work on its AI technology on Project
Maven with the U.S. military, but working with Chinese universities and Chinese researchers.
And since everything in China is a civilian- military fusion, Google was effectively working
with the Chinese military, not with the American military. And there was sort of this question,
“Why Google was doing this?” And one of the things that I was sort of told by some of the insiders
at Google was they figured they might as well give the technology out the front door, because if they
didn’t give it – it would get stolen anyway. Yeah, So it doesn't quite count. Co-opted. Yes. Robert.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary. So, one of the things we have seen and it has happened faster than experts
anticipated especially over the past decade, is Chinese military and naval services have closed
the gap on the U.S., both in terms of quantity but also quality much faster than expected, and so
the gap – I agree with you, I think we still have an edge, but the gap is getting smaller. They’ve
done things, they’re looking at their military platforms the way that maybe Silicon Valley or
industry would look at a product. So there is iterative manufacturing and design, beta testing,
constantly upgrading. And we are looking at what the Pentagon does, where we have these pristine
processes that take decades to get to a platform that is perfect, or near perfect, but it’s taking
us forever to get the products designed and then eventually deployed and at very high expense. What
does the Pentagon need to do to keep the edge and also to fix procurement? You know, in some ways,
to make sure that the Chinese don’t catch up the way they appear to be doing relatively quickly.
Yes. Well, I think the procurement question is obviously a very broad question, but I
think what was healthy about the military, you know, industry complex and what was
relatively healthy about it during the Cold War, was we had some balance of bigger companies and
a lot of smaller companies in the ecosystem, and I think big companies are generally good at doing
things at scale, small companies are generally better at innovating and coming out with new
products, and you want some ecosystem that has a blend of both kinds of companies. And I think
what happened in ’89 after the Cold War ended, was there was a shrinking of military budgets, but
there was also an incredible consolidation of the defense industry, and the consolidation
actually meant the money was spent less efficiently – especially with respect to R&D.
And so we spent less money and less efficiency, and so there was some massive decline in the
effectiveness of the system in the 90s. I think there have been various attempts over the last
half decade to reform the procurement process, to figure out ways to fund smaller companies and
do some — allocate some R&D to all these different projects. And think we’ve improved some, but it
has to be a sort of integrative process. You don’t want to get a $5 million DARPA grant, where what
you invent gets stuck in the broom closet in the Pentagon. It has to somehow, you have to somehow
be able to get a pilot, it scales and somehow be integrated into the whole procurement
process, and it’s just, there are all these risk averse things, where you probably — if you
are — if you are working the Defense Department and it is always safe to go with IBM or something
like that. But it never works. You know, putting these together in some way in terms of how
this technology moves – in a good year, in 2019, there were 360,000 Chinese students studying at
American universities, there were less than 30,000 American’s studying at Chinese universities,
“in-country” at Chinese universities – make any sense? Well it's it's uh you know we're
we're an open society. Right. They are not open in any way, It’s just incredible. I spent some
time in China, in 2015 and 2016, and you know, my book on start-ups did surprisingly well so
I did this two-week book tour. But, It is — you know, there are sort of crazy ways if you just
kinda drive around Beijing, and you have all these military, paramilitary, militarized police –
they are defending themselves against their own population. So even within China, things are
segmented and closed off in all sorts of ways, and even though there are some number of westerners
in there, it’s also as a ratio, you know, it’s a population 30,000 in a population of 1.4 billion.
Which is different than 360,000 in a population of 330 million. So it’s not 10 to 1 – it’s actually
40 to 1 adjusted for population. so even you know even within china things are segmented
closed off in all sorts of ways and then uh and then even though there are you know some
number of westerners in there you know it's also as a ratio you know 30 000 in a population of 1.4
billion which is 360 000 a population of you know 330 million so it's not ten to one it's actually
maybe forty to one adjusted for population.Yea, that kinda the question as a policy maker. You
think of deploying capital – you think about where to invest in the best ideas,
the most innovative technologies, and we have a whole bunch of students
who are either going to go back or stay and work here, and become part of the
US workforce for often large US companies, and sometimes small US companies, and the question
is – taken we are an in fact an “open country,: I think it makes it riskier to have those
students studying here. Because the capacity for that information to end up in places that benefits
the Chinese Communist Party’s model, it’s ideology is pretty significant. And just, as you stare
at workforce issues here in the United States, and there was a President trying to figure out
what the right policy was – do you have thoughts about how they should begin to think about
that? I think you are basically right. You want to be in the more restrictive zone.
It is quite hard to do anything given where a lot of the university leadership is in
sort of a completely deranged space on this, where they think of graduate students as sort of
indentured servants, cheap underpaid labor – and maybe the Chinese grad students are actually less
demanding and are willing to get paid less. And there are all sorts of weird ways
that universities have not been very helpful, and I think we should put a lot
of pressure on them, and be looking at “Are they getting money from Chinese funding?” and think
there has been a lot of abuse on this probably in various ways. Now Peter following up on
Mike's uh question which i think there's a consensus now that ai and quantum computing are
the new high grounds or at least will be the high grounds for the future and i think there's
still a consensus that we have an edge in both those areas. Although it is a diminished
edge over where it was a few years back. What is your advice on Biden administration,
how do we stay ahead in quantum and AI, keeping in mind that we are an open society
and we have graduate students here and that sort of thing, what do we need to do to stay in
the forefront – because my concern is that if we fall behind and lose the high ground, we are
going to be in for a rough spell.The thing that I would say that is tricky about AI is that there
are alot of aspects about the technology that we don’t want to pursuing too much because –
AI is what you need for a surveillance society. Right I’ve had this riff, where people often
say “crypto” or Bitcoin is a vaguely libertarian technology it is. Technology is politically
neutral, but can still be — if crypto is kind of libertarian, AI is kind of communist. And so,
Even though we are ahead of basic science of AI, China is willing to apply it and turn the
entire society into a face recognition surveillance state that is far more intrusive
and totalitarian than even Stalinist Russia was. That is something we are not willing to do. It is
a two-edged thing in that way. Let me follow up on that question, Mike, if I can jump in.
Yes. Of course. What do these folks do, we got these authoritarian countries now, the PRCs
the lead example but you got others like Russia, that will be able to employ these high-tech tools
to create this total surveillance society – you know, something beyond even Orwell and when you go
back read 1984 it seems a little quaint right now. How are those people going to defeat the high-tech
tools that are suppressing them or surveilling them, and how do they ever win back their freedom
or liberty if a government or regime is willing to use those tools, the way we have seen the PRC
and others employ them – What are your thoughts on that? I’m not sure. Certainly in the 1980s I
had the view that the Soviet Union could never be reformed from within, and that even Eastern
Bloc countries would — you know, it was high-tech enough, you had the secret police with guns, they
could break up any protest and it would never change. And certainly the history of the late 80s
suggests there is more possibility than we think, and it is always — you know, there are
probably ways in which the Chinese governments certainly not acting like the technologies are
that straightforward, they are reenforced with concentration camps and lots of police and lots
of secret police and yeah. It is a — it is — it’s not obvious how you would change that at all. This
is — you know, it is — it is not developing at all in the way that people — you know, that people
— that people thought it was going to. You know, one of the — I think that — I — it would
be interesting to hear your view on this: one thought I always had was, why did it take
us so long to wake up to the threat of China, to the way it was not becoming a liberal democracy
and why we were able to tell ourselves all these fictional stories in the west for so long?
The crazy thought experiment I have on it was that — you know, if Tiananmen happened one year
later, we might have woken up 27 years earlier. So Tiananmen happened in June of 1989 and Brent
Scowcroft from the Bush 41 administration went to China and said don’t worry about it because you
are anti–soviet and what matters. Happened 2 years later. Even one year later yeah yeah you might we
might have come to our senses you know 27 years earlier or something like that. I think that’s
right. There are lots of theories out there. In the end it was easy and we believed we destroyed
the Soviet Union. Right. We were right about that. Who needs another long twilight struggle and who
needs to go fight for that and deep commercial interest became connected. It is very different
from the soviet Cold War conflict and very little economic overlap. If could sell one hamburger
to every Chinese person I could sell a billion hamburgers a year. That’s kind of the fill in the
blank with product. It was such an allure and the market was so attractive to American business
folks that those commercial interests caused people to tell themselves a story that just wasn’t
true. Cheap supply chains or Walmart or Apple. A comment to the point about we didn’t know. I was
a young soldier patrolling the East German border in 1989 and literally left two weeks before the
wall came down. We had no earthly idea. I watch the Chinese and how they respond when we talk
about the the Chinese Communist Party as separate from the country of China itself. It’s fragile.
Where it’s Tibet, Mongolia or Taiwan or Hong Kong they know and that’s why surveillance
state has to be so strong. How good of a model do you think we currently have at
all of what is going on in China? Is Xi in absolute control or are there lots of
factions that might overthrow him any day? I think we have a pretty good understanding. I
think of this in the Middle East and we think we know what is going on and the reality is it
is so much more complex and so much more tribal and so much more intricate than we can ever fully
appreciate from the outside. As hard as we work on it we often miss things. That’s why we didn’t
see the fall of Soviet Union coming. It’s why you see these moments where the intelligence
community in the U.S. and the west just can’t get it right. Xi seems to have a very
serious grasp on power and the early corruption purges were a clear cover
for getting rid of political rivals and he seems pretty unrivaled right now and that may
not be the case but all appearances are is that he has a stranglehold on power. We should take
him at his word for his intentions. One that comes to technology and it’s a narrower question
than where I began. Our team spent a lot of time thinking of semiconductors and ecosystem around
it and the manufacturing of semiconductors. I went back and read the Nixon Kennedy debates
where they were debating these two little islands of the coast of China that are a part of
Taiwan formally. Deep intricate debates. Taiwan is even more central today to the high-tech
infrastructure for the world TSMC itself. And all of the subsidiary technologies around it.
I wonder what your sense is? We have a policy, it’s the one China policy and communiques that
flows from it and Trump Administration largely stayed with that. Give me your sense of what
would happen if that were upended. Not necessarily through military force. We didn’t steal it. If it
is coerced into semiconductors not being available or readily available to the west. How should
the private sector think about it as well? Well, I think that there are basically two
cutting edge semiconductor manufacturers, Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung. There are
probably something like 30 semiconductor companies that were cutting edge 20 or 30 years ago. It
has gotten more expensive these scaled economies and so then you have questions about how many
semiconductors do you need that are cutting edge verus more cheap mass produced things?
If you’re going to have a self-driving car it will probably require a cutting edge semiconductor
and there’s probably some weird way in which from an economic point of view you can almost think
of Taiwan as just this one company. Taiwan Semiconductor and then the political questions are
who really controls the company and is it — you know, is it — does the Chinese communist party
have hook into it or are they still more scared of them? But somehow the board corporate
politics of Taiwan Semiconductor probably in some ways a proxy for all of Taiwan
and Samsung is the other one in the mix. One of the very strange dynamics in Silicon Valley
is people don’t do very much with semiconductors anymore. I am a venture capitalist. I get pitched
on semiconductor startups ever few years but then I haven’t done much with it, I don’t know what is
going on and it seems expensive and complicated and I think one of the weird problems with 20
years of intellectual property theft and where IP doesn’t really have as much value as you used
to is that you learn not to invest in things like that. You can think of consumer internet, which
has been the be all and end all for tech investing in the U.S. for the last quarter century as the
kind of thing you invest in a world where there are no intellectual property rights because
consumer internet there are these companies there are brands and network effects and you
get to scale and even if people copy you they can never take it over. Where as semiconductors
are in a very different zone and think we are still ahead of it in lots of ways on the design
side. It is one of the places where we can do more to block China than they can do to block us.
We have lost a lot of ground in the last 20 years. At the end of the Trump administration I
worked with commerce and state and when I took office as National Security Advisor everyone
said the Huawei the fight is over we lost. We decided Mike and Wilbur and Larry Kudlow
and I got together and decided we haven’t lost. Using design tools and other things we
were able to put a crimp on Huawei and I think 29 of 30 western democracies in Europe
and Japan and Australia and India have moved away from Huawei and want trusted providers
and it did show we have some leverage still. I would say in general where China’s at
best is in parity mostly still behind us Huawei may be the one exception at least with all
of the subsidies they have given the company. What do you think the alternative to Huawei is? Is it
Erikson and Nokia? Which I think of is not great, slightly sclierotic companies, but maybe that’s
the best we can do? Or my sort of lovelight answer is maybe we should just say that the 5G technology
is overrated and we can be slower in rolling it out even though you can never say that in public
seemingly. I think both answers are correct and we don’t have to be as fast as we thought we did
and look at a company called raquettan in Japan and Larry and I were out pushing it and American
companies would be nice if we have it Dallas is doing interesting things and Microsoft
is doing interesting things and think that the technology with some of the radio towers
and radio devices are small and inexpensive and we swapped in and out like servers are now. It
has potential to leap frog what Huawei is doing. I’m pretty bullish on it and think it will take a
little more time and problem will be you hit the nail on the head, Peter, in countries in Africa
and Latin America, where there’s zero money and even if technology that the west develops
is less expensive which I think it will be, if the Chinese communist party is coming in saying
we will give you a free Huawei 5G kit, or we’ll take a loan you can repay with opaque terms, we’ll
put you in a debt trap we will give you 5G today and you can pay us back 20 years from now when we
take your railroad stock and we take your mines, it is attractive to take the Huawei if someone
is offering it free, or apparently it’s free, and as we know there is nothing free and these
countries will give up a lot of sovereignty by taking Huawei equipment but for certain
countries in Africa and Asia and Latin America it’s going to be hard to say no.Yeah tech side
covering lots of ground here Mike I will ask you and how do you think of the space race
that is emerging with some said Russia and even more with China and they are launching
killer satellites and space weapons. Yeah, And a lot of this of course is you know very
classified. Lots is classified and lots of people know more about it than I do. Suffice
it to say, here is a data point that is useful. In 2019 the Chinese launched more missiles
than the rest of the world combined. They just have the resources. The scale of what they’re
doing to work to put up the right satellites. To work to make sure they have capability is
staggering and they are moving very quickly. I don’t want to say much about where we are
from a parity perspective but there will be an enormous amount of energy and resources put
into place so that whenever there is confrontation somewhere the world, it doesn’t have to be global
one, that space will be able to generate an awful lot of leverage and an awful lot of power for
some country who gets this most right. Question on war gaming, where and part of the thing that
is strange is China has this sort of new fangled weapons that haven’t really been tested out. They
have hypersonic missiles to destroy US aircraft carriers, or will their satellites be able to
knock out our satellites, and I’m not exactly sure how well it can be gamed out by the Chinese
side since a lot of this stuff hasn’t been tried. Want to take a shot at it Robert? How should one
think about that? Are they going to be deterred because it’s so new fangled , they won’t quite
know that it works, or will it embolden them to tell some heroic story that they’re going to
win without taking any casualties at all? It could be both at the same time, right? Number one, I
remember a few years back calling Buzz Aldrin, who we had out here at the [Nixon] Library not
too long ago, to ask him — he was known as Dr. Rendezvous at NASA, I said “how easy will it
be for one of these DF21 or Dongfeng missiles to take out an aircraft carrier?” He said the
problem is aircraft carrier is moving and the missile — it’s a pretty tough shot. On the
other hand, if the Chinese built enough of them and saturate a zone it may be tougher in a
fast moving aircraft carrier to avoid a missile. Look the way to deter the Chinese, we — when you
talked about the technology theft and the copying, all of the hypersonic technology that
the Chinese have and are now deploying, and their missiles, was stolen from us, or
obtained in gray market by open source means and during the Obama administration, when we stopped
doing our hypersonic research and deployment, the Chinese leapt ahead. One of the things that
was a triumph for the last administration was refunding the military. The Chinese have
sophisticated weapons and we’ve got some pretty sophisticated weapons ourselves. Peace and
strength works and we need to get those platforms deployed, not just do research on them and talk
about them, but we’ve got to get them deployed, so we have to put the Chinese at risk
right now. They are putting us at risk, we’ve got to put their airfields, their ships,
their launch sites at risk, the way they are doing ours with the weapons they are deploying
quickly. At the end of the day I take our qualitative edge any day over theirs, but we have
to continue funding DOD and make sure weapons are getting deployed, not just like you talked about
earlier sitting in a broom closet at the Pentagon. Hugh, have you got some folks out there that
would like to provide some questions to Peter? I will start with Congressman Michael Waltz. Congressman, you have the
floor. Thanks Hugh, can you hear me okay? We do We miss you guys in DC. Oh, my God! I used to say
Afghanistan was tough but there are days these days. Peter, thanks so much for joining us.
You know, I come at this with a business background but also I’m sitting now as the
ranking Republican on a research and technology committee also in space and in armed services.
And, you know, we discussed a lot, obviously how the IP stuff that is either being handed over,
or IP that is being stolen through cyber and through other means, I’m interested in your
thoughts putting on your venture capital hat, on how we block and tackle and fence what is going
on in the MNA world. We’re seeing companies small, medium, and large whether they’re
chip manufacturers, CRISPR technology, advanced materials — really down the shopping list
that are getting gobbled you through MNA and the industry is doing quite well on it. Of course,
we have Cyfius, but that is frankly hugely under resourced and really only scratching the tip of
the iceberg. DOD just rolled out a trusted capital mechanism, but that is a process, that is a
vetting process. What I’m interested in is what from your perspective do you think we
can do either legislatively or importantly from a technology standpoint? I have attended
a number of presentations looking at how AI can follow the money and can look at beneficial
ownership and help us understand the money flows into the venture capital world so that we
can protect some of these technologies. You know, again, particularly from my vantage
point as the head Republican on research and tech sub-committee. Thanks so much. I
will mute and hand it over to you, Peter. Yes well I think that there is sort of a lot
of nuance to this, but to first approximation, you want to have — make it harder for
Chinese investors to invest in the U.S. and perhaps we should also make it a little bit
harder for American investors to invest in China because I think one of the reasons for the
political game theory, the political economy that always works, we have US investors that
invest in China and become a big constituency for open capital flows and doing this I think a
decent part of the Wall Street crowd is pretty bad in this regard. I would dial it
back on both sides making it harder for US investors to invest in China is an
almost equally important part of this.Mary Kissel. You’re next. We’re funding our greatest
adversary both through our capital flows, and we’re handing over. So certainly, I’d
welcome any ideas you have. Mary Kissel Thanks Hugh. Peter, Thank you for joining us. And
Robert and Secretary, it’s great to be with you. It just occurs to me we’re assuming, and maybe
not all the viewing audience knows why we care so much about this. I just want to say we
deal with a lot of authoritarian regimes, but there’s one that has the capability
to dominate, and that’s China. Peter, it seems like they’re in a tech war with
us but we’re not in a tech war with them yet. And they have certain advantages
particularly on the big data front, in that they can command the collection of an
enormous amount of data that’s fundamental to AI, often from countries they dominant near,
abroad, and elsewhere. They’re also often collecting through elicit means. How do we compete
with that? Do we need a free world coalition on the data front?
And secondly, and I think this was implied earlier, is there a
way to innovate around it? We were talking about 5G. Does star link make that obsolete? These are
difficult questions but maybe tackle those two. Well, I think I got the first part
of the question. You know, I do think that seeing China in an adversarial way would be
a helpful start. And Silicon Valley has not been that good on this. Although, in some ways, it’s
structurally better than Wall Street or Hollywood, or the Universities, because Silicon Valley for
the most part has been frozen out of China. And so it’s not — it doesn’t naturally believe it can
get that much out of it. If you look at the big five tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Microsoft virtually very, very little presence in China. So they aren’t naturally pro-China
constituency. Apple is probably the one that’s structurally a real problem, because the whole
iPhone supply chain gets made from China. And Apple is one that has real synergies with China.
But then, there’s something about the woke politics inside these companies, the way they
think of themselves as not really American companies. And it’s somehow very, very difficult
to, for them to have a sharp anti-China edge of any sort whatsoever. At Facebook, I’ll give you
an example. You had with the Hong Kong protest a year ago, the employees from Hong Kong were
all in favor of the protests and free speech. But there were more employees at Facebook who were
born in China than who were born in Hong Kong. And the Chinese nationals actually said that, you
know, it was just Western arrogance. And shouldnt be taking Hong Kong’s side and things like that.
And then the rest of the employees at Facebook sort of stayed out of it. But the internal
debate felt like people were actually more anti-Hong Kong than pro-Hong Kong. (Overlapping
speakers). Let me get follow-up on the question on that. So in Silicon Valley, we’ve
got, it’s a very woke industry in general about what’s happening here. And yet it’s not very
woke in what’s happening to the Uyghurs, what’s happening to the Tibetians, what’s happening
to the democrats with a small “d” in Hong Kong, the threats against Taiwan where you’ve got the
indigenous people of Taiwan. So, there seems to be less concern about those folks in Silicon
Valley and industry in general than the concern for woke progressive politics here. How are they
surprised and how do they get their conscience back when it comes to folks around the world?
Maybe even victims of environmental disaster? There are all sorts of things one can say. If
you’re concerned about climate change maybe the tariffs the Trump Administration put on China
were way too small, they should be much higher, even the carbon tax should be higher because
they use coal power. Even the electric cars in China are dirty, they’re dirtier than oil power
cars than China. But somehow it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff coherently. I had a
set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your
AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t
ask any questions.” You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending everything
is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better.
And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP
fifth columnist collaborators. So it’s some super position of all these things. But I think
if you think of it ideologically or in terms of human rights or something like that, I’m tempted
to say it’s just profoundly racist. It’s like saying that because they look different, they’re
not white people, they don’t have the same rights. It’s something super wrong. But I
don’t quite know how you unlock that.
I’m going to go back to Mary Kissel,
I think you had a follow-up, Mary? Just two questions: How do we get around their
data collection advantage, Peter, technically, in two, are there other areas where you
think we can innovate around them? Thanks. Well, I don’t think they have a technical
advantage. It’s more ideological advantage. In totalitarian society you have no qualms about
getting data on everybody, in every way possible. And that’s where I think that makes AI very tricky
technology where even if we’re ahead in theory, there are a lot of ways we don’t actually want
to apply in the U.S. or West. And they will apply it. And get some advantages from it. I think the
hope is always that it doesn’t give you that much of an advantage. How much does big data really
tell you about things? And there’s certain kinds of things that can tell you stuff about, but I
don’t think it makes as much of a difference as people want beyond maybe having, you know, sort of
all these Communist control mechanism on society. But there’s some places where we probably
shouldn’t even be trying to compete. Let’s go to Jon Burks now.Thank you. Peter, can
you talk concretely about what we should do to improve technology adoption at the Pentagon?
Obviously, none of us want our technological edge sitting in a closet some place in Pentagon,
but how do we move to really deploying it? Again, I’ll just repeat what I said earlier, which
is some, I think big companies are better doing things at scale. Small companies are better at
innovating. To the extent we need to innovate, you need to figure out a way to slightly larger
fraction of the pie to go to start-up companies, mid-sized companies, new companies with
technologies. And there has to be a way for it to be integrated procurement where you
can get a pilot and then there’s a pathway for if the pilot works to scale
rapidly and get adopted rapidly. And then these sort of opposite versions that we
have now is that you can only deploy things where you’ve been buying things from a customer for a
decade. And you have these chicken before the egg type rules, which mean that no new person can ever
break in. And big defense primes have gotten to be more scholarotic and less innovative overtime,
and its very hard to correct that. And that’s the thing I would zero in on.
Obviously, there’s all these different areas where we have set
programs on like building more aircraft carriers. Maybe we should do less of that and be doing more
innovative new areas. And that’s always very hard to do, because set programs have constituencies
around them and that you can’t disrupt easily so, when you have a growing defense budget,
you have more room for innovation. And one of the worries I have is that defense
budget will probably not grow that much in the next few years. And then these innovation
challenges are going to be much, much harder. And we’ll have, the risk is we’ll
have repeat of what happened at the end of the Cold War where are the budget
got cut, but innovation got cut a lot more. christopher cox Thanks, Hugh. Peter, it’s great
to be on this panel with you. I just want to start off with a point that your leadership
at Palantir and the policies you put in place to say that Palantir won’t
deal with countries that are not on good terms with the United States, that’s
such a great leadership position you’ve taken in Silicon Valley and I really commend you for that
because that’s going to be the big issue — Where does big tech fall in the divide with United
States and China? So I commend you with that. My question is regarding digital currency, we’ve
seen recently in the last few days the China has proposed creating their own digital currency.
And I was wondering how much of a threat is that to the dollar and its dominance of world markets?
And if it is a threat, what can we do about it? Well, you know, I think there’s sort
of a lot of different things that fall under digital currency, presumably one
that’s electronic form that China envisions is one that can be monitored even more granularly
the way they’re being monitored currently. The geopolitical thing, I sort of wonder about
is U.S. dollar is a reserved currency of the world. Some things about that that are good for
the U.S., some things that are more problematic. From China’s point of view, they want to get
— they don’t like the U.S. having this reserve currency, because it gives us a lot of leverage
over Iranian oil supply chains and all sorts of things like that. They like — they don’t
want the renminbi to become reserve currency, because then you have to open your capital account
and you have to do all sorts of things they really don’t want to do. I think the Euro, you can think
of is in part a Chinese weapon against the dollar. Last decade has not worked out that way, but China
would have liked to see the two reserve currencies like the Euro. And, even though I’m sort of
a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether at this point Bitcoin should
also be thought in part of as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. where it threatens
FIAT money but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar and China wants to do things to
weaken it. It’s China’s long Bitcoin, and perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the
U.S. should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works. But some internal stable
coin in China — that’s not a real cryptocurrency. That’s just some sort of a totalitarian measuring
device. Venmo for the government? Mr. Secretary, are you going to comment on that? That story
made the front page today — of China wanting to go start their own Bitcoin. What do you think
about that? If I understand what they are doing, they are digitizing their currency. Separate
from Bitcoin, still a FIAT currency, Chinese money that they are now digitizing. It has
huge impact for their surveillance capacity. They would pitch it as anti-fraud. You can prevent
fraud from taking place. I suppose that’s true. This is something I think they believe will reduce
the cost of cross-border transactions as well for the Chinese. Your point about not wanting to be a
reserve currency, I think is right. I think they’d like it to be among a mix, they want to make
sure that when Secretary Pompeo issues sanctions against the Iranian leadership, that there is a
way to purchase Iranian oil that we don’t have the capacity to either seize, understand, or impact.
So I do think these digital currencies, separate from Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, are something
you’ll see more countries go to. The United States has a project, we’re working on it too. But
we will be slow off the gate. It has a lot of implications for us here at home. And my guess is
we will not be the leader in this forefront, where an authoritarian regime like China sees nearly all
upside from having the capacity to issue currency or take away currency from people who act in ways
that are inconsistent with Xi Jinping Thought. One of the things that gives folks freedom
is the ability to walk in with a $100 bill and buy something without it being tracked. And
we’ve given up that privacy with with Amazon because there’s a record of our purchase these
days especially with COVID. But by taking away hard currency that can be used to purchase things, it will give the Chinese Communist Party
enormous measure of control over the Chinese people, which then every time they have an
opportunity for more control, they will take it. And as Peter pointed out and the Secretary pointed
out, this is another step along with facial recognition to have total society surveillance.
They will know everything single thing you do. On some level, It is really an extraordinary
sociological political experiment with no real 20th Century precedent. There
are ways that probably, you know, Stalin was still worse than Xi and killed more
people. But the degree of hooks that you have into people is just extraordinary. It’s sort
of like, it’s sort of like the government is in your inner most core and it’s completely
out. It’s like God of Saint Augustin: Totally outside you, totally inside
you, and knows everything about you. Can imagine how this will
affect the — Omni malevolent. — Social credit score when
you tie-in the currency? What you’re spending money on?
It makes the Stasi look like amateurs. I’ve never heard the team Omni malevolent
before. Dr. Nadia Schadlow. Your turn. Hi, Peter. It’s nice to be here and to see
you.I want to go back to your original point when you were discussing AI and sort of
loose equivalent to Communism. How do we address that problem are set in our
own society of AI, the proliferation of surveillance technology? And setting up an
infrastructure or foundation, an infrastructure for as nascent what China has today. And how do
we grapple with that? How do we grapple with that today in terms of the U.S.? And actually Europe
as well, which is a problem there too. Thanks. Well, it’s all probably all these debates we’re
having that are versions of sort of privacy versus transparency. So transparency is more efficient.
But privacy is an important way in which freedom is preserved in our societies. And so I think,
yeah, I think there are a lot of these ways where I would bet on the privacy side, getting a little
bit more traction in the years ahead. Somehow things have been pushed already too far into
the Chinese are Communist direction in our own country where we have maybe few
big tech platforms, few big companies that know an uncomfortable amount of things
about people. And I think there is going to be some corrective to that in the years ahead.
And at the same time, in the military context, we just need to be pushing this, figuring out
ways to build semi-autonomous or autonomous weapon systems, and we need to sort of figure out ways to
combine cyber and AI. So there’s a military piece where we need to go full steam ahead. And then, in
the large social aspect, I would be more careful. Alex Wong Thanks for joining our group. It’s a
real privilege. Earlier, you touched on the need to continue reforming the defense procurement
system to bring applied engineering faster, to bring defense systems faster into our
competition with China and not wait so long. But I’m wondering if your thoughts also stray
to basic R&D and how the U.S. government invests in that? Looking at our national labs, looking at
the NIH. Are they structured in the right way? Are they doing enough to invest in computing sciences?
But also material sciences, in nuclear, and the biosciences to provide that good base for the
private sector to continue innovating in applied ways to out run the Chinese. Not just in the
defense systems, but also in the wider economy? Yeah, my suspicion is the basic science,
basic research funding is probably even more inefficiently and worse allocated
than the applied things. Because when something is applied, you’re supposed
to get something that works and get some tests on how quickly things work. One of the —
when I looked into the NIH budgets, the striking thing is that a lot of the breakthroughs are
made by somewhat younger scientists. The average age of a scientist to get a Nobel Prize, is in
their late 30s or early 40s when they make a discovery to get a Nobel Prize. And something like
maybe 2% of scientists get funding who are under age 40. If you look at it over last 30 years, it’s
gotten older, the medium age of the scientists getting funding is getting older and older. And
it’s this institutional inertia lock-in. And there is probably something about that which you always
need to push back on. There’s probably something about the peer review process in science that
leads to sort of consensus groupthink, but also very incrementalist kind of things. The things
that worked a lot better in the 50s and 60s, when you had one person running DARPA and he knew
the 30 top scientists in the country and gave them money and they could work on whatever they wanted
to. And so, I think there are ways that as science scales, it often becomes less of a science.
Big tech, you can think of big tech as something that’s very natural. It’s maybe unnaturally
big. It’s unhealthy. It’s too strong.But there’s something in the nature of tech to
be big. Big science is actually an oxymoron. And it’s like if you have a science factory,
or if you have some sort of giant science — you have some giant science factory, there’s probably
not much science going on at all. So yes, I think probably there’s a whole bunch of things on the
basic R&D side where it could be reconfigured in some ways that is much better and how you
do that politically is a very, very hard lift. John Noonan. i, Peter. Nice to see you
again. The great lesson of World War I was the Industrial Revolution was wedged in
this long century of the relative peace between the Napoleonic wars and great wars. And generals
had no idea what the technological leap like steam power versus machinery, chemistry processes
that lead to dynomite and poisonous gas. And the results were awful. And so we’ve
had arguably three Industrial revolutions in the peace between World War II today and I
emphasize the word “relative.” There’s oil, gas, and electric, nuclear physics, and Telecom, and
where we are now in the digital age. Fiber optic, satellite communication, cyberspace, et cetera.
So I have very two different questions for you. And without getting into the viability of futon
torpedo and giant space lasers — From your outside perspective as technologist and investor,
what is the 21st century battlefield look like? And second, just given the fact
that Silicon Valley provides the software backbone or central nervous system
for almost all of our critical industry sectors — that’s IT, banking, agriculture, power,
etc — How do we reduce our exposure to Chinese in big tech where they can potentially build
back door into all these critical sectors that are required for the survival of our country
and ultimately the continuity of government? You’ve done a great job articulating the question.
And thats why it’s very hard to answer. It’s been 75 years since the end of World War
II. And I suspect that if you had a war on the global-scale, that we have no model for
quite what would happen. I think in World War I, in some ways, we had, it was prefigured
by the Civil War in the U.S. And people just didn’t pay attention to that. So, there are
probably things one could be paying attention to the way things have shifted. And I
think the last time aircraft were used, where there was an actual battle between competing
aircraft, military aircraft was between Israel and Syria in 1982. So I don’t think they had
combat between aircraft in close to 40 years. It was just the drone war in Armenia where the
Armen Sarkissian had the war effectively. And so we need to pay attention to what’s going on and
what’s been used. But it’s very, very weird. If you just have the basic division, conventional
weapon, we have cyber, we have shooting war with Russia and China. It’s all-out war. And
then we have all these nuclear weapons which I assume never get used? It’s unthinkable.
And so you have these 3 completely different kinds of weapon systems. One, we have a shooting
war, the conventional war. We don’t really know what would happen. And the nuclear war we
don’t have people thinking about it anymore. It was a thing to think about nuclear deterrent
strategy in the ’50s and ’60s. And the game theory doesn’t actually make any sense anymore.
It’s like the North Korea problem, it’s like if you actually think about it rationally,
we should just be bombing them or you have to stop them now? And then maybe you
treat them as a cartoonville and you ignore it? And actually good but nothing makes sense. So
you think about those systems and how they would interact if you had a major confrontation
with China. It’s really hard to model out. Secretary, does anybody sit around and think
about that? What the next battlefield looks like? Yeah, there’s a lot of folks working on that
assessment. Panicky people down in bowels of the State Department. Yeah, there are big
pieces of the U.S. government working their way through it. But I think Peter’s
point is well-taken. It’s so complex. But for example, just to focus – How do people
think about the nuclear weapons vis-a-vis China? We have a massive advantage in nuclear weapons,
but if we never use them it doesn’t count? They literally have simulations
that try to take into account how people react often acting rationally, often they
turn the rationality switch off and say what happens if someone makes a really bad decision
knowingly? Knowing it may impact them and what their relative value sets are? But your point is
well-taken. It becomes really complicated really fast. You didn’t mention the other space which
maybe we’ll get into the other three spaces which is the information war. Which is so confusing
and can move so quickly, and the capacity for nations now to act in ways the information space
that didn’t have, we didn’t know what was going in the battlefields of the past for weeks. The
information battlespace is so central to how this will unfold that it gets, the variables
quickly overwhelm the capacity for modelers to think their way through this. So they try to do
it in bite-sized chunks and make big assumptions. We do war games frequently, and there are
cottage industries and some are well-run, but problem with the war game
is what Mike just pointed out is you introduce so many different variables. It
used to be easier to do a tabletop if you’re just moving ships or aircraft or things around. But
once you introduce cyber information and space, and all of a sudden, the homeland becomes at-risk
maybe because it’s a cyber-attack, not a long range bomber from China but a cyber-attack on the
electrical grid. So it’s very, very complicated. So if China invades Taiwan, what actually happens?
Do we bomb the strait of Hormuz, do we cut of the oil, do we just lose? Is there some — do we
use tactical nukes? There’s reasons presidents don’t answer that question for an awfully long
time. No President’s ever said in the event, in response to A, I will do B. There’s strategic
ambiguity as the concept to try to avoid just exactly that day. I think a lot depends on two
things. One, who is in charge the day that that happens, that leader and the conditions that
leader has set. And the capacity for that leader to think through the ramifications and to quickly
have prepared himself or herself for that moment and to understand the intended risk. And second,
can that person at that point in time marshall the world for a response that is not just
a U.S.-China response but is more holistic, more complete and at least has the
capacity to convince the Chinese that wherever they are long that way, that deterrents
can be restored quickly. In the event it can’t be, you’ve seen these war games too. It escalates
rather quickly and it gets very confusing and information gets confusing quickly as well.
And we have to keep in mind what a strategic coup it would be, because not just because
of Taiwan or the chips and the factors, and the foundries, but Taiwan sits as the cork
in the middle of the Pacific. The entire Pacific is wide open if China takes Taiwan. I mean, it
splits northern Asia, Japan, our allies there, South Korea. Splits them from Australia and
New Zealand and the Philippines and Thailand and the treaty allies. The entire Pacific becomes
a superhighway and we’ve seen this movie before. What’s your best guess when they’re going to
take a crack at it or if and when they do it? My view is peace through strength works. We are
at the Nixon Library and peace through strength is more associated with Ronald Reagan and the Simi
Valley library. But the point is if we have a strong enough deterrent and we continue to invest
in the Pentagon and in our forces and our allies do the same, and that includes the Taiwanese,
our partners there. If they turn themselves into a porcupine, that would be difficult to digest.
I think it’s possible to deter the Chinese from doing that. But look, I’ve always said weakness is
provocative. And we show weakness to the Chinese or they perceive weakness on our part, it could
actually provoke them into attacking Taiwan. And then it leads to all of the myriad of problems
the Secretary pointed out and potentially war. The best way to prevent war is to be prepared
for it and that’s the policy we have to pursue. Let me run one theory by you guys here. I’m
pretty surprised by the crackdown China has done in Hong Kong. I always thought they could
wait until 2047. They didn’t have to do anything quite this drastic. And in my mental model
was, that every time the Politburo discussed a total crackdown on Hong Kong there was someone
in the back of the room that raised their hand and said we can’t do that because we have
to convince Taiwan to reunify with China. This time that person was told to shut up.
They’re never going to do it peacefully anyway. And there is a way to read the Hong Kong thing
as the Chinese timetable on Taiwan has moved up? Well after Hong Kong, the idea that the Taiwanese
would gladly, or without being coerced, enter into some sort of one country two systems, that’s
never going to happen. They saw what’s happened in Tibet, they saw what’s happened in Hong Kong, and
now they’ve seen what happened in Xinjiang. And the idea that the Tawainese would voluntarily
surrender their liberty and their freedom and their democracy to the Chinese communist party — I
think that idea is past. I think the Chinese have recognized that so the only way for reunification
will be a coerced reunification in my view. Or a total change in China which I
don’t think the CCP has contemplated. Remember too they have elections there. The
Chinese Communist Party’s capacity to influence elections that are held on Taiwan is real. So it
may not be that it takes carriers and missiles and bombs and threats. It may just be that over time
you can apply such coercive pressure – military, economic, diplomatic that you can convince
enough people there that it is not worth the candle and remember Taiwan has never been
part of China. This thing is stitched together. When we think of the historic China – Xinjiang,
Tibet, Mongol, this is stitched together. The People’s Republic of China itself is a
figment of the communist party’s imagination and they know it. And they are trying desperately
to find the tools they can best to consolidate their own power internally and one of the tools
is external power and external threats as well. John Noonan You warned starkly about
Google and forgive my words I am quoting more or less infiltrated
by the Chinese Communist Party and Silicon Valley provides the backbone and
central nervous system for most of the critical industries and sectors in the United States.
What is our exposure just given the fact that Silicon Valley is purportedly infiltrated by a
deep and intrusive Chinese communist presence? You know, I — I think that the thing I
would say is to keep putting a certain amount of pressure on Silicon Valley and we
need to call companies like Google out on working on AI with Communist China not with U.S.
military. I think we should be putting a lot of pressure on Apple with its whole labor force
supply chain on the iPhone manufacturing in China. I think that is — you know, that is one way we
sort of do a little what Robert was talking about earlier where you sort of — you know, there is
obviously crazy double standard where labor laws don’t apply there but do apply here and all sorts
of crazy double standards and you need to call people out on that relentlessly. I think the cyber
security is simply a mess as far as I can tell. Where the basic problem is that cyber is a place
where offense works a lot better than defense. I don’t know quite what you do. I sort of
assume so much stuff has been hacked into in one way or another and I’m sort of amazed
that stuff doesn’t get used in more ways. People should be getting blackmailed, bribed
and all sorts of crazy things should be going on all over the place and somehow all of the
data I assume has already been exfiltrated its weird that it doesn’t get used
more and I don’t know why that is. My model is that cyber is a
disaster and its actually amazing that it doesn’t manifest itself more.
Christian Whiton.Thank you Hugh. Speaking of getting tougher on Silicon Valley and holding
them to account, the Supreme Court decided to vacate its order former President Trump or while
he was President couldn’t block people on Twitter. The more interesting development was a concurring
opinion from Clarence Thomas the associate justice who basically said companies like Twitter and
others should or could be regulated as common carriers basically implying they are a natural
monopoly and their attempts to censor people that we know tend to focus much more on conservatives
could in fact be limited or regulated by federal government or state governments
in same way we regulate utilities. Do you think that is the future where we are
going with Twitter and other platforms like it? I’m on the Facebook board so I have to always be
careful what I say here. You know, de-platforming President Trump, you know, two or 3 months ago
was really — was really quite extraordinary. That, you know, I think there has been lots
of deplatforming of conservatives and I always think that the actual censorship that people talk
about is just the tip of the iceberg and the real problem is the downranking. One of the top Google
executives used to always say 5 or 6 years ago we never sensor anybody we just downrank people
and the downranking was the far more insidious way to sort of tilt the playing field of the
discourse. But there has been outright censorship, outright deplatforming and when you do it
with the President of the United States, that does feel like you really crossed some kind
of rubicon where you know I’m not sure you declare war on half the country but maybe a third, forty
percent of the country and that seems really crazy. When you have Angela Merkle and Obrador
from Mexico saying that the tech platforms have been too anti Trump, too mean to Mr. Trump that
tells you you have probably really overreached. Matt Pottinger, you had a comment. Thank you, Hugh. Going back to the conversation
about Taiwan that we should remember is that we’re talking about all the different domains
China fights in, information, cyber as well as military and the rest. One of the strongest
tools we have is our dominance in finance. Capital markets and the reserve currency
status of the dollar that we talked about. When it comes to Taiwan, one thing that we should be reminding China about is that if they were
to try to coerce — coercively annex Taiwan, we could shut down their entire banking system.
In other words, we can bring — we can sanction all their major banks and we can bring a
lot to that fight as a way to detour them that is non-military, but could actually carry
even more profound costs for China’s economy. I wanted to add that idea.
Thank you. Morgan Ortagus. Thanks, Peter great to be with you. One thing
that struck me in your book that I really liked you talked about in the beginning when you’re
innovating or starting a new company if your trying to make the next Facebook or next Google
that you are already behind that you’re not doing anything innovative and I was wondering this
is a really big and grand question but is there a way to apply this to foreign policy? To what
we do? The Secretary could probably concur that foreign policy and what we do at the state
department hasn’t changed in probably 100 years. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation.
Is there a way to apply what you have done in the business world and innovating and
being entrepreneurial to how we look at foreign policy going forward and especially hoping that
some of us will be working again in 4 or 8 years? I think that is a better question for Robert
or Mike. My, I guess, my sort of pro-innovation bias is that always that people are somehow too
anchored on the past and in business and they are too anchored on doing things that
worked in the past or copying some model that you know building a new search engine
was the right thing for Google to do in 1999. It’s probably not the right thing to do today its
very hard to compete against Google by doing the exact same thing they are doing.
I think that the foreign policy mistake that I suspect that gets made, you know,
a great deal and over and over again is to somehow think that we are still at some point in the past.
So, you know, so maybe the — maybe one version of the mistake that was made with China was to think
it was going to be like the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall came down in ’89 and then surely
something like that was going to happen in China. We are sort of anchored on the 1980s and use that
as a frame and, of course, the dynamic thing where China can also look at the history and read the
history and say that is exactly what’s not going to happen. We’re going to have perestroika but no
glasnost. We can also innovate in certain ways and avoid that and there is, you know, a sort of a
version where it is like — well, you know, is this like 1914 or is this — you know, is this 1989?
What year is this? I always say it is actually just 2021.
It is not very helpful but maybe where we should start.
Monica Crowley? Thank you very much Mr. Secretary and Ambassador
and Peter, thank you for doing this today. How do you see companies and
platforms like TikTok, Chinese-owned, globally hugely popular and yet a national
security threat to the United States? Obviously, the discussion surrounding TikTok’s
future are ongoing. We don’t have a determination yet about that, but how do
you see this going forward? Should the United States have an overarching
uniform policy to deal with platforms and companies like this or should we be dealing
with them on an ad hoc basis? Thank you. Well, obviously a uniform policy is always
better but I often worry that that’s slow. I think multilateral is always better than
unilateralism in theory, and in practice multilateralism is often an excuse that you have
if you if you want to not do anything and if you say we need to do it multilaterally that’s
one way of saying we need to do it for real and maybe it’s a way of saying we don’t need
to do it at all. I would like to see fast, flexible response, you try to do whatever you need
to do to stop the house from burning down and then you try to formalize it as fast as possible.
You know, I think that the thing that is problematic about TikTok is that it again, it has
this sort of incredible exfiltration of data about people. You are sort of creating this incredibly
privacy-invading map of, you know, a large part of the population of the Western World.
And then I think it is also — it is, again, one of these sort of odd things
where it’s — you know, it is a fairly powerful application of AI in a certain
sense where it is innovative and they figure out ways to make it especially addictive and they
figure out what videos to show you so if you watch these you keep watching them more and more.
It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing if you shut it down it would be, you know, this
economic catastrophe either. I think India banned TikTok and there were sort of less good
alternatives that popped up that were local. I don’t think it was like a
tremendous — tremendous loss. So, it is a — I think how to talk about it is
often quite tricky and we need to figure out a way where we can say it is both this problematic
AI technology on one level and another level its not that valuable of a technology at all and
for which reason we can probably do without it. Let me just pitch in here. When
we were thinking about TikTok, two things that you reminded me of. One, our
tools weren’t very good to respond to it. Our tools are the historic tools we have
had for all these years. How do you stop someone if they’re bringing in contraband
on a ship that’s coming across the sea and these export models. They’re really not made fit
for purpose for this world and so we struggled. We worked around them and worked through
and got as creative as we could to figure out the toolkit that would best address
that problem set as quickly as we could. The commercial response was much greater than
the public response to your point. The Indian foreign minister told me when they banned, I
can’t remember the ultimate number but dozens. 150 ultimately It was a matter of weeks before there were call them knockoffs if you will. Indian-made
Indian-manufactured proxies for the applications of softwares and might not have
been at same level or as perfect but the people of India were reasonably satisfied. So I think
policymakers are often very concerned if they take something away there will be huge political
backlash from something as popular as TikTok. My sense is innovators will find a solution
to meet the demand if that demand is real. We have three few more before
we run out of time. Lanhee Chen? Thanks for spending some time with us this
evening. Curious to get your thoughts on something China has done relatively well in
the last 15 or 20 years and that’s infiltrate international organizations. I think they’ve done
a tremendous for example seizing leadership of the World Health Organization — we have seen
how that rot has spread and in fact gotten in the way of us discovering the origins of
COVID-19 along with other potential problems Other organizations, I think, they have
been successful at infiltrating as well. Finally during the last couple years in
the leadership of many people on this Seminar, we have started to push back on China
and started to say, look you can’t do this and have the playing field to yourself anymore.
Is that really the right long-term solution here? Are these sort of international organizations this
model of international collective action, is it the right one to deal in areas like intellectual
property for example or health care or go to something fundamentally different to Peter’s
point about innovating. Is this an area where we need to be more innovative to think outside
of the box? If so, what is the right answer? One short comment. It’s something
that we worked on very hard. Mike’s team and our team at the NSC was that
number one, we try to make sure that there were candidates that believed in free men and women
and free markets at least competing for these international organization top slots. But it’s
not just not the top slot. It’s the deputy and functioniers, even the interns, they were
funding massive number of Chinese interns at international organizations that were cash
strapped and those interns would learn and have their first crack at jobs. And we need to compete
effectively. There are quota systems at the UN. We were not even filling the quota for Americans
at the UN. And there are plenty of young men and women in this country that are constantly
asking me, the secretary, Peter, I’m sure: how do I get in government, I want to get in
foreign policy or foreign affairs. One of the ways to do it, it’s how I got started,
was an international organization. So we need to make sure Americans are in those
organizations. But going to your second question of can they ever be effective, and they’re
generally not super-effective, and we can pick out examples. Gulf 1 and few other examples. But there
are very few where international organizations have mobilized effectively to protect us. We need
to have groupings of like-minded countries. So one of the things we worked on and that Mike worked
on very hard was the quad where you brought Japan, India, Australia together with the United States
to address common issues in the Indopacific. So I think pulling together multilateral coalitions of
like-minded countries that may not necessarily be institutionalized but at least are on an ad hoc
basis is a way for us to harness the value of working with our allies and friends and partners
to address specific threats. And not necessarily getting caught up in the quagmire of UN
specialized agencies. So it’s two parts. One, we need to compete and play there. But, two, we also
need to put together our own groups of like-minded countries to address some of these global
issues. Mike, do you have any thoughts there? I think a lot of these are designed to not work
at this point. And it’s amazing people still think they work at all. You know, the New Dealers
have this fantasy after 1945 that you create these organizations and sort of American, not
quite controlled heavily influenced. And the way I understand the history is already by the time of
the Marshall Plan was already a workaround. And it was basically, it didn’t actually go through
any of the multi-national post World War II organizations because they were already deemed
ineffective by the time of the Marshall Plan. We should if never accept Chinese participation
as their desire to make these things functional. It is an instrumentality for them.
They’re not a rights respecting nation and they don’t join the organizations
to make them better and effective. I’m going to go to Kimberly Reed, then Mary
Kissel, then Christopher Nixon Cox to wrap it up. Thank you so much. I just finished tenure as the
first woman Chairman of the Export Import Bank of the United States and I really want to thank you
for all you’re doing in Silicon Valley, and also sending some great colleagues of yours into USG.
Enjoyed working with them. Congress, including Congressman Gallagher and Congressman Waltz
who are on the China task force was, they were really instrumental in recognizing that financing
was key in competition with China. And Congress changed the law last year to allow Ex-Im to match
the rate terms and conditions that the PRC would be offering foreign purchasers around the world
for products that we all care about, including transformational exports. I’m just wondering, you
wrote your great book in 2014, and you’ve been involved with what’s happening in our government
as we are hearing today. Any thoughts on what else the government should be doing with Silicon
Valley when it comes to competition with China? Well, you know, I think it’s a multi-faceted
thing. I don’t think — I don’t think we should be super dogmatic. So I’m probably always
going to sort of be a free market Libertarian. And the dogmatic Libertarian thing
would be is that you shouldn’t have an export import bank because it involves
all these government subsidies of loans. In a world where we don’t have free trade
and we don’t have a balanced playing field, it makes a lot of sense to have something like
the Ex-Im bank and to actually expand it. So, yes, I think they’re sort of, we should be
trying a lot of different things and a lot of different areas. And we should try
to be practical and not dogmatic on it. Let me go to Mary Kissel again.
So they’re in a tech war with us, we’re not with them. They’ve infiltrated our campuses,
our labs, and our international organizations, they have a big data collection advantage. They
will use unethical means to win. Our defense department is a mess. We’re riven by a privacy
debate and they’re ahead in crypto and threatening our currency status. Are you optimistic here?
How do you feel after coming to a list like that? I think something about the format of
this conversation always pushes you to be little bit more negative and
stress all the problems there are. I would say, I would say on the, I think if
it was a fight between the U.S. and China, I think that’s a tough one for the U.S. But I
don’t think that’s going to be the dynamic. I think it’s going to be China against the whole
world. And it is one metaphor I heard from China. It’s a weirdly autistic country where
everything is sort of drawn to the center. And maybe they can strong arm Taiwan, but I think
it’s just — it’s profoundly uncharismatic and that’s a big limitation they have. And even
if it looks like they’re winning, they’re the rising power, I think that will have the effect
of scaring a lot of other countries. It’s like the U.S. has challenges, but countries
like Vietnam or India, or Japan, or Taiwan, they’re not threatened by the U.S. at this point.
And they’re going to be much more naturally on the U.S. side and on the anti-China side.
And so there’s something about the China dynamic that’s been extremely, you know, zero
sum in a way that’s sort of borderline autistic. I’m going to interject the question.
Since it’s China versus the world, should the world go to China for the 2022 Olympic?
The State Department this evening announced that they’re backing away from their earlier story
today about having a boycott. And I love to hear what the Ambassador and Secretary think about
that too. Should the world descend on Beijing? Well, I think — it’s dangerous to make
predictions. But my prediction is that it will not. Maybe our athletes will go. I don’t
think you’re going to have many political leaders from the Western world. And it will, you know,
like maybe it’s not a full boycott like the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. But I think it will be
anti-climactic. It will be, the turnout, the validation for China will be, you know,
it will be as bad as Sochi in 2014. That’s even with no boycott at all.
Talking about this, do you want to give us a preview of what you were going to
say .”Talking about this, do you want to give us a preview of what you were going to say .”
I don’t think we should have any American go and participate in the genocide olympics.
How you would send your child there to compete when if they said so much as boy, if the food
is bad here, you can end up in a Chinese prison for an awfully long time. I think that’s a modest
overstatment. It seems like there’s an awful lot of risk and I think Xi knows that. He might not
well take anyone and hold them but it’s a risk I would suggest to anyone of my family members if
they were good enough athletes ought to take. I hope we’ll convince the IOC not to hold them there
and find another solution. We figured out how to move an All-Star game pretty quickly. Maybe
we can figure out how to move the Olympics. Well, they revoked for Mike and Pottinger and
myself – they revoked our invitations so I don’t think we’ll be going under any circumstances.
I agree. It goes back to the double standard we spoke about earlier. It’s amazing how quickly
the corporate America can justify a move from Atlanta to Denver. But it’s perfectly prepared to
continue to support events in China. So it’s an area of real concern. And as the former hostage
envoy and having dealt with places in China with the secretary’s full support, he and I have
probably seen this movie play out more times than we like. And it is somewhat frightening. And the
Chinese seem to be getting into the hostage game or at least the detainee game with the two
Michael’s. Spavor and Kovrig, the Canadians, the way the Iranians have played the game for many
years. I think anyone has to be very concerned and has to think twice about why you’re going
to China, what you’re going to do there. If you want to take the risk of having an
extended stay as a guest of Mr. Xi Jinping. Thank you, everyone for this wonderful night.
My question really is to everyone on the panel. During the Cold War, we had benchmarks
of how we’re doing against the Russians, against the Soviets. And we had a clear ending.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated, it was clear we won. And when the Berlin wall fell, it was
clear we won. In an AI arms-race with China, are there similar benchmarks that will show
how we are doing in the years to come? And at the end of the day, what will
determine whether we won or lost? I think AI is a difficult one to benchmark. But
I think one of the big flash points for the last few years has been the Huawei 5G piece. And that’s
been fairly straightforward. You just go down list of countries and what are they doing? And you
can sort of see how we’re doing, how successful we are at holding the line there. I think there’s
going to be some questions about the semiconductor boycotts, how effective those are. And will
China be able to ramp up its production to get around that. That will be benchmarked
pretty straightforwardly as well. AI is always this crazy buzzword. It
means all these different things. So maybe it’s even a term one has to
be careful to use for that reason. Yeah, I think just two things. One is how
many Confucius Institutes continue to be allowed to participate and some of these Chinese
student organizations that are controlled by the CCP and keep other students, other students
of Chinese descent from participating in U.S. universities with free speech.
So we’ll have to see how that goes. Their influence operations. But starting
with those, because those are something easy to benchmark if the institutes are closed
or removed from campus. That’s something that I think we’ll see as useful. Another thing, the
other big fight, and this is something that Larry Kudlow and I started, ran from the White House,
and that’s preventing U.S. investment in China. And we’ve literally had U.S. investment dollars
going to Chinese companies that are building ships and aircrafts and munitions and tanks
that can ultimately be used against either ourselves or allies, or partners in the region.
So if we can cut off the flow of investment and limit the overt influence, I’m not talking
about the covert influence, but just the overt influence, those are just two benchmarks that the
Biden Administration has a chance to gain some traction on and show that we’re going to stand
up to the Chinese. And I think Secretary Pompeo, Mike has not gotten the recognition he deserves
for a number of the measures he took in his last week in office. But especially in labeling
what was happening to the Uyghurs, and what is happening to the Uyghurs as genocide took a lot
of courage, he was the person with the statutory authority to make that decision and there were a
lot of people were angry about it both overseas and in this country especially on Wall Street and
at the State Department. It took a lot of courage. But history is going to treat Mike very well for
having made that decision just like it’s treated folks well who made the similar calls in the
’30s and ’40s that were not popular at the time. It’s an important question. I don’t
know if there’s a singular answer. In the end, Xi Jinping is afraid of liberty
and sovereignty and rules-based order. It’s his enemy. And we will know who ultimately
wins this by which ideas dominate the next 10, 20, 40 years. Are they a set of western ideas or are
they a set of understandings that flow from the authoritarian regime in China? There is a global
component to this. I will take credit for what President Trump allowed us, those of us on this
call who served in his administration to do. We had a chance for the first time to go around the
world and make the case for why the threat from that central underpinning, that central idea
that the Chinese Communist party – this party, not a country, a party puts forward – in
attempt to dominate the world. So ultimately, that’s what we fought out as an ideological
struggle as much as anything else. And we need to remind ourselves of our founding and our
history and the power that flows from that. We need to be unashamed about talking about that
whether on college campus or at a PTA meeting or at the United Nations. And at every one of
those four, we need to put forward the central thesis that our liberty and ideas about freedom,
and Peter is talking about being a Libertarian, that’s my background as well. The capacity for
individual human beings to engage in rational activity in the way they prefer to do so. That’s
how we’ll know if we’ve ultimately won or not. I want to thank our special guest Peter
Thiel and our co-chairs Ambassador O’Brien, Secretary Pompeo and the 15 members of The
Seminar. Thank you. Next month we will go back to the Olympics as we promised to do
this month but we had Peter Thiel with us so we took up the opportunity to do that.
Thank you, all, and we’ll talk to you in May. you
Thanks for sharing