The following article originally appeared in the Perth US Asia Center on July 20, 2023. Excerpts are below, and the full text can be accessed here.
Many traditional supply chains - such as commodities and non-critical manufactured goods - are globally integrated and are likely to remain so. But the globalization of critical and emerging technologies will require a higher degree of trust between countries: being connected in a supply chain that makes jeans is one thing, but being a link in a chain that makes facial recognition-enabled surveillance cameras is another. A natural consequence is the emergence of what a colleague of mine, Dr. Andreas Kuehn, calls "tech alliances."
Some of these “tech alliances” are already beginning to take shape, with the Quad perhaps the most significant such tech alliance in the Indo-Pacific. Just two years ago, the Quad had only a loose set of principles and initial working groups on health, critical and emerging technologies, maritime issues, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and space. Today, it has an investors’ network, research fellowships, a maritime information sharing mechanism, and the deployment of an open radio access network among several concrete deliverables.
While tech alliances may be relatively informal, involving the public, private, and academic sectors of a loose coalition of countries on an issue-by-issue basis, it will require hard choices on the part of various actors. Cooperating with one country on certain sensitive technologies will, in practice, require creating firewalls to separate them from the technologies of competitors. This may mean, at a minimum, physically separating facilities and personnel working on defence, communications, or computing, or even signing up wholly to one or another country’s critical technology ecosystem. While the countries of South and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, South Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East may try to keep multiple options open, such balancing acts will prove more difficult in the years to come.