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10 November 2022

America’s Risky New China Policy Washington has a bold plan to restrict Beijing’s semiconductor imports. The world needs to talk about it.

Ravi Agrawal

Last month, a small U.S. federal agency released a regulatory filing that has gotten relatively little media attention—especially in the context of its immense global ramifications. The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced worldwide limits on China’s ability to import advanced semiconductors. The strict new rules—which countries and companies are scrambling to comply with—go beyond any previous attempt to curtail China’s technological progress and ambitions.

Writing in Foreign Policy a week after the filing, Jon Bateman described Washington’s move as a watershed moment in U.S.-China relations that “all but guarantees a continued march toward broad-based technological decoupling.” He added that the “increasing boldness of U.S. unilateral actions, and Washington’s open embrace of a quasi-containment strategy, … may finally set in motion forces beyond the control of U.S. national security leaders.”

Bateman is a senior fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously, he was a special assistant to then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford and served as the director for cyberstrategy implementation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I spoke with Bateman on FP Live, the magazine’s forum for live journalism, to discuss the ramifications of the latest policy changes since the publication of his essay. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript. FP subscribers can watch the full, 30-minute interview at the top of this page.

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