2024年10月美国安全助理杰克 ·沙利文 布鲁金斯学会讲话
美国国家安全事务助理杰克 ·沙利文在布鲁金斯学会的讲话摘译
U.S. MISSION CHINA 2024年10月28日
Remarks by APNSA Jake Sullivan at the Brookings Institutionhttps://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/23/remarks-by-apnsa-jake-sullivan-at-the-brookings-institution/
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. Oct 23, 2024
华盛顿特区， 布鲁金斯学会（Brookings Institution）2024年10月23日
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我想首先反思我听到的一些问题，然后就如何巩固我们的进展提出一些建议。
一个首要问题是许多其他问题的核心：我们的新方针是否意味着我们正在放弃一种正和（positive-sum）世界观，即美国可以置其他所有国家的利益于不顾而仅仅寻求其自身利益？
总体而言，不，不是这样。事实上，我们正在回归于一种使美国的国际领导力成为持久力量的传统，即亚历克西斯·德·托克维尔（Alexis de Tocqueville）所说的“正确理解的利益”。这种观念认为，加强我们的合作伙伴并维持一个有助于我们所有人繁荣的公平经济体系符合我们自身的利益。
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我们现在看到大国竞争的回归。但与冷战时代不同的是，我们的经济紧密相连。我们正处于人工智能带来的技术革命的前沿，这种变化也将带来经济和地缘政治影响。新冠病毒疫情暴露了全球供应链中数十年来逐步累积的脆弱性。随着每一次飓风和热浪来袭，气候危机都变得更加紧迫。
因此，我们需要再次阐明德托克维尔提出的“正确理解的利益”这一概念。对我们来说，这意味着遵循一种从根本上来说是正和的战略，它适合当今的地缘政治现实，植根于美国的根本利益——有利于美国工人、美国社区、美国企业以及美国的国家安全和经济实力。
我们仍然坚信国际贸易和投资的互惠性，并通过对关键领域进行有魄力的公共投资增强及推动国际贸易和投资；在罕见但必要的情况下，我们对关键的国家安全技术实施有原则的管制；针对有害的非市场行为、虐待劳工、破坏环境以及经济胁迫采取保护措施；并与广泛的合作伙伴进行关键的协调。
我们面临的挑战并不是我们独有的，也不是我们能够独自解决的。我们希望并且需要我们的合作伙伴与我们共同努力。鉴于我们从他们那里听到的需求信号，我们认为，在未来十年中，美国的领导力将取决于一种能力，即能否帮助我们的合作伙伴实施类似方针并在我们的所有政策和投资之间建立协同性和互补性。
如果我们做到这一点，我们就能证明国际经济一体化与民主和国家主权是相容的。我们也将借此摆脱丹尼·罗德里克的三难困境（Dani Rodrik’s trilemma）。
那么，这在实践中意味着什么？这种正和方针对贸易政策意味着什么？我们是否正在放弃贸易作为国际经济政策核心支柱的地位？
美国的进出口已从疫情期间的低迷中恢复，过去两年美国贸易的实际价值每年都远高于2019年的水平。我们也是世界上最大的外国直接投资（FDI）来源国。
因此，我们不会放弃国际贸易和投资。我们目前所做的是放弃某些具体政策，坦率地说，这些政策没有考虑到我们面临的紧迫挑战：气候危机；脆弱而集中的关键矿产和半导体供应链；对工人权利的持续压制；不仅是更多的全球竞争，而且是与一个全面采行非市场政策和做法来扭曲及主导全球市场的国家进行竞争。
忽视或淡化这些现实无助于我们确定一条可行的前进路线。我们的贸易方针旨在应对这些挑战。
气候问题是一个很好的例子。美国制造商是清洁钢铁生产的全球领先者，但他们必须与生产成本更低但排放强度更高的钢铁公司竞争。因此，白宫在今年早些时候成立了气候与贸易工作组（Climate and Trade Task Force），该工作组一直在开发正确的工具来促进脱碳，并确保我们从事清洁生产的工人和企业不会因海外从事不清洁、掠夺性生产的公司而处于不利地位。
关键矿产是另一个例子。该行业的特点是价格极度波动、腐败盛行、对劳动力和环境的保护薄弱，并且高度集中在中华人民共和国，它们人为地压低价格，将竞争对手拦截在市场之外。
如果我们和我们的合作伙伴不进行投资，中华人民共和国对这些供应链和其他供应链的主导地位只会增强，这将使我们越来越依赖一个被事实证明有意将这种依赖性用作胁迫手段的国家。我们不能接受这种结果，我们的合作伙伴也不能接受。
因此，我们正在与他们合作创建一个高标准的关键矿产市场，使我们的供应链多样化，为我们的生产商创造一个公平的竞争环境，并促进强有力的工人权利和环境保护。我们将在接下来的几周内推动就这一想法取得切实进展。
在对我们的未来很重要的多个领域——不仅是关键矿产，还有太阳能电池、锂离子电池、电动汽车——我们看到了一种广泛的模式正在出现。中华人民共和国正在生产的产品远超国内需求，以人为低价向全球市场倾销过剩产能，迫使世界各地的制造商倒闭，并对供应链进行卡脖子。
为了防止第二次中国冲击，我们必须采取行动。
这就是我们今年早些时候做出301关税决定的原因。
我们知道，不分青红皂白的、广泛的关税将损害美国和我们的伙伴国家的工人、消费者和企业。这方面的证据是明确无误的。这就是为什么我们不走这条路，而是选择对战略领域的不公平做法征收关税；在这些战略领域中，我们和我们的盟友正在投资数千亿美元来重建我们的制造业和复原力。
关键的是，我们看到发达经济体和新兴经济体的伙伴都对产能过剩得出类似的结论，并采取类似的举措来避免他们自己的产业遭到损害，其中包括欧盟、加拿大、巴西、泰国、墨西哥、土耳其以及更多国家。这事关重大。
由此回到我刚才提到的一点：我们正在与我们的合作伙伴共同寻求这种新的贸易方式。他们还认识到，我们需要现代贸易工具来实现我们的目标。这意味着考虑基于特定经济部门的贸易协定。这意味着在更有效的情况下基于标准创建市场。这还意味着重振国际机构以应对当今的挑战，包括真正改革世贸组织以应对我所概述的挑战。
这意味着更全面地思考我们的经济伙伴关系。这就是为什么我们创建了印太经济框架（Indo-Pacific Economic Framework，IPEF）和美洲经济繁荣伙伴关系（Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity，APEP）。这也是为什么我们给它们起了这样顺口的名字。
在IPEF内，我们与13个合作伙伴达成了三项协议，以加速清洁能源转型、推广高劳工标准、打击腐败以及在供应链脆弱性造成广泛破坏之前进行修复。在APEP内，我们正在努力使西半球成为具有全球竞争力的半导体、清洁能源等行业的供应链中心。
由此引出我在过去一年半里经常被问到的下一个问题：国内投资在所有这些举措中发挥怎样的作用？我们的正和方针如何与我们的现代工业战略相一致？
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最初，当我们全面推出这些举措时，我们的外国合作伙伴担心这是为了削弱他们的利益，担心我们试图将世界各地所有的清洁能源投资和生产转移到美国。
但事实当时并非如此，现在也并非如此。
我们知道我们的合作伙伴需要投资。事实上，我们希望他们投资。全世界都将受益于这些投资所带来的清洁能源进步的溢出效应。
我们远未达到实现清洁能源部署目标所需的投资饱和点，仅靠市场也无法生成必要的资源。
因此，我们鼓励合作伙伴投资于自己的产业实力。我们通过引导美国外交政策使美国成为这一努力中更有帮助的合作伙伴。我们的合作伙伴已经开始加入我们的行列。看看日本的绿色转型政策、印度的生产激励措施、加拿大的清洁能源税收抵免、欧盟的绿色协议（Green Deal）。
随着越来越多的国家采行这种方针，我们将继续扩大必要的合作机制，以确保我们共同行动，扩大全球投资总额，而不是在一组固定的投资领域相互竞争。
投资于我们的高科技制造实力也是如此。我们认为，一个失去制造能力的国家就有可能失去创新能力。所以，我们正在恢复制造业。
由于《芯片和科学法》（CHIPS and Science Act）的实施，美国有望拥有五家大规模生产领先逻辑和存储芯片的工厂。世界上没有其他经济体拥有超过两个此类工厂。我们正在继续巩固美国在人工智能领域的领先地位，包括通过我们正在最终确定的一组措施，以确保训练下一代人工智能模型所需的实物基础设施在美国建造。
但所有这些高科技投资和开发并没有以牺牲合作伙伴的利益为代价。我们和他们共同发展。
我们正在利用《芯片和科学法》批准的资金对从哥斯达黎加到越南的整个半导体供应链进行补充投资。
我们正在世界各地（从加拿大到新加坡再到日本）建立一个人工智能安全机构网络，以负责任地运用人工智能的力量。
我们还成立了一个新的量子开发小组（Quantum Development Group），以深化这一在未来几十年至关重要的领域的合作。
简言之，我们正在考虑如何与我们的盟友和合作伙伴共同管理这一问题，这将使我们所有各方更具竞争力。
这一切引出了另一个经常提出的问题：你们的技术保护政策何去何从？它如何适应正和方针？
长期以来，美国和我们的盟友及伙伴都在对军民两用技术出口进行限制，这合乎逻辑且无可争议。一些国家有可能利用先进技术来获得对美国及我们的朋友的军事优势，允许公司企业将这些技术出售给这些国家有悖常理。
试图回到地缘政治对手之间几乎没有贸易（包括技术贸易）的冷战范式将是错误的。但正如我所指出的，我们当今处于一个根本不同的地缘政治背景，所以我们必须选择一条中间道路。
这意味着我们实行限制是有针对性的，仅仅对影响国家安全和战略竞争的最敏感技术实行管制。我们说：去风险，而不是脱钩。就包含了这一层意思。
为了达到适当的平衡，确保我们不会以任意或本能的方式实施管制，我们有一个为我们的决策提供依据的框架。我们至少向自己提出四个问题：
第一，哪些敏感技术目前或未来可能涉及美国国家安全的基础？
第二，就这些敏感技术而言，我们在哪些领域中具有明显的优势，并且我们的竞争对手可能尽最大努力来缩小差距？反之，我们在哪些领域中落后，因此最容易受到胁迫？
第三，我们的竞争对手在多大程度上可以通过本土开发或第三国引进来直接替代美国敏感技术，从而削弱我们的管制？
第四，我们能够围绕一项特定管制建立和维持的联盟的广度和深度如何？
是的，当涉及到一小部分敏感技术时，围墙很高，理应如此。
从更广泛的商业背景考虑，院子很小，我们无意不必要地扩大。
除了出口管制和投资审查领域之外，我们还将采取行动保护敏感数据和我们的关键基础设施，例如我们最近对来自受关切国家的网联汽车采取的行动。
我猜想这个会场中几乎没有人会认为我们应该与华为一起打造我们的电信架构或数据中心基础设施。
数以百万计采用中华人民共和国的技术的汽车在路上行驶，每天从中华人民共和国获取软件更新，将大量信息发送回中华人民共和国，这些做法不合常理，特别是当我们已经看到中华人民共和国对我们的关键基础设施构成网络威胁的证据时。
坦率地说，我们必须以过去未曾采用的方式预测系统性网络和数据风险，包括对未来物联网的影响，并且我们必须采取深思熟虑、有针对性的必要措施来应对。
由此引出最后一个问题，也是在某种程度上具有根本性的问题：这一方针是否反映了对美国和我们的固有利益的某种悲观主义看法？
恰恰相反。它反映了一种持久而雄心勃勃的乐观精神。我们深信，我们能够采取明智而有魄力的行动，我们有能力竞争并将获胜，我们能够应对当今时代的各项巨大挑战，我们能够为全体美国人民带来他们应得的利益。
虽然现在还言之过早，但我们已经有了一些成功的证据，包括我们在世界上所有发达经济体中实现了最强劲的疫情后复苏。还有更多工作要做，但通货膨胀已经下降。与在这个十年或下个十年内中华人民共和国的国内生产总值将超过美国的预测相反，自拜登总统上任以来，美国的领先幅度扩大了一倍多。去年，美国吸引的外国直接投资是排名第二的国家的五倍多。
我们再次展示了我们的复原力和重塑能力，其他国家也注意到了。上个月发布的欧盟德拉吉报告（Draghi Report）与我们的战略的关键方面具有一致性。
现在，当我们继续实现这一愿景时，我们需要严格地坚持原则。例如，我们需要果断地进行所需的投资，但不能转向排挤私营部门或与我们的合作伙伴过度竞争的毫无效用的补贴。
我们清楚地知道，我们的政策将涉及选择和取舍。这是所有政策的本质。但套用萨特（Sartre）的话来说，不选择也是一种选择；我们对挑战置之不理的时间越长，在取舍中付出的代价就会越高。
断言达成适当的平衡具有很大难度并不构成满足于现状的理由。
我们已经开始为实现新的正和愿景并证明其价值而努力，但我们仍然有大量工作要做。
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下面这段话可以作为我的结束语：
第二次世界大战结束以来，美国一直倡导一个公平开放的国际经济体系；倡导通过加强全球联系推动创新；倡导通过善用贸易和投资的力量创造良好的就业机会；倡导让托克维尔所说的“正确理解的利益”展现力量。
我们面临的任务是利用这种力量来应对当今地缘政治的现实，不仅要保持美国持久的优势，还要将其延续到子孙后代。我们需要进行更多这样的对话，并经历一次又一次的迭代，才能形成新的共识，完善一套新的政策和能力，从而成功地应对时代的挑战。
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/23/remarks-by-apnsa-jake-sullivan-at-the-brookings-institution/
Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. Oct 23, 2024
Good morning, everyone. And thank you so much, David, for that introduction and for having me here today. It’s great to be back at Brookings.
As many of you know, I was here last year to lay out President Biden’s vision for renewing American economic leadership, a vision that responded to several converging challenges our country faced: the return of intense geopolitical competition; a rise in inequality and a squeeze on the middle class; a less vibrant American industrial base; an accelerating climate crisis; vulnerable supply chains; and rapid technological change.
For the preceding three decades, the U.S. economy had enjoyed stronger topline aggregate growth than other advanced democracies, and had generated genuine innovation and technological progress, but our economic policies had not been adapted to deal effectively with these challenges. That’s why President Biden implemented a modern industrial strategy, one premised on investing at home in ourselves and our national strength, and on shifting the energies of U.S. foreign policy to help our partners around the world do the same.
In practice, that’s meant mobilizing public investment to unlock private sector investment to deliver on big challenges like the clean energy transition and artificial intelligence, revitalizing our capacity to innovate and to build, creating diversified and resilient global supply chains, setting high standards for everything from labor to the environment to technology. Because on that level playing field, our logic goes, America can compete and win. Preserving open markets and also protecting our national security and doing all of these things together with allies and partners.
Since I laid this vision out in my speech at Brookings last year, I’ve listened with great interest to many thoughtful responses, because these are early days. Meaningful shifts in policy require constant iteration and reflection. That’s what will make our policy stronger and more sustainable.
So, today, I’m glad to be back here at Brookings to reengage in this conversation, because I really believe that the ideas I’m here to discuss and the policies that flow from them are among the most consequential elements of the administration’s foreign as well as domestic policy, and I believe they will constitute an important legacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.
I want to start by reflecting on some of the questions I’ve heard and then propose a few ways to consolidate our progress.
One overarching question is at the core of many others: Does our new approach mean that we’re walking away from a positive-sum view of the world, that America is just in it for itself at the expense of everyone else?
In a word, no, it doesn’t. In fact, we’re returning to a tradition that made American international leadership such a durable force, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “interest rightly understood.” The notion that it’s in our own self-interest to strengthen our partners and sustain a fair economic system that helps all of us prosper.
After World War Two, we built an international economic order in the context of a divided world, an order that helped free nations recover and avoid a return to the protectionist and nationalist mistakes of the 1930s, an order that also advanced American economic and geopolitical power.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we took that order global, embracing the old Eastern bloc, China, India, and many developing countries. Suddenly, the major powers were no longer adversaries or competitors. Capital flowed freely across borders. Global supply chains became “just in time,” without anyone contemplating potential strategic risk.
Each of these approaches was positive-sum, and each reflected the world as it was.
Now, the world of the 1990s is over, and it’s not coming back, and it’s not a coherent plan or critique just to wish it so.
We’re seeing the return of great power competition. But unlike the Cold War era, our economies are closely intertwined. We’re on the verge of revolutionary technological change with AI, with economic and geopolitical implications. The pandemic laid bare the fragilities in global supply chains that have been growing for decades. The climate crisis grows more urgent with every hurricane and heat wave.
So we need to articulate, once again, de Tocqueville’s notion of interest rightly understood. To us, that means pursuing a strategy that is fundamentally positive-sum, calibrated to the geopolitical realities of today and rooted in what is good for America — for American workers, American communities, American businesses, and American national security and economic strength.
We continue to believe deeply in the mutual benefits of international trade and investment, enhanced and enabled by bold public investment in key sectors; bounded in rare but essential cases by principled controls on key national security technologies; protected against harmful non-market practices, labor and environment abuses, and economic coercion; and critically coordinated with a broad range of partners.
The challenges we face are not uniquely our own and nor can we solve them alone. We want and need our partners to join us. And given the demand signal we hear back from them, we think that in the next decade, American leadership will be measured by our ability to help our partners pull off similar approaches and build alignment and complementarity across our policies and our investments.
If we get that right, we can show that international economic integration is compatible with democracy and national sovereignty. And that is how we get out of Dani Rodrik’s trilemma.
Now, what does that mean in practice? What does this kind of positive-sum approach mean for trade policy? Are we walking away from trade as a core pillar of international economic policy?
U.S. exports and imports have recovered from their dip during the pandemic, with the real value of U.S. trade well above 2019 levels in each of the last two years. We’re also the largest outbound source of FDI in the world.
So, we are not walking away from international trade and investment. What we are doing is moving away from specific policies that, frankly, didn’t contemplate the urgent challenges we face: The climate crisis. Vulnerable, concentrated, critical mineral and semiconductor supply chains. Persistent attacks on workers’ rights. And not just more global competition, but more competition with a country that uses pervasive non-market policies and practices to distort and dominate global markets.
Ignoring or downplaying these realities will not help us chart a viable path forward. Our approach to trade responds to these challenges.
Climate is a good example. American manufacturers are global leaders in clean steel production, yet they’ve had to compete against companies that produce steel more cheaply but with higher emissions intensity. That’s why, earlier this year, the White House stood up a Climate and Trade Task Force, and the task force has been developing the right tools to promote decarbonization and ensure our workers and businesses engaged in cleaner production aren’t disadvantaged by firms overseas engaged in dirtier, exploitative production.
Critical minerals are another example. That sector is marked by extreme price volatility, widespread corruption, weak labor and environmental protections, and heavy concentration in the PRC, which artificially drops prices to keep competitors out of the marketplace.
If we and our partners fail to invest, the PRC’s domination of these and other supply chains will only grow, and that will leave us increasingly dependent on a country that has demonstrated its willingness to weaponize such dependencies. We can’t accept that, and neither can our partners.
That’s why we are working with them to create a high-standard, critical minerals marketplace, one that diversifies our supply chains, creates a level playing field for our producers, and promotes strong workers’ rights and environmental protections. And we’re driving towards tangible progress on that idea in just the next few weeks.
In multiple sectors that are important to our future, not just critical minerals, but solar cells, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, we see a broad pattern emerging. The PRC is producing far more than domestic demand, dumping excess onto global markets at artificially low prices, driving manufacturers around the world out of business, and creating a chokehold on supply chains.
To prevent a second China shock, we’ve had to act.
That’s what drove the decisions about our 301 tariffs earlier this year.
Now, we know that indiscriminate, broad-based tariffs will harm workers, consumers, and businesses, both in the United States and our partners. The evidence on that is clear. That’s why we chose, instead, to target tariffs at unfair practices in strategic sectors where we and our allies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild our manufacturing and our resilience.
And crucially, we’re seeing partners in both advanced and emerging economies reach similar conclusions regarding overcapacity and take similar steps to ward off damage to their own industries, from the EU to Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Mexico to Türkiye and beyond. That’s a big deal.
And it brings me back to my earlier point: We’re pursuing this new trade approach in concert with our partners. They also recognize we need modern trade tools to achieve our objectives. That means considering sector-specific trade agreements. It means creating markets based on standards when that’s more effective. And it also means revitalizing international institutions to address today’s challenges, including genuinely reforming the WTO to deal with the challenges I’ve outlined.
And it means thinking more comprehensively about our economic partnerships. That’s why we created the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. That’s why we also gave them such catchy names.
Within IPEF, we finalized three agreements with 13 partners to accelerate the clean energy transition, to promote high labor standards, to fight corruption, and to shore up supply chain vulnerabilities before they become widespread disruptions. And within APEP, we’re working to make the Western Hemisphere a globally competitive supply chain hub for semiconductors, clean energy, and more.
And that leads to the next question I’ve often been asked in the last year and a half: Where does domestic investment fit into all of this? How does our positive-sum approach square with our modern industrial strategy?
The truth is that smart, targeted government investment has always been a crucial part of the American formula. It’s essential to catalyzing private investment and growth in sectors where market failures or other barriers would lead to under-investment.
Somehow, we forgot that along the way, or at least we stopped talking about it. But there was no plausible version of answers on decarbonization or supply chain resilience without recovering this tradition. And so we have.
We’ve made the largest investment ever to diversify and accelerate clean energy deployment through the Inflation Reduction Act. And investments are generating hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment all across the country; rapid growth in emerging climate technologies like sustainable aviation fuels, carbon management, clean hydrogen, with investments increasing 6- to 15-fold from pre-IRA levels.
This will help us meet our climate commitments. This will advance our national security. And this will ensure that American workers and communities can seize the vast economic opportunities of the clean energy transition and that those opportunities are broadly shared. And that last part is crucial.
The fact is that many communities hard hit in decades past still haven’t bounced back, and the two-thirds of American adults who don’t have college degrees have seen unacceptably poor outcomes in terms of real wages, health, and other outcomes over the last four decades.
For many years, people assumed that these distributional issues would be solved after the fact by domestic policies. That has not worked.
Advancing fairness, creating high-quality jobs, and revitalizing American communities can’t be an afterthought, which is why we’ve made them central to our approach.
In fact, as a result of the incentives in the IRA to build in traditional energy communities, investment in those communities has doubled under President Joe Biden.
Now, initially, when we rolled this all out, our foreign partners worried that it was designed to undercut them, that we were attempting to shift all the clean energy investment and production around the world to the United States.
But that wasn’t the case, and it isn’t the case.
We know that our partners need to invest. In fact, we want them to invest. The whole world benefits from the spillover effects of advances in clean energy that these investments bring.
And we are nowhere near the saturation point of investment required to meet our clean energy deployment goals, nor will markets alone generate the resources necessary either.
So, we’ve encouraged our partners to invest in their own industrial strength. We’ve steered U.S. foreign policy towards being a more helpful partner in this endeavor. And our partners have begun to join us. Look at Japan’s green transformation policy, India’s production-linked incentives, Canada’s clean energy tax credit, the European Union’s Green Deal.
As more and more countries adopt this approach, we will continue to build out the cooperative mechanisms that we know will be necessary to ensure that we’re acting together to scale up total global investment, not competing with each other over where a fixed set of investments is located.
The same goes for investing in our high-tech manufacturing strength. We believe that a nation that loses the capacity to build, risks losing the capacity to innovate. So, we’re building again.
As a result of the CHIPS and Science Act, America is on track to have five leading-edge logic and memory chip manufacturers operating at scale. No other economy has more than two. And we’re continuing to nurture American leadership in artificial intelligence, including through actions we’re finalizing, as I speak, to ensure that the physical infrastructure needed to train the next generation of AI models is built right here in the United States.
But all of this high-tech investment and development hasn’t come at the expense of our partners. We’ve done it alongside them.
We’re leveraging CHIPS Act funding to make complementary investments in the full semiconductor supply chain, from Costa Rica to Vietnam.
We’re building a network of AI safety institutes around the world, from Canada to Singapore to Japan, to harness the power of AI responsibly.
And we’ve launched a new Quantum Development Group to deepen cooperation in a field that will be pivotal in the decades ahead.
Simply put, we’re thinking about how to manage this in concert with our allies and partners, and that will make all of us more competitive.
Now, all this leads to another question that is frequently asked: What about your technology protection policies? How does that fit into a positive-sum approach?
The United States and our allies and partners have long limited the export of dual-use technologies. This is logical and uncontroversial. It doesn’t make sense to allow companies to sell advanced technology to countries that could use them to gain military advantage over the United States and our friends.
Now, it would be a mistake to attempt to return to the Cold War paradigm of almost no trade, including technological trade, among geopolitical rivals. But as I’ve noted, we’re in a fundamentally different geopolitical context, so we’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle.
That means being targeted in what we restrict, controlling only the most sensitive technologies that will define national security and strategic competition. This is part of what we mean when we say: de-risking, not decoupling.
To strike the right balance, to ensure we’re not imposing controls in an arbitrary or reflexive manner, we have a framework that informs our decision-making. We ask ourselves at least four questions:
One, which sensitive technologies are or will likely become foundational to U.S. national security?
Two, across those sensitive technologies, where do we have distinct advantages and are likely to see maximal effort by our competitors to close the gap? Conversely, where are we behind and, therefore, most vulnerable to coercion?
Three, to what extent do our competitors have immediate substitutes for U.S.-sensitive technology, either through indigenous development or from third countries, that would undercut the controls?
Four, what is the breadth and depth of the coalition we could plausibly build and sustain around a given control?
When it comes to a narrow set of sensitive technologies, yes, the fence is high, as it should be.
And in the context of broader commerce, the yard is small, and we’re not looking to expand it needlessly.
Now, beyond the realm of export controls and investment screening, we will also take action to protect sensitive data and our critical infrastructure, such as our recent action on connected vehicles from countries of concern.
I suspect almost no one here would argue that we should build out our telecommunications architecture or our data center infrastructure with Huawei.
Millions of cars on the road with technology from the PRC, getting daily software updates from the PRC, sending reams of information back to the PRC, similarly doesn’t make sense, especially when we’ve already seen evidence of a PRC cyber threat to our critical infrastructure.
We have to anticipate systemic cyber and data risks in ways that, frankly, we didn’t in the past, including what that means for the future Internet of Things, and we have to take the thoughtful, targeted steps necessary in response.
This leads to a final, kind of fundamental question: Does this approach reflect some kind of pessimism about the United States and our inherent interests?
Quite the contrary. It reflects an abiding and ambitious optimism. We believe deeply that we can act smartly and boldly, that we can compete and win, that we can meet the great challenges of our time, and that we can deliver for all of our people here in the United States.
And while it’s still very early, we have some evidence of that. This includes the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any advanced economy in the world. There’s more work to do, but inflation has come down. And contrary to the predictions that the PRC would overtake the U.S. in GDP either in this decade or the next, since President Biden took office, the United States has more than doubled our lead. And last year, the United States attracted more than five times more inbound foreign direct investment than the next highest country.
We are once again demonstrating our capacity for resilience and reinvention, and others are noticing. The EU’s Draghi report, published last month, mirrors key aspects of our strategy.
Now, as we continue to implement this vision, we will need to stay rigorous. We will need, for example, to be bold enough to make the needed investments without veering into unproductive subsidies that crowd-out the private sector or unduly compete with our partners.
We’re clear-eyed that our policies will involve choices and trade-offs. That’s the nature of policy. But to paraphrase Sartre, not to choose is also a choice, and the trade-offs only get worse the longer we leave our challenges unchecked.
Pointing out that it’s challenging to strike the right balance is not an argument to be satisfied with the status quo.
We have tried to start making real a new positive-sum vision, and we have tried to start proving out its value. But we still have our work cut out for us.
So I’d actually like to end today with a few questions of my own, where our answers will determine our shared success:
First, will we sustain the political will here at home to make the investments in our own national strength that will be required of us in the years ahead?
Strategic investments like these need to be a bipartisan priority, and I have to believe that we’ll rise to the occasion, that we won’t needlessly give up America’s position of economic and technological leadership because we can no longer generate the political consensus to invest in ourselves.
There is more we can do now on a bipartisan basis.
For example, Congress still hasn’t appropriated the science part of CHIPS and Science, even while the PRC is increasing its science and technology budget by 10 percent year on year.
Now, whether we’re talking about investments in fundamental research, or grants and loans for firms developing critical technologies, we also have to update our approach to risk. Some research paths are dead ends. Some startups won’t survive. Our innovation base and our private sector are the envy of the world because they take risks. The art of managing risk for the sake of innovation is critical to successful geostrategic competition.
So, we need to nurture a national comfort with, to paraphrase FDR, bold and persistent experimentation. And when an investment falls short, as it will, we need to maintain our bipartisan will, dust ourselves off, and keep moving forward. To put it bluntly, our competitors hope we’re not capable of that. We need to prove them wrong. We need to make patient, strategic investments in our capacity to compete, and we need to ensure fiscal sustainability in order to keep making those investments over the long term.
The second question: Will we allocate sufficient resources for investments that are needed globally?
Last year, here at Brookings, I talked about the need to go from billions to trillions in investment to help emerging and developing countries tackle modern challenges, including massively accelerating the speed and scale of the clean energy transition.
We need a Marshall Plan-style effort, investing in partners around the world and supporting homegrown U.S. innovation in growing markets like storage, nuclear, and geothermal energy.
Now, trillions may sound lofty and unachievable, but there is a very clear path to get there without requiring anywhere near that level of taxpayer dollars, and that path is renewed American leadership and investment in international institutions.
For example, at the G20 this fall, we’re spearheading an effort that calls for the international financial institutions, the major creditors in the private sector, to step up their relief for countries facing high debt service burdens so they too can invest in their future.
Or consider the World Bank and the IMF. We’ve been leading the charge to make these institutions bigger and more effective, to fully utilize their balance sheets and be more responsive to the developing and emerging economies they serve. That has already unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars in new lending capacity, at no cost to the United States. And we can generate further investment on the scale required with very modest U.S. public investments and legislative fixes. That depends on Congress taking action.
For example, our administration requested $750 million — million — from Congress to boost the World Bank’s lending capacity by over $36 billion, which, if matched by our partners, could generate over $100 billion in new resources. This would allow the World Bank to deploy $200 for every $1 the taxpayers provide.
We’ve asked Congress to approve investments in a new trust fund at the IMF to help developing countries build resilience and sustainability. Through a U.S. investment in the tens of millions, we could enable tens of billions in new IMF lending.
And outside the World Bank and the IMF, we’re asking Congress to increase funding for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which we launched at the G7 a couple of years ago.
This partnership catalyzes and concentrates investment in key corridors, including Africa and Asia, to close the infrastructure gap in developing countries. It strengthens countries’ economic growth. It strengthens America’s supply chains and global trusted technology vendors. And it strengthens our partnerships in critical regions.
The private sector has been enthusiastic. Together with them and our G7 partners, we’ve already mobilized tens of billions of dollars, and we can lever that up and scale that up in the years ahead with help on a bipartisan basis from the Congress.
We need to focus on the big picture. Holding back small sums of money has the effect of pulling back large sums from the developing world — which also, by the way, effectively cedes the field to other countries like the PRC. There are low-cost, commonsense solutions on the table, steps that should not be the ceiling of our ambitions, but the floor. And we need Congress to provide us the authorities and the seed funding to take those steps now.
Finally, will we empower our agencies and develop new muscle to meet this moment?
Simply put, we need to ensure that we have the resources and the capabilities in the U.S. government to implement this economic vision over the long haul. This starts by significantly strengthening our bilateral tools, answering a critique that China has a checkbook and the U.S. has a checklist.
Next year, the United States is going to face a critical test of whether our country is up to the task. The DFC, the Ex-Im Bank, and AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, are all up for renewal by Congress. This provides a once-in-a-decade chance for America to strengthen some of its most important tools of economic statecraft.
And think about how they can work better with the high-leverage multilateral institutions I just mentioned. The DFC, for example, is one of our most effective instruments to mobilize private sector investments in developing countries.
But the DFC is too small compared to the scope of investment needed, and it lacks tools our partners want, like the ability to deploy more equity as well as debt, and it’s often unable to capitalize on fast-moving investment opportunities. So, we put forward a proposal to expand the DFC’s toolkit and make it bigger, faster, nimbler.
Another gap we need to bridge is to make sure we attract, retain, and empower top-tier talent with expertise in priority areas.
We’re asking Congress to approve the resources we’ve requested for the Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security, Treasury’s Office of Investment Security, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.
If Congress is serious about America competing and winning, we need to be able to draw on America’s very best.
Let me close with this:
Since the end of World War Two, the United States has stood for a fair and open international economy; for the power of global connection to fuel innovation; for the power of trade and investment done right to create good jobs; for the power, as Tocqueville put it, of interest rightly understood.
Our task ahead is to harness that power to take on the realities of today’s geopolitical moment in a way that will not only preserve America’s enduring strengths, but extend them for generations to come. It will take more conversations like this one and iteration after iteration to forge a new consensus and perfect a new set of policies and capabilities to match the moment.
I hope it’s a project we can all work on together. We can’t afford not to.
So, thank you. And I look forward to continuing the conversation, including hearing some of your questions this morning.
Good morning, everyone. And thank you so much, David, for that introduction and for having me here today. It’s great to be back at Brookings.
As many of you know, I was here last year to lay out President Biden’s vision for renewing American economic leadership, a vision that responded to several converging challenges our country faced: the return of intense geopolitical competition; a rise in inequality and a squeeze on the middle class; a less vibrant American industrial base; an accelerating climate crisis; vulnerable supply chains; and rapid technological change.
For the preceding three decades, the U.S. economy had enjoyed stronger topline aggregate growth than other advanced democracies, and had generated genuine innovation and technological progress, but our economic policies had not been adapted to deal effectively with these challenges. That’s why President Biden implemented a modern industrial strategy, one premised on investing at home in ourselves and our national strength, and on shifting the energies of U.S. foreign policy to help our partners around the world do the same.
In practice, that’s meant mobilizing public investment to unlock private sector investment to deliver on big challenges like the clean energy transition and artificial intelligence, revitalizing our capacity to innovate and to build, creating diversified and resilient global supply chains, setting high standards for everything from labor to the environment to technology. Because on that level playing field, our logic goes, America can compete and win. Preserving open markets and also protecting our national security and doing all of these things together with allies and partners.
Since I laid this vision out in my speech at Brookings last year, I’ve listened with great interest to many thoughtful responses, because these are early days. Meaningful shifts in policy require constant iteration and reflection. That’s what will make our policy stronger and more sustainable.
So, today, I’m glad to be back here at Brookings to reengage in this conversation, because I really believe that the ideas I’m here to discuss and the policies that flow from them are among the most consequential elements of the administration’s foreign as well as domestic policy, and I believe they will constitute an important legacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.
I want to start by reflecting on some of the questions I’ve heard and then propose a few ways to consolidate our progress.
One overarching question is at the core of many others: Does our new approach mean that we’re walking away from a positive-sum view of the world, that America is just in it for itself at the expense of everyone else?
In a word, no, it doesn’t. In fact, we’re returning to a tradition that made American international leadership such a durable force, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “interest rightly understood.” The notion that it’s in our own self-interest to strengthen our partners and sustain a fair economic system that helps all of us prosper.
After World War Two, we built an international economic order in the context of a divided world, an order that helped free nations recover and avoid a return to the protectionist and nationalist mistakes of the 1930s, an order that also advanced American economic and geopolitical power.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we took that order global, embracing the old Eastern bloc, China, India, and many developing countries. Suddenly, the major powers were no longer adversaries or competitors. Capital flowed freely across borders. Global supply chains became “just in time,” without anyone contemplating potential strategic risk.
Each of these approaches was positive-sum, and each reflected the world as it was.
Now, the world of the 1990s is over, and it’s not coming back, and it’s not a coherent plan or critique just to wish it so.
We’re seeing the return of great power competition. But unlike the Cold War era, our economies are closely intertwined. We’re on the verge of revolutionary technological change with AI, with economic and geopolitical implications. The pandemic laid bare the fragilities in global supply chains that have been growing for decades. The climate crisis grows more urgent with every hurricane and heat wave.
So we need to articulate, once again, de Tocqueville’s notion of interest rightly understood. To us, that means pursuing a strategy that is fundamentally positive-sum, calibrated to the geopolitical realities of today and rooted in what is good for America — for American workers, American communities, American businesses, and American national security and economic strength.
We continue to believe deeply in the mutual benefits of international trade and investment, enhanced and enabled by bold public investment in key sectors; bounded in rare but essential cases by principled controls on key national security technologies; protected against harmful non-market practices, labor and environment abuses, and economic coercion; and critically coordinated with a broad range of partners.
The challenges we face are not uniquely our own and nor can we solve them alone. We want and need our partners to join us. And given the demand signal we hear back from them, we think that in the next decade, American leadership will be measured by our ability to help our partners pull off similar approaches and build alignment and complementarity across our policies and our investments.
If we get that right, we can show that international economic integration is compatible with democracy and national sovereignty. And that is how we get out of Dani Rodrik’s trilemma.
Now, what does that mean in practice? What does this kind of positive-sum approach mean for trade policy? Are we walking away from trade as a core pillar of international economic policy?
U.S. exports and imports have recovered from their dip during the pandemic, with the real value of U.S. trade well above 2019 levels in each of the last two years. We’re also the largest outbound source of FDI in the world.
So, we are not walking away from international trade and investment. What we are doing is moving away from specific policies that, frankly, didn’t contemplate the urgent challenges we face: The climate crisis. Vulnerable, concentrated, critical mineral and semiconductor supply chains. Persistent attacks on workers’ rights. And not just more global competition, but more competition with a country that uses pervasive non-market policies and practices to distort and dominate global markets.
Ignoring or downplaying these realities will not help us chart a viable path forward. Our approach to trade responds to these challenges.
Climate is a good example. American manufacturers are global leaders in clean steel production, yet they’ve had to compete against companies that produce steel more cheaply but with higher emissions intensity. That’s why, earlier this year, the White House stood up a Climate and Trade Task Force, and the task force has been developing the right tools to promote decarbonization and ensure our workers and businesses engaged in cleaner production aren’t disadvantaged by firms overseas engaged in dirtier, exploitative production.
Critical minerals are another example. That sector is marked by extreme price volatility, widespread corruption, weak labor and environmental protections, and heavy concentration in the PRC, which artificially drops prices to keep competitors out of the marketplace.
If we and our partners fail to invest, the PRC’s domination of these and other supply chains will only grow, and that will leave us increasingly dependent on a country that has demonstrated its willingness to weaponize such dependencies. We can’t accept that, and neither can our partners.
That’s why we are working with them to create a high-standard, critical minerals marketplace, one that diversifies our supply chains, creates a level playing field for our producers, and promotes strong workers’ rights and environmental protections. And we’re driving towards tangible progress on that idea in just the next few weeks.
In multiple sectors that are important to our future, not just critical minerals, but solar cells, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, we see a broad pattern emerging. The PRC is producing far more than domestic demand, dumping excess onto global markets at artificially low prices, driving manufacturers around the world out of business, and creating a chokehold on supply chains.
To prevent a second China shock, we’ve had to act.
That’s what drove the decisions about our 301 tariffs earlier this year.
Now, we know that indiscriminate, broad-based tariffs will harm workers, consumers, and businesses, both in the United States and our partners. The evidence on that is clear. That’s why we chose, instead, to target tariffs at unfair practices in strategic sectors where we and our allies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild our manufacturing and our resilience.
And crucially, we’re seeing partners in both advanced and emerging economies reach similar conclusions regarding overcapacity and take similar steps to ward off damage to their own industries, from the EU to Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Mexico to Türkiye and beyond. That’s a big deal.
And it brings me back to my earlier point: We’re pursuing this new trade approach in concert with our partners. They also recognize we need modern trade tools to achieve our objectives. That means considering sector-specific trade agreements. It means creating markets based on standards when that’s more effective. And it also means revitalizing international institutions to address today’s challenges, including genuinely reforming the WTO to deal with the challenges I’ve outlined.
And it means thinking more comprehensively about our economic partnerships. That’s why we created the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. That’s why we also gave them such catchy names.
Within IPEF, we finalized three agreements with 13 partners to accelerate the clean energy transition, to promote high labor standards, to fight corruption, and to shore up supply chain vulnerabilities before they become widespread disruptions. And within APEP, we’re working to make the Western Hemisphere a globally competitive supply chain hub for semiconductors, clean energy, and more.
And that leads to the next question I’ve often been asked in the last year and a half: Where does domestic investment fit into all of this? How does our positive-sum approach square with our modern industrial strategy?
The truth is that smart, targeted government investment has always been a crucial part of the American formula. It’s essential to catalyzing private investment and growth in sectors where market failures or other barriers would lead to under-investment.
Somehow, we forgot that along the way, or at least we stopped talking about it. But there was no plausible version of answers on decarbonization or supply chain resilience without recovering this tradition. And so we have.
We’ve made the largest investment ever to diversify and accelerate clean energy deployment through the Inflation Reduction Act. And investments are generating hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment all across the country; rapid growth in emerging climate technologies like sustainable aviation fuels, carbon management, clean hydrogen, with investments increasing 6- to 15-fold from pre-IRA levels.
This will help us meet our climate commitments. This will advance our national security. And this will ensure that American workers and communities can seize the vast economic opportunities of the clean energy transition and that those opportunities are broadly shared. And that last part is crucial.
The fact is that many communities hard hit in decades past still haven’t bounced back, and the two-thirds of American adults who don’t have college degrees have seen unacceptably poor outcomes in terms of real wages, health, and other outcomes over the last four decades.
For many years, people assumed that these distributional issues would be solved after the fact by domestic policies. That has not worked.
Advancing fairness, creating high-quality jobs, and revitalizing American communities can’t be an afterthought, which is why we’ve made them central to our approach.
In fact, as a result of the incentives in the IRA to build in traditional energy communities, investment in those communities has doubled under President Joe Biden.
Now, initially, when we rolled this all out, our foreign partners worried that it was designed to undercut them, that we were attempting to shift all the clean energy investment and production around the world to the United States.
But that wasn’t the case, and it isn’t the case.
We know that our partners need to invest. In fact, we want them to invest. The whole world benefits from the spillover effects of advances in clean energy that these investments bring.
And we are nowhere near the saturation point of investment required to meet our clean energy deployment goals, nor will markets alone generate the resources necessary either.
So, we’ve encouraged our partners to invest in their own industrial strength. We’ve steered U.S. foreign policy towards being a more helpful partner in this endeavor. And our partners have begun to join us. Look at Japan’s green transformation policy, India’s production-linked incentives, Canada’s clean energy tax credit, the European Union’s Green Deal.
As more and more countries adopt this approach, we will continue to build out the cooperative mechanisms that we know will be necessary to ensure that we’re acting together to scale up total global investment, not competing with each other over where a fixed set of investments is located.
The same goes for investing in our high-tech manufacturing strength. We believe that a nation that loses the capacity to build, risks losing the capacity to innovate. So, we’re building again.
As a result of the CHIPS and Science Act, America is on track to have five leading-edge logic and memory chip manufacturers operating at scale. No other economy has more than two. And we’re continuing to nurture American leadership in artificial intelligence, including through actions we’re finalizing, as I speak, to ensure that the physical infrastructure needed to train the next generation of AI models is built right here in the United States.
But all of this high-tech investment and development hasn’t come at the expense of our partners. We’ve done it alongside them.
We’re leveraging CHIPS Act funding to make complementary investments in the full semiconductor supply chain, from Costa Rica to Vietnam.
We’re building a network of AI safety institutes around the world, from Canada to Singapore to Japan, to harness the power of AI responsibly.
And we’ve launched a new Quantum Development Group to deepen cooperation in a field that will be pivotal in the decades ahead.
Simply put, we’re thinking about how to manage this in concert with our allies and partners, and that will make all of us more competitive.
Now, all this leads to another question that is frequently asked: What about your technology protection policies? How does that fit into a positive-sum approach?
The United States and our allies and partners have long limited the export of dual-use technologies. This is logical and uncontroversial. It doesn’t make sense to allow companies to sell advanced technology to countries that could use them to gain military advantage over the United States and our friends.
Now, it would be a mistake to attempt to return to the Cold War paradigm of almost no trade, including technological trade, among geopolitical rivals. But as I’ve noted, we’re in a fundamentally different geopolitical context, so we’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle.
That means being targeted in what we restrict, controlling only the most sensitive technologies that will define national security and strategic competition. This is part of what we mean when we say: de-risking, not decoupling.
To strike the right balance, to ensure we’re not imposing controls in an arbitrary or reflexive manner, we have a framework that informs our decision-making. We ask ourselves at least four questions:
One, which sensitive technologies are or will likely become foundational to U.S. national security?
Two, across those sensitive technologies, where do we have distinct advantages and are likely to see maximal effort by our competitors to close the gap? Conversely, where are we behind and, therefore, most vulnerable to coercion?
Three, to what extent do our competitors have immediate substitutes for U.S.-sensitive technology, either through indigenous development or from third countries, that would undercut the controls?
Four, what is the breadth and depth of the coalition we could plausibly build and sustain around a given control?
When it comes to a narrow set of sensitive technologies, yes, the fence is high, as it should be.
And in the context of broader commerce, the yard is small, and we’re not looking to expand it needlessly.
Now, beyond the realm of export controls and investment screening, we will also take action to protect sensitive data and our critical infrastructure, such as our recent action on connected vehicles from countries of concern.
I suspect almost no one here would argue that we should build out our telecommunications architecture or our data center infrastructure with Huawei.
Millions of cars on the road with technology from the PRC, getting daily software updates from the PRC, sending reams of information back to the PRC, similarly doesn’t make sense, especially when we’ve already seen evidence of a PRC cyber threat to our critical infrastructure.
We have to anticipate systemic cyber and data risks in ways that, frankly, we didn’t in the past, including what that means for the future Internet of Things, and we have to take the thoughtful, targeted steps necessary in response.
This leads to a final, kind of fundamental question: Does this approach reflect some kind of pessimism about the United States and our inherent interests?
Quite the contrary. It reflects an abiding and ambitious optimism. We believe deeply that we can act smartly and boldly, that we can compete and win, that we can meet the great challenges of our time, and that we can deliver for all of our people here in the United States.
And while it’s still very early, we have some evidence of that. This includes the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any advanced economy in the world. There’s more work to do, but inflation has come down. And contrary to the predictions that the PRC would overtake the U.S. in GDP either in this decade or the next, since President Biden took office, the United States has more than doubled our lead. And last year, the United States attracted more than five times more inbound foreign direct investment than the next highest country.
We are once again demonstrating our capacity for resilience and reinvention, and others are noticing. The EU’s Draghi report, published last month, mirrors key aspects of our strategy.
Now, as we continue to implement this vision, we will need to stay rigorous. We will need, for example, to be bold enough to make the needed investments without veering into unproductive subsidies that crowd-out the private sector or unduly compete with our partners.
We’re clear-eyed that our policies will involve choices and trade-offs. That’s the nature of policy. But to paraphrase Sartre, not to choose is also a choice, and the trade-offs only get worse the longer we leave our challenges unchecked.
Pointing out that it’s challenging to strike the right balance is not an argument to be satisfied with the status quo.
We have tried to start making real a new positive-sum vision, and we have tried to start proving out its value. But we still have our work cut out for us.
So I’d actually like to end today with a few questions of my own, where our answers will determine our shared success:
First, will we sustain the political will here at home to make the investments in our own national strength that will be required of us in the years ahead?
Strategic investments like these need to be a bipartisan priority, and I have to believe that we’ll rise to the occasion, that we won’t needlessly give up America’s position of economic and technological leadership because we can no longer generate the political consensus to invest in ourselves.
There is more we can do now on a bipartisan basis.
For example, Congress still hasn’t appropriated the science part of CHIPS and Science, even while the PRC is increasing its science and technology budget by 10 percent year on year.
Now, whether we’re talking about investments in fundamental research, or grants and loans for firms developing critical technologies, we also have to update our approach to risk. Some research paths are dead ends. Some startups won’t survive. Our innovation base and our private sector are the envy of the world because they take risks. The art of managing risk for the sake of innovation is critical to successful geostrategic competition.
So, we need to nurture a national comfort with, to paraphrase FDR, bold and persistent experimentation. And when an investment falls short, as it will, we need to maintain our bipartisan will, dust ourselves off, and keep moving forward. To put it bluntly, our competitors hope we’re not capable of that. We need to prove them wrong. We need to make patient, strategic investments in our capacity to compete, and we need to ensure fiscal sustainability in order to keep making those investments over the long term.
The second question: Will we allocate sufficient resources for investments that are needed globally?
Last year, here at Brookings, I talked about the need to go from billions to trillions in investment to help emerging and developing countries tackle modern challenges, including massively accelerating the speed and scale of the clean energy transition.
We need a Marshall Plan-style effort, investing in partners around the world and supporting homegrown U.S. innovation in growing markets like storage, nuclear, and geothermal energy.
Now, trillions may sound lofty and unachievable, but there is a very clear path to get there without requiring anywhere near that level of taxpayer dollars, and that path is renewed American leadership and investment in international institutions.
For example, at the G20 this fall, we’re spearheading an effort that calls for the international financial institutions, the major creditors in the private sector, to step up their relief for countries facing high debt service burdens so they too can invest in their future.
Or consider the World Bank and the IMF. We’ve been leading the charge to make these institutions bigger and more effective, to fully utilize their balance sheets and be more responsive to the developing and emerging economies they serve. That has already unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars in new lending capacity, at no cost to the United States. And we can generate further investment on the scale required with very modest U.S. public investments and legislative fixes. That depends on Congress taking action.
For example, our administration requested $750 million — million — from Congress to boost the World Bank’s lending capacity by over $36 billion, which, if matched by our partners, could generate over $100 billion in new resources. This would allow the World Bank to deploy $200 for every $1 the taxpayers provide.
We’ve asked Congress to approve investments in a new trust fund at the IMF to help developing countries build resilience and sustainability. Through a U.S. investment in the tens of millions, we could enable tens of billions in new IMF lending.
And outside the World Bank and the IMF, we’re asking Congress to increase funding for the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, which we launched at the G7 a couple of years ago.
This partnership catalyzes and concentrates investment in key corridors, including Africa and Asia, to close the infrastructure gap in developing countries. It strengthens countries’ economic growth. It strengthens America’s supply chains and global trusted technology vendors. And it strengthens our partnerships in critical regions.
The private sector has been enthusiastic. Together with them and our G7 partners, we’ve already mobilized tens of billions of dollars, and we can lever that up and scale that up in the years ahead with help on a bipartisan basis from the Congress.
We need to focus on the big picture. Holding back small sums of money has the effect of pulling back large sums from the developing world — which also, by the way, effectively cedes the field to other countries like the PRC. There are low-cost, commonsense solutions on the table, steps that should not be the ceiling of our ambitions, but the floor. And we need Congress to provide us the authorities and the seed funding to take those steps now.
Finally, will we empower our agencies and develop new muscle to meet this moment?
Simply put, we need to ensure that we have the resources and the capabilities in the U.S. government to implement this economic vision over the long haul. This starts by significantly strengthening our bilateral tools, answering a critique that China has a checkbook and the U.S. has a checklist.
Next year, the United States is going to face a critical test of whether our country is up to the task. The DFC, the Ex-Im Bank, and AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, are all up for renewal by Congress. This provides a once-in-a-decade chance for America to strengthen some of its most important tools of economic statecraft.
And think about how they can work better with the high-leverage multilateral institutions I just mentioned. The DFC, for example, is one of our most effective instruments to mobilize private sector investments in developing countries.
But the DFC is too small compared to the scope of investment needed, and it lacks tools our partners want, like the ability to deploy more equity as well as debt, and it’s often unable to capitalize on fast-moving investment opportunities. So, we put forward a proposal to expand the DFC’s toolkit and make it bigger, faster, nimbler.
Another gap we need to bridge is to make sure we attract, retain, and empower top-tier talent with expertise in priority areas.
We’re asking Congress to approve the resources we’ve requested for the Commerce’s Bureau of Industry Security, Treasury’s Office of Investment Security, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division.
If Congress is serious about America competing and winning, we need to be able to draw on America’s very best.
Let me close with this:
Since the end of World War Two, the United States has stood for a fair and open international economy; for the power of global connection to fuel innovation; for the power of trade and investment done right to create good jobs; for the power, as Tocqueville put it, of interest rightly understood.
Our task ahead is to harness that power to take on the realities of today’s geopolitical moment in a way that will not only preserve America’s enduring strengths, but extend them for generations to come. It will take more conversations like this one and iteration after iteration to forge a new consensus and perfect a new set of policies and capabilities to match the moment.
I hope it’s a project we can all work on together. We can’t afford not to.
So, thank you. And I look forward to continuing the conversation, including hearing some of your questions this morning.
