Navin Girishankar
For the greater part of the last decade, the United States and China have been locked in a cold war, fought as fiercely over economic and technology advantages as over military advantages. In Washington, there has been bipartisan support to respond to China’s dumping of subsidized goods, its acquisition of dual-use technologies, its rampant intellectual property theft, and its coercive practices. As a result, the last three U.S. administrations have deployed a slate of economic security policies to safeguard U.S. markets, supply chains, and assets, and to rebuild the U.S. industrial base to gain the upper hand on Beijing.
The first Trump administration, for instance, levied tariffs on China to rebalance trade and halt discriminatory policies related to technology transfer, IP, and innovation. The Biden administration then dramatically expanded export controls—tools originally designed to prevent weapons proliferation—to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors that are critical to the artificial intelligence race. Upon returning to office in 2025, President Donald Trump has more aggressively used tariffs to reset economic relations with China. All three administrations, meanwhile, embraced industrial policy, with varying approaches to state intervention in markets to promote supply chain resilience: President Joe Biden used subsidies and tax cuts to encourage the reshoring of chipmaking and Trump has taken government equity stakes in a number of companies in strategic sectors, including chipmaking and critical minerals.
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