Search the archive.

Advancing U.S. national security, economic security, and foreign policy are all vital to our domestic security here at home. As I’ve said before, you can’t secure your house with the doors wide open.

In our ever-connected and ever-evolving world, the United States and our vibrant economy are continuously impacted by other countries. We spend a great deal of our time on this committee discussing our government’s response to our own economic issues, but it is vital to consider the decisions being made oceans away by governments and countries with very different ideals and values than those we hold near and dear here at home in America.

The U.S. has demonstrated that it has the ability to seriously handicap Chinese companies, as in the case of ZTE, which almost collapsed after the Commerce Department banned it for three months in 2018 from buying American technology. Similar moves could hamper Huawei’s 6G ambitions.

Washington has already started to sketch out the 6G battle lines. The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, a U.S. telecom standards developer known as ATIS, launched the Next G Alliance in October to “advance North American leadership in 6G.” The alliance’s members include technology giants like Apple Inc., AT&T Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Google and Samsung Electronics Co., but not Huawei.

The United States is aiming to shape the development of 6G telecom technology at an early stage of research and development and to avoid letting China build up an early lead in next-generation telecommunications, a senior Biden administration official told reporters ahead of a Friday summit on 6G.

“We want to take the list of lessons we’ve learned from 5G, about the importance of early involvement and resilience, and to drive an approach to 6G that optimizes performance, accessibility, and security,” Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said on a call with reporters Thursday.

This viewpoint is one of several reasons that the United States for decades has been losing out on deep tech innovation such as quantum, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, semiconductors, biotech, and advanced manufacturing. And it’s also one of the reasons China has taken the lead in 5G hardware and global deployment.

The world follows whichever country leads the deployment of a new technology. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei has amassed an ever-increasing share of the world’s 5G infrastructure. The Chinese government has long seen the importance of gaining global power and influence through economic and technological dominance. Control of the hardware is part of their growth. As the rest of the world continues to buy Chinese hardware, over time, the world will buy its software as well.

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is beginning to plan for 6G wireless telecommunications, seeking to expand internet access while reasserting U.S. leadership in a sector where China has notched gains.

The White House on Friday will meet with corporate, government and academic experts to begin developing goals and strategies for the new 6G communications technology, which would have the ability to take cloud computing and the mobile internet to true global ubiquity, among other improvements.

Colonel Sandrack, who was the US military attaché during 1990, left from the US embassy in New Delhi on a secret visit to Hisar, in Haryana, near the border. In those days, Hisar was hosting the Indian Army division and the forces which were to attack Pakistan.

Colonel Sandrack set out on a mission to obtain intelligence, and he had the direct permission of General VN Sharma, who was the Chief of Army Staff at the time. At the request of the US Ambassador William Clark in New Delhi, the Indian Army Chief allowed a team of US military attaches to visit the Indian border states where the Pakistani military feared that India would send troops to attack Pakistan, and had deployed tank divisions.

One study published two years ago looked at the likely impacts of a nuclear exchange of about 100 Hiroshima-sized detonations (15 kt yield each) on the most-populated urban areas of India and Pakistan. Each detonation was estimated to incinerate an area of 13 square km, with this scenario generating about 5 Tg (teragrams) of soot as smoke from wildfires and burning buildings entered the atmosphere.

Direct human deaths in this “limited” nuclear war scenario are not quantified in the study, but would presumably number in the tens to hundreds of millions. The planetary impacts are also severe: as the soot reaches the stratosphere it circulates globally, blocking incoming solar radiation and dropping the Earth’s surface temperature by 1.8C in the first five years.

One unpleasant lesson is that the United States cannot meaningfully inhibit the sort of Pakistani risk taking that might spark military escalation with its larger neighbor. Americans have tried for years to stop Pakistan from using proxy militants to frustrate India. They have attempted a dizzying array of strategies: Increase security assistance and decrease security assistance; broaden diplomatic dialogue and constrain diplomatic dialogue; pursue cooperative counterterrorism strikes and engage in unilateral counterterrorism strikes; encourage international engagement and press for international isolation; threaten, cajole, praise, plead, and ignore.

If anything, the past several weeks have served as a reminder that neither the United States nor India has the tools to fundamentally alter, in the near term, what has been a long-standing attribute of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Perhaps Pakistani leaders have made quiet efforts to rein in India-focused terrorists, but the outcomes speak for themselves, and damningly: Attacks on Indian territory have continued unabated. It is foolish to assume that some uniquely clever or marginally novel combination of entrées from Washington’s policy menu will change this fact.

The United States enters today’s struggle to shape the twenty-first century with profound advantages. It still possesses the vast bulk of the material capabilities it had in earlier decades. It remains uniquely positioned geographically to play a great-power role in both East Asia and Europe. Its ability to work with other liberal democracies to shape global rules and institutions is already manifest in its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and will stand it in good stead in any future collective response to Chinese aggression in East Asia. Although China and Russia seek to move the world in the direction of regional blocs and spheres of influence, the United States has offered a vision of world order based on a set of principles rather than competition over territory. Liberal international order is a way of organizing an interdependent world. It is, as the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad called it, an “empire by invitation.” Its success depends on its legitimacy and appeal and not on the capacity of its patrons to force obedience. If the United States remains at the center of world politics in the decades to come, it will be because this type of order generates more supporters and fellow travelers around the world than that offered by China and Russia. 

The U.S. confrontation with China and Russia in 2022 is an echo of the great-power upheavals of 1919, 1945, and 1989. As at these earlier moments, the United States finds itself working with other democracies in resisting the aggressive moves of illiberal great powers. The Russian war in Ukraine is about more than the future of Ukraine; it is also about the basic rules and norms of international relations. Putin’s gambit has placed the United States and democracies in Europe and elsewhere on the defensive. But it has also given the United States an opportunity to rethink and reargue its case for an open, multilateral system of world order. If the past is any guide, the United States should not try to simply consolidate the old order but to reimagine it. U.S. leaders should seek to broaden the democratic coalition, reaffirm basic values and interests, and offer a vision of a reformed international order that draws states and peoples together in new forms of cooperation, such as to solve problems of climate change, global public health, and sustainable development. No other great power is better placed to build the necessary partnerships and lead the way in tackling the major problems of the twenty-first century. Other powers may be rising, but the world cannot afford the end of the American era.

This world system whirred into action most recently in the global reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The struggle between the United States and its rivals China and Russia is a contest between two alternative logics of world order. The United States defends an international order it has led for three-quarters of a century—one that is open, multilateral, and anchored in security pacts and partnerships with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones Western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence, and autocracy. The United States upholds an international order that protects and advances the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in its own way, hope to build an international order that protects authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States offers the world a vision of a postimperial global system. The current leaders of Russia and China increasingly craft foreign policies rooted in imperial nostalgia.

Of course, the United States could reject Iran’s conditions, and there may be no deal. But if so, what is the Biden administration prepared to do to stop the advance of the Iranian nuclear program? The current approach would have Washington increase economic pressure through stricter enforcement of sanctions—making it harder, for example, for Iran to sell its oil by cracking down on countries violating sanctions and buying Iranian oil. But it’s unclear how responsive the Chinese will be, especially now, and the White House may not be keen to keep oil off the market given the price. Moreover, the economic price alone may not be enough to persuade Iranian leaders to give up what they seem to want: either a nuclear weapons capability or being a simple step away from having one.

The bottom line is without a deal, Iran will draw closer to having a bomb sooner rather than later. With a resurrected JCPOA, it becomes later rather than sooner—unless the Biden administration and its successors act to convince Iranian officials of the risks they are running, including by very explicitly conveying that Washington will use force to prevent it.

Recently, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that Iran had enriched uranium to a level just shy of what is generally considered weapons grade. Like many findings before it, this revelation underscores the need for a new U.S. and European policy toward Iran. The two most important and immediate steps in that process are clear by this point: Washington and its partners need to move on from any remaining plans they might have to resurrect the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), namely by activating that accord’s “snapback” mechanism; and governments must heighten their efforts to deter Iran through credible threats of military force.

In addition, the United States needs to coordinate closely with international partners on how they would jointly respond to contingencies that are looking increasingly likely, such as an Iranian nuclear breakout or withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). With Washington perceived as reluctant to act militarily in the Middle East, Israel perceived as lacking the capability to act, and much of the world distracted by the Ukraine war, Tehran may feel that it has a short window in which to develop nuclear weapons, lending the issue renewed urgency.

Peculiar cognitive dissonance seems to have taken hold in the world. The Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—led and propped up by the United States—has reminded the world that the international order is, if anything, more dependent on American military, economic, and financial might now than only a few years ago. Yet everywhere you turn, there is a sense that the U.S. is in some form of terminal decline; too divided, incoherent, violent, and dysfunctional to sustain its Pax Americana. Moscow and Beijing seem to think that the great American unwinding has already begun, while in Europe, officials worry about a sudden American collapse. “Do we talk about it?” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria who remains well connected within Europe’s diplomatic network, told me, somewhat indignantly, after I asked whether an American implosion was ever discussed at the highest levels of government. “We never stop talking about it.”

Again and again, when I spoke with officials, diplomats, politicians, and aides in Britain and Europe over the past few weeks, the same message came back. “It’s weighing on people’s minds, big time,” one senior European Union official told me, speaking, like most of those I interviewed, on condition of anonymity to freely discuss their concerns. From outside the U.S., many now see in America only relentless mass shootings, political dysfunction, social division, and the looming presence of Donald Trump. All of this seems to add up in the collective imagination to an impression of a country on the brink, meeting all the conditions for a descent into civil unrest.

The past two to three weeks have seen a spate of new signals in Washington about the conflict in Ukraine, now entering its tenth month. With winter approaching, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, posed the possibility that a pause in the fighting might afford a new opportunity for diplomacy to stabilize the situation and halt the unending destruction of the country, with damage estimated by the World Bank at $350 billion. After gaining a majority in the midterm elections, some House Republicans have warned that they will try to curtail U.S. funding for Ukraine once the new Congress is seated in January. Other reporting has noted high-level U.S. efforts to prevent escalation that could lead to direct U.S.-Russia hostilities.

Kyiv’s adverse reaction to suggestions of freezing the conflict now may have persuaded some that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while courageous and indomitable, is staking out an unrealistic, untenable position by vowing to expel Russian occupation forces from all of Ukraine, including Crimea. Washington’s national security community, schooled in the lessons of the Cold War, reflexively seeks to contain conflicts and resolve differences through diplomacy, all the more urgently as great power involvement risks escalation to the threshold of nuclear war. As Russian president Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants have issued repeated nuclear threats, the caution underpinning Washington’s support for Ukraine’s defense should surprise no one.

One 2008 study looked at a Russia-US nuclear war scenario, where Russia would target 2,200 weapons on Western countries and the US would target 1,100 weapons each on China and Russia. In total, therefore, 4,400 warheads detonate, equivalent to roughly half the current inventories held each by Russia and the US.

Nuclear weapons held by other states were not used in this scenario, which has a 440-Mt explosive yield, equivalent to about 150 times all the bombs detonated in World War II. This full-scale nuclear war was estimated to cause 770 million direct deaths and generate 180 Tg of soot from burning cities and forests. In the US, about half the population would be within 5km of a ground zero, and a fifth of the country’s citizens would be killed outright.

What’s behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus?

The move that Putin announced in late March would be the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union that Russia has stationed nuclear weapons beyond its own borders, and it raises the prospects for a renewed, destabilizing nuclear arms rivalry with the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies.

In the air domain, we continue to improve our sensors, fighter aircraft, and ground-based air defense systems. These advanced systems enhance Integrated Air and Missile Defense, support Allies’ collective air defense, and increase long-range strike capability. The Aegis Ashore program highlights a key U.S. contribution to NATO’s missile defense. With a site in Romania and one under development in Poland, this capability protects the continent from Iranian ballistic missile attack. U.S. Air Force bombers launched from bases in the U.S. and Europe integrate with Ally and partner forces in Bomber Task Force missions. USEUCOM continues to build the first U.S. multi-role 5th Generation F-35 capability in-theater at RAF Lakenheath. Our air component is implementing the U.S. Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept which, supported by Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, demonstrate a credible, networked combat force from potential airfields across the continent. Through this model, we enhance posture, complicate adversary decision-making, and impose costs. This expansion of European air operations and deployable air bases enhances our forces’ survivability. These capability enhancements are critical to our deterrence posture.

Of course, the United States could reject Iran’s conditions, and there may be no deal. But if so, what is the Biden administration prepared to do to stop the advance of the Iranian nuclear program? The current approach would have Washington increase economic pressure through stricter enforcement of sanctions—making it harder, for example, for Iran to sell its oil by cracking down on countries violating sanctions and buying Iranian oil. But it’s unclear how responsive the Chinese will be, especially now, and the White House may not be keen to keep oil off the market given the price. Moreover, the economic price alone may not be enough to persuade Iranian leaders to give up what they seem to want: either a nuclear weapons capability or being a simple step away from having one.

The bottom line is without a deal, Iran will draw closer to having a bomb sooner rather than later. With a resurrected JCPOA, it becomes later rather than sooner—unless the Biden administration and its successors act to convince Iranian officials of the risks they are running, including by very explicitly conveying that Washington will use force to prevent it.

Whether or not it takes the shape of a full-fledged alliance, there are interesting parallels between the air defense pact the United States is proposing for the Middle East and NATO’s missile defense system in Europe. The growing threat posed by Iran’s missiles and the fear that Tehran could use them for nuclear weapons have been key drivers of U.S. efforts over the past 20 years to deploy a missile defense shield both in Europe and the Middle East. Notwithstanding Russia’s public threats against NATO, the alliance has long maintained that the missile defense system under development in Europe exists to counter threats from “outside the Euro-Atlantic area”—the bloc’s shorthand for Iran. Back in 2015, in the wake of the signing of the Iran nuclear deal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov therefore remarked that there was no longer any reason for the United States to maintain its European missile defense plans. Lavrov had gotten his cue from U.S. President Barack Obama, who stated in April 2009 that once the Iranian threat was “eliminated,” there would no longer be a need for missile defense in Europe.

Yet with the Biden administration now admitting that the chances of reviving the nuclear deal are diminishing by the day, NATO’s anti-missile shield has a renewed purpose. Iran’s firm support for Russia’s war in Ukraine—including reports that it is supplying Russia with combat drones for use in Ukraine—could revive concerns of a potential Iranian threat to Europe. At the same time, there is also a heightened fear in Europe of the Russian missile threat. Even Berlin, a long-standing friend of Moscow, has expressed interest in purchasing a missile defense system to protect itself from Russia. Alongside the significant advancement of its nuclear program, Iran possesses the largest and most sophisticated missile arsenal in the region. Iran has missiles that can reach targets in the Middle East, Turkey, and southeastern Europe. In late 2018, Iran reportedly tested a medium-range ballistic missile, thought to be the Khorramshahr, which could potentially hit much of southern and eastern Europe—possibly including targets in France.

In the air domain, we continue to improve our sensors, fighter aircraft, and ground-based air defense systems. These advanced systems enhance Integrated Air and Missile Defense, support Allies’ collective air defense, and increase long-range strike capability. The Aegis Ashore program highlights a key U.S. contribution to NATO’s missile defense. With a site in Romania and one under development in Poland, this capability protects the continent from Iranian ballistic missile attack. U.S. Air Force bombers launched from bases in the U.S. and Europe integrate with Ally and partner forces in Bomber Task Force missions. USEUCOM continues to build the first U.S. multi-role 5th Generation F-35 capability in-theater at RAF Lakenheath. Our air component is implementing the U.S. Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept which, supported by Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, demonstrate a credible, networked combat force from potential airfields across the continent. Through this model, we enhance posture, complicate adversary decision-making, and impose costs. This expansion of European air operations and deployable air bases enhances our forces’ survivability. These capability enhancements are critical to our deterrence posture.