Arthur Kroeber

They would love the opportunity to tap into it more.

We could learn from them.

And if you did that, basically you would be saying whatever we're in with China, it's not a cold war because we are willing to have high levels of direct investment by both sides.

And you might want to put protections around that, all kinds of rules of the road.

But in an ideal world, I think we would have a lot more of that.

Now –

First question is like, why is that so difficult?

Why do you essentially have a consensus in Washington that not only do we have to prevent the export of US technology goods to China, but we also have to prevent Chinese companies from investing in the US?

This is basically agreed on in Washington.

And the reason is data.

Fundamentally, there is a view that any manufacturing process today is also a data creation machine.

And where does that data go and who benefits from that data?

And the other thing is that it used to be back 30 or 40 years ago, you could divide the world into most technologies, which were essentially for civilian use, a few technologies that were military.

And then a very, very small proportion of technologies, dual-use technologies that could go either way.

And it was those dual-use technologies that had to be controlled very carefully.

Now, basically, everything is dual-use.

Any technology that you can imagine...

can be put to some kind of military use.

So it becomes much more risky to have these patterns of investment, particularly when you don't know where the data is flowing and how that will feed into someone else's defense production base.

And I think that is a legitimate concern.