Azeem Azhar

And what I want to argue that that decoupling is actually more interesting and perhaps more dangerous than things we've seen in the past.

It's not so much separation, but the emergence of these two parallel tech universes, but they remain deeply entangled.

And the rub of all of this is that the tools we use to manage it, export controls, tariffs, sanctions, well, they're 200 years old.

We're dealing with a 21st century problem, a 21st century economy, and a 21st century technology.

So are those traditional containment tools helping or harming?

Or was I overstating the case in the first place?

That's where my daughter has just flown off to this today, in fact, to a school trip to Taiwan for 10 days.

And we've seen that a little bit with these new rare earth tariffs or controls rather that were announced a couple of weeks ago where it's the heavy rare earths that you can find in missile control systems that have fallen under this new control.

But the lighter rare earths that live in things that the Chinese export, like wind turbines, don't fall into that control.

There's some pragmatism that's going on.

But I guess the thing that I thought felt like it might look different is a sense that

every attempt at control creates an unintended resilience, a greater capability to be independent.

I think of the quote, it's a misquote of Fontaine, but it's in Kung Fu Panda, and Master Oogway says to Master Shifu,

one often meets one's fate on the path one takes to avoid it.

And if the path you want to take is to have more control in this case, what you may end up doing is making the other side much, much more resilient.

And we've known from China's various...

five-year plans that they wanted greater independence in semiconductors.

They wanted greater independence in a range of other products.

They do lean more heavily on open source for their software infrastructure than we do in the West.

If there is any coherence to this big mess that you described, does it actually just lead to a control illusion rather than a real sense of control?