By: Andreas Kuehn
With the presidential election just two months away, the United States’ allies and partners are watching carefully for how the results might affect relations. One major focus over the past four years under President Joe Biden has been a conscious effort by Washington to build what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan calls “a latticework of alliances and partnerships globally that are fit for purpose for the 21st century”.
This has involved the building of a series of bilateral and minilateral commitments among democratic, liked-minded allies and partners to address challenges to economic security and critical and emerging technologies. These partnerships are reflected in the 2022 National Security Strategy, the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy, the 2023 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy, and the 2024 Department of State International Cyberspace & Digital Policy Strategy. The 2022 U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy specifically refers to “a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions” as a means to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific via a collective capacity of the United States and its closest regional partners.
In practice, the latticework has been operationalized through a growing number of bilateral and multilateral fora, such as the Quad, the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, a series of bilateral Critical and Emerging Technology Dialogues (including the U.S.-India initiative on critical and emerging technology or iCET), and AUKUS with Australia and the United Kingdom. Taken together, they provide a vision for a more flexible and integrated approach to align and cooperate on key issues including security, economics, and technology. Issues and priorities vary depending on the relationship and change over time as interests evolve.
These new initiatives underscore how technology has moved from the edge to the center of the United States’ diplomatic agenda. Only a few years ago, technology was a subject for government engineers at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a relatively obscure agency of the United Nations. Today, heads of state discuss semiconductors and quantum computing at the Quad’s leader meeting. Three decades of globalization diffused technology and its benefits around the world but also created formidable challenges for the United States to control sensitive, dual-use technologies. China’s ambitions to lead in critical technology areas has only further exacerbated the need for the United States to coordinate and cooperate with partners to promote and protect technologies, including supply chain resilience in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals, among other areas.
The new approach is a departure from the multilateral alliance and the hub-and-spoke models. The numbers of U.S. bilateral and minilateral fora have steadily increased in the past few years, requiring more expertise and resources to sustain diplomatic engagements in multiple fora concurrently. It is a flexible construct that allows for more diplomatic engagements on specific interests and the individual needs of U.S. partners. But it also leaves room to advance diplomatic conversations elsewhere in the latticework should a particular issue in a specific forum reach an impasse. As the diplomatic interactions are only loosely coupled, the latticework does not need to produce any overarching, consensus-driven agreements but rather advance key interests of the U.S. and its partners to remain relevant.
Independent of the outcome of the U.S. election, many of the pressing technology issues that are discussed within the many fora of the latticework are rapidly evolving. Whatever happens in November, U.S. interests will be best served if these relatively novel diplomatic engagements remain highly active and their form flexible and adaptive.
Dr. Andreas Kuehn is a Senior Fellow for the Cyberspace Cooperation Initiative at ORF America.