China Strategy Initiative Launch Event

DOSHI: All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us so early in the morning on a Monday, after a weekend. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I am Rush Doshi, director—as of just moments ago—of our China Strategy Initiative. (Laughter.) We’re excited to welcome you to the launch of this new endeavor. In just a moment I’ll play a short video that explains our initiative and turn it over to CFR President Mike Froman. But before I do, I’ll just offer a few quick thoughts on what we aim to do.

The China Strategy Initiative begins with the recognition that competition with China poses a challenge unlike any that the United States has faced before. CFR has a history—a one-hundred-year history—of convening Americans across the political spectrum to meet the foreign policy challenges of the moment. And we aim to do so again with this initiative. CFR’s new China Strategy Initiative will answer the core questions that go to the heart of America’s China strategy. We’ll do so by launching several new programs. They’re going to provide fresh analysis, granular policy recommendations, and convenings with experts. We’ll do so by drawing on the strength of CFR staff...

DOSHI: All right. Good morning, everybody. Thanks very much for sticking with us. The room is still packed and we have overflow seating so that’s good news. I’ve heard that we actually have more than 800 online in addition to 300 in the room so it’s great that we have so much attention.

As you heard earlier this morning, a critical part of CFR’s mission is to convene Americans across geographies, industries, and political parties to answer the questions of the moment and that is what we aim to do with this great panel. We’ll consider different perspectives on U.S.-China strategy where there is disagreement but, perhaps, even more importantly where there is agreement and overlap.

We’re thrilled to be joined by three excellent panelists who also happen to be CFR members.

On the screen behind me we have Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration and the author most recently of The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, an excellent book I highly commend to all of you. Matt is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, principal at Garnaut Global, and chair of the China program at the Foundation...

NAKASHIMA: Hi, and welcome back to today’s China Strategy Initiative launch event. That was quite a lively panel we had before, and hopefully, you know, we’ll keep the liveliness quotient up with ours. This session is titled “Biden Policy on AI, National Security, and China.” And I’m joined by Maher Bitar, coordinator for intelligence and defense policy at the White House; and Tarun Chhabra, senior director for tech and national security at the White House. I am Ellen Nakashima, a national security reporter at the Washington Post. And I will be presiding over today’s conversation.

So it seems like AI burst into the public consciousness with the advent of ChatGPT about a year and a half ago. You know, we were all stunned by an app that you could, say, ask to write an L.A. pulp fiction story in Shakespeare in English in five minutes. And could it be asked to write a recipe for a bioweapon? In fact, the Biden and, indeed, Trump administrations were working on AI policies that tried to address the implications of such breakthroughs long before ChatGPT emerged. In just the last year and a half, we’ve seen the White House blueprint for...