Antony Blinken Dragged US Diplomacy Into the 21st Century. Even He’s Surprised by the Results

Look, what I’ve seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy.

There’s almost a perfect storm that’s come together over the last few years, several major developments that have really brought this to the forefront of what we’re doing and what we need to do. First, we have a new generation of foundational technologies that are literally changing the world all at the same time—whether it’s AI, quantum, microelectronics, biotech, telecommunications. They’re having a profound impact, and increasingly they’re converging and feeding off of each other.

Second, we’re seeing that the line between the digital and physical worlds is evaporating, erasing. We have cars, ports, hospitals that are, in effect, huge data centers. They’re big vulnerabilities. At the same time, we have increasingly rare materials that are critical to technology and fragile supply chains. In each of these areas, the State Department is taking action.

We have to look at everything in terms of “stacks”—the hardware, the software, the talent, and the norms, the rules, the standards by which this technology is used.

Besides setting up an entire new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy—and the bureaus are really the building blocks in our department—we’ve now trained more than 200 cybersecurity and digital officers, people who are genuinely expert. Every one of our embassies around the world will have at least one person who is truly fluent in tech and digital policy. My goal is to make sure that across the entire department we have basic literacy—ideally fluency—and even, eventually, mastery. All of this to make sure that, as I said, this department is fit for purpose across the entire information and digital space.

Your tenure here at Foggy Bottom has coincided with what feels like the fracturing of the dream of a global internet. We’ve begun to see this splintering into separate realms—a European regulatory web, and authoritarian regimes using the internet as a surveillance tool. Of course, we’ve seen this play out in US policy on Huawei and TikTok.

Ideally we don’t have that fracturing, and certainly that would be the preference. We’ve done a number of things actually to try to move in another direction—to try to build broad consensus on the way technology is used. Let me give you an example on AI. We had incredible work done by the White House to develop basic principles with the foundational companies. The voluntary commitments that they made, the State Department has worked to internationalize those commitments. We have a G7 code of conduct—the leading democratic economies in the world—all agreeing to basic principles with a focus on safety.

We managed to get the very first resolution ever on artificial intelligence through the United Nations General Assembly—192 countries also signing up to basic principles on safety and a focus on using AI to advance sustainable development goals on things like health, education, climate. We also have more than 50 countries that have signed on to basic principles on the responsible military use of AI.

The goal here is not to have a world that is bifurcated in any way. It’s to try to bring everyone together. Having said that, you’re right—there are areas where, of course, we’re in intense competition with other countries. If we can’t come together on rules that make sure that we’re elevating the good and minimizing the bad, we have to make sure we’re protecting our values and protecting our interests.

For example, when it comes to the highest-end technology—say the highest-end chips—we want to make sure that a country like China is not able to acquire those and then feed them directly into its military program. They’re engaged right now in an extensive expansion of their nuclear program—very opaque—and it’s not in our interest for them to have the highest-end technology.