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The U.S. Ambassador of the UK says that a new US-UK technology partnership is essential to prevent China from achieving Western technological dominance in key areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology.
Lord Peter Mandelson said that if China wins the competition for technological hegemony in the coming decades, it will affect “every aspect of our lives.” He compared the planned high-tech agreement with the United States and London’s unique, close security ties with the Cold War Treaty that he created with Washington.
“Only the US has the capacity, wealth and determination to technically compete with China,” he said in a lecture on the future of UK-US post-Brexit relations on Saturday.
He added that the US and the UK will “have to combine formidable assets at our joint disposal” in order to win the competition with Beijing.
Mandelson, a worker Grandie, appointed Washington ambassador by British Prime Minister Kiel in December last year, presented a harsh vision for America, where he was “confined to a strategic rivalry” with China, which he is described as the “most frightening modern competitor.”
London hopes to sign a memorandum of understanding with Washington on technology partnerships when President Donald Trump sets out to visit the state for three days this month.
Although there are few details, authorities said they would create a “complementary partnership” across civil nuclear energy needed to power AI, quantum computing, defense innovation and the advanced computing economy.
Mandelson said the imagined partnership should be as important as the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement, in which the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and the subsequent nuclear agreement negotiated by Harold Macmillan with John F. Kennedy.
“The choices before us are strict and urgent,” Mandelson told an audience at Ditchley Park, an Oxfordshire-based foundation for transatlantic relations. “The Atlantic Alliance must evolve to address the biggest challenges of our time. Stay ahead in the global technology race.”
The UK became the first country to sign a “liberation day” tariff reduction agreement with Trump in May. This provided discounts on automobile and iron tariffs provided that the UK met the “US requirements” to exclude China from its strategic supply chain.
Mandelson did not provide details on whether the technology partnership with the US would result in a demand to follow the US lead by excluding China from technologies such as autonomous vehicles and mobile communications.
British government officials said Mandelson’s binary approach to technology races against Beijing is compatible with the government’s desire to “cooperate” with China in insensitive regions, while “competitive and compete” in the strategic sector.
However, priorities face an imminent test of where to draw the lines. The UK will decide whether one of China’s largest wind turbine manufacturers should allow wind farms in the North Sea. This is a transaction that the Trump administration raised concerns.
Mandelson also showed that the UK would use Brexit’s freedom to embrace a more liberal, US-style approach to technology regulations and not allow future technologies such as EU data protection regulations and AI laws to be “stricken by excessive regulation.”
The Trump administration has threatened the EU and the UK with tariffs if it doesn’t loosen its technical taxes and online regulations. But Mandelson said that Brexit “punched” the UK economically between the three greatest regulatory blocs of the world: the US, the EU and China, which essentially “changed geopolitical options.”
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“Brexit has freed us to pursue close US ties,” he added, claiming that predictions that Brexit would be less influenced in Washington “find to be false.”
Mandelson, who was sent to Washington to attract Trump, said “we can give respect without being sycophantic.”
He praised the US president for his efforts to resolve conflicts in Ukraine, citing interventions in “multiple areas of conflict” as evidence that Trump is not “indifference to the world” as depicted at times.
He concluded that because of all his mercury style, Trump was not responsible for shattering the postwar order, and was “more than cause” of the ongoing geopolitical upheaval for some time.
“He doesn’t always get everything right, but with his mechanical pencil and freewheel oval office press spray, he made deafening wake-up calls to the old international security guards,” he said.
