Biden has called together more than 100 leaders from democratic countries around the world for a virtual Summit for Democracy this Thursday and Friday.Īt this week’s summit, there will be plenty of familiar-sounding pledges to root out corruption and defend human rights. Biden met with the heads of state of Australia, India and Japan - world powers on China’s doorstep - to ensure that “the way in which technology is designed, developed, governed and used is shaped by our shared values and respect for universal human rights.” And it’s the reason Mr. Trade and Technology Council, which established working groups to develop new technology and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
That’s the reason President Biden and European counterparts formed the U.S.-E.U. The Biden administration’s response has been to counter those threats by gathering a coalition of democracies that will work together to safeguard our economies, our militaries and our technological networks from bad actors in China, Russia and elsewhere. “We have already reached the point where the behaviors of a limited group of talented actors in cyberspace could completely obliterate systems that we rely on for our day-to-day survival,” Candace Rondeaux, a specialist on the future of warfare at New America, a Washington-based think tank, told me. They are scenarios that keep American national security officials up at night right now. These aren’t nutty hypotheticals in some distant dystopian future. Imagine China obtaining the private health data or private phone communications of millions of Americans, including members of Congress. Imagine pirates in cyberspace disabling American missile defense systems without warning.
Imagine a hostile country shutting down New York City’s electrical grid for months at a time using code-breaking quantum computers. To the contrary, they are evolving rapidly. While Americans angry about the results of the 2020 election were busy storming their own Capitol and conducting the umpteenth recount in Arizona, threats from outside the country didn’t take a lunch break.