In the first episode in a deep dive into tech and geopolitics, Johanna Weaver sits down with Martijn Rasser, Vice-President of Technology Leadership at the US Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). The pair talk about strategic technology competition between the US & China, and what this means for middle power countries like Australia. They also discuss SCSP’s new ‘Tech Scorecards’, the Pax Silica agreement, how conflict in the Middle East is impacting global semi-conductors supply chains, Anthropic’s battle with the US Department of War, and President Trump’s approach to tech policy.
Links
SCSP’s Tech Scorecard: https://scorecard.scsp.ai
Pax Silica declaration (original, from December 2025): https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/pax-silica-declaration-countries-attending-pax-silica-summit-12-december-2025
TPDi’s AI Agency Discussion Draft: www.techpolicy.au/ai-agency
System Update: an Australian-led New Deal for Tech (article in Australian Foreign Affairs): https://www.australianforeignaffairs.com/afa/editors-note/3148
Blog: Middle Power Tech Strategy in Carney’s Honest World Order: https://techpolicy.au/news/middle-power-tech-strategy-in-carneys-honest-world-order
For transcript and full show notes visit techpolicy.au/podcast
Transcript
Johanna: The Tech Policy Design Institute acknowledges and pays our respects to all First Nations people. We recognize and celebrate that among many things, indigenous people were Australia’s first tech innovators.
Welcome to Tech Mirror. I’m Johanna Weaver and on this podcast we talk about how technology is shaping our world and how we the humans can shape technology back now. There is a lot going on in the world right now, and technology is at the core of so many of the trends that we are seeing reshaping global power dynamics.
So we thought it was timely to do a deep dive that unpacks tech and geopolitics.
Today’s episode, our guest, Martin Rasa, joins us from the US and next up in the next episode, we’ll talk to an Australian tech analyst who’s living in China. Then we’ve got an episode planned that looks at the role of middle powers like Australia in all of.
Because perhaps counterintuitively, when great power rivalry heats up, the role for middle powers likewise increases. Now we couldn’t have a better guest to kick us off today. Martijn Rasser is Vice President of Technology Leadership at the US Special Competitive Studies Project. He’s got a background working in US Intelligence. He’s also worked in the private sector and think tanks, including at the Center for New American Security, which is where I first met him many years ago.
So Martijn, welcome to Tech Mirror. Let’s perhaps start at the beginning, what actually is the US Special Competitive Studies project?
Martijn: So we’re a nonprofit research organization focused squarely on American competitiveness with a particular focus on strategic technology competition.
Right? And so SESP is about four years old, and it originally started as a continuation of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. So that was a congressionally mandated effort. It ran for three years. It was co-chaired by Dr. Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google. And you know, at the end of that commission’s work, they issued, uh, a huge report that had a ton of policy recommendations, and they knew that the work had only just begun and they wanted to continue.
So Eric decided to create what became the special competitive studies project with his own money. Ylli Bajraktari became the CEO of the organization. And as to be expected, the initial focus was heavily on artificial intelligence. But since then, we’ve expanded to look at energy quantum computing or quantum information science more broadly doing work in robotics and biotech.
And so now we cover the full spectrum of critical and emerging technologies, and part of our mission is to inform US policy makers, but we also have a broader educational mission. So to really make sure that people, not just in Washington, but across the United States, understand why technological competitiveness is so important and how we foster a stronger, more resilient society as a result.
Johanna: And is there truth to the rumour that the special competitive studies project was sort of mirrored off the Rockefeller Special Studies project, which was the Kissinger Rockefeller during the Cold War?
Martijn: Yeah, so Eric Schmidt and Dr. Kissinger were close friends, and it was Dr Kissinger that actually proposed to Eric that he model SESP on the Rockefeller project.
Johanna: Mm. I just find this so fascinating. We talk so much at the moment about living through periods of great change, and it’s like often easier looking at it in retrospect or with the benefit of hindsight, you know, reflecting on the Cold War and how that drove technological change, but also the need for new institutions and governance structures.
And without question today we are living through a similar period of change and there’s a huge focus on technology, but I would argue perhaps not enough focus on how we need to strengthen the institutions or update governance structures. And this is something that we are definitely gonna be unpacking over the next few episodes of the pod.
But perhaps Martijn, to get back to what it was that led me to reach out to invite you onto the podcast this time, and that was this new body of work that you’ll be releasing soon called the Tech Scorecards, where you are measuring the competitiveness of the US and China across a suite of different technologies.
Can you tell us a bit about this project?
Martijn: Yeah, the tech scorecard in part is a way to move beyond that binary thinking, right? Of giving a simple, like who is winning answer to an any specific technology competition, because at the end of the day, it’s much more complicated, much more nuanced than that.
And so we really wanted to fill the analytical gap to help policy makers understand a relative technological advantage or disadvantage, but then also identify the strengths you wanna protect and the areas of weakness that need policymaker attention. In order to be able to drive the country to be more capable in any specific field.
And while SESP had already done a lot of work on gaps analysis, so you know, form of net assessment at the end of the day, we wanted to revisit that framework and that then became the tech scorecard. And so we just published the methodology of this two weeks ago so that you can come to our website scorecard dop.ai, and so you can see it firsthand.
It lays out the five categories that we use to, to help people think through and. While we approach it from a US China comparison, analysts in Canberra, Tokyo, or London can use the same framework for their respective context as well. So it’s agnostic in terms of what countries you apply it to at the end of the day.
Johanna: And can you take us through how you’re assessing power in that context?
Martijn: Yeah, so we identified five dimensions of technological power. So one is innovation leadership, so that’s the technical metrics, so you know who’s pushing the envelope of what’s possible through research, technological breakthrough standard setting.
The second one is industrial capacity, so those are physical metrics, so that’s infrastructure, supply, chain control, really the ability to produce technology at scale. The market ecosystem. So these are economic measures, commercial backing, private investment, global market share, all the economic components that you need to sustain long-term advantage.
The talent pipeline. So the human component. Who attacks, attracts and retains the technical talent attacks –
Johanna: Attacks probably works too.
Martijn: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. This is a zero sum game when it comes to human capital. So you know, the PhDs, the skilled workforce, really the raw material over innovation in that sense. And finally, national leverage.
And these are the policy actions that a government takes in order to create. Technology strategies, setting up regulations, but also setting up partnerships and alliances with other countries in order to produce a certain outcome. And at the end of the day, it’s not a one size fits all model, right?
There’s tailored metrics. And that all is dependent on the specific technology area that you’re looking at, because those will vary. If you’re looking at robotics versus quantum information science versus autonomous vehicles, there’s different metrics that you measure and the overall weight of those metrics will vary somewhat.
So there is a human element, a qualitative component that comes into it as well. So the framework is really meant to augment how we think about technology competition. We don’t intend that you could create a model and automate that type of analysis. We don’t think that’s the right way to go.
Johanna: And so as you are describing that, it really jumps out to me how many of those concepts that you’re talking about from the tech scorecard are quite similar to TIPD’s AI agency tool.
Now, these two frameworks are measuring very different things. One, looking at AI agency, one looking at tech competitiveness more broadly. But it’s really interesting how so many of these concepts are quite similar in terms of framing things like access, control, choice, leverage, and opportunity. So we’ll perhaps circle back to that again in future episodes.
But I wanna pick up on something else that you said there, Martijn, when you were referring to the need for these scorecards to have nuanced data sets behind them to capture. Accurate picture of competitiveness. Is it difficult when you’re looking to gather data on the US and China to find data from those two very different jurisdictions that is both reliable and comparable?
Martijn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that, that’s always a challenge, right? And even, you know, the most exquisite intelligence agencies on the planet still are not able to have a complete picture. Of course.
Johanna: Mm.
Martijn: That’s where human expertise and human judgment comes in as well. ’cause as advanced as a lot of the large language models have become, that type of assessment is still something that I think humans are much better positioned to do.
And so because we’re doing this all with publicly available information, I think by default, you already know that you’re dealing with probably 80 to 90% of what you need to know. But then there’s the issue of, well, how trustworthy is the information that you have at your fingertips? Now with China the problem is that we know there are incentives to fudge the numbers for certain types of outcomes.
Sometimes the government is doing that in order to paint a rosier picture, sometimes the researchers themselves are doing that to be able to justify the money that they’re spending. But we do have ways of comparing and contrasting various data sources. So in addition to information that we find ourselves through various resources, we also work with several private sector entities that specialize in open source intelligence on China.
And so we’re able to, I think, piece together a fairly accurate picture of what’s happening. At the same time, there’s challenges for that in the United States as well in order to, to get the most comprehensive data because there’s also, uh, incentives to fudge the numbers sometimes. At the end of the day, overall, we feel quite confident in our assessment, particularly the strengths of the blue team, so the United States in this case.
So for our upcoming industrial robotics tech scorecard, you know, we consulted with numerous experts in the field. So these are leading academics, founders of robotics companies, venture capitalists and so forth that have a very granular understanding of the US ecosystem, and at the same time also have quite good insight into China’s ecosystem and, and several of the people we spoke with traveled to China regularly to visit robotics companies, go to the big trade shows and conferences, and so overall we feel quite confident that we have as good of a picture as you can expect, given some of the limitations that I mentioned earlier.
Johanna: So you’ve released the methodology. Do you have a timeline in terms of when our listeners can expect to come back to this website and see the scorecards being released?
Martijn: The robotic scorecards should be live on the 18th of March, is what we’re aiming for. Soon to follow will be the Quantum Tech Scorecard, and we have an advanced draft of one on autonomous vehicles and then we have a series planned for the rest of the year. Our goal is to update these tech scorecards on a regular basis going forward. But CSP also has a live program that we do and we created a special ticker. So it’s in the style of a stock ticker where it can just give you quick love, okay, yeah. US is leading here, China’s leading here, this area’s contested.
Johanna: Listeners in Australia are very familiar with the aspi tech tracker. I think the level of interest in these types of products is always extremely high, so we’ll put the links to that in the pod notes.
What I find interesting about this is, given the nature of the special competitive studies project, but you’re not just doing the scorecards as a standalone project. This is also part of a broader call for the scorecards to be informing policy and informing decisions that are being made. One of the proposals that you have on the table is for a technology council, which is sort of sitting as an advisory body into the White House.
Can you talk us through? What the proposal or the call for the council is and why you think that’s important.
Martijn: Yeah. Yeah. So the original proposal actually dates back to the National Security Commission on AI days. So SESP as a successor organization has echoed and endorsed that recommendation. At the end of the day, the United States biggest hurdle to creating and crafting sound tech policy is that we don’t have a focal point within the US government to do that, right? There’s pockets of excellence scattered throughout various departments and agencies. But there’s no one place that unifies all that knowledge and uses that.
Then as a foundation for policy recommendations, a lot of my work at the Center for New American Security focused on that as well, because I always made the case that the United States needs a true national technology strategy in order to be successful and as, as admirable as I find the US tendency to want to be the very best at everything, you know, the reality of it is you, that’s just not realistic, right? And so we need to make hard decisions. We need to think about the trade-offs in terms of what technology areas. Do we absolutely want to be the best in the world? In what are areas where, it’s actually okay if we’re globally competitive, but that the fact of who is actually best is contested.
And in some cases it, it may be worth just being a fast follower, watching what others do, learning from their mistakes, and that could actually save you quite a bit of money over time. What we need to do as a country and our political leadership needs to articulate this is where do we wanna be as a country 20, 30 years from now?
Because that then will inform what technology areas where we want to focus most of our efforts, ’cause if you think back to, well, just looking at today’s economy, what is critically important? Semiconductors, the internet and the global positioning system. Right. And those technologies date back to research and development investments that the US government made in the 1950s and sixties.
You know, the transistor APA net and early positional satellites. And we’re not having those types of discussions right now about what we believe the US economy will be built on two generations from now. And at the same time, there’s also a lot of downward pressure on R and D investments, particularly when it comes to basic r and d. The US government is doing less and less of that. It’s also not an area that private industry is particularly interested in investing because the return on investment is so uncertain. And so the United States is in a tricky position, particularly when we have China investing a lot of money in r and d, and they’re pursuing a strategy of overbuilding to ultimately over match its competitors in the Western world.
And if we don’t come to a more realistic projection of what we actually want to achieve. We’re gonna be making a lot of wrong calls and we’re going to scatter ourselves over too many different lines of effort, with at the worst case outcome, that we end up not being particularly good at anything as opposed to being very good at a few things and reasonably good in other areas.
Johanna: Oh, so there’s so many threads I wanna pick in there. Imagine. So I just wanna double tap on the importance, and it’s exactly the same in the Australian ecosystem of pockets of excellence, but the real need for coordination across the policy framework. I think the important part of that is also that if you don’t have that coordination, it’s not only are we going to be focusing on the wrong technologies.
But it’s also recognizing the power dynamics that exist within government and how when you’re sort of sitting at that trifecta of national security or a security perspective with a societal impact perspective and an economic impact, often the people from a national security community, the economic arguments will outweigh the longer term societal impact arguments in short term, particularly in Australia where we have sort of three year election cycles.
The other part that I really want to get you to expand on is the point you were talking there about the way that China is diffusing technology. Can you speak about that in terms of your observations of how China’s technology diffusion model differs from a US diffusion model?
Martijn: Yeah, well it’s, it’s, uh, very much state driven, right?
Uh, no surprise given the governmental structure there. But Beijing is willing to spend money inefficiently in a lot of cases in order to achieve scale, and Beijing is often willing to be good enough and not necessarily the absolute best. And you’re seeing that play out right now in artificial intelligence in particular, right?
Where US companies are focused on building the most exquisite large language models, Beijing has largely directed its AI ecosystem to focus on good enough models. In part because they have to because they’re being denied certain types of semiconductors and they don’t have access to the semiconductor manufacturing equipment to be able to make a more advanced chips.
But also the recognition that you can achieve some very good capabilities by spending a lot less, or in this case through, well, there’s still of course, technology theft taking place, but then the strategy of inferencing. So in effect, building off of US breakthroughs, but doing it with much less time and energy and money that is required and through that strategy combined with really pushing AI use cases throughout the Chinese economy, Chinese society already, the public sentiment towards artificial intelligence in China’s much more positive than it is here in the United States, and it’s pretty stark – it’s public approval of AI in China, somewhere around 80%. It’s less than half that in the United States. There’s a lot of skepticism here, but the more readily people start using artificial intelligence enablers and tools in their day-to-day lives, the more trusting they become and it becomes just a normal part of your day. That then also gives Chinese companies a leg up in exporting their products, their tools to other parts of the world.
And American companies will have a hard time competing because US models cost so much more. And so one suggestion I would have is that the techno democracies work together to create a viable, open source alternative to these Chinese models. So a good enough model that is affordable and works in the context of the global south, for example.
And then this is an issue that, at this point, very few people in the United States are talking about, but it goes back to those technology alliance discussions that we were having a few years ago when I was at CNAS. All those issues remain valid today, if anything are even more urgent now, given what a formidable technology power that China has become.
The amount of improvement and achievement that China’s had just in the past five years is, is remarkable. And now we’ve seen in the new five year plan, you know, they, they are pushing both feet on the gas pedal to go even faster.
Johanna: Hmm. If we’re looking at China diffusing with a good enough model that is cheap and accessible out at the same time as we are hearing, and at this stage it’s only media reporting, I think it’s largely coming off one Reuters report about the Trump administration reverting back to sort of enliven a Biden administration policy around the licensing of AI for allies. And tiered countries to control much more the access to cutting edge frontier US AI models. I understand sort of the strategic motivation behind that. But when you look at it from tighter controls over US technology, less control, proliferation of the Chinese technology, these controls being embedded through societies, my concern of that approach, if we’re not adopting and leaning into this techno democracy third set of AI model is that actually we’re kind of handing and giving a gift to China to say we’re almost seeding that space.
I’m really interested in how, given the current dynamics of the Trump administration and the reverberations that that’s having around the world as Australia, we would normally have looked to the US to be sort of spearheading that type of, you know, techno democracies coming together to provide an alternative to a Chinese product.
Certainly many of the people I’m talking to now are saying we can’t look to the US for that type of leadership. How is the conversation on these topics happening in Washington and how, like, does that make you uncomfortable hearing me say that? That’s sort of the vibe in Australia, that we can’t look to the US for that leadership.
Martijn: Yeah. It’s, it’s been an interesting year in Washington, right? Because everyone is trying to figure out what the, the Trump administration’s objectives and priorities are when it comes to tech policy and there’s been some whiplash, to put it mildly, where certain policy decisions are just veering back and forth and it’s really a matter of, it seems like whoever has had the president’s ear most recently, that is the direction we’re going.
Part of the issue is that the inter-agency process in Washington, as it had existed for decades, isn’t really functioning anymore. Right. The National Security Council has largely ceased to function as it was originally intended. There’s really a very small group of advisors around the president that are driving most of the decision making, and the president is also very eager to engage directly with the executives from various tech companies and, and in most cases, they’re very eager to focus on exports, including to China. Now, that said, the administration is in a monolith and neither is the US Congress. I’m very encouraged, for example, by the Pax Silica Initiative because this is very much a multilateral approach, in this case on semiconductor and critical mineral supply chains.
Johanna: Just quickly, let me jump in here to explain what the Pax Silica initiative is. Pax Silica is a joint US led initiative that was launched with very little fanfare back in December in 2025, and I think this is best summed up with a quote from Jacob Helberg, who’s the US under Secretary for Economic Affairs, and he described Pax Silica in these terms.
‘If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, then the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it. This historic declaration, pax silica, hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing and models.’
So, clearly I shouldn’t be a dramatic reader. But in essence, this proposal is looking at diversifying and securing supply chains, things like silicon and the critical minerals that are essential to all modern technologies. And what’s particularly interesting about this declaration is that when it was first announced back in December last year, it was a pretty small group of countries.The US, Australia, the Republic of Korea, Japan, the UK, Singapore, and Israel. But since then, it’s expanded and it now includes countries like the UAE and Qatar with Taiwan as a non-signatory participating economy. So this is an example of a new form of initiative that we’re increasingly seeing in this transactional new world order.
Martijn: We had the critical minerals forum here in Washington several weeks ago that appeared to be quite successful from initial readouts. So there is still an appetite to work together with allies and partners on some of these issues. But yeah, there’s elements within the administration that want to do that.
And so far the president himself hasn’t articulated that as his preferred way forward, and I think a lot of people in the administration are trying to read the tea leaves to determine what would be amenable to the president at the end of the day. And as you can imagine, that’s not an easy task.
Johanna: Yeah. And I think it’s, it’s not just those within the administration, I think globally, there’s a lot of people, looking that, and my my starting point is anyone who tells you they know what’s gonna happen next, I wouldn’t trust them because we actually don’t know –
Martijn: They’re lying no one knows.
Johanna: Exactly. Exactly. But I think, again, the point that actually concerns me, and it goes to this global leadership point, is where you started with that response of, you know, the structures of the NSC, the National Security Council, not functioning the way that they have for decades, right? And I think it’s that erosion. It’s not that just the erraticness, the transactional nature of Trump, I think it’s also the damage that is being brought through the administrations that through what we would call in Australia, the public service. I do recognize that there are still incredibly good people within the US administration working to do the right thing and to position the US not just for this government, but for whatever comes next. But I think that erosion of the institutions of government is more concerning to me than Trump’s behavior because I think it has a much longer term impact on the ability for the US to bounce back into a global leadership position.
You mentioned there also the relationship between Trump in particular and tech companies.
Martijn: Mm-hmm.
Johanna: It’s quite dramatic seeing the shift from them all lined up at the inauguration in the photos, kissing the ring almost style to some of the battles that are now happening. So what are your thoughts on the US government designating Anthropic, this US company, who we all know and love from Claude, as a supply chain risk?
Martijn: I just wish this whole dispute never saw the light of day in this, you know, this should have been kept behind closed doors. This should never have been a public food fight the way it has been ’cause no one wins in that situation. The whole issue became highly politicized. It’s just extremely unfortunate that, that we find ourselves in this position.
It’s very concerning that a US company was named a supply chain risk. That’s gonna be fought in the courts now, but that’s gonna take years most likely. So unless there’s a stay, it is going to impact Anthropics business, ’cause at the end of the day, I think if a company wants to do business with the Pentagon, they’ll think very carefully about whether or not they want to have Anthropic in their technology stack, even if it’s not for work that has anything to do with the defense department is doing.
I think much of the issue ultimately boiled down to, you know, personality conflicts. Don’t get the impression that Emil Michael or Dario Aade really liked each other all that much. It’s unfortunate that personal dynamic played such an overwhelming role in, in the contractual relationship between the department and, and Anthropic.
I wouldn’t, wouldn’t, uh, wanna make a prediction on how this is going to play out. This is gonna be a very complicated legal case.
Johanna: The flow on implications of this, obviously we’ve seen flocking of people to an Anthropic product, Claude, because of the stand that they’ve taken. But I think what’s lost in the focus on that is the big businesses that have built anthropic into their products who are now questioning whether or not they can continue to use them.
Martijn: Yeah, exactly. And that’s ultimately where the bulk of Anthropics revenue comes from. Exactly right. A lot of people downloaded Claude, but will they be converted to paying customers? Maybe. How much are they willing to pay? That’s unclear. And big businesses will, their own operations will be affected, right? Because I think a lot of people really respect the capabilities that Claude provides overall. It does hurt American competitiveness in that sense, and that’s the biggest tragedy, uh, that happens in all this.
It’s, you know, a self-inflicted wound that could and should have been avoidable.
Johanna: How do you think more broadly about the role of the private sector? So what do you see as a best case scenario in that relationship between the private sector and the US government?
Martijn: The US government did a lot of work over the, the past 10 years in particular to build trust with companies in Silicon Valley in particular, so it still remains to be seen how much of that trust has been eroded.
With regards to the Anthropic dispute, so far, it seems like the, you know, the tech companies are willing to just keep moving forward, you know, OpenAI announced a deal with the Department of Defense shortly after the Anthropic dispute.
Johanna: Hmm.
Martijn: And I think the other tech companies, by and large, are pragmatic enough to, to understand that the national interest is still very important.
But at the same time, the US government also realizes that corporations, that their best interest don’t always necessarily align with the US national interest. And that’s why we’re also seeing a renaissance in various forms of industrial policies that 10 years ago would’ve been unheard of. So it does go both ways as well, where government leaders here in Washington are more willing to step in and say okay, we’re actually going to take a more active role in a company’s operations or, you know, nudge a company to, to do things that they may not have done otherwise. And it’s not just US companies, but international companies as well. So, for example, you know, ultimately convincing TSMC to open various fabs in Arizona, that’s something that five years ago also would’ve been almost unthinkable.
In part, you can argue with the, with the merits of the, the tactics, but the, the trade disputes and the tariffs, they have brought about some, some pretty significant changes. You know, it’s not always, uh, you know, a willingness to, to do that, but out of necessity. But there have been decisions made by, by company leaders that just on paper would be quite surprising if you look at the, the impact to their operations.
Johanna: TSMC is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, and what Martijn is referring to here is a huge supply chain dependency coming out of Taiwan who play an absolutely critical role in manufacturing almost all of the world’s advanced AI chips. Now, the US has been trying to incentivise companies, including TSMC to produce these chips in the US in order to provide a safety net should anything happen in Taiwan, but this is something that only the US could do, and even then it’s questionable as to whether or not they’re going to be able to pull it off. Each fabrication plant is worth billions of dollars and takes years to build, and this is where the concept of supply chain resilience and partnerships becomes so, so vital.
Martijn: That’s also why that concept of a semiconductor alliance that we spoke about a few years ago already remains relevant, right? Because it’s not just TSMC as a single point of failure. It’s ASML in the Netherlands with their EUV lithography equipment. It’s the Japanese company, Nittobo. Which is the only manufacturer of the, the T-glass. I believe there’s only two, maybe three Japanese companies that make the photo resists, so the chemicals that you use during the semiconductor fabrication process. Carl Zeiss in Germany making the optics for the EUV lithography equipment. And so you start seeing how, how fragile the global semiconductor value chain actually is. In my mind, it’s a no-brainer that the governments of these countries work together to ensure that there is greater resilience in these supply chains.
’cause any one of those nodes getting pulled out of the supply chain and you know, the whole thing falls apart, like a house of cards. Right now, everyone’s very focused on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. What very few people are talking about right now is, well, we know that Qatar closed down its LNG production. That’s about 20% of global output, but a very important byproduct of LNG production is helium, and helium is essential for semiconductor fabrication. And I, it’s somewhere in the 35 to 40% range that is Qatar’s share of global helium supply. So almost overnight we went from a very comfortable supply of Helium to now a severe shortage.
And the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the more severe that crisis is going to be. And we’re going to start seeing some waves going through the semiconductor industry as well, because there’s another critical input that is under a lot of strain.
Johanna: So we spoke about Pax Silica earlier and you know, as an example of countries coming together to build secure and resilient supply chains.
And I think, you know, reflecting on Canadian PM Kearney’s Davos speech, the famous speech, he really emphasized this point as well, that middle powers have more power than we think that we can actually be stepping up and building unique coalitions. I think what’s interesting in Kearney’s framing is that he’s actually quite transactional about it. He’s saying that these coalitions, maybe different countries for different issues and taking quite a pragmatic approach. And you know, you’re kind of seeing that play out, for example, with Qatar being included in Pax Silica because of the helium, you know, for example, as you were just discussing there.
So Martijn, from your perspective, sitting in Washington, what’s your call to action to Australia right now? What do you think we should be prioritising as a country in this really uncertain world that we are living in?
Martijn: Australia has a lot of capabilities in, in technology areas that matter. Australia’s also blessed of course, with substantial natural resources, which are critically important. Just on the rare Earth’s front alone Australia could be a true powerhouse. But it requires a pretty significant investment and a sustained investment. Because again, you’re dealing with Chinese mercantilism and you have to be able to have a, a certain modicum of industrial policy to, to build a viable Australian industry in that regard, in this environment.
Of course, Australia should continue to work with the United States as much as it can, but it’s very important to build up. Independent relationships with the other key technology actors in Europe, in Japan, South Korea, and I think India would be a very interesting partner to, to look toward as well.
Europe in particular, it’s been a wake up call, right? With the state of the transatlantic relationship right now. I think people are, are waking up to the fact that the old way of doing business is not gonna be a recipe for success anymore. And that’s a realisation that that Canberra can tap into and start dialogues on, on how Australia and the EU, Australia and the UK can work together more effectively on, on specific technology areas.
That would be my recommendation ultimately is yes, keep working with the United States because again, you know, the current state of affairs will pass, things will get better. But at the same time, you know, you need to hedge your bets just like everyone else is. It’s just this ultra realist approach that we need to take the current state of global affairs.
Johanna: 100 percent. And for anyone listening to this podcast, I did not set Martijn up to answer the question that way, but it certainly won’t come as a surprise to regular listeners of the pod that this is something that I a 100 percent support the idea of Australia taking the initiative and building out these partnerships to build broader coalitions of countries.
We’ll talk about that more in the coming episodes. In the next episode, we’re going to talk to an Australian tech analyst based in China. Looking forward to that conversation.
For now, Martijn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Martijn: No, thanks so much for having me on. It was a real pleasure.
Johanna: Well, that’s it for this episode of Tech Mirror, which is brought to you by the Tech Policy Design Institute. We are based here in Canberra on the lands of the Ngunnawal Ngambri people.
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