As a result, the strategy goes beyond cyber conflict management rules and focuses on US efforts to ensure control over physical technologies such as undersea cables, which connect countries, companies and individual users to cloud services.
Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, has been trying to dominate cable laying across the Pacific and, increasingly, around the world. But Fick maintains that American, Japanese and European companies still dominate the market and that “this is still an area where we can compete vigorously.”
Blinken, in his speech, made clear that part of the diplomacy he envisions involves persuading nations not to rely on undersea cables, data storage or cloud computing supplies from Chinese suppliers or other states in China's technological orbit. . He describes an increasingly zero-sum competition, in which countries will be forced to choose between subscribing to a “suite” of technologies dominated by the West or one dominated by China.
“In these areas, the United States currently leads the world, but suppliers to authoritarian states are increasingly competitive,” Blinken said at the RSA Conference. “It is critical that we work with trusted suppliers and exclude untrustworthy ones from the ecosystem.”
Blinken made it clear, implicitly, that it was the Chinese companies he described as untrustworthy.
He cited an effort backed by the United States, along with Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan, to connect 100,000 people living in the Pacific Islands (a small population, but one that China has targeted because of its strategic location) in its effort to expand its influence in the South Pacific.
