How the U.S. Could Lose a Tech Cold War

In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. sought to rally its allies to block construction of a Soviet oil pipeline that would supply Red Army forces in Eastern Europe. It was an exercise in futility. West Germany grudgingly agreed not to supply high-technology pipes for the project. But Britain, Italy and Japan all rebuffed Washington’s appeals. The Friendship pipeline went ahead with only a short delay, having exposed strains in the Western bloc. Worse, from a U.S. perspective, the episode convinced Moscow to become self-sufficient in steel pipes.

Today, as the U.S. seeks to deny China access to advanced technologies — in the latest move, U.S. legislators introduced a bill last week to ban chip sales to Chinese tech companies that defy U.S. sanctions — many talk glibly of a tech Cold War, as though there are simple parallels with Washington’s efforts in an earlier era to impede the advance of a strategic competitor. That assumption not only misconstrues the Chinese economy, which is nothing like the Soviet one, but gets the Cold War completely wrong.