New and Old Cold Wars: The Tech War and the Role of Technology in Great Power Politics

Abstract

Recently, a ‘tech war’ between the United States and China has emerged, as the United States aims to maintain its technological supremacy while restricting China’s access to critical technologies. However, the drivers and implications of the tech war are poorly understood, as great power scholars typically adopt an instrumental view of technology as a tool of state power. Drawing from Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies, this article challenges the conception of the tech war as merely one area of competition among others. It asks how sociotechnical imaginaries—distinct sets of values, institutions, conventions, and symbols through which members of a political community imagine their past, present, and future-shape U.S. elite discourse on technology in its great power relations, particularly in the contexts of the Cold War and the U.S.-China tech war. Based on a frame analysis of U.S. elite tech discourse on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and China in the present, the article finds that policy elites rely on sociotechnical imaginaries to associate technology’s possible negative effects in society with a geopolitical rival to construct and justify a geopolitical agenda. This allows domestic sociotechnical life to be ordered according to the overriding needs of a narrow, security-oriented national interest. The analysis draws attention to the cultural, social, and political dynamics underpinning technology's role in great power politics and thus calls for a more multifaceted understanding of contemporary great power rivalry and the tech war.