Rush Doshi

Asst Professor, Georgetown • Director, CFR China Strategy Initiative • Biden NSC '21-24 • Wrote The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

I've watched @amanpour on TV for decades. So I was grateful for the opportunity to sit down with her for 15 minutes.

Our interview aired on @CNN this weekend.

We talked China policy, Trump's approach, and why this decade is the decisive decade in the competition.

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

The more realistic answer is probably allied scale. Not easy, but much more plausible than quadrupling the US population.

[Garrett Wright @garrxttt]

Palmer Luckey warns America cannot compete with China’s population advantage forever through innovation alone: “We need 1 BILLION Americans minimum. Probably more like 2 or 3 billion.” 🇺🇸🇨🇳

“Yes, we need to get our act together. We need to do better at manufacturing, at defense, all these things. But everything is just biting around the margins if we’re 350 million people and they’re 2 billion people who are roughly the same.

How exceptional do we have to be to achieve a 10-to-1 ratio forever, in perpetuity? It’s not practical. It’s not logical.

I would say it’s even possibly a racist thing to believe that we can be so much better than China and the Chinese people that we’ll just beat them with a tiny fraction of the population.

We need to do better with what we’ve got. But we also just need a lot more people. We need 1 billion Americans minimum, probably more like 2 or 3 billion, with better demographics and better natural resources.

The Dutch once had the most powerful navy in the world. They didn’t lose that position because they fell behind on factories or shipbuilding. They became economically irrelevant.”

Both countries are competing with respect to declining birth rates. Both nations must be more willing to have children and expand the population growth exponentially over the next decade. The current economic path is unsustainable if our labor force begins to shrink even with artificial intelligence on the rise.

[Noah Gordon @noah_gordon_]

China is quietly ordering its wind industry to rip out European components and replace them with Chinese ones, while it complains about European plans to discriminate against Chinese suppliers.
Great data work by @OSW_eng

[Steve Yates (葉望輝) @SteveYates]

A father’s worst phone call came on October 18, 2023.

My daughter Christina overdosed on a counterfeit Xanax laced with fentanyl. What followed were 12 days from the trauma center to the ICU to hospice — and her final breath on October 30.

This is our story. Not a statistic. Not a talking point. A family.

Part 1 of a special series on Nation States with Yates. I hope it helps prevent another family from living it.

Listen here:
https://t.co/XuR7UAGZJl
#FentanylCrisis #FentanylAwareness

[Kate O'Keeffe @Kate_OKeeffe]

NEW: Four founders of leading Chinese AI company https://t.co/RnPNXd9oRm worked on research in a joint project with an institute British intelligence accused of having “very strong ties” to China’s main spy agency
https://t.co/nsXm3rum1v with @eastland_maggie

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Read this. An advertisement for a new American industrial policy. China will eat our lunch without one.

[Robert Friedland @robert_ivanhoe]

Chinese export controls now extend beyond refined critical metals to specialized industrial equipment, including tunnel boring machines (TBMs).

TBMs are the most common way of building underground road and rail infrastructure... and they are also increasingly used in mining.

TBMs have been used in underground mine development at several copper, coal and platinum-group-metal operations in the US, Australia, and South America.

Over the past 20 years, Chinese-produced TBMs have grown from ZERO to 60-70% of the global market share, producing approximately 250-300 TBMs per year... approximately half of which are exported. So, we suspect that this news will cause a PANIC in the global TBM market.

We plan to use a TBM at our Santa Cruz copper project in Arizona to develop mine access from the surface. Fortunately for us, the US has its own TBM manufacturer, @Robbins_Co, and earlier this year we purchased a 9.3-metre diameter Robbins TBM for Santa Cruz.

So this news won't disrupt our development plans at @ivanhoeelectric... others may not be as fortunate.

https://t.co/BZ9x6B9qKM

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

@joshrogin @AliRogin Congratulations!

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

To be clear, I support testing the idea. I’m just realistic about the probabilities of success.

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

Exactly this — Beijing isn’t going to indulge our requests for investment with tech transfer, especially when other markets will accept final assembly.

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

China: We believe in openness and cooperation on technology and development—unlike some countries.

China: We’re planning to place export controls on an additional 40 technologies, covering AI, biotech, and solar.

[Gabrielle Sierra @GabSierraWrites]

Roughly 95 percent of U.S. ibuprofen imports come from China. Prefer acetaminophen? About 70 percent. @RushDoshi and @OliviaWKosloff join me on @CFR_org Why It Matters podcast to discuss this and oh so much more. https://t.co/SBSVul6RnY

[CFR China Strategy Initiative @CFR_China]

.@danwwang, author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, and research fellow at @HooverInst discussed long-term competition between the U.S. and China with @RushDoshi during the C.V. Starr & Co. Lecture on China. Watch the conversation: https://t.co/96YGOYNx1O

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

My take after a few days in the ROK this week is that the Korean government is opposed to SK making this investment in the US.

They’d rather this investment be made in Korea, particularly in certain politically relevant constituencies.

[Bill Bishop @niubi]

SK Hynix conditions new US factory on more US chip equipment exports to China, sources say https://t.co/PBcjRAuTPL But the ROK government does not want SK Hynix to make this US investment, so the US government would be naive to agree to this proposal

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

@lorandlaskai Glad to see you back on social media!

[Lorand Laskai @lorandlaskai]

Beijing’s biggest coup in recent years is convincing western analysts that it’ll burn down the global economy if liberal democracies take actions that are in their self-interest.

I don’t think China will shut down the global SME industry in response to MATCH. Here’s why:

[Council on Foreign Relations @CFR_org]

“I feel like the United States used to be an engineering state—when I’m walking around cities like New York, you know, it really feels like we’re walking through the ruins of a formerly great industrial civilization that our grandparents’ generation built. And so this is where I hope that we can do a little bit more thinking about how do we build better, a little bit more like the Chinese,” says @danwwang, research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

[Jennifer Doshi Welch @geoeconjennie]

#BloombergNewEconomy Forum is in India for the first time — and we’re bringing you an inside look.

Join us for a special virtual briefing, live from the Forum. @becca_wasser, @lyndsayhoward, @chetnakum, Shantanu Jaiswal of @BloombergNEF and I will be digging into the event's defining debates and exclusive remarks from global leaders — plus previewing new research from Bloomberg Economics and BloombergNEF.

- Wednesday, Oct 14
- Starting at 2:45 PM IST*
- No Terminal subscription required

More information and registration: https://t.co/VoGZFEIlSG

* We will have a broadcast for Europe/US time zones. Stay tuned for details!

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

@SanderTordoir It’s a real problem, but perhaps surmountable:

https://t.co/PIA5hzh6PT

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

An interesting proposal for allied scale in AI

[Sam Winter-Levy @SamWinterLevy]

In @ForeignPolicy, @anton_d_leicht and I make the case for compute-for-access deals: allies host data center sites for U.S. labs struggling to build at home, in exchange for guaranteed access to frontier AI. The data centers are the enforcement mechanism—a credible commitment to anchor allies in the U.S. tech stack. (Guest link ⬇️)

[Anton Leicht @anton_d_leicht]

America might get to AGI before it manages to reindustrialise. That means there's room for an international version of 'industrial AI', where America makes the tokes and its allies build chips, robots, and missiles.

(1) America needs allied factories. The US only accounts for 15% of global manufacturing, China for 32%; but the US+allies have 43%. @RushDoshi argues this should generally motivate 'allied scale', but it's particularly urgent in AI. If a country of geniuses in a datacenter is supposed to cure cancer or beat China, someone still has to manufacture the cures or produce the drones at scale.

(2) American reindustrialisation alone is not enough. The US economy seems afflicted by 'AI Dutch Disease', absorbing all its capital and capacity into more and more AI buildout (also discussed this week by @DKThomp!). Allies that can't build AGI have no better alternative, their economies are less dominated by the build-out, so they're better-suited to scale up manufacturing.

(3) Allies need American models. Proprietary industrial data is valuable. But it's a complement, not a substitute, for frontier AI: it's most valuable for building post-training pipelines on top of powerful general-purpose models. Allowing for US integration is the only way to make use of this data before it becomes obsolete due to synthetic data down the road.

(4) It's still very hard to stabilise this deal. Allies are worried that Americans siphon off all their IP; Americans are worried that their models get commodified. Figuring out a good deal is the most important next step; I suspect it's (a) exclusive joint ventures between allied industrial firms and American labs with (b) proprietary post-training of specialised models that don't leave the premises of the specific JV.

(5) Waiting makes the deal worse. If allies keep dismissing American AI progress, and Americans keep hoping they can go it alone, we all lose out: allies will have to come crawling back and get a much worse deal later on, and America loses out on years of highly productive industrial integration.

Much more in this week's piece: https://t.co/bMTh5BvkCC

[Rush Doshi @RushDoshi]

Manufacturing construction spending down 25% while data center production is up 65%.

[Jason Furman @jasonfurman]

This is what crowd out looks like.