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

Abstract

Introduction

Since the mid-2010s, U.S.–China relations have deteriorated significantly. While the United States under the Trump administration (2017–2021) instigated a ‘trade war’, it slowly but surely developed into one more narrowly focused on technology. Under the Biden administration (2021–2024), this ‘tech war’ has rapidly intensified as the government has concentrated on maintaining its technological supremacy while barring China from accessing critical technologies.

Thus far, think tanks have taken a leading position in examining the tech war, frequently focusing attention on its likely trajectory, advising governments and companies on strategic positioning (e.g., Center for Strategic & International Studies 2024). Scholarly attention, on the other hand, has been sparse (however, see Gur and Dilek 2023; Ryan and Burman 2024). Great power scholars typically treat technology as a state instrument, which renders the tech war one among many areas of bilateral friction. However, as scholars from the field of Science and Technology studies (STS) have long highlighted, technology plays a crucial role in modern societies in the making of political orders, both domestic and international (Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014b). This perspective underscores the importance of understanding how technology mediates domestic politics, the U.S.–China rivalry and great power politics more broadly.

The purpose of this article is to critically examine the role of critical technology in U.S. great power relations by analyzing U.S. elite discourse on critical technology¹ across different eras through the lens of sociotechnical imaginaries. These imaginaries allow members of a political community to imagine and thereby craft their past, present, and future as one community with a distinct set of shared values, institutions, conventions, and symbols, wherein technology plays a pivotal role as one of modernity's most salient forces (Jasanoff 2015; McCarthy 2021). By focusing on sociotechnical imaginaries, the article sheds light on the cultural, social, and political dynamics that underpin technology's role in great power politics, which allows it to examine issues of identity, memory, and society's relationship with technology. In doing so, the article challenges great power scholarship and specifically U.S.–China scholarship for its reduction of technology as a mere tool of state power.

Moreover, the article compares the role of sociotechnical imaginaries in U.S. elite discourse during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the contemporary U.S.–China tech rivalry. This comparison is vital given the pervasive use of Cold War language, events, and framing in U.S. elite tech discourse about China, but also since observers increasingly rely on the Cold War as a primary historical analogy to understand and describe U.S.–China relations. Yet, most use the analogy unreflectively or debate its appropriateness (e.g., Westad 2019; “Anonymous” 2021). The article argues that while the Cold War analogy is a useful reference point for understanding the continuities in technology's role in great power politics, it is also actively invoked by policy elites to strengthen domestic political unity and legitimize the tech war with China. By critically engaging with the Cold War analogy, the article thus underscores its relevance and insightfulness while exposing its manufactured and politicized nature. The central research question, therefore, is: How do sociotechnical imaginaries shape U.S. elite discourse on technology in great power relations, particularly in the contexts of the Cold War and the U.S.–China tech war?

To address this research question, the article draws on both STS scholarship and recent developments in Critical Security Studies (CSS) that apply STS insights to the study of security (e.g., Bellanova, Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020) in order to strengthen the conceptualization of technology in the analysis of great power relations. Specifically, it builds on the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries as a particularly helpful framework to develop a more nuanced understanding of technology's role in U.S. great power relations. Methodologically, the article utilizes two case studies of U.S. policy elites’ technology discourse and subjects them to a frame analysis in the context of U.S. foreign relations with the Soviet Union and China, respectively.

The article finds that U.S. policy elites utilize sociotechnical imaginaries of technology to consolidate a single political project of the United States, which is justified to safeguard physical and ontological survival in the face of a threatening ‘Other’. In particular, technology in U.S. policy discourse—as elsewhere—often consolidates contrasting sentiments, such as hope/despair, progress/statis as well as winning/losing. Both the Soviet Union and China, as America's Other, are often depicted as incapable of innovation but also as technological powerhouses, and therefore as threatening the United States, which therefore necessitates a strong, united response. Although technology assumes a strikingly similar role in the great power relations with the Soviet Union and China, respectively, such similarities are neither naturally given nor dependent on the particularities of specific technologies (i.e., space technology or semiconductors) but are seen in the way in which elites use fears and hopes surrounding technology to pursue geopolitical agendas.

As the analysis reveals, China's technological abilities are largely portrayed as dishonestly obtained, which plays into broader grievances that China's rise as a great power was inherently unfair. Specifically, policy elites center attention on massive Chinese acquisitions of Western technologies, espionage, and forced technology transfer as the main reasons for its technological advances, downplaying the role of China's own innovative capabilities. In contrast, Soviet technological capabilities were generally portrayed as a formidable demonstration of what a disciplined, authoritarian state could achieve. Another important difference is that, during the current conflict, U.S. policy elites are able to rely on the old Cold War framework to justify the need for a tech war. As such, policy elites regularly invoke collective memories of events, sentiments, and self/other constructions from throughout the historical Cold War. Although doing so also makes it possible to portray a tougher approach towards China and the tech war as necessary, it also means that important questions regarding modern technologies and their effects on society can be suppressed in the name of the national interest. Moreover, the possible dangers of critical technology can be externalized; that is, responsibility for the negative societal or environmental effects of technological progress (e.g., job loss) can be attributed to a concrete geopolitical foe (i.e., as emanating from China) rather than being the consequence of America's own relationship to technology. In this way, it becomes possible to portray technologies as neutral tools that advance society in the hands of a benign user, such as the United States, and disastrous in the hands of a malicious user, such as the Soviet Union historically, and now, China. This in turn depoliticizes critical technologies and the unfettered quest for innovation.

These findings have important implications for our understanding of (critical) technology in great power politics and the tech war specifically, as well as the notion of the United States and China as engaged in a new Cold War. As such, the results underscore an important domestic dimension to the tech war. Specifically, insecurities regarding the promises and perils of modern technologies and innovation are addressed by transferring them onto the United States’ rivals. Thus, aside from the competition for technological advancement, the negotiation of a society's relationship to technological progress constitutes a chief dynamic in U.S. great power relations and is also a driver in the present tech war. Through the prism of technology, it becomes evident how U.S. policy elites try to instill a sense of political community with a clear sense of domestic and also global order. Domestically, technological competition is purposefully used to structure the national interest, while globally, the sociotechnical imaginary of technology is used to order the world into a clear hierarchy. In this view, 'good' and 'benign' users of technology are at the top, in comparison to China as the ‘Other,’ whose unfair exploitation and malign application of technology have supported its illegitimate rise. Finally, the findings of the article also suggest that, rather than truly describing the nature of U.S.–China relations and its likely trajectory, the Cold War analogy plays an important function in justifying and pursuing the need for the United States to engage in a tech war with China.

This article is organized as follows: First, it critically examines how technology is conceptualized in International Relations literature and introduces insights from STS and Critical Security Studies (CSS) to better situate the role of technology in great power politics. The next section introduces the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries and outlines the methodology employed, including the use of frame analysis to examine U.S. elite discourse on technology. The empirical sections examine U.S. elite discourse on technology on the Soviet Union during the Cold War and in contemporary U.S.–China relations, respectively, to highlight key sociotechnical imaginaries and their role in shaping the understanding and role of technology in U.S. domestic and international politics. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the implications of these findings for understanding the intersection of technology and great power politics.

Technology in IR and in Great Power Relations

Since 2017, practically all dimensions of U.S.–China relations have become strained. One particular point of friction relates to technology in U.S.–China relations. The terminology of a ‘tech war’² itself started to take hold in the public imagination sometime in 2018 during the Trump administration and became progressively more prevalent in the Biden administration. Kevin Rudd noted, for instance, that 2018 saw ‘the beginnings of a war of a different type: a trade war, an investment war and a technology war between the two great powers of the twenty-first century, with an uncertain landing point’ (Landler 2018). Citing unfair trade practices and security concerns, both the Trump and Biden administrations have tried to impede China's further growth as a technological power, such as by restricting foreign investments in China, particularly in high-tech industries (e.g., semiconductors), limiting Chinese investments in the United States or curtailing the operation of Chinese companies in the United States and elsewhere (Sheehan 2022).

Concerns over Chinese technology and unfair trade practices more broadly are not entirely new phenomena. Yet, for the most part, the academic literature and public discourse have either neglected the role of technology or maintained that China's technology was of little concern given China's innovation weaknesses (Beckley 2011; Cheung 2011; Brooks and Wohlforth 2015). Only recently have scholars begun to pay more substantial attention to the role of technology in U.S.–China relations and to consider China's technological capabilities as worrisome (A. B. Hannas and Tatlow 2020; Cheung 2022; Kennedy 2023; Rühlig 2023). A. B. Kennedy and Lim (2018), for instance, draw from power transition theory to present an ‘innovation imperative’ in which rising states ‘have no choice but to elevate the pursuit of innovation to the status of major national interest’ (p. 556).

Underlying such concerns is a conceptualization of technology as a neutral instrument of statecraft and thus one among other factors that play important roles in changing the overall balance of power between states. This conceptualization dominates research on great power relations, in which (critical) technologies are presented as an important source of (national) power or as a potential exogenous shock that stirs up the political landscape (such as with the dawn of the nuclear age) (e.g., Mearsheimer 2001, 55; Nye 2011). As McCarthy (2015, 2) notes, despite the centrality of technology in IR, the conceptualization of technology itself has for a long time been largely limited to an ‘environmental condition or set of instrumental possibilities rather than the product of political contestation in which the International itself is central.’

This conceptualization of technology prevalent in studies of U.S. great power relations is problematic as it neglects the relevance of technology as a driver of modernity and thereby political orders, as STS scholarship has long since argued (e.g., Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Ezrahi 1990). Based on their insights, technology is thus not simply ‘out there’ affecting society and politics, or something that can become the crux of the U.S.–China rivalry. Instead, it is, as Fouché (2017, p. 495) puts it, ‘a mediator of a multitude of social, cultural, and political interactions [that] influences the shape of the modern world.’ Technologies and their development inherently reflect societal norms, ambitions, and conflicts. Humans—whether inventors, investors, or policymakers—define which problems technologies should address and design technologies to provide solutions. However, neither identifying these problems nor designing or implementing their solutions are neutral acts. These processes are full of political implications, such as determining which issues are seen as problems, which are prioritized (if at all), who stands to benefit from technological solutions, and who may be excluded from or even disadvantaged by them. For example, facial recognition software is promoted as a security solution but also raises significant privacy and surveillance concerns. At the same time, STS reminds us that technology (re)configures the human condition and therefore continues ‘to force societies to rethink, reassess, and reexamine the morphing relationships among themselves and with intertwining complex sociotechnical arrangements’ (Fouché 2017, 495). Indeed, the notion that social order and technology shape each other (are ‘co-produced’) is central to STS (Jasanoff 2004; see also Sismondo 2011).

Yet, the focus of STS has often been inward-looking, that is, focused on how societies order themselves internally through technology and science (Evans, Leese, and Rychnovská 2021, 190). However, questions of global order and its interplay with domestic orders are equally important, particularly against the background of great power politics broadly and the U.S.–China tech war specifically. Here, the field of Critical Security Studies (CSS) provides a helpful addition since examining security critically allows one to also examine ‘the ways that threats to those social orders are constructed, by whom, and the role of technoscience in doing so’ (Evans, Leese, and Rychnovská 2021, 190).

While several (edited) volumes have introduced STS insights to IR (e.g., Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014b; McCarthy 2018; Hoijtink and Leese 2019), CSS has led in offering a more nuanced understanding of technology in IR. Instead of viewing technology as a neutral tool of statecraft, they highlight how power and security structures are embedded in and reproduced through technology. CSS also draws attention to how actors (governments, security consultants, private firms) develop technical solutions to specific (in)security issues, such as drone warfare, biometric border controls, or digital surveillance (Amoore 2006; Holmqvist 2013; Goede 2018; on the integration of CSS and STS, see Bellanova, Jacobsen, and Monsees 2020; Evans, Leese, and Rychnovská 2021; Liebetrau and Christensen 2021).

Based on such scholarship, it is clear that elites often use technological solutions to resolve (but, in doing so, also frame and solidify) insecurities about the present and future. In the context of the U.S.–China trade war, at least part of it is likely driven by the elites’ desire to pursue critical technologies and technological supremacy as a way to soothe broader uncertainties about the global order and America's role in it, particularly vis-à-vis its great power rivals (as a representation of ‘techno-optimism’, see Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014a, p. f4).

Of course, technological capabilities themselves are often seen as a source of danger, be it due to their potential to disrupt labor markets, rival military power, or even threaten humanity (‘techno-pessimism,’ Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014a, 5–6). Indeed, many of the specific technologies that have become controversial in U.S.–China relations have ethical, practical, and economic implications for social and political life in the United States (and elsewhere), including, for instance, the evolution of AI technologies, facial recognition or deepfakes. It is in this context that CSS concepts are useful to trace how Chinese technological capabilities have become a U.S. national security priority that requires the launch of a tech war. Securitization, in particular, highlights how political issues can be recast as security threats requiring extraordinary measures (Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998). As the empirical analysis will show, U.S. policy elites frequently frame Chinese tech advancements as existential threats to U.S. military dominance, economic prosperity, and way of life, which justifies the need for a unified response (see also Yang 2023).

Taken together, both STS and CSS thus provide useful tools to ascertain the role of technology in politics. That said, neither field has focused its attention on the narrower question of technology and its relation to great power relations specifically. Arguably, this can be seen as a consequence of different priorities, for both STS and CSS have a tendency to focus on analyzing particular security devices and systems rather than looking at broader questions regarding technology and the (re)making of domestic and global order. Notwithstanding, it is reasonable to approach the tech war as an arena of political and technological encounters between the United States and China but also as a space in which society grapples with understanding and defining its relation with critical technology, including its fears and hopes for the emerging domestic and international political and technical order against the background of intense geopolitical rivalry.

The Tech War through the Lens of Socio-technical Imaginaries

To studying the U.S.–China trade war and strengthening our understanding of the role of technology in great power relations, one STS concept is particularly helpful, namely that of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries.’ The concept has its roots in political theory, in which Charles Taylor originally defined social imaginaries as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor 2004, 28). Social imaginaries thus weave people together as part of a political community (see also Anderson 2006), which consolidates widely shared understandings of what the world is but also what the world ought to be now and in the future. In this way, a sense of moral order and legitimacy is central to social imaginaries (Taylor 2004, 28).

In Jasanoff's (2015) reworking of the concept, sociotechnical imaginaries point towards the profound role of technology in enabling and driving forward imaginaries of political orders and futures. Specifically, she argues that technology has been a key feature in the rise of modernity, as seen in the example of the printing press in Benedict Anderson's influential work on nationalism and imagined communities. Sociotechnical imaginaries are thus ‘collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable!) [… that are also] animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff 2015, 19). Since this influential formulation, sociotechnical imaginaries have been widely studied in STS and beyond (see McNeil et al. 2017).

Although scholars of sociotechnical imaginaries have seldom focused on it explicitly, with its focus on political community, the notion lends itself well to examining questions of collective identity and its relation to the crafting of political order. Of course, questions of identity formation have been central to CSS with its rich tradition of examining national security discourses as identity discourses (Campbell 1992; Buzan and Hansen 2009). Through such discourses, a political community's ‘Self’ is assembled and consolidated by constructing an ‘Other’ as a securitized threat, that is, someone or something (e.g., a state, migration, etc.) that poses an existential threat to the physical and ontological survival of the state that requires a unified and coordinated response. In the context of U.S. great power politics, the concept of the ‘self’ is closely tied to values such as democracy, innovation, and the pursuit of a free-market economy. Conversely, the ‘Other’—represented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War and by China today—is depicted as an authoritarian rival with distinct sociopolitical systems and approaches to technology. Here, challenges to ‘ontological security’ refer to how a rival can pose threats to the secure sense of the U.S. self and (the superiority of) its way of life. In terms of technology, for instance, the ability of non-democratic systems to innovate can be seen as such a challenge to ontological security (on ontological security, see for instance the special issue edited by Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017).

These insights are crucial as they can illuminate issues related to political order and the construction of collective identities, and how they are shaped through sociotechnical imaginaries. Kinnvall (2018), for instance, demonstrates how populist politics in Western Europe relies on social imaginaries surrounding the immigrant/refugee ‘Others’ as both a source and remedy of ontological insecurities in an effort to strengthen the political community. Her work also underscores the importance of myths, memories, and heritage of the political community that actors can draw on to craft an emotional resonance of sociotechnical imaginaries. In this context, it is reasonable to assume that historical analogies, such as that of the Cold War, can strengthen the appeal of sociotechnical imaginaries. McCarthy (2021) also illustrates how the United States’ pursuit of technological innovation as a national security project is driven by sociotechnical imaginaries of market-driven innovation as integral to American identity and way of life. Hence, an examination of the role of technology in great power politics needs to consider how visions of technology as well as identity formulations undergird sociotechnical imaginaries of futures and political orders.

The framework of sociotechnical imaginaries is well equipped to examine the U.S.–China tech war and great power politics more broadly. First, it focuses attention on the relationship between technology, politics, and society both in a domestic and in an international context, an element crucially missing in contemporary discussions of technology in great power relations. Second, sociotechnical imaginaries focus explicitly on the way hopes and anxieties about the future are expressed through and mediated by discourse on an advancement of technologies, which is particularly useful against the background of a ‘new’ Cold War as a potentially imminent future order. Third, since the framework incorporates past achievements, myths, and narratives of identity as central to the way in which sociotechnical imaginaries craft political projects to bring about (or prevent) particular articulations of the future, it makes it possible to examine how the original Cold War relates to the present and future.

To examine the role of technology in U.S. great power relations and the tech war specifically, the article relies on a case study design of U.S policy elites’ technology discourse on the Soviet Union and China respectively.³ The Soviet Union and China share several characteristics that make such a comparison reasonable, in particular in terms of their great power status as America's chief rival and their non-democratic regime type (i.e., totalitarian/authoritarian). That said, the differences between the cases are also noteworthy, particularly since the study looks at two different eras (1949–1990 and 2017–2024 for the Soviet Union and China, respectively).⁴ Within these eras, the technology discourse under examination will naturally look different as different technologies occupy elites’ attention. What these technologies have in common, though, is that policy elites consider them critical technologies given their potential to radically impact the society, economy, and national security of states and international politics. The terminology of critical technologies has only recently been used, for instance, by the White House or the European Union, but the label is useful to discuss key technologies of the past that elites also expected to affect domestic and global order significantly. This includes, for instance, automation, space technology, and nuclear technology. Today, most governments include semiconductors, information and communication technologies, quantum technologies, and artificial intelligence as critical technologies. Comparing elite discourse on critical technologies in different eras is thus helpful to understand the broader role of technology in U.S. great power relations.

Finally, one aspect that makes the comparison between the Soviet Union and China particularly important is that commentators often draw implicit and explicit similarities between the Soviet Union and China, either due to the ubiquity of Cold War language and reference points that permeate contemporary tech discourse or because the current conflict is often called a ‘new Cold War’ outright. Of course, the definition of the Cold War and what it was truly about defies clear definitions. As Westad (2013) suggests, for some, the essence of the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States boils down to great power rivalry, while others focus more on the clash of different beliefs, ideas, and systems. In other formulations, the Cold War assumes the role of an era in world history between the end of World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For yet others, the Cold War is defined largely by bloc politics, threats of nuclear annihilation, proxy wars, and a domestic Cold War consensus. Arguably, the existence of these different interpretations makes the Cold War a flexible and therefore powerful frame, which will also become clear in the empirical analysis. For the purpose at hand, the article understands both the old and new Cold War as a particular interpretation of international order.

The article examines U.S. sociotechnical imaginaries in relation to the Soviet Union and China by using frame analysis. While frame analysis shares several core ideas with the method of discourse analysis—such as the belief that language shapes socio-political reality and a focus on power and dominance (van Hulst et al. 2024)—this article employs frame analysis to explore specifically how U.S. elites (more or less) strategically use language to frame issues around critical technologies and foreign policy to influence public perception, interpretation, and action. Framing thus refers to how U.S. policy elites craft narratives to build a shared understanding of a particular situation, assign responsibility, offer solutions, and promote coordinated action (Benford and Snow 2000). Sociotechnical imaginaries thus consist of various frames that elites combine to advance their vision of past, present, and future. These can be frames related to historical and present achievements, traumatic experiences, core values of the political community or internal and external threats against the political community.

The paper will therefore focus on identifying the specific frames used to craft the broader sociotechnical imaginaries of the past, present, and future, and examine how these sociotechnical imaginaries are utilized to shape political orders both domestically and internationally. How do U.S. policy elites frame critical technologies within these imaginaries? How does a sense of morality and legitimacy undergird the depiction of technology within these imaginaries? How is the relation between the political community and critical technologies framed, particularly against the background of intense geopolitical rivalry? Which visions of political community become apparent, in particular in terms of its insiders and outsiders, and in which ways do these relate to the depiction of critical technologies? How do they frame and draw from the past to construct a vision of the present, and which notions of the future are evident? Which silences are noticeable in the discourse?

The relevant material for the analysis is large, as principally any utterances of U.S. policy elites on technology and the Soviet Union/China could be relevant. To delimit the scope, the focus is mostly on presidential documents as the most authoritative representation of elite discourse. To retrieve relevant documents, the article utilized the ‘American Presidency Database’, which collects presidential speeches, remarks, memos, policy briefs, and interviews (including statements from other senior members), allows for advanced search queries, and supports researchers in feeding the data as .txt files into the program “R”. Searching for texts that contain the keywords ‘technology’ and ‘Soviet Union’/’China’ returned approximately 2000 documents, which were reduced further by excluding those that mentioned the keywords but not in relation to each other, leaving approximately 500 texts for closer analysis.⁵ These were skimmed once to develop preliminary thematic codes. Based on these thematic codes, the texts and paragraphs were re-read and coded, and the themes were refined, after which citations were extracted as representations of the various frames.

The advantages of this procedure are that they represent presidential discourse comprehensively. However, other strands of elite discourse could be neglected. For this reason, thematic nodes were used as keywords to search through the news database Factiva.⁶ Moreover, documents from other key actors were also collected (Departments of Commerce, Defense, and State).⁷ Whenever the documents seemed relevant (approximately 200), they were added to the pool of documents and further analyzed. To save space, the article presents chiefly presidential material unless important differences in content and style become obvious in the analysis.

The Role of Technology in U.S. Relations with the Soviet Union

From the early days of the Cold War, technology and innovation were viewed through an ideological lens. Initially, many U.S. observers were convinced that a democratic system would necessarily advance science and technology far more reliably than a Communist system and totalitarian government ever could. Early Cold War thinkers such as Vannevar Bush argued that Soviet ideological constraints would limit scientific productivity (Hurd 1948), a sentiment echoed in the press, which framed Soviet technological successes as achieved ‘in spite of’ Marxist ideology (Kaempffert 1946). However, major Soviet technological and scientific breakthroughs in the late 1940s and 1950s, such as the 1949 nuclear bomb test and the 1957 launch of Sputnik, challenged these assumptions, and forced the United States to confront the reality that the Soviet Union was a technological power to be reckoned with. As Senator Hubert Humphrey noted, these milestones underscored the transformation of the Soviet Union from a ‘backward peasant nation’ into a formidable technological power (Humphrey 1958). These Soviet breakthroughs not only jumpstarted the Space Race but also forced U.S. policymakers to reconsider their assumptions about the ideological superiority of democratic technological innovation (Kay 2013; see also Wolfe 2013, 40). As a consequence, the United States had to re-examine how it approached technology in its relations with the Soviet Union.

Two main ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ shaped the U.S. response to Soviet advancements. In the first imaginary, U.S. policy elites cast technological progress as an essential defence against the Soviet Union, thereby presenting American technological supremacy as crucial for survival. In this imaginary, elites framed the pursuit of better, cheaper, and deadlier technology as the solution to the Soviet threat, thus representing an optimistic understanding of technology in great power relations. President Reagan epitomized this imaginary when he claimed, ‘we can either bet on American technology to keep us safe or on Soviet promises. And I'll bet on American technology every time’ (Reagan 1986). Statements such as this reinforced public support for defence initiatives and promoted a dual commitment to progress and national security. This was the case in particular since elites also regularly argued that progress in military research and technologies would naturally trickle down to civilian applications (Nixon 1974; see also Mayer, Carpes, and Knoblich 2014a).

The other main sociotechnical imaginary was dystopian, centering on technology's potential to bring harm and catastrophe rather than progress. While some of the common themes centered on the risk of technology replacing human labor (Cherry 2019; Sanchez 2022), one of the main themes revolved around the dangers of nuclear energy and warfare. Often, these painted a picture of an undesirable future, consisting of a nuclear wasteland after all-out nuclear war or nuclear accidents. Films such as the popular 1961 movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire visualized and heightened these anxieties. Notably, while such dystopian narratives often originated from voices critical of the government and its unfettered quest for technological progress, policy elites leveraged these anxieties to further consolidate support for a high defence budget and technological investment. President Carter, for instance, maintained that preventing nuclear war ‘requires the most modern strategic forces based on America's superior technology’ (Carter 1980b), thus reframing fear-driven dystopian visions of the future as a justification for continuous technological advancement in the present in the name of security.

Throughout the Cold War, these two competing imaginaries coexisted, reflecting the contradictory pressures on technology policy: the hope for technological salvation and the fear of its destructive potential. These two main imaginaries were largely set against a background of geopolitical rivalry. However, sociotechnical imaginaries, which relied on visions of a less volatile future in which technology became the gateway for improving bilateral relations, also sporadically gained in strength (Jenks 2021). Particularly during the détente era in the 1970s, policy elites framed technological and scientific cooperation as an important measure to ease geopolitical tensions. Since they presented cooperation as a technical (rather than political) endeavor, it seemed more achievable, which made it easier to justify and pursue cooperation. Technology exchange and joint scientific or engineering projects thus proliferated (e.g., Nixon 1972b; see also Thomas-Noone 2021).

However, as the Cold War intensified in the late 1970s, policy elites reframed technological cooperation, securitizing it as a direct threat to U.S. national security. Specifically, they argued that technological cooperation had enabled the Soviet Union to acquire Western technology by any means necessary, including theft and bribery (Casey 1984; Reagan 1985). Now, the United States once again had to increase military spending and technological innovation and block Soviet access in order to, as Reagan put it, ‘keep up with Soviet capabilities which we helped create’ (Reagan 1982). Effectively, this marked a resurgence of the original sociotechnical imaginary in which a precarious geopolitical future could be navigated with the help of critical technology investments. Notably, this imaginary now also included a particular representation of the past, insofar as policy elites depicted the previous cooperation as a costly mistake since it provided a crucial lifeline for the Soviet Union to maintain its technological capabilities amidst its economic decline.

Policy elites thus relied on these various sociotechnical imaginaries to communicate their visions of political order and the role that technology plays within them. As a political project, this order was centered on a broad consensus that technological progress would ensure the safety and prosperity of the United States and its way of life. Indeed, policy elites often utilized the concern that the United States lagged behind the Soviet Union's technological progress to argue in favor of further science and technology investments, lest it fall behind in the technological race and risk its national security (e.g., Nixon 1972a; Stockton 1981). Since policy elites framed technological progress as inevitable, they were able to exclude alternative orders. As a contemporary physicist noted, ‘if a weapons system could be made, then it would be made’ (cited in Peoples 2008, 68). As Reagan also argued, ‘the world is rapidly changing, and technology won't stop here. All we can do is make sure that technology becomes the ally and protector of peace’ (Reagan 1988).

Notably, these depictions enabled policy elites to argue that pursuing technological progress was essential. However, they also suggested that society had to accept the negative externalities of such technologies in the national interest. The nuclear arms race serves as a key example: Increased investments in nuclear weapons heightened the risk of accidents both domestically and internationally. Nevertheless, these risks were deemed acceptable, as the arms race was thought ultimately to protect the political community's security. Through this framing, policy elites were also able to downplay their responsibility for any negative societal or environmental side effects of critical technologies. George Meany (1894-1980), an influential American union leader, for instance, maintained in the domestic debate on automation and unemployment that the first consideration ‘must be to maintain the defense program in such strength as to deter the Kremlin from proceeding with any further aggressive plans’ (The New York Times 1956). Thus, as the quest for more technology became a matter of national security, public and democratic decision-making regarding the development, usage, and regulation of technology diminished. This is not to say that these questions were absent from public debate. In fact, scientists in particular have debated the question of individual and collective responsibility as well as governmental patronage of science and technology at least since the days of the Manhattan Project (1942–1945) (Wang 1999). For the government, however, the Soviet Union's existence meant that it could pursue technological progress without much pushback.

Throughout the Cold War, policy elites thus framed the Soviet Union as the primary threat to the domestic sociotechnical order. Notably, it was precisely this portrayal of the Soviet Union as a technologically menacing ‘Other’ that helped to consolidate and legitimize this order from the outset. Policy elites often focused on distinguishing the United States (the ‘Self’) from the Soviet Union (the ‘Other’) to bolster the Soviet threat as well as strengthen the political identity of the United States and its political community. Exemplifying this rhetoric, President Truman, for instance, argued that the United States faced ‘a long, hard test of strength and stamina between the free world and the communist domain’, which would also pit U.S. ‘science and technology against the best they can do’ (Truman 1953).

In this context, policy elites employed a strategic dichotomy between the technology usage of the United States and the Soviet Union, framing American technological advances as inherently positive and the Soviet Union as dangerous. In so doing, they reinforced the perception of the United States as a morally just political entity under external threat. Indeed, throughout the Cold War, there were countless examples in which political elites distinguished between the ‘good,’ ‘moral,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘beneficial for all’ or ‘responsible’ usage of technology that the United States exemplified and the ‘oppressive,’ ‘tyrannical,’ or ‘mad’ usage of technology of the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower, in talking about the technological progress of the Soviet Union, noted how ‘all this is directed by a despotism that is fully capable of the supreme folly ̶ that of unleashing these powerful forces if it should ever believe that it could ̶ without destroying itself ̶- succeed in destroying the free world’ (Eisenhower 1957; see also Truman 1951; Nixon 1968; Carter 1979).

A key aspect of this narrative is the presentation of technology as apolitical, which downplays the significant role that the U.S. government played in its pursuit. Through this framing, policy elites again distracted from the state's responsibility for the dangers and negative externalities of the technologies they pursued. President Kennedy's claim that science and technology ‘has no conscience of its own’ and that ‘whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man’ underscores this rhetoric (J. F. Kennedy 1962). This narrative implies that the morality of technology is determined by human usage only, rather than, for example, funding schemes, geopolitical agendas, and other structures that played a role in their original development.

While the Soviet technological threat was often cast in military terms, its framing as a threat to America's self-understanding, namely, its ontological security, was equally as important. As such, Soviet technological achievements were difficult to align with the steadfast belief in the superiority of the U.S. liberal-democratic system to deliver substantial technological progress. Throughout the Cold War, policy elites continued to assert that Communism was a considerable hindrance to scientific and technological development and that only the way in which the U.S. pursued technological innovation was sustainable (e.g., Carter 1980a; Reagan 1985). Notwithstanding, in the light of Soviet achievements, the superiority of the United States had to be demonstrated rather than assumed ex ante. For this reason, the United States engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the world, in which Sputnik’ and ‘Apollo’ diplomacy became important pillars to persuade others that the future lay with the Soviet Union or the United States, respectively (Wolfe 2013, 61–62; e.g., Reagan 1969). In this way, different frames of technology and technological achievements became essential to efforts to design international order according to U.S. preferences.

The Role of Technology in U.S. Relations with China

Since diplomatic relations were established between the United States and the People's Republic of China in 1979, the United States has relied on scientific and technological cooperation as a diplomatic tool (Suttmeier 2014). For instance, the U.S.–China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement of 1979 was the first treaty signed with China after normalization and was part of the U.S. strategy to encourage China's opening and reform by providing economic and technological support. Policy elites circulated a sociotechnical imaginary in which a shared future international order was stable and prosperous, as (technological) cooperation would increase mutual understanding and support China's peaceful development as a U.S. partner. This vision was epitomized when President Clinton told Chinese students it was important to ‘bring together the talents of our scientists, doctors, and engineers into a shared quest for progress’ (US-China Institute 1998). Policy elites often framed modern technologies, such as the internet, as having the potential to ‘change China’ from within, implying technology could address the security concerns with a rising China (The New York Times 2000).

While some critics have always opposed China accessing and benefiting from U.S. technologies (e.g., Gertz 2000), most commentators on Chinese technology maintained until at least the mid-2010s that China technology was far behind that of the U.S., and thus there was little to be concerned about. Brooks and Wohlforth (2015) noted that, since ‘the overall technological gap between China and the United States is so massive, the process of closing it will be lengthy’ (see also Beckley 2011; Cheung 2011; Abrami, Kirby, and McFarlan 2014). With the deterioration of U.S.–China relations during the Trump administration, however, the general discourse on technology changed significantly, and technology emerged as a major flashpoint in bilateral relations, leading to a resurgence of a sociotechnical imaginary centered on China as America's largest technological threat.

Within this sociotechnical imaginary, one framing became particularly influential, namely, the notion of injustice. The Trump administration regularly pointed to China's ‘unfair’ practices that undermined U.S. economic and national security interests. These practices include forced technology transfer, espionage, theft or the discriminating regulation of U.S. economic activity in China. Policy elites thus framed the loss of American jobs as a direct consequence of this unfair behavior that had to be rectified by forcing China to abandon these practices (Carlisle 2017; Trump 2018). The Biden administration largely echoed these sentiments, such as when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki noted that China ‘has been willing to do whatever it takes to gain a technological advantage’ (Psaki 2021). The Biden administration thus often stressed that China's behavior regarding critical technologies illustrates its disregard for international rules, which thus warrants a response from the United States and its partners (Biden, 2019, 2021b).

China's unfair behavior thus constitutes a major frame in the contemporary discourse on its technological capabilities. A central pillar of this framing is the notion that China was unable to innovate by itself due to its state-led approach to research and development, thereby limiting its technological advancements to imitation rather than genuine innovation (Ji 2023). Consequently, a logical solution to the ‘China problem’ is to cut off China's access to critical technology. In so doing, the tech war's measures can be portrayed as rational as they will prevent China from closing the technological gap with the United States, thereby ensuring the future of the United States as the world's foremost technological leader.

Notably, policy elites express considerably less admiration for China's technological advances than was ever directed towards the Soviet Union. By repeatedly emphasizing how China's technological rise has relied on unfair means, policy elites regularly imply that American technology has driven China's rise, rather than Chinese ingenuity (see White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy 2018; Brent 2019; Ji 2023). By contrast, the Soviet rise to superpower status in the 1940s and 1950s, though seen with apprehension, was nonetheless acknowledged with a sense of fearful respect. While Soviet practices were occasionally depicted as unfair, this notion only gained popularity in the 1980s and was framed as a desperate attempt by the Soviet regime to slow its impending economic decline. Against this background, the policy response of restricting technology flows appears as a familiar fallback option. In the case of the Soviet Union, restricting access to critical technologies was seen as an effective tool to contribute to its economic turmoil and eventual decline. However, as China is still rising, it is doubtful that this strategy will yield similar results.

Besides, the view that an authoritarian and repressive regime is unable to pursue technological progress independently has recently come under scrutiny, and commentators have begun to label China an ‘innovation powerhouse,’ not despite but because of its unique governance structure (Sheehan 2023; Rühlig 2023). Thus, China's technological capabilities become a key factor in the construction of China as a national security threat. Elites have also promoted sociotechnical imaginaries in which America's lacking investment in science and technology means that it will lose its technological edge and national security unless the United States invests more and unless the United States prevents China from accessing U.S. technologies (Psaki and Bernstein 2021; Biden 2021e; Cary 2023). Similar to the Cold War era, policy elites thus utilize the technological threat from China as an ordering device to justify and advance domestic policy programs in which more technological progress is necessitated due to an external threat to the political community.

Similar to the Cold War era, contemporary policy elites make the negative externalities of modern technologies tangible, geopolitical, and external to the United States by attaching them to China. For instance, the domestic debate on automation in the 1960s involved considerable uncertainty regarding its effects on the American workforce. This resembles contemporary debates on the effects of artificial intelligence (AI). By pointing to China and its approach to AI as the more significant concern, policy elites can effectively distract from possible domestic problems since the ability to counter and compete with China in this critical technology can be presented as the preeminent task. Representing such a line of argumentation, a White House press release, for instance, draws attention to China's technological capabilities as a threat alongside other issues, including high-tech companies, but one that necessitates that the U.S. advance critical technology ‘in a way that reflects our values of freedom, human rights, and respect for human dignity’ (The White House 2020).

Notably, in examples such as these, as in the past and with the Soviet Union, policy elites frame China's reliance on critical technologies such as AI as serving malign purposes, including the surveillance and suppression of ethnic minorities (see also Pence 2019; Biden 2021f; U.S. Department of Commerce 2021). Similarly, policy elites treat technology as neutral and its progress as inevitable, while the government's role is mainly to ensure its appropriate usage. That said, the government's efforts to encourage the development of AI to compete with China indicate clearly how such frames distort the fact that critical technology is not simply ‘out there’ developing independently from governments. Either way, in so doing, policy elites can frame the measures undertaken in the name of the tech war also on moral grounds, rather than only economic or national security interests. Considering that acquiring U.S. technologies played a key role in advancing Chinese capabilities in the first place, it is thus the United States’ moral responsibility to pursue the tech war (e.g., The White House 2021).

At the heart of these framing efforts are sociotechnical imaginaries in which U.S. policy elites paint a dystopian near-future scenario in which China's ‘technology-enabled authoritarianism’ might ‘own’ the future as it will be able to dictate international order and the rules of critical technologies (The White House 2020; Biden 2021e, 2021b). To avert such a future requires the United States’ political community to come together, collaborate with its international partners, and share in a joint vision of the future in which China's access to critical technologies, and thus technology-enabled authoritarianism, is curbed. In this sociotechnical imaginary, the international society's relationship to technology is centered around values such as freedom, prosperity, and human rights. Insofar as China's rise unsettles the international order, these depictions of the future need to be seen as policy elites’ attempts to preserve an idealized version of the current international order and America's leading role in it.

While there are thus important similarities in terms of the role of technology in U.S.-Soviet and U.S.–China relations, there are also some subtle and important differences. For one, while both the Soviet Union and China are regularly framed as the U.S.’ technologically threatening other, arguably, the Soviet threat was experienced as a threat to the immediate security of the United States, rather than the future, whereas the China discourse is more focused on averting an undesirable possible future. Or put differently, the securitization of China's technological capabilities has not yet fully crystallized, and critics of the tech war and the broader direction of U.S. China policy continues to challenge the government's narrative (e.g., The Washington Post 2019). Particularly since the public has only in recent years started to consider China as a security threat (Lam and Silver 2023), policy elites can use broader anxieties surrounding critical technology and the tech war at large as a useful framing device to justify U.S. China policy.

In this context, the most striking element of the contemporary U.S. technology discourse emerges, which is the pervasive role of Cold War language that permeates practically all aspects of the technology discourse. Counter to official claims that the United States is not seeking a Cold War with China (e.g., The White House 2023), Cold War language permeates the contemporary discourse on the tech war with China, and policy elites often rely on familiar events and language from the Cold War era to justify their (technology) policies. For instance, the Trump presidency put space exploration back onto the political agenda when it pledged to ‘establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars’ (NASA 2017). While doing so is justified by citing China's militarization of space (Pence 2017), these efforts also evoke nostalgia for a past era when space exploration united the nation in a common quest and sense of achievement and when life generally was ordered more straightforwardly under the national interest.

Since the mid-2010s, policy elites have also regularly declared that America finds itself in a ‘Sputnik moment,’ i.e., a sudden reckoning with the technological capabilities of its competitor. This is epitomized by Mark Warner's words as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee that ‘our country is facing a new Sputnik moment where we must take steps to remain competitive, especially in technology, and find better ways to strengthen our defenses against the CCP's myriad intelligence, tech acquisition, and foreign influence operations (U.S. Congress Senate 2021). By employing Cold War rhetoric, policy elites not only emphasize China's technological threat but also frame it in familiar terms, invoking the ‘Sputnik moment’ to elicit a collective memory that combines despair and hope: While the Soviet threat was existential, the United States won the Cold War because it came together as one political community united by a shared quest for national security. In this way, policy elites advance sociotechnical imaginaries that intertwine the past with the present and are focused on a future vision that hinges on the adequacy of the U.S.’ response to China's technological challenge.

At other times, policy elites draw examples from the Cold War era to justify spending proposals. In advertising his ‘American jobs plan,’ Biden reminds his audience how NASA's existence also advanced civilian technology and how ‘pushing the frontiers led to big benefits back home’ (Biden 2021d). Indeed, similar to how the Soviet threat became an overarching reason for crafting a ‘Cold War consensus,’ referring to the threat emanating from China, particularly in terms of its technological prowess, is often used as a justification to construct a domestic consensus that attempts to override other concerns.

Finally, the ideologization of technology has become a particularly well-established element of the tech war discourse. The original Cold War was for many a conflict between democracy and communism, with technological progress an important marker of the superiority of either system. As seen in the previous section, the Soviet Union's achievements despite its despotic system were a constant source of anxiety for American policy elites throughout the Cold War. In the present-day conflict, technology is also increasingly framed and read through an ideological lens, thus tapping into a familiar sense of ontological insecurity. As such, the United States and its partners are said to stand for liberal democracy, capitalism, and the free market, with Silicon Valley as the epitome of this, contrasting with China's state-led approach to technological development.

Over time, this juxtaposition has centered on the competition between democracy versus authoritarianism and which of the two systems can lead to better, safer, and fairer technological progress, both domestically and internationally. As such, Biden has argued that it is ‘clear, absolutely clear […] that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the twenty-first century and autocracies’ (Biden 2021c). For this reason, technology, its usage, and regulation must reflect democratic values (Biden 2019, 2021b), or be used to defend democratic values (Buttigeg 2019). Indeed, precisely because technological change is so rapid, it is crucial to demonstrate to the world that autocracy is not the future and that democracies can ‘get their act together’ (Biden 2021g). After all, it is about who will win the technological competition for the future (Psaki and Bernstein 2021; Biden 2021a). Here, the ideologization of technology taken together with the prevalent Cold War lens serves to create a sense of nostalgia, in which the risks inherent in technologies, such as AI, can be associated with China and its malign usage of technology. This means that the political community has to come together to persist, lest a dystopian future of an ‘AI-enabled authoritarian superpower’ (Allen 2024) unfold.

Conclusion

This article has examined the unfolding U.S.–China tech war by relying on the insights of STS and CSS and, in particular, the analytical lens of sociotechnical imaginaries. By comparing the discourse on technology throughout the historical Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States and the contemporary conflict, the article has made several important contributions to understanding the role of technology in great power politics. First, the article has brought STS and CSS insights on technology to the study of great power relations. Rather than treating technology as one among many arenas of competition between great powers, the article has demonstrated that technology serves as a mediator between political and social interactions in which hopes and anxieties about the present and future play out and in which political actors actively try to construct or reaffirm a political community (including its past and future) through technology and vis-à-vis the other great power. Through the prism of sociotechnical imaginaries, it is possible to see how a political community's struggles with ever-advancing technologies and their role in society play a key role in great power politics, which has hitherto gone unrecognized.

Beyond these immediate concerns, the article has also drawn attention to the importance of historical analogies in contemporary politics by examining the ‘new Cold War’ discourse as a crucial element of the tech war. For one, the paper has focused on the similarities and differences of both Cold Wars in terms of the role of technology in the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, respectively. The most salient of these similarities are: The difficulty to acknowledge a technologically well-versed rival whose system differs from the American way of life; the geopoliticization of technology that concretizes the dangers associated with modern technologies as represented only by the geopolitical Other; the strengthening of political identity through distinguishing the U.S.’ benign usage of technology vis-à-vis the malicious usage of its Other; and the politicization of technological rivalry to order domestic and international society around a sociotechnical imaginary that warrants continuous technological innovation.

In terms of notable differences, first, U.S. discourse on China's technological capabilities emphasizes that China's emergence as a technological threat was obtained through illicit means, which implies that its status and even presence as a great power are fundamentally unfair. While beyond the scope of this article, it would be interesting to draw from the vibrant research on recognition and status in IR to further investigate the effects thereof on U.S.–China relations and beyond (e.g., Paul, Larson, and Wohlforth 2014). Second, while the Cold War rhetoric characteristic of contemporary U.S. discourse on China's technological capabilities is novel, it plays a crucial role as it provides a rich tapestry of memories, events, and rhetoric that policy elites have used to paint sociotechnical imaginaries that contrast a desirable future with undesirable alternatives. Effectively, this narrows the range of conceivable political action lest the United States and its allies are willing to face a future that China dictates through its dangerous usage of modern technologies.

Short-term, there are several conceivable advantages that such sociotechnical imaginaries might bring. For one, appealing to a particular representation of the past as dangerous but ultimately well-managed is likely to resonate well with other elites and, in particular, the public, much of which is still familiar with the Cold War era. This can increase support for the tech war and make economic disadvantages for companies and consumers more acceptable. Moreover, framing a geopolitical threat powered through its technological capabilities underscores the need for a domestic consensus concerning America and its role in the world, which is likely to have broad appeal, particularly given the domestic rift between political positions in the United States. However, there are also notable dangers from such a framing, such as the possibility of escalating tensions or underestimating technological capabilities as they are seen through a Cold War lens and, finally, the allocation of resources to costly technological prestige projects with little immediate benefit for the people.

Ultimately, the analysis of this article suggests that the notion of the United States and China as engaged in a ‘new Cold War’ has much to do with the way in which policy elites are able to use the familiarity of the Cold War analogy to strengthen sociotechnical imaginaries of domestic and international order. As such, it begs the question whether the ‘new Cold War’ is by design rather than default.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments, as well as the participants of the workshop on the U.S.–China tech war in Odense in May 2023, especially Pak K. Lee, Ingvild Bode, and Cecila Ducci. Additionally, I am grateful to Karl Gustafsson and Nina Krickel-Choi for their detailed comments, as well as the seminar participants of Stockholm University's Department of Economic History and International Relations.

Funder Information

This article has received funding from the Swedish Research Council (2021-06652).

Footnotes

References