Why should the US decide who can have certain tech?

Restrictions on Iranian and Chinese technology are about preserving US geopolitical power

Nemik talking about the problems with Imperial tech. Photo: Disney/Andor

On Saturday night, the United States rained bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities half a world away, in violation of international law. As it was happening, I was safely at home in Canada rewatching the first season of Andor. In fact, I only saw the news while taking a break between episodes.

The original trilogy of the franchise took inspiration from the Vietnam War, with the Empire modeled after the United States and the rebels on the Viet Cong. The specific series of episodes I was watching that evening told the story of the raid on Aldhani, a remote Imperial garrison. One of the small group tasked to break in is a young and deeply ideologically committed rebel called Nemik, who is in the process of writing his own manifesto.

At one point, not long before they set off, he pulls out a dated navigational unit, prompting a short discussion with the titular character on the political nature of technology. “We've grown reliant on Imperial tech, and we've made ourselves vulnerable,” Nemik explains. “There's a growing list of things we've known and forgotten, things they've pushed us to forget. Things like freedom.”

It’s easy to see this statement in a libertarian manner; it would certainly fit in with some of the mutterings of cyberlibertarians over the years: that the path to liberation is individuals controlling their own technology. Yet, it particularly resonated with me on Saturday evening because it helped reinforce something I had already been thinking about in recent weeks, particularly in light of aggressive actions of the United States and Israel against Iran.

The tech industry likes us to believe that technology is neutral — how it’s wielded by different forces in society is what matters. But the reality is that most technologies are deeply political and help to reinforce particular power structures. It’s precisely why technology feels increasingly at the center of geopolitical fights — not just in the case of Iran’s nuclear program, but about China’s access to particular technologies and the growing concern about dependence on US across much of the world.

Who gets access to certain technologies? Who gets to make those decisions? Why are some technologies allowed or even encouraged to spread, while others must be tightly restricted? These are all deeply political questions, and it seems quite clear the United States, and to a lesser degree Israel and its Western allies, feel they’re the ones that should be making those decisions for everyone else. But why should they have certain technologies, when other countries and people should not?

Iran’s contested nuclear program

There are many issues at play when it comes to the relationship between the West and Iran, not to mention a very long history that includes the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian prime minister in 1953 by the CIA and British intelligence followed by decades of brutal Western-backed dictatorship under the Shah. But the question of its nuclear program is, in part, a technology debate.

Iran wants access to nuclear technology, which entails a nuclear power generation, but also the possibility of one day developing nuclear weapons — something it claims not to be interested in doing. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed since 1992 that Iran is on the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon, which helped spur the ongoing Western hysteria around the Iranian nuclear program. He sounds a bit like Elon Musk claiming self-driving cars are always just a year or two away.

Yet, for all those decades, Iran has not developed a nuclear weapon. In 2015, it agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and was in compliance until the United States — not Iran — withdrew from it. More recently, it sought a new deal in exchange for sanctions relief, and was at the bargaining table to achieve just that — until Israel attempted to kill its chief negotiator and convinced the United States to shift its demands to the elimination of Iran’s entire nuclear program, not just limitations that would stop it from weaponization.

Reclaiming sovereignty in the digital age

Despite proving itself willing to abide by international rules and to allow inspections of its nuclear sites, Israel and the United States remain determined to deny Iran access to this specific technology — despite Iran being a sovereign country that, theoretically, should be able to decide which energy technologies it wants to use to power its country. Those same standards are not applied to Israel itself, which has had nuclear weapons for decades, but does not allow inspections and has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory.

There is a not just a clear double standard here, but it serves as a good example of how technology and power are intimately intertwined. The United States and Israel are flexing their power to try to deny Iran access to a technology they feel will allow it to increase its relative position, and make it more difficult for Western countries to push it around in the future. For example, there has been plenty of discussion in recent years of the consequences of Ukraine’s agreement to give up its nuclear weapons in 1994, and how that likely made it possible for Russia’s invasion in 2022.

The United States and Israel do not want Iran to reach a place where it cannot be so easily bombed and interfered with, because its rulers are not geopolitically or ideologically aligned with the Western project. Israel, on the other hand, does not have to follow the same rules around nuclear technology because it is closely aligned with the United States. That’s despite the fact it regularly bombs and attacks its neighbors, steals their territory, and is in the process of carrying out a genocide in Gaza. As this whole back and forth with Iran has been playing out, daily reports have been published about the number of Gazans killed by Israeli troops for the terrible crime of seeking food. Yet Western leaders position Iran as the ultimate evil and rogue power in the region.

China’s technological advance

There’s something deeper here, beyond just what’s playing out in the Middle East around nuclear technology, and this is where I want to pull in the earlier Star Wars quote around the reliance on Imperial technology again. It increasingly stands out to me how the United States has wanted some technologies to spread while others must be restricted, particularly around digital technology. For me, this goes back to the very early days of the internet.

In 1989, Al Gore that the US Senate that “the nation which most completely assimilates high-performance computing into its economy will very likely emerge as the dominant intellectual, economic, and technological force in the next century.” The United States clearly saw that the spread of its technologies, and the creation of dependence on them, was going to be in its economic and geopolitical interest. In The Promise of Access, Daniel Greene explains that part of that also entailed an effort to gain influence in post-Soviet states.

We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry

When the internet was privatized in 1995, it was accompanied by a narrative that countries needed to leave digital technology to the private sector and not place limitations on foreign companies operating in their markets. As a result, US tech companies, with easier access to capital and often a head start on foreign firms, were able to dominate, buy up competitors, and cement their global power. But the United States benefited from that too — not just economically, but politically, as well.

Those tech companies built a business model that relied on mass surveillance, which was reframed as data collection to provide a more personalized experience. In the process, they built out a more extensive surveillance apparatus than any government could have previously imagined. As we learned from the Snowden leaks, the US government took full advantage of that network, embedding itself in it to spy on foreign governments and their citizens. It also used social media platforms for its geopolitical ends for many years, working with dominant players and even occasionally deploying its own platforms to interfere in domestic politics, as it did in Cuba for a time.

But in recent years, that’s begun to change. The United States threatened to ban TikTok and other Chinese platforms. It prohibited Huawei technology from its telecom network and pressured allies to do the same. It restricted advanced semiconductor exports not just to China, but briefly to many different parts of the world, even angering some of its allies. The shift from pushing for markets to be fully open to foreign tech companies to placing growing barriers on its own is a big reversal, but it happened for a very obvious reason.

In the past, the United States and to a lesser degree its allies were technologically dominant, but now Chinese companies are catching up and have become serious competitors. As a result, the notion that countries should remove their barriers to foreign companies is being reversed, starting in the United States itself, because US and some other Western companies are no longer the only ones moving into markets around the world. Now it’s Chinese companies going in the other direction, and that’s something the United States will not and cannot allow.

The TikTok ban is all about preserving US power

It’s certainly an economic decision, but it’s about far more than that too. The United States claims Chinese technology must be restricted and efforts must be taken to hamper its further development. Sometimes, it’s even framed as an existential question: will the democratic technology of the United States keep its position or will China’s authoritarian tech push it aside? It’s a very convenient framing for the United States, but also a deceptive one, given the country has no qualms in sharing that technology with countries like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, which will gladly use it to oppress their citizens.

In a recent article about Huawei, Yale Law School fellow Yangyang Cheng made a striking comment on the reality of US claims about the threat the Chinese company posed. “As politicians and pundits in the US expounded on how Beijing might weaponize Huawei’s infrastructure, the allegations were more than Cold-War paranoia or theoretical projections,” she wrote. “They reflected capabilities Washington already possessed and wished to monopolize.” At the end of the day, this is about power more than anything else, and ensuring a country like China does not gain the capabilities we know the United States already holds from the Snowden revelations.

The need to challenge US tech

The global rollout of US digital technology and the platforms we all depend on gave the United States a significant degree of power — a fact many countries are belatedly coming to terms with. After Microsoft cut off the email account of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court following a vote in the US Congress to sanction him for the Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and a former Israeli defense minister, European officials were scrambling as they came to terms with how vulnerable the digital systems they rely on truly are. Donald Trump can cut off their access to cloud services and other key infrastructure at a moment’s notice.

Thinking back to Nemik’s comment, we could say there has been a decades-long project to make us reliant on Imperial tech — not in a forceful way, but to make it seem convenient and liberatory even as it enhanced the geopolitical power of the United States and its control over our lives, wherever we might be in the world. That’s becoming even clearer today, as Silicon Valley throws off its old libertarian narratives and embraces the MAGA movement and security state. Just last week, the US Army named four tech executives lieutenant colonels, including Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar. He wrote his own manifesto last year, calling for the tech industry to defend “Pax Americana” and to effectively become the new military-industrial complex.

The United States has gone rogue. There must be consequences.

Now more than ever, we need to challenge the domination of US tech and the power it gives an increasingly belligerent United States. That also requires opening our eyes to the ways it wields technology and the power derived from it in the global system, to reinforce its own authority while limiting the ability of other countries to defend themselves or advocate for their own interests. When Europe tries to make US tech companies align with local standards or Brazil expects them to comply with legal orders, they’re met with pressure from a US government that wants to ensure its companies can act with impunity.

This isn’t an argument for Iran to have a nuclear weapon or for Chinese tech companies to simply usurp Silicon Valley. It’s a call to recognize how technology and power are intimately linked, and how the United States uses its technological dominance to maintain its power and ensure it can push around countries and people that are technologically inferior.

In this light, digital and technological sovereignty are essential for countries to gain control over their destinies. We need to escape our reliance on US tech, not just so some other country can try to step into that position, but to fundamentally alter that relationship — to develop better structures for technological governance and the sharing of technological advances. I feel it’s important to believe a better world is possible, just as do the fictional rebels breaking into Aldhani, but that first requires challenging the Imperial power that seeks to deny us the possibility of freedom.