On April 11, Chertoff Group Executive Chairman and Co-Founder Michael Chertoff delivered remarks on U.S. tech strategy and priorities amid growing competition from China at an event hosted by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. He touched on topics including technology innovation and artificial intelligence (AI), access to rare earth minerals for tech development, the use of digital assets and the impact of a strong supply chain. Secretary Chertoff authored the forward to an April 2025 New Line Institute report, Future Proofing U.S. Technology: Strategic Priorities Amid Chinese Tech Advancement. A video recording of his presentation and the full program can be found on C-SPAN.
Michael Chertoff: Well, I’m delighted to be here. I had the opportunity, I was pleased to do so, to write a very brief forward for this report, and it is very topical, particularly at this moment. When I started out dealing with issues in security, there was a tendency to have a very siloed approach in the U.S. there was national security, which was guns and bombs and missiles, and then there was the economic sphere, which was the free market, let innovation take over, let the market operate, and the two were viewed as being separate and distinct areas of operation.
What we lacked was a strategic vision of how these are really dimensions of the same set of problems, which is, how do we protect our countries and the countries of our allies?
We learned some lessons in the last few years about that fragmented approach. Interestingly, one lesson came from Covid. Because Covid interrupted and disrupted supply chains, and we began to see the security effects of that across a whole range of activities that were critical to the United States and like-minded countries.
And that got us to begin to look more strategically at the issue, how do you integrate all of the dimensions of security, both the obvious ones and the less obvious ones, to make sure we are producing the best result for preserving and protecting the values and the activities of citizens of this country. Interestingly, China has, for a long time, been taking that integrated approach, one that was more strategic, not hands-off with respect to the economy, but rather viewing the economy as a dimension of national security.
And I remember telling people a few years ago, that I was beginning to realize that while we were playing checkers, the Chinese were playing go, and we needed to up our game and at least get to chess, if we don’t go further than that. And I’m pleased to say that this report is a real big step in terms of explaining what we need to do in order to integrate things. There are several dimensions to this, which are getting careful consideration here.
First is recognizing that a critical element of our national and economic security is the supply chains. We talk about putting data in the cloud, for the cloud is not just wisps of moisture up in the air, it is hardware and it is software. A lot of that hardware requires that we get access to rare earth and minerals and are able to integrate them with chip manufacturers into a hardware platform for these kinds of online activities. How do you get the rare earths and the minerals?
Again, for years, the Chinese with the belt and road initiative has been out in the southern hemisphere, trading their economic assistance for being able to access and even monopolize the critical resources that we need to build this hardware.
We’ve begun to realize in the last few years, you have to get in the game. You have to be part of that chain. Beginning to recognize that while we want to provide security assistance to allies and friendly nations around the world, we also want to make sure they are serving our needs, to make sure we have the rare earths and minerals that we need in order to foster our technology.
As we said a moment ago, innovation has been a critical element of the way we develop our technology, both military and nonmilitary. Here again, we need to consider other values that have to be balanced and considered, because if you have unrestrained innovation, where, for example, your personal data can be used at will in order to influence or even manipulate you, that becomes problematic.
So there needs to be, again, some guardrails about the way innovation produces results, to make sure we don’t get unintended consequences that become dangerous and even undermine our democracy and undermine our safety.
Now we are getting into some new technologies that we use to defend ourselves. for example, cryptography, the ability to shelter our written words for even our speech from somebody hacking and getting a hold of that. That has been a positive step forward.
But we are entering the age of quantum. Quantum is now raising serious questions about whether cryptography will be undermined. So how do we develop quantum? What are the rules of the road in using quantum? How do we build capabilities, perhaps use quantum as an encryption tool and not merely as a decryption tool?
These are matters that will require a unified approach. And a thought process that shares the perspectives of policy makers along with technology and capabilities of the scientific community.
We are also looking, in a similar vein, at alternative payment manners. We used to think about the dollar as the backbone currency. Not so much anymore. Everything is secured by gold, but now we are getting into bitcoin and other kinds of graphic currencies, and those may become the emerging ways of the future, how we do global exchange rates and finance.
Again, we need to understand, what are the risks? What are the advantages? What is the advantage that western nations have in using this?
And what, as China is beginning to do, is this a threat to our payment system? Because China will use cryptographic and cryptocurrency as an alternative payment, which does give us a lot of the international domain.
Finally, artificial intelligence. This is a very interesting and provocative area. We are hearing a lot of discussion about it. most people, they are thinking about it in terms of ChatGPT, you can get AI to write your term paper for you or something of that sense, but it will actually be much more than that.
It will be something that can be a powerful tool for persuasion. It can be a way to undermine, for example, our cybersecurity and our physical security, but it can also be a way to enhance it.
One of the examples, if you look at securing your border, drugs or human smuggling, one thing AI will allow you to do, going forward, is to analyze the travel patterns and similar communication patterns of freight companies in the both maritime and land companies, to analyze those which, based on their patterns, if there’s a higher risk of smuggling something illegal. And then that allows the law enforcement community to focus on those higher risk freight and similar companies that are more likely to be smuggling, rather than try to do it randomly or slowing up the process by looking into everybody’s cargo.
So all of these tools and technologies have some real positive values that can enhance our security as well as our economic well-being. but they also have risks. And that is why this project, looks specifically at developing technological awareness on the part of policymakers. You can debate about policy, but it should be an informed debate, and this kind of a report focuses the policymakers and their aides and other counselors that they rely upon on the categories of issues that we need to be able to look at and consider as they develop policies for the next decade. So, you will find it compelling reading. It is a great project, and I’m delighted to endorse it. Thank you.
Michael Chertoff served as the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary from 2005-2009. He served as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 2003-2005. He is co-founder and executive chairman of The Chertoff Group
