“For decades, both adversaries and allies of Washington have spied on American companies to gain insights into innovation in the United States,” writes David Cohen in a new Foreign Affairs essay. “Yet amid this brazen robbery,” Washington has long refrained from responding in kind.
It is time for the United States to start allowing its intelligence agencies to collect commercial secrets from foreign companies and hand that information over to U.S. firms, Cohen argues. More than ever, national security depends on private-sector innovations, including in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering. “Although economic espionage is not without risk,” Cohen contends, “unilaterally renouncing the practice in the current global environment is far more dangerous.”
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