Washington has spent three decades lecturing the world about intellectual property protection. Now it looks as if the United States wants to start stealing economic secrets from China and elsewhere. 

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon is standing up an intelligence unit geared toward the acquisition of economic secrets from foreign companies to benefit American companies. Although details remain hazy, the unit is expected to use operatives disguised as private business persons in order to infiltrate foreign companies and appropriate their commercial secrets. This shift was presaged in a Foreign Affairs article by David Cohen, former deputy director of the CIA. 

This represents a significant, if not necessarily unwarranted, change in U.S. commercial espionage policy. In its recent history the United States has refrained from direct theft of economic secrets. During the Obama administration the United States attempted to establish norms of commercial espionage that rejected thefts of intellectual property that would award private firms with stolen secrets. The theft of information in order to improve the strategic position of the U.S. was fine; handing stolen goods to an American firm was across the line. This was in accord with a broader U.S. diplomatic effort to improve intellectual property protection across the world.

That the Trump administration would reject such norm-building efforts is unsurprising. The administration has made it clear that it does not believe that anything approaching a “fair” system of global trade exists; the United States has leverage over its trading partners and should use that leverage in order to generate favorable trade arrangements. It is also clear that while Chinese trade policy and practice has become more complex, especially with respect to intellectual property protection, Beijing never accepted anti-espionage norms. China would of course be a primary target for such espionage, especially in fields such as artificial intelligence.

But the effort also suggests that the Pentagon has no confidence that U.S. firms will remain ahead of Chinese and other foreign firms on the innovation curve. The Obama administration’s policy reflected the convenient reality that U.S. companies were, by and large, well ahead of most of their international competitors. Playing “fair” thus benefitted the United States more than it benefitted anyone else. The Pentagon now believes (probably correctly) that America’s technological advantage is not as secure as it would like. 

While aggressive industrial espionage is obviously in contrast with some of the norms of the liberal international order, it is not exactly unprecedented for liberal democratic states to play hardball on technology theft. France, for example, has long conducted espionage to benefit French firms, to the endless frustration of French partners. South Korea and Japan have long made light technology appropriation a key part of their industrial strategies. And at its inception, even the United States undertook aggressive steps to steal foreign intellectual property, a practice that paused only when the US achieved a dominant technological position. 

In any eventuality, this change in U.S. espionage policy, however justified or inevitable it might be, represents a major shift in how the United States has thought about intellectual property for the last three decades. Moreover, given the technological challenge that China represents to the United States, it seems unlikely that a future administration will reverse this effort.