US-UK S&T partnerships and 'technological sovereignty'

The UK and US have announced a 'strengthened' S&T partnership, but what does this mean?

I was asked by Research Fortnight to comment on the announcement by Johnson and Biden of a 'strengthened' US-UK S&T partnership as part of their 'new Atlantic Charter'. As usual I offered more comments than they could use in their article so here is a quick post based on what I said in case anyone is interested.

Bilateral science co-operation agreements are a common output from visits and summits – because they are the easiest, least controversial thing to agree and because they typically don’t cost anything. And most bilateral agreements are signed with much pomp and fanfare but then just languish in the filing cabinet. Most scientific co-operation is bottom-up, and the US is the largest single collaborator for UK-based researchers as measured by international co-publications, this without much assistance from policy initiatives. 

There are of course always exceptions to prove this rule – the Human Genome Project was a joint US-UK initiative, for instance (though you wouldn't know it from the NIH website). The Biden-Johnson statement mentions quantum and perhaps there will be a major programme launched there. 

In the context of the new Atlantic Charter, it is also worth noting that there’s long been a (modest) programme of scientific co-operation between NATO member countries, and NATO also has its own scientific advice capabilities.

But in case anyone is interpreting this US-UK S&T partnership as proof of some special status for the UK I would just point to reports that the US is also about to announce a broadly similar sounding (but rather more grandly titled) technology collaboration with the EU. As with the UK this will build on existing strong bottom-up links. The US-UK announcement from Cornwall has more direct emphasis on security and defence than the reporting of the US-EU discussions, but of course EU member states co-operate with the UK and US on defence technologies as well.

Why then should we take these agreements seriously? Perhaps because of the context: question marks about the impacts of global free trading (which tends to lead to different industrial and technological specialisms in different places) on 'technological sovereignty' and the security/resilience of supply chains, and in particular growing distrust regarding China’s S&T prowess and ambitions. It could be that either or both of these agreements will just go in the filing cabinet, but it may also signal a real interest in rethinking global supply chain and technological independencies.

The danger, however, is that politicians and policy makers underestimate the extent of these interdependencies. We have a lot to lose from a new science cold war with China (as indeed would China). And I think scientists have a special responsibility here - for all the talk of 'science diplomacy' as bridging divides between people, when scientists lobby governments for money they feel they have to do it in nationalistic terms. Research is presented as a zero-sum competition between nations. If the scientific communities in the US, EU and UK continue to make arguments in these zero-sum terms perhaps they shouldn't be surprised when more and more barriers are erected between them and their counterparts in China, making collaboration and exchange of knowledge more difficult. But China is now a such a huge part of the leading edge of world science and technology that it is hard to see how hard barriers to collaboration can do anything other than make us all much poorer.

Edited 14 June 2021 at 12.20 to add a hyperlink to this Nature news article.