Third, embrace nuclear power as a means to provide clean energy, potable water, and development to Africa. Before this century’s end, Africa will become home to the world’s most populous cities. Lagos, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam will each count more than 70-million inhabitants. Only nuclear power can provide the energy for such concentrated populations. China and Russia now dominate in its provision. With each plant, they create strategic redoubts, which coupled with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, will bleed Africa of its mineral riches in a new imperialism. To counter China and Russia, President Biden should support an energy consortium composed of America and its allies, to offer non-exploitative energy alternatives. Fourth, intellectual property theft by China must be stopped. President Obama’s former director of National Intelligence documented China’s theft of intellectual property in a groundbreaking 2013 report. The situation has continued to degrade. America, the NATO nations, and our Indo-Pacific allies must collect and disseminate industry-specific data across borders to stem Chinese theft. Counterfeit parts, including software, which may compromise military systems, must be rooted out through joint efforts, which should include tagging to ensure authenticity. Fifth, the American education system must be revamped, with emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). American universities cannot continue as China’s preferred graduate schools. Grades K─12 must expand online education. The Department of Education must overhaul teaching methods. Technology exists to map each student’s optimum mode of learning, enabling the mastery of technical subjects.

The People’s Republic of China touts the superiority of its system. To China, America’s freedoms manifest weakness. China believes it is the stronger power, for communism allows no dissension. This assertion seems almost plausible given our nation’s riots and assaults against the White House and Capitol. However, if important policies persist between administrations that detest each other, such continuity proves that America possesses the more resilient political system. Our national policies toward China rank as the most important domain in which continuity between administrations is a necessity. The Biden administration will demonstrate great sagacity if it builds upon the prior administration’s policies in five areas. First, America’s military power should be fortified. The Biden administration must continue freedom of navigation challenges, opposing China’s strategy of sea denial. Demonstrating increased emphasis on alliances, our Navy should be joined by ships representing Japan and Australia. Support for Taiwan’s security is paramount. The world cannot afford China’s becoming a global hegemon, which would swallow Taiwan as it did Hong Kong. Second, build upon the Obama administration’s “2015 Framework for the U.S. ─ India Defense.” Expand the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the United States, Australia, Japan and India, with the intent of initiating talks to create a NATO-like organization for the Indo-Pacific region. India should become America’s strategic partner, for the world’s largest democracy will soon surpass China in population and economic dynamism ─ attributes necessary to constrain China’s bellicosity.

North Korea has once again greeted new American leadership with the rattling of the saber. Rather than allow the unsettling sound to reverberate unanswered, a more productive course would be to reaffirm progress toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula made during the previous administration, and to ask the North to do the same. During President Biden’s brief tenure, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has already ignored a perfunctory entreaty for the resumption of diplomatic contacts, and Mr. Kim’s powerful sister has blistered the air with rebuke of routine U.S.-South Korean military exercises. More ominously, the North Korean dictator has drawn international concern by firing short-range missiles into the western sea, followed by the launch of what defense analysts believe were two advanced ballistic missiles. Mr. Biden’s response was to point out, half-heartedly, that the tests violated a United Nations resolution. It was less than two years ago that President Trump arrived at the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas and took an unprecedented step over the demarcation line to greet North Korea’s young ruler. The act triggered a glimmer of hope that negotiations faltering over the North’s demand for economic sanctions relief would resume. With U.S. regime change in the wind, Mr. Kim lost interest. Mr. Biden should launch a message to his North Korean counterpart reaffirming American devotion to those honorable goals and requesting that he do likewise. There is no naivete in Mr. Biden opting to build upon his predecessor’s work and championing a series of verifiable measures that step down U.S. economic sanctions and North Korean nuclear activity in unison.

America’s college campuses, already corrupted in recent decades by far left Marxist-loving professors bent on reliving their 1960s-style protest years, have now, apparently, obviously, become even more dangerous places for the youth of the country. “Harvard leads U.S. colleges that received $1 billion from China,” The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in February. Roughly 115 colleges in the United States have taken money from mainland China over the last few years, Bloomberg found. Not only is China’s government slipping money into the hands of college administrators across America. But China’s government is also sending a growing number of their youth to attend American colleges. “The number of Chinese students at U.S. colleges has almost tripled over a decade,” The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote. “China accounts for one-third of the 1.1 million foreign students.” So what? These foreign students form a bridge between America and China - and given the stark differences between governments, the inherent dangers of bridging a nation of individualism with a nation of collectivism cannot be dismissed. Or ignored. It’s money plus manpower - communist money plus communist manpower - seeping and soaking into America’s college campuses. The national security risks are both real and substantial. China is pressing forth its Chinese influences into American society and politics. “Chinese Values Are Changing America,” The Atlantic wrote, back in October of 2019. Yes, indeed. And not in ways that definitively favor the American way, either. If U.S. youth are trained in the communist way, there’s really no effective way to combat the communism in the coming years.

Detroit’s answer to the larger problem of too many employees: Automation. Robots don’t call in sick or file grievances. The luddite United Auto Workers (UAW) - a union representing line employees in the car manufacturing plants - didn’t rollover when confronted with the job security threat. In exchange for expanding automation into the facilities, company executives agreed to refrain from laying workers off. Surplus employees were paid handsomely to show up but not to work. Companies were playing an expensive transitional long game waiting for these no longer necessary employees to quit or retire. Fast forward to 2021 and a $15 minimum wage is threatening to accelerate worker replacement in service industries. In a 2017 study, economists from the London School of Economics and University of California were able to specifically tie minimum wage hikes to increased automation and worker replacement. Big labor still fumes about the threat “unbridled” automation poses to workers, but emphasizes the virtues of raising the wage floor in the same breath. You can’t have it both ways when the price-sensitive consumer has choices. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour while also gutting the tipping system is generally a bad idea. And it should be a nonstarter amid a pandemic that has the service industry on the ropes. Hopefully, legislators will do a deeper dive into the economics behind their perceived free-lunch pay raise. Otherwise, when you find more self-service systems at a favorite restaurant or retail store, you’ll know you’re happily performing a job previously held by someone else.

The damage of a monster jump in labor costs is predictable in any industry. It accelerates the arrival of what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” The creative part is the introduction of self-service. I’ve chronicled the deep flaws associated with minimum wage hikes in these pages before. The consequences are well documented. Much to the chagrin of labor activists, a 2021 review of the academic literature dating back roughly 30 years consistently finds most economists connect the dots between big wage increases and fewer entry level jobs. One analysis released last month finds a federal $15 minimum wage in conjunction with eliminating the wage credit for tip income will add an additional $99 billion in payroll liabilities to company balance sheets. That’s not a cost figure you adjust for with minor operational tweaks. If greater productivity is needed to offset dramatically higher labor costs, it comes at the expense of current employees and future hiring. Some form of automation and self-service designs become the name of the game. Self-order kiosks at McDonald’s or self-service checkouts at CVS are evidence of the broader developments in worker replacement. The U.S. automation process largely began during the aftermath of World War II in the automobile and steel industries. Japan and Germany were decimated during the war and rebuilt their factories using the latest technology - allowing them to build automobiles at a fraction of the Detroit cost. U.S. car manufacturers were at a competitive disadvantage. They had to deal with fragmented job descriptions (over 10 categories of electricians) for craft workers in union contracts.

America’s high-tech colossi dominate the globe: Amazon, Uber, Apple, Microsoft, Lyft, Intel, Facebook, Google, Instagram, eBay, Twitter and others were all made in America. Europe’s tech companies, by contrast, are puny. Only Spotify, a Swedish music-streaming app, has made much of splash globally. The reasons for America’s tech dominance are hardly secrets ― a healthy respect and appreciation of entrepreneurship, higher education that attracts students from all over the world, and abundant access to venture capital reserves. Above all, the political culture, most of the time, promotes business rather than punishes it. It’s different in the Old World. Authorities there tend to see successful businesses as a threat, a problem to be tamed, or at the very least sources of revenue to be tapped. More so if those businesses are native to America. The European Union levied a multibillion-dollar fine against California-based Google. The EU ordered Google to pony up 4.34 billion Euros, about $5.1 billion at current exchange rates. The $5.1 billion fine against Google is the largest EU fine so far. The EU accuses Google of unfairly exploiting its ownership of the Android operating system for smartphones in a way that hampers competition with other search engines. The economics are simple: European firms have fallen behind their American counterparts to the point that not one European firm appears in the list of top 20 internet companies ranked by market capitalization. Any aggressive approach toward antitrust enforcement of mobile or online business practices will, not-so-coincidentally, handicap Silicon Valley companies to the advantage of smaller European rivals.

For the first time in their careers, many teachers and professors are careful not to go off-topic and rant to their high school and college students. Their video streams are not only seen by captive classroom audiences but occasionally peeked in on by the parents and taxpayers who pay their salaries. This is the first autumn in memory that a huge percentage of college students are staying home. And no one is sure of the ensuing consequences. With college revenues dropping, will ambitious promises to hire more diversity administrators, build more self-segregated racial theme houses and increase campus social services be seen as just more costly overhead that shorts classroom teaching? During the pandemic, government has become more intrusive and yet seemingly more impotent and incompetent. Pick a month and some government official issues yet more contradictory orders on mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns - all to be soon reversed. Taxes stayed high and yet urban services got worse. We still do not know the full consequences of these radical changes in American life, especially whether they will continue after the COVID-19 virus abates and quarantines end. The cultural currents are often contradictory. They defy easy political analysis and seem at times counterintuitive. But there is one historical constant. When institutions and politicians cannot accommodate radically changed circumstances, people will no longer value institutions and politicians. In their place, citizens will seek to ensure their own livelihoods, leisure and safety in ways that are more reliable and affordable - with their circumstances in their own hands rather than in those of distant others.

The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting and protesting - all in a presidential election year - are radically disrupting American habits and behavior. Rents, home prices and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast. Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office. Worries about COVID-19 in high-density cities, and unreliable city services add to the unhappiness. Residents want less dependence on mass transit and elevator living. Constant human contact is seen more as risky than desirous. Gun sales are at record highs. When some cities take steps to defund police and some soften bail laws, citizens quietly go to the local gun store and stock up on ammunition. Many of the people who have never before owned firearms are no longer clamoring for gun control. A “man’s home” is now becoming his armed castle. As a general rule, any business or activity that does not bother, judge or lecture Americans and instead allows them to work or relax in peace is preferred. Why are Amazon and Walmart booming while smaller businesses are going broke? Largely because home delivery better serves those who are barricaded at home, terrified both of the virus and government reaction to it. How ironic that in our quest to become safe and in control of our own destinies, we empower the anonymity of huge conglomerates and erode the viability of reliable, service-friendly, mom-and-pop stores.

In striking down the agreement, the chief concern of EU regulators was NSA surveillance, but our lack of a national privacy standard didn’t help either. What assurances do Europeans have that U.S. companies will protect their data if Americans don’t even have a comprehensive law in place to protect their own? That’s why enacting a federal privacy law is critical to reopening trans-Atlantic data flows and strengthening our position against China. By leading on data privacy, we can differentiate Silicon Valley from surveillance-obsessed Beijing to build trust with our foreign trade partners and increase American tech influence abroad. The good news is there’s growing support for a national privacy standard. Major tech CEOs from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Apple’s Tim Cook have called for comprehensive privacy legislation. And a majority of the American people are behind them: according to a Pew Research Center poll, 75% of adults support stronger online privacy protections. The key will be striking an agreement that uniformly protects consumers without imposing undue burdens on free enterprise. This won’t be easy, but Congress is up to the task. As the former staff director of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, I helped craft the CLOUD Act - one of the most important pieces of data privacy legislation to pass Congress in the last decade. What helped get the CLOUD Act across the finish line will also help with a federal privacy proposal. By passing national data privacy legislation, Congress can give Silicon Valley a competitive edge over China and help ensure U.S. digital hegemony in the 21st century.