China and Russia must not emerge as the winners of the coronavirus pandemicsaid Britain’s ambassador to the United States, urging the Western world to show that the most open societies are those that thrive.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Karen Pierce said that the The United Kingdom and the United States will need to work closely to counter the strategic challenge of China and Russia, as the world recovers from the pandemic.
He highlighted the risk that China, in particular, could set the rules for future technological developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, comparing it to the expansion of nuclear technology in the 1950s.
“We don’t want to wake up one day and find out that there are Chinese standards on things like artificial intelligence and cybernetics.“Pierce told Bloomberg TV’s Francine Lacqua on Thursday. That would be” too authoritarian “and new technologies should benefit” open markets, “he added.
“The second big challenge is the strategic competition from Russia and China, particularly China,” Pierce argued. “We have to get it right again so that it is open societies that are seen to prosper and recover from the COVID pandemic.”
Crucial moment
The ambassador’s intervention comes at a crucial time for the so-called special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States, with Britain abandoning the single market and the customs regime of the European Union and a new administration assuming power in Washington.
Boris Johnson and Joe Biden never met and their relationship got off to a rocky start. The president-elect is a known skeptic about Brexit, the policy that has defined the prime minister’s political career thus far. However, the couple had what Pierce described as a “warm” phone call after Biden’s election victory. He said they will work well together on shared goals, including fighting climate change.
The ambassador said that the UK and the US can finalize a trade deal during 2021 and made an offer to Biden to rewrite the mandate of the deal. Talks between London and the Trump administration have continued for months, but despite initial hopes for a quick deal, none were reached.
“We believe this deal can be done, it can be done in 2021,” Pierce said. It wouldn’t take a lot of time or effort for an agreement to make its way through Congress, he added. “We would be happy to work with the Biden administration if there were any particular angles, some people have mentioned work, some people have mentioned the weather, which they would like to see included.”
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