Silicon Valley Needs a Foreign Policy

As California's high-tech firms grew to become economic powerhouses in the American economy, they punched below their weight politically. For the most part, they are not very savvy about the ways of Washington -- they came late to the lobbying game -- and their political strategies were naïve compared with those of old industrial sectors like oil and automobiles. The upshot is that the United States' foreign economic policy has suffered. In the last decade, it should have been geared toward promoting fast-growing, innovative sectors. Instead, it sat by as Washington pursued a hodgepodge of uncoordinated, often ineffective efforts that did little to advance the economy and instead threatened to leave the United States behind more tech-supportive international rivals. This was all the worse considering that in every economic age, government taxation, employment, and capital access policies have been instrumental to companies' competitive successes at home and in international markets.

The United States will not be able to maintain its global advantages if the country fails to craft policies that maximize information-age soft and hard powers. But before defining an ideal high-tech foreign economic policy, one has to recognize that, as often as not, the sources of most policy lay in particular economic interests. When the interests are as politically sophisticated, organized, and strategic as agriculture and energy, then they successfully articulate and lobby for their own agenda. That has not been the case with Silicon Valley.