To me, TikTox and WeChat highlight the growing 'national securitization' of trade and business transactions in U.S. foreign policy. 'Trade, Technology, Telecommunications and Transaction' (T4) has become the newest foreign policy focus of the Trump administration.

This focus on business and government intervention is in the context of a rapidly changing global and digital environment with increasingly unilateral and mercantilistic state actions, often challenging the international legal and multilateral institutional systems, as well as the notion of free markets. Foreign policy is not what it used to be; it is not your father's foreign policy.