Harvard Business School Case- Trusted Clean Network – Keith Krach

The Clean Network turned the tide on Huawei and the CCP’s 5G master plan and in the process, proved that China Inc. is beatable and most meaningfully, exposed its biggest weakness— lack of trust. Krach’s team has actually executed that strategy by getting 60 countries, representing 66% of the world’s GDP, on the Clean Network and 200 Telcos on top of that. According to Bloomberg, Silicon Valley veteran Keith Krach harnessed the power of Metcalfe’s Law to build a network of nations to counter China—a notable change in tone after years in which the Trump administration pursued a go-it-alone, “America First” strategy.

And says the Clean Network’s effort to create a united economic front is to China what George Kennan’s “long telegram” of 1946 was to the Soviet Union. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the Clean Network is an undisputed success and will be perhaps the most enduring foreign-policy legacy of the last four years.
Clean Network had three stated objectives: “The first objective was to prove that China Inc. is beatable by defeating the CCP’s master plan to dominate 5G which would also open the playing field and enable U.S. entrants. The second objective was to deliver an enduring model for competing with China Inc. as measured by meeting ten essential factors.

The final objective was to provide a beachhead and a head-start on building a strategic platform that could be leveraged in other sectors of economic competitions, such as cloud computing, mobile applications, underwater cable, AI, IoT, clean energy, digital currency, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing and biomedical engineering, electronic payments, since they all pose the same challenges.”The Clean Network serves as the crucial first step in constructing a trusted network of networks composed of like-minded countries, companies and civil society that operate by a set of democratic principles for all areas of collaboration and establishes an equitable and unifying alternative to the One Belt One Road.

His Global Economic Security Strategy provides a winning bipartisan formula in addressing CCP’s long-term threat to data privacy, security, human rights, investment capital and democracy by leveraging the three big areas of U.S. competitive advantage: the strength of allies and friends, the innovation of the private sector, and the moral high ground of democratic principles.