By Greg Ip

Democrat Mark Warner, a former telecom executive, suggests industrial policy may be necessary to sustain Western competition to China.

When Mark Warner was in the telecommunications business in the 1980s and 1990s, he didn't think much about how U.S. rules and standards shaped the global use of technology -- it was a given. "I never appreciated how much we set the standards on almost every technology and innovation, even if not invented in America," Mr. Warner said in an interview this week. "We flooded the zone with engineers. We had the best schools, we had most of the companies. It got built in as an assumed advantage, and we kind of got lazy about it."

Today, as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he sees China's erosion of that technological advantage as an existential threat to American values at home and abroad.

Nor is he happy with the U.S. response -- either the hands-off attitude of previous administrations or an "erratic, reactionary" approach, exemplified by the current administration's campaign against the social media app TikTok. In a series of speeches over the past year Mr. Warner, a former governor of Virginia, has laid out an alternative strategy: set standards on where interacting with China poses unacceptable risks to national security, get allies on board, and then pour the necessary resources into building up Western alternatives to Chinese companies.

In a speech last week he confessed that he once thought China would liberalize economically and politically by integrating with the world, and that technological innovation could only flourish in free societies. "Like so many, I was wrong," he bluntly told the National Democratic Institute. "Instead, China has shown that the development and use of cutting-edge technology and economic expansion are, indeed, possible within authoritarian-state capitalism."

He describes China's strategy thus: First, allow domestic companies to fight it out until a national champion emerges and nurture it by keeping out foreign competition. Use state resources to expand into foreign markets. Then target the international bodies that set standards that allow differing manufacturers' equipment to work together, from mobile phones to artificial intelligence and facial recognition. In this way, he said, Chinese instead of American values will become embedded in the way the world uses technology.

As a former telecom investor -- he co-founded the wireless company that became Nextel -- who still calls himself a "tech guy," Mr. Warner knows that with technology, a market can "tip" to one company or one standard, and its competitors then wither away. Despite the Trump administration's all-out efforts to constrain Huawei Technologies Co., its share of global telecom revenue continues to climb, hitting 32% this year, according to Dell'Oro Group, as that of its main competitors, Sweden's Ericsson AB and Finland's Nokia Corp., shrink.

"We've been told that if Huawei is able to gain 50% global market share, it will send Ericsson or Nokia -- and potentially in the longer term, both -- into a tailspin," he said last week.

As China's technological prowess advances, so does its ability to suppress domestic dissent "at scale," to export that suppression abroad to, for example, the Chinese diaspora, and eventually challenge U.S. economic and geopolitical leadership, Mr. Warner warned.

Mr. Warner proposes several steps in response. First, all stakeholders, not just the federal government, must be involved. Mr. Warner and Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, until May the intelligence committee's Republican chairman, have had intelligence officials brief leaders of universities, businesses and the Asian-American community on China's efforts to acquire American know-how and influence the Chinese diaspora.

The senators' message "was that things were changing, they had new concerns [about] the relationship between China and the U.S.," said University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Patrick Gallagher, who attended one meeting, in an interview. For example, international academic collaborations may pose risks that didn't exist before, he said. "That's a jarring shift for a lot of research faculty."

Next, the U.S. needs clear security standards on how much business U.S. companies and researchers can do with Chinese entities. It must then persuade as many allies as possible to sign on to common principles on cybersecurity, socialmedia abuse, technology standards and permissible use.

Mr. Warner said the Trump administration uses haphazard tactics that repel rather than attract allies. He called negotiations over TikTok "the epitome of nontransparency." Why, he asked in the interview, is Oracle Corp., a supporter of Mr. Trump, now the preferred bidder instead of Microsoft Corp.? A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment. (The Journal reported that TikTok's parent, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., saw Oracle as more aligned with its interests than Microsoft.) The U.S., he said, is losing credibility on what constitutes a national security threat by using it to justify tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from allies.

Finally, to ensure access to equipment as good as anything China produces, Mr. Warner said the U.S. may have to embrace industrial policy, often criticized as "picking winners." He has co-sponsored one bipartisan bill to fund an international consortium that develops telecommunications equipment and another to fund semiconductor research and development.

Many businesses will no doubt see Mr. Warner's road map as overkill. Nor would China take such measures lying down. Moreover, having accused China of undermining the rules of global commerce with state aid and discriminatory policies, the U.S. would in effect be piling on by imitating those same practices.

Mr. Warner doesn't deny that risk. The goal, he says, should be for the U.S. and its allies to "only buy from countries with systems that are based on rule of law."

Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com