The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is among the most significant tools in the U.S. government’s arsenal to further its national security interests. In response to concerns that Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries were purchasing strategic U.S. assets, President Ford created CFIUS to empower agencies to review transactions involving foreign investments in order to determine their effect on national security. The U.S. government has increasingly leaned on CFIUS, originally a bureaucratic review process, to mitigate or block transactions that it views as posing national security risks, such as CFIUS’s unprecedented intervention in the recent attempt by Wise Road Capital, a China-based private equity firm, to acquire Magnachip, a South Korean semiconductor company.
CFIUS’s Expanding Jurisdiction in the Magnachip Acquisition – Lawfare (lawfareblog.com)
