US Tech Strategy Shifts to National Security Imperative, Learning From China's Rise

What Sputnik couldn’t do to American science, Beijing has

The US’ new tech strategy shows Washington is adopting the core lesson of China’s rise: tech leadership is a national security imperative

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Thomas O. Falk is a journalist.

Published: 5:30am, 5 Sep 2026

The US government owns 9.9 per cent of Intel, converted out of US Chips Act grants, alongside a golden share in US Steel, US$400 million in the rare earth mining firm MP Materials and stakes in roughly 30 firms worth US$26.7 billion. In 2025, Nvidia and AMD gave up 15 per cent of their China chip sale revenues in exchange for export licences. The country that spent four decades advising its allies against picking winners now runs a portfolio.

The United States has not fully turned to state capitalism, but it has accepted something it resisted for 80 years. Technological leadership is a security objective in its own right, pursued with the instruments of security policy rather than an economic advantage that pays security dividends.

The National Security Science and Technology Strategy, unveiled on August 18 and the first such document bearing this name since Bill Clinton’s in 1995, is where that proposition appears in writing. Most of it reads as such documents often do. Then comes a sentence that gives away the game: the US should avoid contests where capable adversaries can readily counter its moves and should not spend on replicating what a rival has already built better.

Countries do not redraw the board while they are winning. Washington has adopted the tactics of a fighter with reach who declines to trade blows in the clinch: keep it long, concede the inside, win where your arms are. That is rational enough, and also what fighters do once they have felt their opponent’s power.

The rest of the document follows from that concession. Foreign investment, firms and personnel touching American research face tighter scrutiny, though a presidential memorandum had already turned the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US against Chinese money in strategic sectors in February 2025. Research security has gone from a compliance chore to a branch of statecraft. Three domains are ring-fenced for battlefield advantage – undersea, space, artificial intelligence and autonomy – above an enabling technologies list running through hypersonics, directed energy, semiconductors and nuclear energy.

The strategy document reaches furthest into American life through alignment. Agencies are steered towards milestone contracts with competing vendors, told to place federal money where it complements private capital rather than crowding it out, and to expedite clearances so expertise moves between laboratory, firm and department at commercial speed. The universities enter the same architecture through vetting.