The White House released a new national security science and technology strategy this week, an addendum to December's broader national security strategy focused on preserving U.S. technological leadership, according to Foreign Policy staff writers Rishi Iyengar and John Haltiwanger. While the document repeats familiar America First themes on tech investment and arms transfers, it also stakes out a more measured posture than the administration's rhetoric on troop cuts, tariffs, and alliance management would suggest, including a recognition that the U.S. is behind rivals like China in some areas and should not simply try to out-spend them there.
"Successfully shaping the competition also requires avoiding forms of technology competition where capable adversaries can readily counter U.S. moves with less effort," the strategy reads, adding that in some sectors "cooperative mutual restraint can deny competitors strategic advantage while preserving U.S. resources for higher priorities." That kind of tech dialogue is expected to be high on the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Trump next month, with China's recent progress in AI and robotics weighing heavily on Washington's thinking.
The strategy also leans hard on allied cooperation, calling it "essential to protecting America's innovation base" and pledging to streamline export controls so allies can more easily access technologies like drones, while still keeping sensitive tech out of adversaries' hands. Iyengar and Haltiwanger argue that framing may be too late: NATO is de-Americanizing at Trump's own urging, allies have already been burned by sudden U.S. curbs on AI model access, and Europe is actively pursuing "tech sovereignty" even as Washington threatens partners in its Pax Silica supply-chain initiative with further restrictions if they engage with a competing Chinese effort.
Other parts of the strategy sit uneasily next to the administration's own record: it calls for "robust and deliberate American participation on international standards bodies" despite Trump's open disdain for the U.N. and other multilateral institutions that help set those standards, and it promises to attract "top-tier global talent" to national security tech fields even as restrictive immigration policy and heightened scrutiny of universities cut against that goal. The strategy singles out undersea and space capabilities in the military domain and names artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing as the "transformative emerging technology areas" where U.S. leadership is considered most urgent.
Overall, the piece reads the document as marking a shift toward trying to shape the terms of tech competition itself rather than simply racing to match adversaries technology by technology. Whether that's achievable is another question: with allied relationships frayed and China closing gaps in AI and robotics, a strategy built on deep coordination with partners the administration keeps antagonizing may be easier to write than to execute.