Technological Change Will Upend Our Understanding of National Security

As it approaches its 250th year, the United States finds itself in a period of unprecedented technological change that is upending our understanding of national security. Advances in data technology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and the ability to produce the energy required to power it are radically altering the way we live and shifting how we think about safety, security, and well-being. The United States stands as a potential leader in this new world, but its leadership is far from assured. China has been purposefully investing in the skills and resources needed to challenge America’s global position. And other nations have been engaging in similar efforts. 

During the Cold War, the American public largely agreed that the Soviet Union was the nation’s primary adversary and accepted the huge price required to counter it. To be sure, fierce debates took place about how to build a policy of containment, the benefits of arms control agreements, and the role that trade would play as both a carrot and a stick. Nonetheless, a post-war liberal order endured and lent itself to a relatively coherent strategy that benefited the United States and its allies. 

But this liberal order has been steadily deteriorating since, straining under the weight of rising powers, fast-changing technologies, and an inability to connect goals to tactics. The tools that once worked to attract allies and stymy opponents are ill-shaped for today’s competition. America’s commitment to free trade, for example, has only seemed to facilitate China’s rise and hollow out the American middle class.  Foreign aid investments, while helping millions around the globe, have not slowed Chinese activity in key areas in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. The Cold War arms control agreements no longer constrain Russian nuclear advancement, and they were hardly constructed to forestall Chinese capabilities. 

Looking forward, US leaders will need a new understanding about the drivers of US economic growth, the  investments required to further research and development, the international partners who will be additive to US capabilities, and, importantly and most overlooked, the institutional architecture required to ensure that technological advancements advance American safety, security, power, and wealth. 

"America can certainly lead in this new era, but a leader needs followers."

Of the many issues confronting leaders on the precipice of this next historic period, three related challenges stand out: securing the raw and processed materials that the new data-intensive economy requires; powering tomorrow’s data- and energy-intensive industries; and building the governance structures required to ensure that technological advancements serve American interests, rather than undermine them. Each of these are daunting in and of themselves. Together, they represent key challenges confronting leaders at this milestone year. 

With the definition of wealth and power being rewritten almost daily and breakthroughs in data technologies leading the way, the new reality the United States enters will be dependent upon natural resources—many of which are beyond US borders or current ability to leverage domestically. This future will require vast quantities of energy that will place a heavy burden on the planet. And what we have learned, repeatedly, is that technological advancement is never solely positive or negative. 

The same breakthroughs that help to cure cancer and send spaceships to Jupiter, for example, also possess the ability to destroy life on Earth as we know it. What decides the fate of how technologies are used are the guardrails—domestic and international—that are put in place to manage them. To be effective, these guardrails require buy-in, either through sophisticated diplomatic management or coercion. 

US leadership in this new era is possible but not assured, and much work remains to be done. Future leaders will need to build a new consensus that balances the safety-centric approach—that in some cases limits innovation—with an economically driven one that, at times, deprioritizes broader security concerns and banks on the power of economic integration and the intelligence that flows from it. Careening erratically between the two ends of the spectrum is an unlikely recipe for success. 

Determining who America’s friends and allies are in this new reality is another challenge confronting leaders. Yesterday’s allies will not necessarily be tomorrow’s. But neither should they be dismissed without careful calibration. America can certainly lead in this new era, but a leader needs followers. Defining who those are, and who they will need to be, is perhaps the most important question confronting us all.