afrasianet - Foreign Affairs magazine published a lengthy article by the American researcher Amy Seggart in which she addressed the reasons for the decline of the power of the United States, on which knowledge was the most prominent foundation, and proposed solutions to this dilemma, and said that the United States lost its strength when it lost the knowledge that was considered the place of its strength.
Zigat, a researcher at the Hoover Institution and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California, said that for centuries, the power of nations has stemmed from tangible resources that governments can perceive, measure and control, such as the numbers of citizens they can recruit, the territory they can subjugate, the military navies that can be deployed, and the goods they can display or restrict, such as oil.
Today, states derive their strength from intangible resources represented by knowledge and technologies that promote economic growth, scientific discovery and military capabilities, such as artificial intelligence, and it is difficult for governments to control these resources due to their intangible nature and ease of spread across sectors and countries.
U.S. officials cannot, for example, insist on restoring an algorithm from a U.S. adversary, as President George W. Bush's administration did when it demanded that Beijing return a U.S. spy plane that crashed on the southern Chinese island of Hainan in 2001.
Nor can they ask a Chinese bioengineer to return the knowledge he gained from his postdoctoral research in the United States, Zigat says, is the best mobile weapon.
Because these resources usually originate in the private sector and academia, they make the task of government more difficult.
Private corporate decisions are beginning to have geopolitical consequences, so that private sector interests no longer always coincide with national goals. The American researcher gave the example of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which formulates the facts for the 3 billion people who use its platforms worldwide.
When war broke out in Ukraine, billionaire Elon Musk, formerly owner of Twitter platform, decided on his own whether, where and when he would allow the Ukrainian military to use his Starlink internet service.
With many of the U.S. government's capabilities deteriorating, its traditional foreign policy tools have lost their vitality and strength to the point where the president's appointments to senior State Department posts are so problematic that at least a quarter of key positions remained vacant midway through the first term of the last three U.S. presidents.
For the first time ever, this year, the United States will spend more money to pay off rising federal debt interest than it will spend on defense.
Because Congress often cannot pass some annual budgets, the Pentagon increasingly relies on temporary budget measures to fill the funding gap in existing programs only, not new ones, preventing new R&D initiatives or weapons development programs.
According to the article, this "broken" system unfairly hinders new and small companies offering innovative solutions. That is why large, expensive weapons systems remain in place while cheap new solutions die in the bud.
More importantly, the kindergarten to high school education system and research universities in the United States are "in decline," even though they are the country's long-term innovation reservoirs.
In today's knowledge- and technology-driven world, U.S. policymakers must think in new ways about what is the mainstay of American power, and how to develop and disseminate it.
Teaching and research capacity
In the future, prosperity and security will depend little on preventing adversaries from acquiring U.S. technology, but on strengthening the country's educational and research capacity and further adapting emerging technologies to serve national interests.
For decades, US policymakers have been using hard and soft power tools to influence foreign adversaries and allies. They used hard power to advance American interests, building military power and using it to protect friends and threaten or defeat enemies.
With soft power, Zigat explains, they spread American values and attracted the interest of others in U.S. issues. Hard and soft power are important, but because they do not determine a country's success as it once did, the United States should expand its knowledge power by advancing national interests by mobilizing the country's ability to generate transformative technology.
The power of knowledge consists of two basic elements: the ability to innovate and the ability to anticipate. The first relates to the ability of the State to produce and harness technological discoveries. The second element concerns intelligence. Part of this work is part of the intelligence community's traditional mission to uncover adversaries' intent and ability to threaten U.S. interests.
But as the boundaries between domestic industry and foreign policy blur, intelligence agencies also need to help the government understand the implications of technologies being developed at home.
Innovation
While innovation and anticipation can enhance the U.S. military's capabilities and attractive power, the core task of knowledge power is how close its producers are to home. This involves mobilizing the ideas, talent, and technology that help the US and its partners thrive, regardless of what China or any other enemy does.
It may be difficult to identify and measure the components of knowledge power, but that does not preclude a good starting point to stand at national educational competence levels. Overwhelming evidence shows that a well-educated workforce drives long-term economic growth, Ziegat explains.
The geographic concentration of technical talent gathering in one place or geographic area is another indicator of the power of knowledge, which determines which countries are poised for a boom in vital areas.
Measuring a country's long-term power prospects necessarily requires measuring the effectiveness of its research universities. Although companies play a key role in technological innovation, the supply chains of those innovations start early in university labs and classrooms.
For Zigat, if education and innovation are key to the United States' ability to assert its power, the country's potential still stands on fragile ground. Basic and secondary education in the United States is in crisis, with students today scoring worse on proficiency tests than they did decades ago, lagging behind their peers abroad.
Competition for talent
U.S. universities are also struggling with increasing global competition for talent and a chronic lack of federal investment in basic research that is vital to long-term innovation.
While students in the United States are lagging behind, their peers in other countries are advancing. The Program for International Student Assessment, which tests 15-year-olds worldwide, revealed that in 2022 the United States ranked 34th in average skill proficiency in mathematics, behind Slovenia and Vietnam.
At the senior level, only 7% of American teens scored the highest level of proficiency in mathematics, compared with 12% of test takers in Canada and 23% in Southern Korea.
In her article, Zigat noted that populations of other countries of the world have become considerably more educated than American citizens in the past decades, redrawing the map of the power of knowledge in the process. The performance of foreign universities has improved dramatically in recent years, offering more alternatives to the best and brightest students.
Surveys already show that the share of Chinese students who prefer to study in Asia or Europe rather than the United States is rising.
If China curbs the flow of its outstanding students to the US, many American laboratories and university companies will face serious problems. Against this backdrop, the innovation advantage of American universities over their foreign counterparts, as they have produced the most scientific research used by the world, is eroded.
Private Sector Attractiveness
Ziegat explains that the attractiveness of the private sector boosts short-term innovation and economic benefits, but it also drains the sources of future innovation.
As a first step, the United States will need to develop its intelligence capabilities to see how far it stands and lags behind in emerging technologies.
They should also institutionalize efforts to build stronger relationships with companies and universities, provide channels for faster and more frequent exchange of experiences, and invest in national infrastructure for technological innovation.
The other thing is that enhancing the power of knowledge does not depend on developing new capabilities, but also on fixing the problems of the country's immigration system and defense budget.
Congress should pass immigration reforms to allow more of the world's best and brightest students to stay and work in the United States after graduating from U.S. college, provided there are measures in place to protect U.S. intellectual property and protect against espionage risks.
Finally, the US needs to reform education from kindergarten to high school, and warning of the sector's deteriorating and the threat it poses to the country's future prosperity, security, and global leadership is nothing new.
Source: Foreign Affairs