How the U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy Rewrites Geopolitics Through Technology
Rather than seeking universal technological governance, the US National Security Strategy aims to ensure that U.S. systems remain the preferred choice.
A man walks past the logo of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on April 16, 2025. Photo by Anadolu Images.
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n early December, the Trump administration published the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), which will guide the administration’s actions in the coming year. From a general perspective, it is clear that this strategy signals a significant shift in American foreign policy priorities. It reflects a deeper transformation in how the United States understands power itself. In this broader context, technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is not merely a means to an end, but a strategy in and of itself. Economic security, military deterrence, alliance management, and competition with China are all reframed through technological control, access, and leverage.
This marks a departure from the values-driven, institution-centered multilateralism that shaped earlier strategies. The new NSS instead advances a transactional, pragmatic, and interest-based vision, measuring national advantage by who controls the critical technological systems that underpin the global economy and modern warfare. In this framework, AI, advanced semiconductors, data infrastructure, and supply chains are not neutral tools; rather, they are the terrain on which geopolitical influence is exercised.
Technology as the core of national US interests
The strategy narrows the definition of U.S. national interests, focusing on tangible economic and security outcomes. Technology sits at the center of this calculation. Leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, autonomous systems, and enabling digital infrastructure is essential not only to innovation, but also to military superiority and global influence. The NSS makes this clear: Losing technological primacy would erode deterrence, weaken the industrial base, and diminish U.S. leverage abroad.
This technological framing reshapes traditional notions of power. While earlier strategies — especially the one released by the Biden administration — emphasized international norms, institutions, and democratic alignment, the 2025 NSS prioritizes control over technological ecosystems (i.e., standards, platforms, data flows, and supply chains). Power is no longer primarily defined by who sets the rules of international order but by who builds, owns, and governs the systems on which others depend. This new tech-dominated type of realpolitik has been apparent for some time, but the strategy is unusually explicit in acknowledging it and adapting U.S. policy to the new strategic environment.
Economic security is technological security
This is most evident in the treatment of economic policy. Trade, tariffs, export controls, industrial policy, and reshoring have been elevated from economic instruments to core tools of national security. The strategy explicitly endorses the use of tariffs and regulatory leverage to promote reindustrialization and protect domestic production in critical and emerging technology sectors.
This is not just about jobs or competitiveness. It’s about ensuring the technological resources necessary for AI, such as advanced chips, rare earth elements, energy, and data infrastructure, remain secure and accessible to the United States and its allies. Supply chains are described as strategic vulnerabilities and critical minerals as assets whose control will shape the future balance of technological power.
Compared to the Biden administration’s emphasis on “friend-shoring” and incentive-based coordination, the 2025 NSS takes a more coercive approach. Alignment is enforced through access and restriction. Markets are opened or closed based on strategic usefulness. Economic openness becomes conditional on technological alignment.
Export controls illustrate this shift most clearly. While the NSS maintains many Biden-era restrictions on advanced semiconductors and AI-related technologies, it reframes these restrictions in explicitly transactional terms. Export controls are not just about denying adversaries access; they are also about establishing a hierarchy of technological access.
Countries that align their export control regimes with U.S. standards are rewarded with preferential licensing, deeper technological cooperation, and access to the U.S. “AI stack” — the integrated ecosystem of advanced semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, software frameworks, and standards that underpin modern AI development and deployment. Conversely, those countries that do not align with U.S. standards risk exclusion. In effect, export controls become tools for managing alliances and promoting technological discipline, shaping global innovation pathways through incentives and constraints. Simply put, this is a new form of the “carrot and stick” policy.
This approach signals a shift from multilateral governance to managed technological blocs. Standards are no longer negotiated as global public goods but rather leveraged as instruments of influence. Consequently, technology governance becomes a form of geopolitical bargaining.
China: Technological competition without ideological crusade
The strategy’s treatment of China reinforces this logic. Although China was officially and explicitly defined as a strategic competitor and a revisionist power challenging U.S. interests through technology, economics, and military modernization in Trump’s 2017 NSS, the latest NSS still identifies China as the central strategic competitor. However, the strategy avoids framing the relationship as a rivalry. Instead, the strategy emphasizes the technological and economic competition relating to subsidies, intellectual property theft, supply chain leverage, and market distortion.
The focus has shifted from reshaping China’s behavior through international norms or institutions to constraining its capacity to dominate the technological foundations of the global economy. Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and digital platforms have emerged as the primary arenas of competition. In this sense, the strategy reflects a shift in objectives and instruments—from an explicit decoupling logic to a rebalancing one. The aim is to limit China’s technological reach while maintaining a certain degree of managed economic interaction.
In this light, the shift is both pragmatic and understandable. Elements of decoupling are already underway and are unlikely to be reversed. They have simply receded into the background of policy discourse. China’s intensified focus on advanced chip design and the U.S.’s efforts to bring semiconductor manufacturing back home, expand fabrication capacity, and secure alternative supply chains for rare earth minerals all point to a gradual but ongoing process of technological separation.
These dynamics suggest that decoupling is unfolding structurally, even if it is no longer articulated as a central policy objective. Rather than accelerating this process rhetorically, the United States appears to accept its long time horizon, choosing to manage competition in the present while the deeper reconfiguration of technological interdependence continues in parallel.
This approach reflects the belief that technological dominance, rather than ideological alignment, will determine long-term power. China is not portrayed as an adversary to be defeated but rather as a system to be counterbalanced through tariffs, export controls, and the strategic promotion of U.S. technologies abroad.
Spheres of influence in the digital age
The most striking aspect of the NSS is perhaps its implicit acceptance of spheres of influence, reimagined in technological terms. The strategy explicitly rejects global domination, instead emphasizing global and regional balances of power. In practice, this translates into competing technological ecosystems.
Rather than exercising influence through territorial control, it is exercised through dominance over digital infrastructure, AI platforms, energy systems, and data networks. Regions are shaped by the standards they adopt, the cloud services they rely on, and the AI tools that power their economies and security systems. In this sense, spheres of influence are technological rather than geographic.
The NSS embraces this reality. Rather than seeking universal technological governance, the NSS aims to ensure that U.S. systems remain the preferred choice. Access to American AI, capital, and defense technology is used as an inducement, and alternative ecosystems are discouraged. Stability is pursued through technological interdependence on U.S. terms.
Interpreted this way, the NSS implicitly acknowledges that the United States no longer operates in a technological vacuum. The emergence of another actor with increasingly capable—albeit still asymmetric—technological capacity necessitates a shift in strategy: From assuming dominance to actively competing for alignment and from enforcing universality to persuading other states to opt into the U.S. technological sphere rather than a rival one.
State-private sector fusion as technological strategy
One final shift that is often overlooked is the strategy’s embrace of state-private sector collaboration. Given that the private sector has driven the current technological revolution and increased the power of big tech companies, the state-private sector fusion mentioned in the NSS deserves special attention. The NSS explicitly calls for closer coordination between the U.S. government and American companies, framing the private technology sector as a strategic asset. Ambassadors are tasked with promoting U.S. firms, especially those in technology-intensive sectors, abroad.
What emerges here is not merely coordination but rather a reciprocal cycle of instrumentalization. Private technology firms seek state support to expand into new markets, secure regulatory access, and outcompete foreign rivals. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is increasingly relying on these firms’ platforms, infrastructures, and technological reach to extend its influence, shape standards, and steer the strategic choices of other states. Thus, commercial expansion and geopolitical leverage become mutually reinforcing.
However, this cycle is inherently unstable. As technology firms grow in size, importance, and reach across borders, the balance of this relationship may shift. The state risks becoming dependent on private actors whose priorities are driven by market logic rather than strategic coherence. Alternatively, firms risk becoming more deeply involved in geopolitical competition, which would constrain their autonomy and global legitimacy. While the NSS acknowledges this tension as a necessary aspect of technological competition, a critical question remains: How long can this reciprocal arrangement persist before one side dominates the other?
The risks of a technological worldview
The U.S. 2025 National Security Strategy provides a focused vision of power in a technologically fragmented world. The era of the democracy agenda may be over. What replaces it is a strategy based on code, platforms, and supply chains. However, this should not be mistaken for strategic resignation. Rather, the NSS reflects the implicit judgment that now is not the time to confront China directly, either technologically or geopolitically, but rather to consolidate strength at home.
By prioritizing industrial capacity, technological ecosystems, and managed competition, the strategy seems intended to buy time to rebuild domestic capabilities, secure critical supply chains, and regain the upper hand in AI, advanced manufacturing, and defense technologies. In this interpretation, restraint becomes preparation. Whether this period of consolidation will eventually give way to a more assertive posture once those foundations are secured remains an open question. However, the NSS reads less like a final strategy and more like a pause. In geopolitics, however, pauses are rarely neutral; they are taken either before decline or before returning to competition on sharper terms.
(Originally published in Turkish by Kriter)
