The United States enters 2026 in a paradoxical position. It remains the world’s most powerful technological actor, yet it is increasingly defined by chaos rather than confidence. The global system no longer bends automatically toward American preferences. India is constructing a multipolar future rooted in autonomy and industrial self‑reliance. China is executing a state‑directed industrial ascent with relentless discipline. The European Union is asserting regulatory leadership paired with pragmatic innovation. The United States, by contrast, has chosen a different path: hegemonic renewal through technological dominance, no matter the cost.
The Trump administration’s technology doctrine (expressed through the America’s AI Action Plan, sweeping executive orders on AI infrastructure, and a re‑engineered CHIPS Act) constitutes an attempt at a full‑spectrum industrial mobilization.¹ Deregulation, massive compute buildout, export controls, and alliance leverage are fused into a single thesis: if the United States controls the frontier of AI and semiconductors, it controls the future.²
Yet beneath this ambition lies a deeper contradiction. The administration’s actions accelerate innovation in the short term while weakening alliances, destabilizing governance frameworks, and eroding the trust that underpins American influence. The result is a nation building unprecedented AI capacity while diminishing its strategic position in an increasingly multipolar world.
Dominance Without Stability
The United States stands apart from other major powers not because of its capabilities, but because of the confrontational, zero‑sum worldview driving its current strategy. India seeks autonomy within a multipolar system. China seeks domain supremacy through state‑directed industrial integration. The EU seeks regulatory influence that shapes global norms. The United States seeks unquestioned dominance.
This ambition is not subtle, nor hidden. The preamble to the America’s AI Action Plan declares it a national security imperative for the U.S. to maintain “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”³ It is the language of a nation unwilling to accept the structural change (accelerated by its own policy decisions) reshaping the global order. Where India views the rise of other technological powers as diversification, the U.S. views it as erosion. Where China builds state‑led ecosystems, the U.S. unleashes private‑sector oligarchs. Where the EU builds guardrails, the U.S. removes them. This ideological divergence shapes every subsequent policy choice and every strategic contradiction.
The administration frames deregulation as pro‑innovation, but in practice it accelerates the dominance of a small group of firms with deep political influence networks and outsized leverage over national policy. Critics argue this reflects a pattern of strategic favoritism rather than neutral governance; OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, Meta, and Anthropic all benefit in this fashion.⁴ By stripping away regulatory friction, the U.S. signals that American firms should run faster than anyone else, and that the world will adopt their standards because they work, not because they are mandated. Yet deregulation without stability carries profound consequences. It empowers a small number of private‑sector oligarchs who control compute, data, and talent. It concentrates market power, raising barriers for startups and reducing innovation diversity. It creates regulatory volatility that undermines investor confidence and long‑term planning. And it weakens U.S. credibility in global AI governance, where allies expect continuity and rule‑based leadership.
Acceleration becomes indistinguishable from instability. Innovation becomes inseparable from unpredictability. And the United States, long the anchor of global governance, becomes a source of volatility rather than assurance.
The Quad illustrates this tension. While publicly framed as a partnership for a “free and open Indo‑Pacific,” it has become a political mechanism for aligning supply chains and technology standards around the United States.⁵ Japan anchors semiconductor resilience through its dominance in photoresists, specialty chemicals, and advanced manufacturing equipment. Australia reinforces the system through critical minerals essential for batteries, data centers, and AI‑scale energy systems.⁶ India, while maintaining strategic autonomy, is increasingly drawn into U.S.‑aligned frameworks for cloud security, semiconductor cooperation, and “trusted vendor” digital infrastructure.⁷
Together, these dynamics allow the United States to redirect key supply chains away from China and promote American‑led standards for AI, data governance, and cloud security. Yet the Quad’s informality limits its durability. India resists full alignment, and Japan and Australia remain cautious about being pulled into U.S.–China escalation. The Quad is therefore both a powerful instrument of U.S. technological statecraft, and a reminder of the constraints of coalition‑based hegemony in a multipolar world.
Industrial Mobilization Without Coherence
The CHIPS and Science Act stands as the exception to the current administration’s reliance on executive authority. Enacted under the Biden administration, the CHIPS and Science Act provides the durable legislative foundation the AI Action Plan lacks. With $50 billion in federal incentives and more than $630 billion in total supply chain investments, it represents a genuine industrial renaissance.⁸ It signals long‑term commitment in a way executive orders cannot; what can be done by executive order can be undone by executive order.
The compute buildout that follows this legislation is unprecedented. The federal government is leasing land for frontier data centers, funding clean energy facilities to power them, guaranteeing demand through offtake agreements, and accelerating permitting at Cold War–era speeds.⁹ It is industrial policy at scale, but without strategic coherence across administrations.
The workforce strategy mirrors this same ambition. The administration is investing in tax‑free AI training, rapid retraining programs, an AI Workforce Research Hub, and AI‑integrated military and civilian education.¹⁰ Yet the pace of automation raises doubts about whether retraining can keep up with displacement, and the social consequences of failure could be profound. Equally puzzling is how the current administration seeks to retrain millions of American workers while dismantling its Department of Education; self-sabotage at its finest.
The Trump Administration’s decision to dismantle large portions of the clean‑energy ecosystem created under the CHIPS and Science Act further undermines the coherence of America’s industrial strategy. By cancelling billions of dollars in hydrogen hubs, grid‑modernization projects, battery‑manufacturing facilities, and offshore wind deployments (many of them already under construction) the United States has effectively severed the energy backbone required to power next‑generation semiconductor fabs and frontier‑compute infrastructure.¹¹ These projects were not symbolic; they were the physical infrastructure that would have supplied fabs with stable, low‑carbon baseload power, reduced transmission bottlenecks, and enabled the high‑density energy demands of AI‑scale data centers. Their removal creates structural energy deficits that private industry cannot solve alone, and it forces U.S. manufacturers to operate within an increasingly brittle and outdated grid. This is not merely a policy reversal; it is a strategic self‑inflicted wound that weakens the very industrial capacity the CHIPS Act was designed to restore.
China and the European Union, by contrast, are accelerating precisely the clean‑energy investments the United States is now abandoning. China continues to expand its dominance in solar, batteries, grid‑scale storage, and high‑voltage transmission, integrating these assets directly into its semiconductor and AI‑compute buildout.¹² The EU is doing the same through its Green Deal Industrial Plan, pairing decarbonization with industrial competitiveness.¹³ As a result, both China and Europe are constructing vertically integrated ecosystems where clean energy, advanced manufacturing, and AI infrastructure reinforce one another. The United States, meanwhile, is attempting to compete in the most energy‑intensive technological race in human history while dismantling the energy systems required to win it. In a world where compute is constrained not by chips but by electricity, this divergence all but guarantees that China and the EU will outpace the U.S. in the next phase of industrial and technological power.
These contradictions become most visible in export controls. The United States restricts China’s access to frontier chips such as Blackwell and Rubin, then authorizes H200 sales in exchange for a 25 percent revenue share.¹⁴ This is not containment; it is managed decline coupled with political rent‑seeking through profit extraction. The current manufacturing bottleneck deepens the vulnerability. Despite CHIPS Act ambition, the U.S. remains dependent on TSMC for advanced nodes, South Korea for memory, and globalized supply chains for lithography.¹⁵ Hegemony built on foreign fabs is inherently fragile and unsustainable.
The broader multipolar reality compounds these challenges. China is building indigenous capability at accelerating speed. India refuses bloc alignment and pursues strategic autonomy. The EU is exporting regulation as power. The world is not returning to unipolarity, and the U.S. strategy (rooted in the assumption that hegemony is still achievable) struggles to accept reality and adapt. The United States is not losing power; it is losing coherence and legitimacy due to the political incentives (re: money) shaping its electorate and institutions.
Rebuilding Stability in the Age of AI: Policy Makers and Business Professionals
If the United States is to sustain leadership and credibility in the AI era, it must confront the structural weaknesses embedded in its current strategy, its political system, and its governance framework. The path forward requires a shift from improvisation to institutionalization, from acceleration to alignment, and from unilateral dominance to strategic coherence and collaboration with international partners.
An increasingly urgent priority is the creation of a dedicated federal institution for AI governance: a Secretary of AI and a Department of AI capable of providing the strategic coherence the United States currently lacks. No major technological transition in American history has been managed without a central authority: nuclear energy required the Atomic Energy Commission, aviation required the FAA, space required NASA, and cybersecurity required CISA. Artificial Intelligence, by contrast, is being governed through a fragmented patchwork of agencies, executive orders, and private‑sector self‑regulation.¹⁶ This diffusion of responsibility leaves the U.S. without a durable center of gravity, vulnerable to four‑year policy swings, and unable to present a unified counterpart to the EU, India, or China. A Department of AI would not only stabilize standards and harmonize federal and state rules, but also provide the enforcement capacity, institutional memory, and long‑term strategic alignment necessary to manage the transition into the Age of AI. In a multipolar world, institutional power is strategic power, and the U.S. must build the governance architecture worthy of its technological ambitions.
The United States must also move beyond executive orders and enact durable, bipartisan AI legislation. Without congressional authority, the nation cannot establish stable guardrails, empower agencies with enforcement mechanisms, or provide the predictability that industry and allies require. Legislation is the only way to transform rapid innovation into long‑term governance. Policymakers must rebuild trust with allies by committing to consistent standards and transparent coordination. The U.S. cannot lead global AI governance if partners expect its frameworks to be rewritten every four years. Stability is a strategic asset, and the United States must treat it as such.
But the responsibility for navigating the AI transition does not fall on government alone. Business executives now sit at the center of the most consequential technological shift since electrification, and their decisions will shape not only corporate competitiveness but national resilience. Executives must recognize that the era of voluntary commitments and ad‑hoc governance is ending. They should begin aligning internal AI practices with emerging global norms (particularly those taking shape in the EU) rather than waiting for federal mandates.¹⁷ Companies that anticipate regulatory convergence will be better positioned than those that treat governance as a compliance burden.
Executives must also invest in workforce transition at a scale commensurate with the disruption their technologies will unleash. The private sector cannot outsource reskilling to government; it must build continuous learning ecosystems, redesign roles around augmentation rather than displacement, and create internal mobility pathways that prevent talent stratification. Firms that treat workforce development as a strategic asset (not a cost center) will be the ones that thrive in an AI‑saturated economy.
Supply‑chain resilience is another domain where business leadership is indispensable. As the United States attempts to re‑route semiconductor, compute, and critical‑mineral supply chains away from China, companies must diversify vendors, build redundancy into procurement, and participate in allied‑nation manufacturing ecosystems. The firms that survive the next decade will be those that treat supply chains not as cost‑minimizing pipelines but as strategic infrastructure.
Finally, executives must embrace a multipolar mindset. The global AI landscape will not be governed by a single set of rules, and companies must be prepared to operate across divergent regulatory regimes. Strategic agility (knowing when to localize models, when to adopt regional standards, and when to build sovereign‑cloud variants) will be essential. The companies that succeed will be those that can navigate fragmentation without sacrificing scale.
Only by addressing these structural weaknesses (across both government and industry) can the United States convert its extraordinary technological momentum into enduring geopolitical advantage. The future of American leadership will not be determined solely by the speed of innovation, but by the stability, coherence, and responsibility with which that innovation is governed. And whatever form that governance ultimately takes, it will reflect the character, incentives, and choices of the American electorate.
References
- White House. America’s AI Action Plan. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, July 2025.
- Latham & Watkins LLP. “White House Unveils Comprehensive AI Strategy: ‘Winning the Race’—America’s AI Action Plan.” Client Alert, August 13, 2025.
- White House. America’s AI Action Plan, preamble. Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, July 2025.
- Wiley Rein LLP. “White House Launches AI Action Plan and Executive Orders to Promote Innovation, Infrastructure, and Investment.” Legal Alert, July 23, 2025.
- InnovationAus. “Quad Commitment on Semiconductor Supply Chain, Tech Principles.” InnovationAus, September 26, 2021.
- Climate Energy Finance. International Solar PV and BESS Manufacturing Trends 2025. Sydney: Climate Energy Finance, March 23, 2025.
- Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement. “Quad Leaders’ Joint Statement: Partnership for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” September 2021 (and subsequent Quad summit readouts on semiconductors and emerging technologies).
- “CHIPS and Science Act.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2024.
- Bipartisan Policy Center. “Strategic Federal Actions Aim to Strengthen AI and Energy Infrastructure.” Policy Explainer, November 12, 2025.
- U.S. Department of Labor. “The Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan Is Bringing Agility to America’s Workforce.” DOL Blog, November 23, 2025.
- Clean Air Task Force. “Trump Administration Freezes Offshore Wind Projects, Undermining Affordability, Reliability, and Permitting Certainty.” December 22, 2025.
- Climate Energy Finance. International Solar PV and BESS Manufacturing Trends 2025. Sydney: Climate Energy Finance, March 23, 2025.
- European Commission. “European Commission Unveils Clean Industrial Deal” (including elements of the Green Deal Industrial Plan and Net-Zero Industry measures). February 28, 2025.
- AI CERTs. “Trump Opens Nvidia China H200 Exports with 25% Fee.” AI CERTs, December 22, 2025.
- “CHIPS and Science Act.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified 2024.
- U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “About CISA.” Accessed 2025 (for historical analogy on centralized cyber governance).
- HIMSS. “White House Releases America’s AI Action Plan – What It Means for Healthcare.” HIMSS.org, 2025.
