It’s immigration, education, and energy. Everything else is just details.
It’s simple – a single, competitive, and collegial global market. For decades, we operated within a framework similar to that. Capital, talent, and ideas flowed relatively easily across borders, fueling extraordinary growth and innovation. Today, that framework is eroding. Suboptimal policies, particularly in talent and research, are undermining the foundations of innovation and competitiveness.
The costs of these policies are profound. Restricting students, closing doors to immigration, and politicizing talent pipelines will cost the United States dearly. Look closely at the most advanced companies and technologies in the United States; nearly all are founded, built, and run by talented immigrants. To stifle that flow is not only misguided, it is self-destructive.
Fractured Supply Chains
Policies that undermine the free flow of talent and products not only hinder competitiveness but also disrupt efficient global supply chains. Trade restrictions and volatile, sometimes bewildering, policies are creating smaller, more fragmented supply chains and redundancies. This creates inefficiencies, driving up costs and slowing innovation.
Redundancies are costly. Building duplicate supply chains, developing parallel infrastructures, and retrenching into regional markets introduce inefficiencies, costs, and delays. But given fractured geopolitics, trade restrictions, and adversarial policies, redundancies are no longer optional—they are necessary. Efficiency gives way to resilience, and reasonable cooperation is abandoned for the sake of an ill-defined and obscure construct of “national security.”
Many experienced executives and entrepreneurs hope that these challenges will disappear because the policies are obviously ill-advised and inefficient, leading to slower growth, less innovation, and ultimately, everyone being worse off. But, hoping that these challenges will disappear, that policies will realign, or that markets will magically converge is wishful thinking. They won’t.
This fractured environment will persist, and policy must act with purpose and foresight.
It’s the Talent
It’s the people. Everything else is just theory.
The unique value created by talented and highly trained people is vastly underestimated. People are the key component in the innovation equation, and are too often overlooked as if specialized, talented, motivated entrepreneurs are somehow interchangeable and easy to find. They are not, and are the critical component to success. We are doing our best to deter these individuals and remove their motivation.
You need people—innovative, creative, relentless people—to make breakthroughs happen. The United States’ primary global competitive advantage has always been that the best and brightest from all over the world come to be trained and educated in the US at the world’s top universities. When combined with access to capital and a unique entrepreneurial culture, this ecosystem produced the world’s most innovative and valuable companies.
Killing the Goose
We can’t have golden eggs without the right geese.
Yet we are actively undermining these advantages. By restricting the inflow of global talent, by making it harder for international students to stay and contribute, we are trading long-term competitiveness for short-term politics. Consider this: if the founders and executives of our leading technology companies, including Intel, Google, Tesla, and numerous others, had been denied the ability to study or emigrate, and had been barred from accessing the US market, educational system, and venture capital, the global technology landscape would look very different, and the US would have suffered the most.
Recent policy is testing that scenario. Instead of inviting the best and the brightest to come to the United States to innovate and create, we are actively deterring them and chasing them away from our markets. We are creating international competitors by denying our companies their best assets.
Talent is not just an input; it is the differentiator. Capital is abundant, technology spreads, but talent—the rare blend of insight, drive, and skill—is irreplaceable. Nations that attract, cultivate, and retain talent win. Those that do not will fall behind, regardless of how much money they spend or how many policies they draft.
It’s Energy
Power is prosperity.
If talent is the brain of global competitiveness, energy is the circulatory system. Without abundant, reliable, and cheap energy, economic growth stalls. Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen once wrote, “Power is prosperity.” It is not just a concept. It is literal.
China has proven this. By investing massively in energy infrastructure—generation, transmission, storage, and delivery—it has built the backbone of its economic prosperity. Industrial capacity, urbanization, and digital transformation all rest on that foundation.
Looking out over a 10- to 20-year horizon, energy innovation will shape global power. Breakthroughs in fusion energy, more cost-efficient nuclear power, and scalable geothermal are not distant dreams; they are trajectories we must commit to now. Not that everything will work, but this is fundamental to basic discovery. One of these energy breakthroughs would transform society. Energy innovation is not a marginal gain; it is a multiplier that unlocks everything else.
It’s Talent and Energy, Stupid
Energy and talent, taken together, are the twin engines of prosperity. Both should be priorities and yet are mostly ignored or the victims of ill-considered policies. Policymakers often focus on tariffs, subsidies, and tactical maneuvering, while overlooking the structural drivers of competitiveness. This is the bewildering part: the advantages are obvious, the solutions are clear, and yet we choose restriction over expansion, shortsightedness over vision.
The Next Leap
Alongside energy, the next great driver is computing. We stand at the edge of new paradigms—quantum computing, novel semiconductor architectures, and entirely new models of processing information. These innovations will not simply speed up existing processes; they will enable fundamentally new capabilities.
Quantum computing has the potential to redefine every global industry, unlocking calculations previously considered impossible. Advances in semiconductor design will create architectures suited not only for today’s AI workloads but for entirely new categories of applications.
These are not technologies that materialize overnight. They require decades of investment, patient research, and collaborative ecosystems. This is why underfunding or cutting off research and fundamental discovery is so damaging—they cut off the flow of ideas and people at the very moment when long-term commitment is required.
We are not planting the trees that will shade future generations.
Strategic Myopia
In summary, the US’s competitive advantage was developing the world’s best educational system, initiating innovative research and development, welcoming the world’s best students to thrive in an unrestricted environment, and accessing unique forms of capital for entrepreneurial ideas.
The unique environment that combined academia and entrepreneurship, as seen at places like Bell Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor, was the spark that ignited Silicon Valley, the Life Sciences Corridor, the Innovation District, and the Research Triangle, among others, creating an unprecedented entrepreneurial environment and economic engine. This drove economic growth, disruptive innovation, and greater prosperity. This created a virtuous cycle that enhanced national wealth and economic opportunity.
We are undermining all these advantages.
Restricting immigration, underfunding basic research, and politicizing global cooperation are misguided. They weaken the very foundations of competitiveness. Despite our intention to weaken other competitive nations, especially China, we have only weakened ourselves while enabling our competitors to adapt. We are shooting ourselves in the foot and then claiming we can still run.
China assumes that these misguided policies are not temporary, and is accelerating its push toward independence—and in some areas, potentially superior development. China’s energy infrastructure, its investments in semiconductors, and its determination to build its domestic talent show what a long-term strategy looks like.
We risk waking up a decade from now and realizing that we squandered our advantages.
Now What?
Face reality. The fractured global system will not mend itself. Geopolitical competition, trade barriers, and redundant supply chains are the new normal. Hoping for a return to the past is not a strategy.
Prioritize talent. Make immigration easier for the best and brightest. Invest in education at every level. Build environments that empower entrepreneurs to take calculated risks and learn from their failures. Talent is not a side issue—it is the critical element to success and prosperity.
Innovate Energy. Fund fusion, nuclear, geothermal, and other potential energy sources. Develop the ability to capture, transmit, store, and deliver energy more efficiently and cost-effectively. Create policies that reward breakthroughs and scale deployment. The nation that leads in energy leads in everything.
Research and Development. Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology that will impact all aspects of industry and society. But the future will require deeper research, technological innovation, and revolutions. Plan today for the future 20 years from now and begin fundamental scientific research.
We currently underfund this, and are therefore starving tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Quantum, neuromorphic, and post-silicon architectures will take decades to mature, but they are worth the patience. Brilliant serendipity comes from fundamental research. Applications follow.
Among the many examples is the first transistor. We had no idea it would revolutionize our world, and it came from basic research at Bell Labs. The pathway from Bell Labs to Fairchild Semiconductor to Intel to Nvidia was a choppy and unpredictable one. However, without the spark of basic research, this would not have been possible. Applications are unpredictable but can only come from research and discovery.
Openness and competitiveness. Ultimately, it would be a good idea to stop being our own worst enemy. The US is undermining its strengths, which include a combination of talent, capital, and openness. Restrictive policies erode each of those pillars. Aligning policy with that reality is a good start.
The Horizon
The next 20 years will be defined by choices made today. Talent and energy—the two most underestimated components of competitiveness—are also the most decisive. Combined with technological innovation, you have built the foundation for prosperity. Undermine them, and you guarantee decline.
The horizon is clear, but only with foresight and discipline.
