For the greater part of the last decade, the United States and China have been locked in a cold war, fought as fiercely over economic and technology advantages as over military advantages. In Washington, there has been bipartisan support to respond to China’s dumping of subsidized goods, its acquisition of dual-use technologies, its rampant intellectual property theft, and its coercive practices. As a result, the last three U.S. administrations have deployed a slate of economic security policies to safeguard U.S. markets, supply chains, and assets, and to rebuild the U.S. industrial base to gain the upper hand on Beijing.The first Trump administration, for instance, levied tariffs on China to rebalance trade and halt discriminatory policies related to technology transfer, IP, and innovation. The Biden administration then dramatically expanded export controls—tools originally designed to prevent weapons proliferation—to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors that are critical to the artificial intelligence race. Upon returning to office in 2025, President Donald Trump has more aggressively used tariffs to reset economic relations with China. All three administrations, meanwhile, embraced industrial policy, with varying approaches to state intervention in markets to promote supply chain resilience: President Joe Biden used subsidies and tax cuts to encourage the reshoring of chipmaking and Trump has taken government equity stakes in a number of companies in strategic sectors, including chipmaking and critical minerals.Despite these dramatic shifts in economic policy, however, Washington has struggled to achieve its stated economic security objectives. Trump’s current tariff strategy has extracted investment commitments from allies, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, but it has also produced widespread economic uncertainty, Chinese retaliation against U.S. industries, and a long list of trading partners looking to hedge their bets. Neither did his first-term tariffs reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. Biden-era incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act did expand domestic chip-making in several states, and export controls appeared to temporarily preserve the United States’ advantage in leading-edge chips. But these measures also fueled China’s drive to develop indigenous advanced chips and inspired Beijing to deploy its own export controls on rare earth minerals as a coercive tool against the United States and its allies.Washington’s mixed track record reflects more than simply individual policies gone awry. It reflects a competition between one rival that struggles to play the long game and another that has mastered it. The United States has deployed existing tools to new challenges, often without fully anticipating the consequences. It has yet to demonstrate its ability to systematically connect dots across policy domains, develop economic war-games, and devise strategies as part of a comprehensive and effective approach to economic security.The United States, in other words, has improvised piecemeal policies and hoped for the best, while China has fused strategic vision with institutional coordination and dedicated resources to developing the human capital needed to pull off such an approach. Washington needs to raise its economic security game. To do so, it needs to nurture a new class of economic warriors adept in the new tools of national power, resilience, and global influence.HOW TO BUILD A PIPELINEBeijing is prepared. China has matched U.S. tariffs and export controls move for move. It has weaponized its dominance on rare earths processing, exploited U.S. supply chain vulnerabilities, and poured immense resources into dominating strategic sectors, including shipbuilding. China’s fingerprints are on offensive cyber campaigns such as Salt Typhoon, which mapped Western telecommunications networks, and Volt Typhoon, which prepositioned malware in U.S. critical infrastructure. Beijing also outspends the United States and allies in industrial subsidies and basic research in emerging fields, and it bundles infrastructure finance and technology transfer with guaranteed market access as part of an attractive offer to the global South—as the United States begins to withdraw.What many in Washington often overlook is that China’s competitive success is a function not simply of party diktats but of the resourcefulness of its trained personnel, as well. China’s 2023–2027 National Cadre Training Plan calls for officials to master global economics, supply chain resilience, dual-use technology, and financial risk via mandatory training programs using online self-study and in-person “collective training” sessions. At the Central Party School, cadres study international political economy, the Belt and Road Initiative, and China’s framework for assessing national strength. Elite universities extend the pipeline: the Seven Sons of National Defense, a grouping of public universities affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, trains technologists for strategic industries. Tsinghua University and Wuhan University offer research, advisory, and training activities related to BRI. The China University of Labor Relations trains foreign trade union leaders on Chinese economic and labor theory and practice to build solidarity among BRI partners.This institutional architecture embodies what Dan Wang, currently a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford, has called China’s “engineering state”—a system that channels technical talent toward national economic objectives, forming an ecosystem designed to produce officials who can “win wars without fighting” by mastering markets, logistics, and technology. Chinese decision-makers have long understood that winning the geoeconomic long game requires cultivating a pipeline of top talent with breadth and depth across technology, economics, and investment.OWN WORST ENEMYBuilding economic security capabilities for a complex market economy is more challenging than Beijing’s task. When U.S. efforts have combined technology and markets expertise, actionable economic intelligence, and the right policies, they have been successful. In 2019, for example, the first Trump administration successfully pressed the Dutch government to block chip equipment maker ASML from selling advanced chipmaking equipment to China. But as the chips race accelerated, applications of the same tools produced uneven outcomes. Biden administration officials, for instance, did not fully anticipate that Nvidia could (and would) engineer a workaround when it announced semiconductor controls in 2022; within months, the company had rolled out export-compliant chips that it continued to sell to China.Building and retaining economic security capacity is a challenge for the U.S. government in part because of civil service rules and difficulties attracting top private-sector talent with relevant skills. To implement the manufacturing components of the CHIPS and Science Act, the Biden administration had to work around around civil service pay rules in order to rapidly recruit technologists and investors into the Commerce Department. The second Trump administration tried to improve some of these operational inefficiencies in federal agencies with its Department of Government Efficiency, but it ultimately undermined its own goals with a chaotic launch.Neither bespoke nor sweeping reform efforts have yielded a coherent economic security apparatus or, as H.R. McMaster and Andrew Grotto have pointed out, a professional corps with a distinct identity. This basic insight is not lost on U.S. decision-makers. Government job postings advertise open positions that would form the backbone of an economic security corps: export-control officers, technologists, and investment officers across the bureaus of the Commerce Department, sanctions analysts and economists at the Department of the Treasury, and scientists at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. But without the right mix of skills, institutional setup, and esprits de corps among economic security professionals, business-as-usual recruitment will not meet the moment.Washington urgently needs to build competencies in these areas, but the talent pipeline from universities and the private sector is weak. At the undergraduate and graduate levels annually, U.S. universities award about 6,000 degrees in public policy, more than 250,000 in engineering, and 550,000 in business with about three percent year-on-year growth over the past decade. U.S. degree programs that explicitly combine economics, technology, and national security are few and far between. Without intervention, the United States is doomed to repeat its mistakes: leaky export controls, evaded sanctions, and industrial policies that miss their mark. Building an economic warrior class should be a national priority among government, business, universities, think tanks, and philanthropies. The challenge is not unprecedented; the United States government has mobilized expertise to meet national challenges before. The question is whether Washington will provide direction, mobilize support, and marshal resources to do so again.UNCLE SAM NEEDS YOUWashington need not model this effort on Beijing’s. In fact, it should take some solace in the advantages that the United States’ decentralized knowledge ecosystem affords: its ability to adapt quickly, encourage debate, and weed out bad ideas. When faced with major national challenges, the U.S. government and independent research institutions have reinvented policy research and training time and time again. During the New Deal, the Social Security Administration established training programs for administrators managing a novel national social insurance system. After World War II, the RAND Corporation pioneered systems analysis for complex defense problems, methods which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara introduced to the Pentagon. By 1970, universities were offering graduate programs training policy analysts in these approaches.Universities have also incubated creative approaches to policy challenges, particularly in response to moments of crisis. After the Cuban missile crisis, political scientist Graham Allison developed the decision sciences, which are now taught at policy schools. Similarly, the oil shocks of the 1970s spurred the development of energy economics expertise; the post-Soviet transition created demand for market reform specialists; the 2008 financial crisis elevated systemic-risk analysis; and most recently, COVID-19 highlighted the need to study supply chain resilience.China’s top-down system may appear more efficient, but America’s distributed innovation has proven more adaptable—as long as leaders set clear priorities and mobilize resources. At its best, the U.S. ecosystem benefits from the relationships between public and private sector. Government funding, foundation support, and market demand create conditions for universities to respond and redesign curricula. Federal agencies signal workforce needs, DARPA partnerships train scientists, and grants from the National Institutes of Health develop the research workforce.There are, to be sure, early signs that this is happening already with economic security. The graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, for instance, offers a concentration in economic security. And Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale offer courses linking technology, energy, and statecraft. George Mason University offers an M.B.A. in national security, Purdue offers a certificate in Innovation for Public Service, and Carnegie Mellon offers advanced degrees in engineering and public policy. The National Defense University provides training on economic security topics including political economy for security practitioners and modern economic warfare. And among U.S. allies and partners, Korea University, Yonsei University, the University of Tokyo, and Sciences Po offer graduate-level courses in energy security and economic statecraft.But much more must be done. Business and engineering schools that teach familiar frameworks—cost-benefit analysis, systems modeling, scenario planning, finance, microeconomics, and national security—should encourage students to apply those frameworks to pressing practical questions; for example, how tariffs affect strategic supply chains or how export controls affect innovation. Philanthropic organizations and corporations should also step up and fund economic security scholarships with the same urgency that they have at times devoted to climate and public health. Think tanks can convene researchers across allied countries to share insights on economic security topics including modern industrial policy, technology protection, and national security investing. These platforms can advance allied coordination without the need for new multilateral structures.Economic security is here to stay.Government must also lead here. Trump should issue an executive order establishing a professional corps of economic statesmen. It would include the creation of a standing Economic Security Committee, modeled after the Deputies’ Committee within the National Security Council, to direct strategic economic security priorities and coordinate across the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, Energy, and Defense and the intelligence community. The Economic Security Committee, working with the Office of Personnel Management, should define economic security competencies, tag federal jobs accordingly, and prioritize filling those vacancies, sending clear signals to the labor market about the government’s needs. The executive order should also direct departments to partner with universities on curriculum development, offer faculty sabbaticals in government, and create rotational programs with industry.Of course, executive action without legislative backing (and dedicated resources) will not work. Congress should establish an Economic Security Braintrust Foundation, modeled on the Department of Energy Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation (FESI) authorized by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, to more effectively leverage private resources. It should also direct the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy to designate economic security as a research priority, making grants available to create incentives for universities. A pipeline of approximately 1,000 new graduate students per year would respond to demand for economic security talent in government and the private sector. At an annual cost of roughly $180 million, congressional appropriations and private matching funds could help mature economic security as a field of study by supporting graduate fellowships, endowed chairs, paid internships, and applied research in areas such as supply chain resilience, investment screening, sanction, industrial policy, and economic intelligence.To be sure, building government capacity faces political headwinds in an administration seemingly hostile to expanding government or funding research. But the Trump administration has demonstrated an appetite for ambitious economic security initiatives, typically by leveraging private sector resources to meet public ends. For instance, the administration’s recently announced Genesis Mission aims to double U.S. scientific productivity within a decade by mobilizing scientists and federal scientific data across the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories, alongside industry and university partners, to meet grand scientific challenges, including in AI and quantum computing. The administration has downsized the federal workforce and dismantled several federal technology units, but it has also floated plans for a U.S. Tech Force of 1,000 early-career technologists, who would serve two-years stints in government through partnerships with 25 tech companies. In some areas, the administration has even expanded funding. The Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital has grown from a $984 million pilot in the Biden administration into a $200 billion lending powerhouse.Economic security is here to stay. The United States must prepare to win an economic contest worth trillions of dollars. China has prepared itself with cadres and systems to follow through on its economic warfare strategy; the United States has not. Just as the Cold War was won by strategists who mastered deterrence, today’s economic competition will be won by professionals who can leverage interdependence in service of national strength and resilience. It’s time to train them to wield economic power as skillfully as their predecessors wielded military power.Loading...Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly.