David Brooks: America’s response to the new Cold War is weak and self-defeating. We can do better

Confidence Particular people have more of it and specific people have less Confident people have what psychologists call a strong internal locus of control They believe they have the tools to control their own destiny They have a bias toward action They venture into the future When it comes to confidence particular nations have it and certain don t Various nations once had it but then lost it Earlier this month on his blog Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok a George Mason University economist requested us to compare America s behavior during Cold War I against the Soviet Union with America s behavior during Cold War II against China I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast between a nation back in the s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation this day that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away In the s American intelligence suggested that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging U S capabilities across a range of military technologies Then on Oct the Soviet Union launched the first satellite Sputnik into space Americans were shocked but responded with confidence Within a year the United States had created NASA and ARPA later DARPA the research agency that among other things helped create the internet In President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Mentoring Act one of the largest part key training reforms of the th century which improved training especially in math science and foreign languages The National Science Foundation budget tripled The Department of Defense vastly increased spending on research and rise Within a inadequate years total research and rise spending across various agencies zoomed up to nearly of the entire federal budget It s about currently America s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one It s who can out-innovate whom So they fought the Soviet threat with learning with the goal of maximizing talent on our side One reason the U S market system had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one historian Hal Brands writes in his book The Twilight Struggle Federal assistance for academic research rose to billion in from million in Earlier in that century American universities lagged behind their best European peers Brands observes by the end of the Cold War they dominated the globe In the present day we are in a second Cold War For the first couple of decades it wasn t clear whether China was a rival or a friend but now it s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend As scholar Robert D Atkinson argued in The New York Times this year for the Chinese regime the desire to make money is secondary Its primary goal is to damage America s financial sector and pave the way for China to become the world s pre-eminent power he wrote China is a country that according to a House committee inquiry was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans to Since the beginning of the st century China has moved confidently to seize the future especially in the realm of innovation and ideas China s total research and growth funding has grown -fold since Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres In Chinese scholars produced very inadequate broadly cited research papers Now they produce more high impact research papers than Americans do and according to The Economist they absolutely dominate research in the following fields materials science chemistry engineering computer science the setting and ecology agricultural science physics and math These achievements of module lead directly to China s advantages across a range of high-tech industries It s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles drones and solar panels It s high-tech everything In the years between and according to a evaluation by the Australian Strategic Plan Institute the United States led the way in of frontier technologies stretching across sectors such as defense space force the milieu computing and biotech By the period between and the Chinese led among of those key technologies while the United States led in only seven Then along came AI Americans overall are fearful about it Last year the polling organization Ipsos sought people from countries if they were excited for the AI future or nervous about it Americans are among the majority nervous people in the world The countries bulk excited by the prospect of that future China South Korea Indonesia and Thailand The fact is that nobody knows what the AI future holds people s projections about it mostly reflect their emotional states Americans used to be the youthful optimists of the globe Not right now So how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II With huge increases in research By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas We re doing the exact opposite At present s leaders don t seem to understand what the Chinese clearly understand that the future will be dominated by the country that makes the the majority of its talent On his blog Tabarrok gets it about right The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat Populists are anti-intellectual President Donald Trump isn t pumping research money into the universities he s draining it out The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation s budget it s trying to gut it The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science A survey by the journal Nature of scientists in the United States located that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete Trump s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls to erect pact blockades and to turn inward A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China but the United States is burning bridges in all directions A normal country would be trying to restore America s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world We re trying to save it through protectionism The thinking seems to be We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world That s a recipe for national decline Related Articles John Lawrence Uncle Sam wants you to rat on national parks that reflect true history David Mastio Democrats will regret their Epstein Files glee Bret Stephens Mamdani for mayor if you want a foil for Republicans Mary Ellen Klas The GOP s Medicaid cuts have a very convenient timeline Noah Feldman The Supreme Court s silent opinions undermine its legitimacy The difficulty is not just Trump China has been displaying intellectual and innovative vitality for decades and the United States has scarcely mobilized This country sometimes feels exhausted gridlocked as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future In the progressive era America built new institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Reserve During the New Deal Americans created an alphabet soup of new agencies By Americans had created NATO and the precursor to the World Bank Where are the new institutions fit for in contemporary times Governing body itself is not great at innovation but for a century general sector money has been necessary to fuel the fires of creativity in the United States in Israel and in China On that front America is in retreat Can confidence be restored Of discipline Franklin Roosevelt did it and Ronald Reagan did it Is China s dominance inevitable Of class not Centrally controlled economies are prone to monumental blunders But the primary contest is psychological almost spiritual Do Americans have faith in the power of the human mind Are they willing to invest to enlarge the national talent pool Right now no Americans on the left and the right have become highly attentive to threat risk-averse and self-doubting about the national project What do you do with a country with astounding advantages but that no longer believes in itself David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times