The countries that prevail in great-power rivalries are those that adapt. Athens and Sparta and their allies constantly innovated so their navies could outperform one another. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union spent nearly two decades engaged in a space race. Now, technology is the central front in U.S.-Chinese competition and in the broader contest to shape the world, and the United States must adapt again. This rivalry is playing out across frontier sectors including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and clean energy. To prevail, Washington needs a clear definition of success and a clear and consistent strategy for how to achieve it.

For decades, U.S. policy toward China rested on a quiet but powerful assumption: Beijing was essentially running the same race as the United States, just a few steps behind. China was seen as a copycat—adept at imitation, lagging on innovation, and ultimately dependent on access to Western technology. The American lead was assumed to be durable, perhaps even self-sustaining.

That assumption has not been borne out. China has moved beyond simply chasing American innovation. It is pursuing a different theory of power: one that places production, scale, and control of critical inputs at the center of its national strategy. As the United States has focused more narrowly on maintaining its lead in innovation breakthroughs, confident that these would cascade naturally into economic, military, and soft power, China has focused on the cascade—aiming to translate technological advances into applied capabilities across its economy and national security enterprise. In other words, while the United States has been running one race, China has been running another. Although this shift unfolded gradually, its consequences are now impossible to ignore. In sector after sector, China has built or is building dominant positions in many of the foundational layers that underpin the modern economy.

Americans tend to see the competition as a race to a finish line—a contest to see which country reaches the next exciting innovation first. But that framing is misleading and counterproductive. This contest has no end date. Success will not manifest as a single moment of triumph with one side declaring victory. Nor will it come from running fast in a single lane. Instead, this competition will extend indefinitely, across a wide variety of sectors. It is no longer enough to be the first to discover new advancements if others are faster at deploying them, or to lead in design if the inputs and capacity vital to production sit beyond the control of the United States or its allies. Washington’s goal must be to establish all these forms of advantage at once.

The point of this contest is not simply to “beat” China. If the United States pulls ahead of China on some relative metric but fails to deliver on making its people more secure or creating greater opportunity for them, then it will have failed—full stop. Success will require fostering a techno-industrial base that drives continuous innovation, rapidly adapting the U.S. military to deter major conflicts, and spreading American digital infrastructure and standards, all while remaining open to cooperation with China over shared interests to prevent a race to the bottom that leaves the whole world worse off.

Securing these objectives must be the central task of American statecraft in the twenty-first century. Doing so will require changes in mindset that transcend partisan boundaries and persist across multiple administrations. But locking in those changes now is urgent, because technological power is translating directly and rapidly into geopolitical power to a degree the world hasn’t seen in years. And for the first time in a long time, the United States is facing a genuine peer competitor.

Becoming a leader in global technology has become a central organizing principle of Chinese state power. Beijing’s industrial policy is shaped around this goal, and its strategy is designed for the long term. Chinese leaders are seeking to make the rest of the world dependent on China while making China independent from everyone else. And they have assessed that to achieve this, China does not need to lead in every frontier domain. Instead, it needs to control nodes of leverage—that is, the inputs and systems that advanced economies and militaries depend on to function. Beijing has already captured several of these nodes, including processed rare earths, precursor ingredients for pharmaceuticals, and batteries, and it is striving to capture others, such as robotics.

China has also gotten much better at technological breakthroughs. After capturing the battery supply chain, for example, it has been able to race ahead in battery innovation, now producing more than 70 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and controlling roughly three-quarters of global battery cell manufacturing capacity. It is now trying to repeat this pattern in the biotechnology industry.

China’s execution of this sweeping strategy is made possible by its political system. Unlike Washington, Beijing has the centralized authority to direct vast national resources toward national objectives with speed and coordination. State banks, industrial policy, procurement, and regulation all move swiftly in concert. There is no meaningful separation between the military and civilian realms, so civilian technological breakthroughs flow directly into the national security enterprise. And the state is unencumbered by free-market constraints, which means it can mobilize inputs at a staggering scale and subsidize intense competition, in which most recipient firms fail but a few champions emerge that can dominate a global industry. Short-term inefficiency and massive capital misallocation are tolerated in service of long-term gains; there are no voters asking their elected representatives whether their tax dollars could be put to better use.

The United States has long dismissed the Chinese system as too rigid for frontier innovation. And there’s no question that the American system—democratic and capitalist, with a limited government, world-class universities, strong intellectual property protections, and a free-market system in which winners and losers emerge on their own—has produced a dazzling lineup of transformative breakthroughs. The United States cannot replicate China’s approach, nor should it want to. But Americans must find their own way to compete on this broader playing field—not only innovating but also producing the advanced technology and controlling the vital inputs that will power their economy and defense industrial base.

An effective American technology strategy would aim to establish and protect four areas of high ground. A high ground provides an enduring structural advantage. It delivers concrete, measurable results that connect policy to the real lives of the American people. First, the United States must revitalize its techno-industrial base, not only to preserve its position at the cutting edge of innovation but also to generate enough production capacity to produce advanced technologies at scale, across diversified and resilient supply chains and in cooperation with allies and partners. The U.S. military, for its part, must focus on rapid innovation and adaptation, which will be critical for deterring aggression in multiple theaters and, in particular, for maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Washington must also build a democratic digital order that makes American technology the prevailing model, protected by high safety standards, financed transparently, and in respect of human rights and data privacy. Finally, this approach must establish a floor of stability in the U.S.-Chinese relationship and create meaningful cooperation between the two countries to prevent a race to the bottom that hurts everyone.

These high grounds are mutually reinforcing. A revitalized techno-industrial base would support military power and economic resilience. Military innovation that deters a war over Taiwan would protect American industry and preserve a dynamic global economy. A global digital order that enshrines democratic values rather than authoritarian ones would create an economy in which people of all backgrounds and beliefs can participate freely. And so on.

Three families of technology will be essential to this strategy. The first is computing, which includes semiconductors, quantum information systems, and, especially important, artificial intelligence. The second is biotechnology and biomanufacturing, from drug discovery to the synthetic production of construction materials. The third is clean energy, especially the “electric stack” of batteries, motors, chips, and power electronics. Advancements in........

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