Economic security is technological security
This is most evident in the treatment of economic policy. Trade, tariffs, export controls, industrial policy, and reshoring have been elevated from economic instruments to core tools of national security. The strategy explicitly endorses the use of tariffs and regulatory leverage to promote reindustrialization and protect domestic production in critical and emerging technology sectors.
This is not just about jobs or competitiveness. It’s about ensuring the technological resources necessary for AI, such as advanced chips, rare earth elements, energy, and data infrastructure, remain secure and accessible to the United States and its allies. Supply chains are described as strategic vulnerabilities and critical minerals as assets whose control will shape the future balance of technological power.
Compared to the Biden administration’s emphasis on “friend-shoring” and incentive-based coordination, the 2025 NSS takes a more coercive approach. Alignment is enforced through access and restriction. Markets are opened or closed based on strategic usefulness. Economic openness becomes conditional on technological alignment.
Export controls illustrate this shift most clearly. While the NSS maintains many Biden-era restrictions on advanced semiconductors and AI-related technologies, it reframes these restrictions in explicitly transactional terms. Export controls are not just about denying adversaries access; they are also about establishing a hierarchy of technological access.
Countries that align their export control regimes with U.S. standards are rewarded with preferential licensing, deeper technological cooperation, and access to the U.S. “AI stack” — the integrated ecosystem of advanced semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, software frameworks, and standards that underpin modern AI development and deployment. Conversely, those countries that do not align with U.S. standards risk exclusion. In effect, export controls become tools for managing alliances and promoting technological discipline, shaping global innovation pathways through incentives and constraints. Simply put, this is a new form of the “carrot and stick” policy.
This approach signals a shift from multilateral governance to managed technological blocs. Standards are no longer negotiated as global public goods but rather leveraged as instruments of influence. Consequently, technology governance becomes a form of geopolitical bargaining.