The world has entered a new era of Great Power competition, where civilizational and regional blocks are coalescing to create large spaces of economic, trade, and military influence. Leaders and experts worldwide have termed this the new era of multipolarity.
The political, economic, and technological systems of the West have been hybridized and fused by competing superpowers such as China, India, and Russia. Furthermore, next-generation technologies with dual-use and civil-military applications have elided with nationalist and civilizational movements aligned against the United States and its way of life. The unipolar moment, when America emerged triumphant over the Soviet Union, has now passed, and the seventy-five-year golden period of the American-based world order is being challenged from all quarters.
American Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this clear in a recent interview:
It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power … It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to the point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.
Mirror systems such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Brazil-Russia-India-China group, and the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System have been created to rival the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, thereby providing alternative security, trade, and financial infrastructures that could challenge or even replace the formerly dominant Western-based institutional systems.
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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has provided the resources, capital, and power projection to ensure that these rival systems remain solvent, while subverting, undermining, and manipulating the former Western-based systems with its Unrestricted Warfare Doctrine.
The U.S. once controlled the various key financial, trade, economic, and technological systems, which had provided peace and security to the world over. Indeed, the dollar has acted as the world’s reserve currency since the end of the Second World War, facilitating capital investments, providing loans, and ensuring global financial stability. But in the present multipolar era, new and emergent threats from rival powers have shifted the geopolitical chessboard, and thus, a new policy calculus must be applied by America’s institutions concerning international affairs.
When circumstances change, so must cogent policymaking and planning.
American institutions of higher education, as key incubators for the governmental, corporate, and STEM fields, must also take note of these epochal shifts in great power competition. This acknowledgement will be necessary to support the freedoms and democratic way of life that have led to the advancement and protection of human rights, environmental rights, and the right to live a life free from fear and oppression.
The Western liberal model will not survive if it is not defended from those who seek to dismantle and replace it.
The current policy stance of many of the most esteemed American universities remains crystalized in an outdated global outlook that does not acknowledge the present-day realities of great power competition, the multi-polar world, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Furthermore, the rise of artificial intellengce (AI) has increased the risk paradigm tremendously, as rival powers such as China and Russia, as well as their client states, seek to steal proprietary research from America’s tier one research institutions. They then built on this technology with minimal research and development costs, thereby increasing the capital they could spend on other critical technological research to defeat the U.S. militarily and economically.
For example, it has been speculated that the large language models for China’s Deep Seek AI—supposedly Chinese home-grown technology—were stolen from the developers of Chatbot GPT, in which Microsoft is a major investor.
Why was this possibility only whispered by the tech magnates of the U.S.? The most likely answer is China’s vast markets, where major technology firms have massive investments. If the American tech CEOs called out China on theft, then they would lose their market share to global competitors who choose to remain silent. This is another form of censorship and, in many ways, an illicit extra-territoriality extension of China’s Corporate Credit System on our domestic corporations.
It is much the same game in America’s university systems, where funding streams from foreign adversaries provide a steady flow of monies to fill decreasing federal and state funding. As long as universities remain silent on key issues such as China’s re-education camps, then they are permitted to continue to engage with China.
Business investments by major corporations with universities are also down as the risk of research and data being stolen is high. China literally has convertibility centers to innovate off stolen research and data. To wit, the People’s Liberation Army of China even promulgated a campaign termed, “Picking Flowers, Making Honey,” in which military universities sent out students to steal from Western universities that were providing them with a first-rate education in good faith.
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There is a clear solution to this problem, and it is a simple one. Support domestic universities in the STEM fields with a focus on talented low-income students, cut all university funding ties with China, and ensure that all digital systems utilized in American institutions of higher education are secured by domestic tech firms.
It is an unfortunate reality that poverty and high living costs are becoming ever more pronounced in the U.S., making it hard for everyday citizens to make ends meet. This is a pressing and very real issue that runs across the color spectrum and the urban and rural divide.
It is high time that America’s technology firms, under the direction of the Federal Government, begin to invest heavily in domestic university technology programs in AI and other emergent technologies to ensure the U.S. remains at the cutting edge in STEM fields. These programs should provide tuition stipends, training, summer internships, and jobs at the very firms that make these investments.
Supporting talented low-income students will burnish America’s economy and benefit those who need it most. It will reduce social service expenditures while increasing domestic prosperity and general welfare. It will also redirect America’s efforts from working against one another to supporting each other for the greater good of democratic values and the protection of the liberal ideal.
The U.S. has an internet-based system for the AI age, and this must change.
America’s top universities must acknowledge that the world has crossed an event horizon towards a new multipolar age. Confidential data must be protected, critical research secured with domestic tech corporations, and policies changed to reflect the New World Order that has emerged upon the global stage.
Image: “Brics Leaders” by Beto Barata/PR on Wikiemedia Commons
The 1957 launch of Sputnik led to an immediate and massive improvement to our high school science departments — particularly physics. The PSSC curriculum was developed, and those students became the Apollo program, etc.
We need to do the same thing again. FIX K-12!!!!
“There is a clear solution to this problem, and it is a simple one. Support domestic universities in the STEM fields with a focus on talented low-income students, cut all university funding ties with China, and ensure that all digital systems utilized in American institutions of higher education are secured by domestic tech firms.”
This is simply stupid, as well as paranoid. It is the way to destroy American science and technology leads, and probably drive the other powers together as enemies of America. This is already being seen in real science and tech — not among readers in law school, or political scientists, or sociologists. You can read about the disaster bringing upon American science by Trump and his bunglers. If you think it’s easy to damage the stock market, have at it in science. Ask the Canadians, and Europeans, and Chinese, and the other Asians. Throw in the Latin Americans and Africans. Trump is doing his best to drive these people away, most of whom would love to join the Americans, the way they were for nearly a century.
And there was this gem:
“For example, it has been speculated that the large language models for China’s Deep Seek AI—supposedly Chinese home-grown technology—were stolen from the developers of Chatbot GPT, in which Microsoft is a major investor.”
Now that is really interesting. Supposedly Deep Seek needed to steal the AI from Microsoft via Chatbot GPT — rather than using home-grown tech. But then the American technology is apparently is superior, and the Chinese were reduced to stealing it. It’s hard to have it both ways.
So we should not look out for our own national interests?
We should first of all not commit national suicide, as Trump is doing with the economy, with American science, and America’s universities.
China has been investing massive money into science and technology. Meanwhile, the U.S. was declining before Trump’s second term. Now the attacks and cuts on science are huge. It really is, as I said, national suicide.
In re-reading this, I still think that two clauses are horrible. But the first clause
“Support domestic universities in the STEM fields with a focus on talented low-income students.”
has merit. Furthermore, I claim, from personal knowledge, that this is already done quite a lot under “DEI” programs. At least, at the mid-level “flagship” university where I toil. And I strongly suspect at other such institutions, as well as others both more and less selective and well-funded.
By the way, I don’t in any way support promoting the talents of low-income American students, to the exclusion of talented, generally high-paying foreign students.