You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And today, the United States is competing economically with China without a clear picture of where it is winning, losing, or falling behind.
This blind spot is not only a concern of national security, it is an economic imperative.
Tensions between the United States and China are the defining competition of this century. But this competition is not only about tariffs or troop deployments. It is about access: access to markets, to infrastructure contracts, to data, to standards, and to the digital systems that will underpin national economies for decades. In other words, the U.S. is in an economic cold war. And we are fighting it largely on vibes.
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History offers a warning. For years, American policymakers treated Huawei and ZTE routers as cheap, harmless hardware. Only later did we recognize that whoever builds the digital plumbing shapes the system. The same pattern repeated with 5G base stations. Today, it is playing out again with open-source AI models, where many of the most widely deployed systems are Chinese. Each time, the United States wakes up after the fact, scrambling to respond to advantages that accumulated quietly over years.
The problem is not a lack of intelligence collection. The United States tracks an enormous amount about China, much of it classified: supply-chain chokepoints, industrial surge capacity, technology transfer pathways, economic coercion. This work is done across the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department, and others. It is serious and necessary.
But it is optimized to answer one question: What could go wrong? What it does not answer well is a different question: How competitive are we, really?
China measures economic competition relentlessly. It tracks manufacturing dominance, technology self-sufficiency, trade dependence, and infrastructure reach. It compares itself to the United States on scale, control, substitution, and influence. The metrics are imperfect, but they are directional and strategic.
By contrast, the United States relies on backward-looking indicators such as trade balances and foreign direct investment flows. Those still matter, but they capture only a fraction of how power is built in a digital economy. Cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, semiconductor ecosystems, and software standards now function as backbone assets. Whoever embeds them becomes indispensable.
Yet Washington simply does not know how much advanced digital and AI activity runs on American platforms versus non-American ones. That ignorance has consequences.
One useful signal, if handled with care, is AI activity itself. Metrics such as where AI workloads run or how much inference occurs on U.S. versus foreign platforms can offer insight into where value is being captured. These should not be treated as precise measures of advantage. More capable models may use fewer tokens. A hospital diagnostic system is not the same as a casual chatbot. And as inference moves onto devices, visibility will decline.
But this is no different from electricity consumption. It is a rough indicator of economic activity, not a measure of welfare. No one confuses kilowatt-hours with productivity, yet no serious economy flies blind without tracking them.
The point is not to fetishize a single metric. It is to acknowledge that activity signals, properly contextualized, are better than anecdotes and after-action reviews.
President Trump has correctly identified artificial intelligence and infrastructure as central to American competitiveness. From the American AI Initiative in his first term to the more recent executive actions aimed at accelerating adoption and reducing regulatory fragmentation, the strategy is clear. The missing piece is measurement.
If the United States wants to compete, it needs modern economic intelligence to match modern economic statecraft. That means integrating public data, voluntary, aggregated industry reporting, and all-source intelligence into a coherent, forward-looking picture. Not to surveil allies or micromanage companies, but to understand where American firms are winning, where they are absent, and where policy tools actually change outcomes.
China already does this. Quietly. Continuously. Systematically.
Clear metrics do not guarantee success. But without them, America is competing in the dark. In a world defined by economic power, the first act of leadership is measurement.
It is time to measure what matters.
*Disclosure: TIME owner and co-chair Marc Benioff is an investor in January AI.
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