Imagine that it is May 2025. U.S. President Donald Trump has just finished bulldozing the entire U.S. interstate system, because Elon Musk decreed that highways are wasteful and the country should run on hyperloops. No hyperloops currently exist, and the entire nation requires the interstate system to function, but that is deemed irrelevant. For months prior, Deep Interstate tried desperately to draw attention to the range of public needs that roads fill, how critical highways are to national security, and how rash it would be to squander the decades of bipartisan work—and the billions of taxpayer dollars—that went into constructing them. But Deep Interstate has been labeled untrustworthy, existing only to protect its own interests and undermine the administration.
By July, hyperloop construction is facing years of delays. Construction supplies are stuck in warehouses while workers are consistently late or absent: The local roads have become too congested to allow the efficient passage of even critical materials or employees. To transport supplies long distances, beleaguered investors discover that they will need to build a giant system of high-speed roadways connecting localities.
Bulldozing the highways, it turns out, has catastrophically complicated hyperloop expansion—even though those highways had never been designed to support hyperloop construction, let alone optimize it. But hyperloop experts maintained that efficiency and innovation demanded their destruction.
If that hypothetical sounds far-fetched, consider this: One month ago, the Trump administration was gifted a U.S diplomatic infrastructure spanning 271 embassies, consulates, and missions, as well as a foreign assistance infrastructure reaching more than 170 countries through approximately $68 billion in foreign assistance funding in 2024 alone. The United States’ vast reach was no accident: Building it required half a century of bipartisan collaboration and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Only one country enjoyed a larger footprint: China.
Despite that, through a breathtaking failure of imagination and an even greater failure of checks and balances, this administration has terminated U.S.-backed agreements across thousands of markets and dozens of sectors, showing no concern for immediate and catastrophic impacts, legality, constitutional authorities, the long-term destabilization of emerging markets, or even the safety of its own employees.
As of Feb. 25, anywhere from 5,800 to 14,000 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staff have been placed on leave or laid off. A claimed “waiver” program for USAID and State Department foreign assistance programs is non-operational in practice. Embassies, where most employees are local staff, have been ordered to make cuts. The country’s hard-won reputation as a reliable, trustworthy, and rule-abiding partner is teetering on the brink. It’s bulldozers all around.
Such destruction is a seismic, unforced error. We are at the advent of a new technological age of artificial intelligence, in which the United States must seize every opportunity to protect and expand its competitive advantage. Scale is the U.S. government’s untapped superpower.
By treating the country’s vast diplomatic presence and foreign assistance infrastructure as expendable “soft power,” the Trump administration misses two hard truths about protecting geopolitical power in the age of AI: first, that speed depends on scale; and second, that models require markets.
The United States’ untapped superpower in the AI race is not the so-called innovation economy, or an unregulated market. Those have been leveraged. Rather, it is the sheer scale of the U.S. government’s global presence, and how that could be used to turbocharge America’s global leadership in the AI race.
Moreover, the ability to build markets—not just individual AI models—will determine which nation’s technology dominates globally. Supporting the early and successful deployment of basic, useful AI systems across global markets will be key to protecting market entry opportunities for American AI technologies for decades to come.
The United States’ sturdy global presence provides a ready-made distribution network for AI innovation and adoption, particularly in critical sectors such as global health, food security, and climate resilience—areas where AI can drive immediate and transformative change.
Outside of better-known humanitarian and public health work, U.S. foreign assistance programs also help support anti-corruption initiatives, investigative reporting, STEM training, local entrepreneurship, free and fair elections, and rule of law—all of which underpin the political stability and due process that enhance opportunities for long-term market growth and diminish market entry risks for U.S. companies.
Finally, protecting robust U.S. diplomatic engagement at local levels optimizes for the country’s unusually large embassies: More staff on the ground means broader coverage and deeper insights than most foreign ministries can gather.
Broad reach also ensures that the United States’ scale is being used to benefit broader U.S. private sector interests. AI incumbents and Big Tech can hire local offices, lawyers, and lobbyists to support their expansion into new markets (and the new sources of data they offer for model training). Key benefits of the U.S. government’s scale accrue to “Little Tech.” The country’s start-ups and innovators are better equipped to balance the scales when taxpayer investments do the heavy lifting of building awareness of U.S. business, developing trust with local governments, and supporting broad private-public partnerships that facilitate rapid scaling.
While U.S. foreign assistance was not designed to support the expansion of these emerging technologies, it will be far faster to optimize for such expansion over this existing infrastructure. Financing structures, legal registrations, banking agreements, compliance protocols, training programs, public-private partnerships, growth strategies, and expert staff: These mechanics are core to foreign assistance implementation, and they could be adapted with relative speed to support AI deployment across markets. Notably, 11 of the United States’ top 15 export markets have been the recipients of U.S. foreign assistance funding to support their development.
A truly efficient scaling strategy for American AI would capitalize on intense recent efforts to modernize both USAID and the State Department; years of work laid important groundwork that should not be wasted. All of the country’s embassies now employ officials charged with cyber and digital policy in alignment with a new global foreign-affairs strategy expressly designed to reassert U.S. leadership in the digital age. USAID launched a new digital strategy in 2024 to achieve a similar transformation.
In addition, AI dominance will depend not just on market presence but also on compute power, semiconductor access, and cloud infrastructure. While technological expertise in those areas is mission critical to American AI expansion, so too is the technical expertise required to develop partnerships with governments and communities around the world. U.S. development agencies are ideally situated to house the private-public partnerships that could launch the country’s innovators—and not just its largest tech companies—into markets around the globe.Chinese President Xi Jinping understands that assignment. For more than a decade, the Chinese government has demonstrated how deeply it appreciates the competitive advantage that global presence confers in the digital age. Between 2013 and 2022, China invested $679 billion in infrastructure projects through its Belt and Road Initiative across nearly 150 countries. These investments have not only bolstered China’s global influence but also created dependencies with long-term strategic implications.
In particular, China’s Digital Silk Road initiative has invested billions in 5G, fiber-optic cables, and data centers across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Those investments, notably, have also created unsustainable debt in many recipient nations, giving China greater influence over local decisions.
As a result, many governments around the world are less than eager to lean on Chinese development support. But in a vacuum of U.S. offerings—and with limited domestic capacity to grow absent foreign support—they may see no alternative. Whether through announcing a multimillion dollar de-mining initiative in Cambodia or joining a global declaration at the recent AI Action Summit which the United States sat out, China is already demonstrating that it can pounce to fill the sinkholes that the Trump administration’s policies have created, even if it won’t fully bridge the global gap.
By 2030, AI infrastructure markets in Africa and Southeast Asia will be worth approximately $50 billion. Undermining America’s diplomacy and foreign assistance infrastructure kneecaps the deployment of U.S. AI innovation at the exact moment when the government’s scale could have been leveraged to turbocharge it. American investors and technology leaders should consider how much harder it will be to build markets where U.S. embassies increasingly lack influence, access, or insights.
Critically, as China fills the development hole that this administration has dug, the Chinese Communist Party will not only deepen its first mover advantage in AI deployment, but also be positioned to condition continued development assistance on nations’ refusing to engage with U.S. industry, possibly denying American businesses access to local manufacturing capabilities or even banning importation of American-made products or services.
Foreign officials can already see what technology leaders may be missing: The U.S. government is bulldozing its global infrastructure so quickly that it is leaving American industry with rubble rather than glide paths, much less a hyperloop.
This may be one reason that Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the mid-February AI Action Summit in Paris rang both hostile and hollow when he insisted that the Trump administration “will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for other foreign countries and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI.” Actions speak louder than words, and while Trump could have leaned into the unique competitive advantage the U.S. government’s existing scale provided, his administration is instead now well down the path of converting that advantage into equally scaled risk.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio can still course-correct to rebuild some trust in U.S. promises and rule of law. Rubio needs to conduct a coherent, good faith, State Department-led review of foreign assistance investments in order to determine how best to align existing work with this administration’s foreign-policy goals, including the ones that Vance has enumerated. Taking a more deliberative approach in the short term will protect the infrastructure needed to support future innovation at speed and scale. Equally importantly, it will reassure the world that U.S. agreements—be they public or private—can still be trusted.
Absent such proof, partnering with Xi to build out global AI systems will make abundant sense to many governments, including those that house lucrative markets. China’s diplomatic reach and development footprint are not accidental; they are reflective of a government that understands the value of investing in infrastructure and then capturing the market efficiencies that can be gained by building on top of it.
Thanks to the past month, Beijing is better positioned than ever to match that scale with speed. Perhaps it will even invest in new models akin to hyperloops and make progress there as well. The geopolitical AI race will be won by those who had the wisdom to protect their highways and turn them all into express lanes.
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