4 February 2025, NIICE Commentary 9918
Souradeep Sen & Rajyavishek Pradhan
Where American grand strategy fails for its paucity of geopolitical imagination, it hopes to succeed by doubling down upon dreary tactical policies. In March 1983, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—a space-based ballistic-missile shield, nicknamed Star Wars—albeit ahead of its times, undermined decades of arms control negotiations with the Soviets. Similarly, following the abrogation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, President Trump’s creation of the United States Space Force (2020)—vaguely retaining cyberspace elements of the erstwhile SDI to the detriment of ties with Moscow and Beijing—as well as the recent order of his new administration—unveiling a $500bn Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure project to ‘keep’ AI development within the US, dubbed Stargate—point inexorably to a reactive and counterproductive Star Wars Syndrome afflicting the global hegemon-in-retreat.
Geopolitics is at once the cause and the effect of emerging global complexities. The immanent weaponization of connectivity, supply chains, and other geoeconomic tools, not least the creation of narratives surrounding non-traditional security issues and technological revolutions in cyberspace and AI have entailed the reorientation and redeployment of state policies, especially against the backdrop of insoluble crises in the concurrently critical geopolitical domains—cyberspace, outer space, and maritime space. With cyber-security and the application of AI transforming international relations beyond recognition, the great powers have variously attempted to rein these in to serve the ends of their respective national interests.
As the pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, the US has rather belatedly engendered the Stargate, a collaborative effort between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, with an initial $100bn investment to build a network of data centres across the country that would purportedly create more than 100,000 American jobs. The Stargate has come in the wake of the Biden administration’s comprehensive order aimed at AI safety standards and content branding, thereby signalling a decisive shift in American AI policy. Through Stargate, Trump aims to re-establish the US as the global leader in AI technologies, in the face of trenchant competition from China and the emergence of several swing states in critical components and advanced semiconductor manufacturing, comprising inter alia, Taiwan and South Korea.
Populist projections aside, there are entrenched domestic scepticism regarding the viability of Stargate that impels allusions to the Syndrome. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, opines that the American tech industry, and specifically, the major investors in Stargate do not possess the requisite financial resources to fund such an ambitious project. Moreover, exactly how President Trump endeavours to restrict AI development through Stargate within the territorial confines of the US is beyond comprehension: since AI, for all practical purposes, transcends borders and has thereby been developing rapidly in Eurasian climes.
Significantly, the Stargate also pales in comparison with China’s recent strides in AI development following its putative New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (NGAIDP), the creation of the Digital Silk Road (DSR)—comprising science and technology, innovation and e-commerce—within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its declaration of the Global Artificial Intelligence Governance Initiative (GAIGI) at the third Belt and Road Forum (BRF) in October 2023. Unlike the Chinese and before the advent of Stargate, the Americans did not have a nation-wide AI development policy. In comparison, China issued its NGAIDP in 2017 with the expressed intent of emerging as the world leader in AI by 2030 through innovations in AI theory development; applied AI research; control over domestic and global markets for AI; and the application of AI in basic industries and global value chains.
Over the years, China has harnessed impressive AI capabilities, as evinced negatively by its leverage of technology for mass surveillance and profiling. Its poor human-rights record notwithstanding, China is now increasingly poised through the GAIGI towards shaping global norms on AI technology—to be implemented through mechanisms of the DSR—thereby belying the ever-tightening web of American unilateral sanctions and export controls designed to depreciate China’s AI ecosystem. Moreover, with the recent unveiling of the Chinese large AI language model DeepSeek-V3 at a fraction of the cost—precisely $5.6mn—of operationalizing the OpenAI, Meta and other frontier models has sent shockwaves across global markets, thereby necessitating a readjustment of the AI narrative in favour of the US.
Unlike the US, China’s centralised approach enables rapid mobilization of resources and alignment across government and industries. Chinese tech giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei have achieved significant strides in AI—particularly in facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics—benefiting from access to massive datasets due to less stringent data privacy regulations compared to the West. The concurrent success of the open-source DeepSeek over closed, profit-driven American AI models also undercuts notions of China falling behind in the AI race, indicating in the obverse, that it is on the threshold of surpassing the US. These developments have snowballed towards the promulgation of the Stargate.
The initiative, however, is more likely to degenerate into a belated dénouement of American techno-nationalism that aggravates the extant geopolitical ramifications of the Sino-American AI race. This is also stark in the face of the security dilemma posed by AI. Despite its undeniable role in counterterrorism and counter-espionage, as well as in the hypothetical fifth-generation warfare—purportedly incentivising non-kinetic means of attack—AI has ramifications beyond the military sphere. Chip wars, trade restrictions and embargoes, the precarious terms of trade between component manufacturers and the US and China respectively, the abuse of AI chatbots in academia, the role of Narrow AI in tracking climate change and improving healthcare, the use of generative AI in the formation of political discourses and the spread of disinformation, and concomitant protectionist measures by states to curb AI’s socio-economic and security ramifications, point to its inexorable geoeconomics.
The post-cold War wave of globalisation and thereafter the DSR have further broadened and deepened the geoeconomics of AI, sans incentivising the instinct for international collaboration. Since China has been actively promoting a domain-specific global governance regime—underpinned by the narrative of opposing AI exclusivism—it contributes towards the inevitable trans-nationalisation of AI technologies. Consequently, China enjoys a steady clientele of states seeking a cheaper alternative to American AI technologies. Thus, the Stargate—for all its practical contradictions and pitfalls as a protectionist measure—is destined to entrench and not ameliorate the competitive instinct at the heart of the Sino-American AI race, thereby belying the possibilities of a future US-led and sponsored global AI regime.
Furthermore, since the Stargate has been identified in the beginning as a manifestation of a larger Syndrome afflicting the US, the fact that the country was directly responsible for the creation of China’s AI infrastructure, not least the development of authoritarian, state-led capitalism therein, begs remembrance. As regards the first, the collaboration of major American tech firms with Hikvision may be recalled; and for the second, the dialectic of the liberal-democratic United States and authoritarian China betrays the indecisions of the former and the efficacies of the latter vis-à-vis the implementation of strategic AI policies. In the light of these, it would be safe to surmise that the Americans are too late for a viable course correction. Ergo, the grandiloquent and ambitious Stargate, divested of an overarching and radical geopolitical vision, is nothing but an untimely symptom of a perpetually self-defeating Syndrome.
Souradeep Sen, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Bengal, India. Rajyavishek Pradhan is an Assistant Professor at North Bengal St. Xavier’s College, India.
