WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 30: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on "Investing in America" on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump was joined by CEOs to highlight companies and their investments in the United States during the event. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

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“If we can grow economically, we will be strong militarily.” That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asserts, and he’s 100% correct.

Strong militaries don’t simply exist, rather they’re an effect of matching men and women with the most abundant and advanced defense materiel possible. Which is why with national security top of mind, the U.S. political class must remove technology-based export controls levied on China.

About what’s being written here, it would be easy to state the obvious: if U.S. politicians succeed in limiting Chinese access to U.S. technology, or even succeed in causing the Chinese to question reliable supply of U.S. technology, the success will play right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As is sadly the case with U.S. politicians, those in China similarly associate prosperity and strength with autarky. Which means CCP members would love for China-based corporations to be competitive with Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and countless other unrivaled American companies that Chinese businesses and consumers presently rely on.

Better yet, the capability within the Chinese to catch up with the U.S. technologically, is not insignificant. If this is doubted, readers need only conduct a search on ChaptGPT, or for that matter DeepSeek about Huawei’s Mate Pro 60 vis-à-vis- Apple’s iPhone’s. Alas, focusing on the truth about substitution effects in commerce is shooting fish in a rather crowded barrel.

Much more important is that the U.S.’s best and brightest technology corporations must be allowed to sell their wares in China precisely because China’s present and future growth is so promising, which means U.S. tech firms would be weakened twice by export controls: not only would they forfeit a big and growing market, they would also be forfeiting the chance to work alongside some of the world’s greatest technological minds.

Put in another way, U.S. politicians don’t naively want to “decouple” the U.S. from China because China’s technologists are substandard, but precisely because they’re some of the world’s best. Which means export controls don’t just mean reduced sales in a growing market, they also mean that best in its class U.S.-developed AI infrastructure won’t be matched with some of the world’s greatest talent, thus limiting the transformative potential of U.S.-created technology.

Next, there’s the powerful truth about work divided. The genius of it has been revealed countless times, including over 100 years ago when Henry Ford made cars for “the great multitude” by creating assembly lines that would combine a wide variety of worker skills on the path to soaring production. What was true about work divided in Dearborn, MI hardly loses its genius when those dividing the work are combining their genius in two different countries.

In other words, precisely because China is viewed as an AI “rival” to the U.S., it’s essential that AI talent in both the U.S. and China be free to work together. If not, advance in the AI space for both the U.S. and China will be a pale imitation of what it otherwise could be.

Which brings us to the national security part. The more AI progresses stateside, the more growth there is, which means the more resources our various military branches will have access to. Quoting Jensen Huang once again, “If we can grow economically, we will be strong militarily.”

Will China similarly grow economically and militarily under the scenario described? Yes, most definitely. Which is the embodiment of national security exactly because economically thriving countries are so loathe to use their militaries in ways that sap economic growth.