We should use Reagan as a guide in handling our modern arms race with China
I can still remember, as a young Air Force officer, sitting in the cockpit of my B-1 bomber knowing that we could deliver nuclear weapons virtually anywhere in the world.
I also remember watching President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 to negotiate nuclear arms reductions. The whole world was watching. The nuclear arms race was a global threat, and the world’s two most powerful nations had a responsibility to confront it.
Now imagine that, as Reagan sat across the table from Gorbachev, American companies were selling Moscow the technology it needed to make its nuclear arsenal even more powerful.
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The idea would have been absurd.
Yet today, as the United States enters another potentially historic technological arms race, we are entertaining a remarkably similar proposition: selling China the advanced computer chips it needs to build the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence.
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Advanced AI chips are not nuclear weapons. But in the emerging competition over artificial intelligence, they may be the closest equivalent we have to the strategic materials that powered the last great arms race. In short, they are the fuel.
Without enormous quantities of advanced chips and computing power, China cannot train frontier AI systems at the same scale or speed as the United States. That is precisely why Beijing wants them, and precisely why Washington should think very carefully before selling them.
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When President Donald Trump welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House this month, there will be no shortage of issues to discuss. Trade. Security. Technology. The future of the world’s most consequential relationship.
But Trump should make one principle clear: America will not help China build the technology that could erase one of our greatest strategic advantages.
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The United States currently possesses enormous leverage. America remains at the center of the world’s most advanced AI ecosystem, and China still depends heavily on access to American-designed chips and the broader technological infrastructure surrounding them. We should not give that leverage away.
Earlier this year, the United States began allowing some advanced AI chips, including Nvidia’s H200, to be sold to China on a case-by-case basis. Those sales come with restrictions and security requirements. But the strategic question is more fundamental: Why should we accelerate China’s ability to compete with us in the first place?
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Supporters of chip sales argue that keeping China dependent on American technology preserves our influence and supports American companies. They also argue it disincentivizes China from developing its own capabilities. But there is great evidence that it has exactly the opposite effect. China is using our chips to accelerate their own capabilities. And national security should never be reduced to an argument over market share.
An advanced AI chip sold to China does not simply power a search engine or make a factory more efficient. At sufficient scale, these chips provide the computing power required to train increasingly capable AI systems with applications in intelligence, cyber operations, military planning, autonomous weapons, scientific research and countless other fields.
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We would never have looked at Soviet demand for strategic nuclear technology and concluded that the important question was whether an American company could make the sale. We understood that some technologies were too consequential to treat as ordinary commerce, and AI chips increasingly belong in that category.
This does not mean America should retreat from AI development. Quite the opposite. We should build faster, innovate more aggressively and maintain as large a technological advantage over China as possible. But there is a difference between racing ahead and helping your adversary catch up.
Trump should use the Xi meeting to turn America’s chip advantage into negotiating leverage. If China wants greater access to advanced American computing power, then Beijing should have to accept meaningful, verifiable limits on the most dangerous forms of AI development. We should demand transparency around massive compute clusters and clear restrictions on capabilities that could threaten U.S. national security or escape meaningful human control.
And any agreement must be enforceable. China has given us little reason to rely on promises. The standard should be simple: Trust nothing. Verify everything.
This is where Reagan’s example matters. He did not negotiate with the Soviet Union because America was weak. He rebuilt American strength first, then used that strength to secure limits on a dangerous arms race.
He understood something we should remember today: You do not surrender your leverage before negotiations begin. Trump should apply that lesson to the defining technological competition of our time. America should lead in AI. America should win. And America should negotiate from strength to keep this race from carrying both nations somewhere neither can control.
But we cannot negotiate from strength while handing China the fuel it needs to catch us.
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Selling advanced AI chips to Beijing while worrying about China overtaking us makes about as much strategic sense as selling nuclear technology to the Soviets during the Cold War.
Reagan would have understood that immediately. Our current leadership should too.