The Weaponization of Technology Standards: The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy and Great Power Competition
March 18, 2026
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy and Great Power Competition
By Fiona Neibart
The Trump administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) reframes technological innovation as leverage rather than a shared asset among allies. By conditioning access to advanced capabilities on political alignment, the strategy risks accelerating fragmentation across technology standards and systems that depend on interoperability. That fragmentation is not just an economic inconvenience. It makes unintended conflict more likely by weakening crisis communication, early-warning coordination, and shared safeguards. The weaponization of technology standards is uniquely destabilizing because it reshapes the infrastructure through which other risks are managed. Preventing dangerous fragmentation requires competition to be bounded by guardrails, including reducing pressure on middle powers to lock into a single bloc and preserving technical channels for communication even between rivals.
