Dober komentar v Washington Postu: Velesila, ki se odpove financiranju znanosti, ki ji je omogočila tehnološki, gospodarski in vojaški vzpon, se je odločila za samomor. Kitajska je seveda povsem nasproten primer od trumpovske Amerike. Toda lekcija je aktualna tudi za Slovenijo. Brez povečanega financiranja znanosti, raziskav in spodbujanja tehnološkega sektorja se nikoli ne bomo prebili med razvojno propulzivne države. Vedno bomo le drugo- ali tretje-razredni dobavitelji komponent za druge. Pa še to le v primeru, če kitajska podjetja ne bodo povsem izrinila nemških, za katera delajo naši dobavitelji. In ta stava je zelo tvegana.

But the planned spectacle is laughably hollow. Even as the president wants to showcase U.S. military power, he is doing grave and possibly irreparable damage to the real sources of U.S. strength, including its long-term investment in scientific research. Trump is declaring war on science, and the casualty will be the U.S. economy.

Since the 1940s, when the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the University of California played a central role in the Manhattan Project, the engine driving U.S. economic and military competitiveness has been federal support of research universities. That partnership has produced most of the key inventions of the information age, including the internet, GPS, smartphones and artificial intelligence.

Federal support of university research has also made possible the success of the United States’ world-leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Advances enabled by federal support include magnetic resonance imaging, the Human Genome Project, LASIK surgery, weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, and drugs that have saved countless AIDS and covid-19 patients.

Now Trump is sabotaging a research and development pipeline that is the envy of the world. The Trump budget would cut the National Science Foundation budget by 55 percent. Already, the U.S. DOGE Service has terminated more than 1,600 active grants from the foundation, worth $1.5 billion. According to the New York Times, the science foundation’s grants this year are being disbursed at the slowest pace in at least 35 years. The NSF directly supports 357,600 researchers and students; many of them will now be out of luck.

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It isn’t just universities that benefit from the presence of foreign students — so does the entire country. According to the Association of International Educators, the more than 1.1 million international students in the United States create about $44 billion in economic activity and 378,000 jobs. And then there are the benefits they deliver after they graduate, assuming they are allowed to stay in this country. The National Foundation for American Policy reports that one-quarter of all billion-dollar U.S. start-ups have a founder who attended a U.S. university as an international student.

The United States’ competitors are salivating at the prospect of gaining an edge in technological competition at our expense. France, Australia and Canada are throwing out the welcome mat to scientists who can no longer do their work in the United States. But the biggest beneficiary is likely to be China. Even before the Trump cutbacks, China was already catching up to the United States in scientific spending; its research and development budget has been growing by an average of 8.9 percent a year, compared with just 4.7 percent in the United States.

In March, Beijing announced a $138 billion government fund that will invest in cutting-edge fields such as AI, quantum computing and hydrogen energy.

So while China is investing to win the economic (and potentially military) contests of the future, Trump is undercutting long-term U.S. military and economic competitiveness with his anti-intellectual animus. The weapons systems that will be paraded in Washington on June 14 won’t be of much help to the United States in the future if it falls behind in the R&D race with China. I fear we may be seeing, as suggested by China expert Rush Doshi, the suicide of a superpower.

Vir: Max Boot, Washington Post