Existential Innovation Is Now National Security
After finishing reading the new National Security Strategy, I kept thinking about how much has changed. And I want to say this upfront that my reaction here isn’t political. I’m looking at this purely through the lens of innovation, systems building, and the country's long-term resilience. In that context, the document feels like a turning point.
The headlines will focus on the usual stuff — China, the Middle East, NATO, the border — but something much bigger is happening, written very plainly. The United States is rewriting the definition of national power, and in doing so, it’s turning existential innovation — from AI to biotech to energy to industrial capacity — into a matter of national survival.
For decades, DC treated innovation as something that happened “over there,” in Silicon Valley, in labs, in startup garages. Now it’s right at the center of what the country considers essential. The strategy basically says that if America is going to remain strong, it has to rebuild the foundations of strength: energy, industry, science, manufacturing, real-world capability, and even culture. In its own way, the document provides the clarity we’ve been missing.
The old model, where national security was defined almost entirely by military power, is fading. The new model is about systems — the industrial base, the scientific engine, the supply chains, the factories, the chips, the minerals, the energy grid, the AI models, and the cultural self-confidence that allows a nation to build without apologizing for wanting to build.
The world we’re moving into is one where power comes from how fast a nation can innovate, produce, deploy, and adapt. Weapons matter, but so does the capacity to create, and to create faster than your adversaries.
What struck me most was the directness with which the strategy talks about technology. It says, plainly, that America must remain the most innovative country in the world, especially in AI, biotech, and quantum. It acknowledges that the country’s future depends on controlling the frontier technologies that will shape the next century. It ties innovation to deterrence, prosperity, resilience, economic independence, and, importantly, cultural confidence.
This means innovators, founders, and engineers are being pulled into the center of national strategy to rebuild the machinery of civilization. Beneath all the diplomacy, the strategy is saying that the future belongs to nations that build. Nations that build factories, reactors, robots, defense systems, next-generation energy, AI that matters, infrastructure that lasts, and education that prepares people for the world that’s coming, not the world that’s gone.
For the first time in a long time, you can feel the government acknowledging that without innovation — real innovation, deep innovation — the country cannot stay stable, let alone strong.
There’s another layer to this, and it might be the most important one: the cultural layer. The strategy openly talks about restoring confidence, optimism, and the belief that the next generation could inherit something better. It might sound sentimental, but it’s actually foundational. You cannot build a civilization if you don’t believe you’re capable of building one. Innovation is technical, but it’s also emotional. It’s the story a nation tells itself about what it can be.
And so here we are, in a strange but pivotal moment. The government has thrown down a marker: America wants to reindustrialize, out-innovate, out-build, and reclaim the frontier. But it can’t do any of it alone. Bureaucracies don’t build the future. Builders do, which is why I keep thinking about this moment as an invitation to recognize that what we build now, where we choose to build, and how we choose to build matters at a level that simply wasn’t true even five years ago.
Founders today aren’t just building companies; they’re helping shape statecraft. Investors aren’t just allocating capital; they’re allocating national capacity. Technologists aren’t just writing code; they’re writing the story of the next century.
There’s this growing sense that our work sits inside a larger arc, that existential innovation isn’t a niche or a set of optimistic posts, but the operating system of national resilience. The thing that keeps a society sturdy, adaptable, confident, and alive. And now, whether by design or by accident, the U.S. government has said it out loud: we won’t stay strong unless we build.
I don’t think there’s been a more important moment since the end of World War II for ambitious builders to step forward. The world is shifting under our feet as global power reorganizes, and the tools of the next era — AI, robotics, nuclear, biotech — are finally here, available for bold people willing to wield them.
It’s a new era, and it belongs to builders.
With belief,
Yon
👋 Hello! My mission with Beyond with Yon is to help solve humanity's greatest existential challenges and advance the human condition. Connect with me on LinkedIn and X.
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