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When Russia's invasion of Ukraine appeared imminent in early 2022, U.S. intelligence officials were so confident that Russian tanks would roll quickly to victory that staff evacuated the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Based on traditional measures of power, the intelligence assessment made sense. In 2021, Russia ranked fifth in the world in defense spending, whereas Ukraine was a distant 36th, behind Thailand and Belgium. Yet more than two years later, Russia and Ukraine are still fighting their brutal war to a standstill.
Ukraine's resilience is a telling indicator that power is not what it used to be. The country's surprise showing is in no small part a result of its highly educated population and a technology innovation ecosystem that has produced vast quantities of drones and other homemade weapons on the fly. Ukraine has even managed to wage naval warfare without a navy, using homemade drones and other devices to destroy nearly two dozen Russian ships and deny Russia control of the Black Sea.
For centuries, a nations power stemmed from tangible resources that its government could see, measure, and generally control, such as populations that could be conscripted, territory that could be conquered, navies that could be deployed, and goods that could be released or restricted, such as oil. Spain in the sixteenth century had armies, colonies, and precious metals. The United Kingdom in the nineteenth century had the world's strongest navy and the economic benefits that emerged from the Industrial Revolution. The United States and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century had massive nuclear arsenals.
Today, countries increasingly derive power from intangible resources-the knowledge and technologies such as ai that are supercharging economic growth, scientific discovery, and military potential. These assets are difficult for governments to control once they are "in the wild" because of their intangible nature and the ease with which they spread across sectors and countries. U.S. officials, for example, cannot insist that an adversary return an algorithm to the United States the way the George W. Bush administration demanded the return of a U.S. spy plane that crash-landed on Hainan Island after a Chinese pilot collided with it in 2001. Nor can they ask a Chinese bioengineer to give back the knowledge gained from postdoctoral research in the...