The issue of national security is—alongside technology and the liberation of Venezuela—one of the core axes that consistently occupies my interest and my independent research. It is something I have always approached with a sense of responsibility.

For that reason, my book La Seguridad de la Nación Venezolana. Modelo Teórico, despite being a local work written in Spanish, is held in the libraries of universities such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as in institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer Kulturbesitz, among others.

Within that context, the publication of the United States’ 2025 National Security Strategy drew my attention for a specific reason: its explicit emphasis on technology as a structural axis of national power. The NSS does not treat technology as a rhetorical appendix to “innovation” or “competitiveness,” but as a component of sovereignty—what determines which capabilities can be sustained, which dependencies become intolerable, and what real margins exist for strategic autonomy.

In fact, my reading of the NSS as more than a programmatic document does not begin with the 2025 edition. In State purpose: the national sense. The commitment of strong strategic leadership (April 4, 2025), I developed the idea that a national strategy is operational only when it translates a purpose of state into sustained direction—and when that direction aligns with a national sense capable of sustaining institutional coherence beyond political cycles.

From that perspective, the NSS is valuable not because it enumerates priorities, but because it functions as an instrument of continuity: a framework that integrates security, the economy, technology, diplomacy, and defense within a single logic of governance.

It is precisely from that understanding—the NSS as an architecture of strategic coherence—that the 2025 edition takes on particular significance, because it makes explicit that, in the current context, the point at which that coherence is consolidated or eroded is no longer only doctrinal or geopolitical, but technological.

The document opens with a demand for realism: a strategy exists only when it connects ends with means—what is sought and the tools available, or that can realistically be created, to achieve it. That premise shifts the debate. In the 2025 NSS, technology occupies a different place: not only as an instrument, but as the very terrain on which it will be decided who governs the rules of the international system in the decades ahead.

From post–Cold War critique to structural reorientation

That opening demand for realism is not a decorative preface; it frames a frontal critique. The 2025 NSS begins with a direct acknowledgment: U.S. strategies after the Cold War failed to connect ends with means. The document insists that a strategy exists only insofar as it is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential link between what is sought and the tools available—or that can realistically be created—to achieve it.

And it adds, without ambiguity, that subsequent strategies “fell short”: they became laundry lists of desired end states, produced vague platitudes, and, at times, even misjudged what they should want. From that framing, the NSS describes the drift as a wager: after the Cold War, foreign-policy elites convinced themselves that permanent global domination was both desirable and feasible when—according to the text—“the affairs of other countries” concern the United States only if their actions directly threaten U.S. interests.

That wager implied assuming disproportionate global burdens, simultaneously sustaining a massive regulatory-administrative state and an equally massive military–diplomatic–intelligence–aid complex, and anchoring U.S. policy to an international institutional web in which, the document argues, transnational logics operate to dissolve state sovereignty.

The balance sheet is presented as an internal cost: not only was an undesirable and impossible objective pursued, but in pursuing it the means required to achieve it were undermined—“the character” of the nation on which its power, its wealth, and its decency were built. The NSS then advances a structural reorientation. Rather than sustaining an apparatus of global domination, it proposes restoring preeminence by strengthening internal capabilities: a robust industrial base, an energy sector capable of sustaining growth and projection, the preservation of scientific and technological leadership, and the protection of intellectual property against external appropriation.

Within that design, technology ceases to be one component among others: it becomes the axis that structures the recovery of strategic autonomy, because it determines which capabilities can be sustained without dependence and which standards end up conditioning—through technical pathways—the way other actors can participate in critical domains.

To read this transition precisely—from the post–Cold War critique to structural reorientation—it helps to situate it within a line of analysis I have been developing separately. In Internal economic development and the state purpose: Overhauling economic security for national sovereignty (May 4, 2025), I argued explicitly that sovereignty does not hold as an abstraction but as deliberately constructed internal capacity: an industrial base, institutional coherence, the circulation of economic power within the territory, and the material continuity of the pillars that make real autonomy possible.

In that framework, the “economy” stops being a technical plane and becomes a structural component of strategy: the space in which the means are fixed that later determine which ends are actually attainable. That is why, when the NSS criticizes “laundry lists” and demands reconnecting ends with means, it is not simply revising style or rhetoric—it is reinstating the sovereign criterion of strategy as a discipline of capabilities, where national power is defined by what can be sustained without dependence and by the internal architecture that makes that sustainability possible.

Along the same line, in Design here, build here: the missing technological advantage (September 4, 2025), I developed the complementary point: the decisive gap is not between “innovating” and “competing,” but between designing and building as a continuous circuit.

There I argue that U.S. technological supremacy was historically tangible because it integrated the full chain—research, design, fabrication, and deployment—and that the turn toward a model in which the intangible (software, algorithms, platforms, IP) concentrates profitability while production shifts outward creates a strategic void that cannot be corrected by isolated intellectual leadership.

That reading makes the NSS’s emphasis immediately intelligible: when the document repositions technology as an axis of strategic autonomy, it is signaling that power does not depend only on “having ideas” or “setting standards,” but on possessing the material capacity to make them real with continuity, scale, and control over inputs.

Put differently, the NSS is not simply calling for “more innovation”: it is demanding closure of the distance between laboratory and plant, between architecture and manufacturing, between the norm and the infrastructure that sustains it. And that closure is the logical bridge that connects its post–Cold War critique to its structural reorientation: rebuilding internal capabilities not as a sectoral economic program, but as a condition of practical sovereignty in the technological domains that will define power in the decades ahead.

Structural reading from the ISM: integrative forces, globalizing forces, and regime control

From the Integrated Security Model (ISM)—a theoretical construct I have been developing for fourteen years—this diagnosis can be read with conceptual clarity. National community systems operate under a permanent tension between integrative forces—identity cohesion, institutional autonomy, and control over national processes, through a centripetal movement—and globalizing forces—transnational standardization and network dynamics that tend to operate outside national identity content.

In that key, what the NSS describes as an erosion of “character” can be understood as the result of yielding control over integrative forces to globalizing dynamics sustained for decades: productive offshoring that weakens the industrial base, normalized strategic dependencies, and transnational institutional frameworks that displace sovereignty.

The technological response articulated by the 2025 NSS can therefore be understood as an attempt to recover dominance over the integrative forces of the American community system. In the ISM, power is expressed as the capacity of a unit—internal or external—to dominate integrative forces and, by doing so, condition the system’s behavior.

Under that criterion, controlling technological standards (who designs, who manufactures, who sets protocols) is not a technical detail: it is a form of power over one’s own system and over the patterns of interaction among systems.

That is why technology, understood in this way, is not neutral: it is the terrain where it is contested whether relations among community systems will tend toward balance (stable cooperation) or toward resistance (tension that must be transacted, channeled, or confronted).

But if that diagnosis is taken seriously, then the decisive question is no longer whether a nation “has technology,” but rather what form control takes when technology becomes the infrastructure through which systems interact. At the strategic level, technology does not operate only as an internal capability but as a mechanism of coordination and conditioning: it establishes technical languages, interoperability formats, certification requirements, supply routes, security thresholds, and verification schemes that reorder the field of what is possible for the system itself and for the systems with which it interacts.

That is why, when a strategy places technology at the center, it is not describing an additional “sector,” but the site where the geometry of power is fixed: the difference between competing within a shared framework or defining the framework; between participating in a domain or governing its conditions of access. From there, the next step becomes unavoidable: to read the NSS not as a catalog of technological initiatives, but as a thesis about the regime the United States seeks to sustain and project.

Technology as standard: from competitive advantage to external governance of the system

From there, one of the text’s most consequential conceptual moves becomes clear: the NSS does not describe technology only as a set of internal capabilities, but as a mechanism of external governance. When the document states that U.S. technology and standards should “drive the world forward,” it is not describing competitive advantage in the ordinary sense. It is describing normative capacity: the ability to fix the framework within which other actors will be able to participate, interoperate, certify, scale, or even exist in those domains.

This is where my concept of asymmetric technological supremacy enters: when a nation not only leads a domain, but possesses the regime through which that domain becomes reproducible, governable, and obligatory, supremacy stops being measured by performance and becomes measured by possession.

In such a regime, the standard does not function as a technical recommendation but as a condition of existence: it defines what can be built, certified, made interoperable, and scaled—and by doing so, it displaces competition outside the shared field. Rivalry can continue along familiar metrics—cycle times, efficiency, throughput—but the decisive advantage occurs in an unshared space: the space where the system’s conditions of feasibility are set.

A standard is not an idea; it is a condition of interaction. It defines what counts as compatible, secure, verifiable, or acceptable, and in doing so it turns technical choices into mandatory pathways. Whoever controls standards controls—indirectly but profoundly—the geometry of the system: data flows, governance schemes, infrastructure requirements, component chains, compliance layers, and exclusion points. In practical terms, standards determine who enters, under what conditions, at what cost, and under what dependencies.

From the ISM, this is intelligible without metaphors. Standards operate as integrative forces when they consolidate internal coherence (the capacity to coordinate industry, defense, energy, academia, and markets under a single technical language), and as instruments of projection when they compel other community systems to align if they want to participate in the domain.

The tension emerges when that alignment—presented as “interoperability”—becomes structural dependency: it is not only a protocol that is adopted; it is the decision regime that updates it, certifies it, sanctions it, and turns it into a requirement.

That is why, in this reading, “technology as standard” is not a technical chapter inside a strategy; it is the point where strategy becomes system architecture. The question is not only what a nation can do, but under what rules others may interact if they want to operate in the domains that will define power in the decades ahead.

The material anchoring of the regime: inputs, industry, energy, IP, scale, and cybersecurity

For precisely that reason, the NSS immediately drops down to the material ground. It calls for expanding U.S. access to critical minerals and materials and, in addition, assigns the intelligence community the monitoring of key supply chains and global technological advances in order to understand and mitigate vulnerabilities and threats. In other words: if standards are the regime’s “language,” materials and supply chains are its physical grammar. Without inputs, the standard becomes a promise; with controlled inputs, it becomes infrastructure.

The next layer is reindustrialization: “The future belongs to makers.” The document speaks of reindustrializing, reshoring, attracting investment, and focusing on critical and emerging technology sectors “that will define the future,” with an explicit criterion: not returning to dependence on adversaries for critical products or components.

Here technology no longer appears as abstract “innovation,” but as reproducible productive capacity—the condition under which a standard is not merely a rule, but a reality.

That same logic hardens when the defense industrial base enters. The NSS describes a gap observed in recent conflicts between low-cost drones/missiles and the expensive systems used to defend against them; from there it derives a mobilization requirement: innovate powerful defenses at low cost, produce systems and munitions “at scale,” and reshore defense industrial chains rapidly. This is decisive: a technological regime is not validated by promises, but by scale, cost, speed, and continuity under pressure.

Energy then appears as a direct enabler of the regime: restoring “energy dominance” and reshoring energy components as strategic priorities; cheap and abundant energy to “fuel reindustrialization” and maintain an edge in frontier technologies “such as AI.” Here the NSS does not separate energy and technology; it fuses them into a single sustainment equation.

In parallel, the document marks the defensive boundary of the regime: protecting intellectual property against external theft. It frames it as an objective (“protect our intellectual property from foreign theft”) and reiterates it as a hostile practice that must end: “grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage.” If the standard is systemic power, IP is part of the machinery that makes it persistent; without protection, the regime leaks and loses asymmetry.

Added to this is military and dual-use continuity: investing in research to preserve and advance advantages in military and dual-use technology, including—explicitly—AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems, alongside the energy required to sustain those domains. The NSS thus chains applied science, defense, industry, and energy into a single circuit, not separate compartments.

Finally, the document recognizes that the technological regime is also an attack surface: monitoring persistent threats to U.S. networks—including critical infrastructure—depends on relationships with the private sector, enabling real-time discovery/attribution/response (defensive and offensive operations) while protecting the competitiveness and resilience of the technology sector.

This closes the loop: standards and industry require operational security so they do not degrade through intrusion, sabotage, or capture.

Taken together, these “anchors” are not placed as a list; they are linked as a thesis. Whoever governs standards must control inputs; whoever controls inputs needs industrial capacity; industry requires energy; the regime requires IP, dual-use R&D, and cybersecurity to persist. That architecture is precisely what turns “technology” into practical sovereignty—and what makes intelligible why the NSS places it as a structural axis of national power.

And yet there is a methodological risk worth anticipating: when a strategic document articulates so many components—inputs, industry, energy, defense, R&D, IP, cybersecurity, alliances, and intelligence—the habitual reading tends to treat it as a set of fronts, an enumeration of priorities, or, at best, a technopolitical agenda.

That reading misses the essential point: the NSS is written as an architecture. Its logic is not additive but structural: each piece takes on meaning by its position within the full circuit of sustainment, projection, and protection of the technological regime. Read this way, the strategy is not evaluated by the number of initiatives, but by coherence—by the ability to connect means to ends in a stable, reproducible, and defensible manner under pressure.

The CR framework: how we will organize the NSS in articles II and III

To preserve that coherence—without reducing the NSS to an inventory or diluting it into generalities—in Articles II and III I will use the CR Model, a strategic planning framework I have developed and applied consistently for more than two decades to structure decisions in complex contexts.

In its simplest representation, the CR Model takes the form of a triangular architecture defined by three structural environments: Economic (E), Organizational (O), and Operational (Op). Two edges function as translation platforms into operation: E–Op, where economic resources and constraints are converted into operational capability, and O–Op, where organizational structure and behavior are converted into operational performance.

At the apex sit the integrated operational plans as the synthesis layer that concentrates direction and makes the strategy executable—here, the NSS is positioned as the governing strategic framework that orients those plans.

At the center, the core is constituted by the Strategic Objectives, which regulate the system’s internal tension between coherence (centripetal alignment toward the core) and adaptability (centrifugal deployment from the core).

Using this framework, Article II will reread the NSS by mapping its components into the CR triangle (E, O, Op; E–Op and O–Op; apex; core), and Article III will consolidate that mapping as a coherence analysis—identifying where alignment is structurally achieved, where tensions accumulate across edges and layers, and which pressure points become decisive when the strategy is translated into operation.