The Logic of Strategic Assets: From Oil to AI

What resources and technologies are strategic? Policy theoretical debates often focus on this question, since the “strategic” designation yields valuable elevated attention. The ambiguity of very concept, however, frustrates these conversations. We offer a theory when decision makers should designate assets as strategic based presence important rivalrous externalities for which firms or military organizations will not produce socially optimal behavior their own. distill three forms externalities, involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, dependency-strategic logics. Although our framework cannot resolve about assets, it provides theoretically grounded conceptual vocabulary to make more productive. To illustrate analytic value thinking technologies, we examine US-Japan technology rivalry in late 1980s current policy discussions artificial intelligence.