The United States has led on nuclear fusion for decades but China has made enormous progress. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque )
CFS was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2018, which was set up in 1976 with funding from the US Department of Energy.
It's been a 50-year scientific journey so far. By comparison, it took 16 years to get from the discovery of nuclear fission to the first nuclear power plant (in the USSR). Fusion is much harder to do than fission.
Trump's 2026 budget slashes funding for science and universities, and while no specific cutbacks have been announced for MIT's fusion and plasma research, it is clearly at risk, along with all basic scientific research in the US.
The Department of Energy still has an Office of Fusion Energy Science, but the Chinese equivalent is outspending it at a ratio of 2:1.
The Chinese government has made fusion power a national priority and last month launched the state-owned China Fusion Energy Co (CFEC) with $US2.1 billion in capital.
There is now a race between China's CFEC and America's CFS to generate fusion electricity, and both are talking about 2027 as the year they enter the final lap. But with the Trump administration cutting back science funding and China increasing it, you'd be brave to back America in this race.
Meanwhile, in a speech to the United Nations earlier last week, Trump doubled down on his opposition to renewable energy, calling climate change the "greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion", and added that he had signed executive orders to hunt for oil because "we have the most of any nation in the world".
"And if you add coal, we have the most of any nation in the world," he said.
"I call it clean, beautiful coal."
So he's hardly likely to back fusion energy to replace coal and oil and help stop global warming.
Elsewhere in that speech, he said that everyone thought Russia would win the war in Ukraine in three days, "but it didn't work out that way".
That's true, and one reason for that is drones, which have now become the key weapon of war and evened up the battlefield between the bullied and the bully.
In a speech to the United Nations, Donald Trump doubled down on his opposition to renewable energy. (Reuters: Mike Segar)
In World War I, coal-powered trains were the key to military success, getting troops and supplies to the front. In World War II, it was oil-powered tanks and planes. Now it's cheap, electric battery-powered drones.
In June, the French Institute for International Relations published a paper that said: "… the Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the theatre of a massive drone-driven transformation of military operations. This phenomenon is unprecedented, both in quantitative terms — with several million drones now produced and destroyed each year —and in its influence on the dynamics of operations and the structure of forces."
American supremacy in the second half of the 20th century rested on having built global leadership in three things that it did while World War II was still going: harnessing nuclear fission with the Manhattan Project in 1942, making an alliance and oil deal with Saudi Arabia in 1943, and hosting the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944 that established the post-war financial system with the US dollar and free trade at its centre.
So, when Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies retired in 1966, he said, justifiably: "If I were asked which was the best single step that had been taken in the time of my government, I think I would say the ANZUS Treaty."
But now ANZUS, signed in 1951 and entrenched and expanded by AUKUS in 2021 (if the Americans don't bail), is the proverbial old generals fighting the last war — the submarines it is supposed to provide will be useless against drones, including underwater ones.
More broadly, for the next few years at least, the US is an autocracy that is unreliable and unfocused, in what might be called the set-up phase.
At least Trump's authoritarianism is out in the open; China's is cloaked in fine-sounding rhetoric, but it is mature and very focused.
Chinese President Xi Jinping also addressed the UN last week, saying: "This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and the founding of the United Nations. Eighty years later, while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, the Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world."
He announced China's emissions reduction targets for 2035, contrasting his approach with Trump by talking about how China is at the forefront of the energy transition, that it would increase solar, wind and hydropower to run more than 30 per cent of its power system over the next decade and said in China, "new energy vehicles are the mainstream in the sales of new vehicles".
But then he came out with about the world's weakest 2035 target (apart from America's non-existent one, of course): 7 to 10 per cent down from the peak, whatever that was.
Experts were baffled and unhappy, but I suspect it's simply because China is more focused on electrifying its economy than reducing carbon emissions, so it's building every type of generation, as fast as possible, including both coal and fusion.
That's because it's not just warfare that is becoming electrified through drones, but the new technology that is revolutionising civilian life: artificial intelligence.
On Friday, the chief executive of Walmart, Doug McMillon, said: "It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job."
The military industrial complex on which American power has been based is morphing into the "electro tech stack".
China is driving hard to supplant the US in this new military industrial complex, and has already achieved leadership in electric vehicles, batteries, drones and renewable energy, and is working on semiconductors and AI.
If China beats the US to fusion energy, its supremacy will be assured.
Alan Kohler is a finance presenter and columnist on ABC News, and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.