This is pretty insane: if you read the details of this new policy 👇 that now bans scientific collaboration with China, it's entirely driven by the Department of War.
Which means that civilian scientific research in the US is now driven by military logic - something that had basically never been the case since WW2.
I'm not making it up, you can read the new policy of the National Science Foundation for yourself:
https://nsf.gov/funding/information/dcl-prohibition-collaborations-entities-us-prohibited-party
They explicitly write that the basis for this new prohibition is to be "aligned with the Department of War's approach to collaborations": a civilian science agency - the one that funds most fundamental research in the US - is now openly modeling its policies on the military's. The Pentagon decides who the enemy is, and science falls in line.
It doesn't take a genius to understand how this will backfire. Cancer, for instance, doesn't care about geopolitics. Some of the most promising research in oncology, like every other field, depends on international collaboration (and especially with China who are extremely advanced in cancer research, and most research fields). Putting soldiers in charge of who scientists can talk to is a guarantee that these problems will be harder to solve.
It's also the US repudiating pretty much its entire philosophical approach to scientific research for decades: the notion that science thrives on openness. Even at the height of the Cold War, Reagan - not exactly a peacenik - enacted a directive called "NSDD-189" that stated that fundamental research must remain open and unrestricted.
This is, obviously, the complete opposite direction.
The only precedent I can think of for this is the Wolf Amendment, passed in 2011, which prohibited NASA to engage in bilateral cooperation with China. The result, 15 years later: China is the only country in the world to have its own space station and to have landed on the far side of the Moon.
That's the track record of the policy they now want to extend to all of US science