As the Trump administration floods the zone with one radical shift after another, its tariffs have gotten the most attention. But the policy that could end up costing the U.S. even more in the long run is the White House’s assault on universities and on research more broadly.

The U.S. has led the world in science for so long that it’s easy to believe this has always been one of the country’s natural strengths. In fact, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. was more a follower than a leader. British industrialists often complained about American businesses stealing their technology and violating their patents. In the first decades of the 20th century, the country that walked away with the most Nobel Prizes in science was Germany — with one-third of all the awards. Next was Britain with almost 20%. The United States took just 6% of the Nobels in science.

Three powerful forces transformed the scientific landscape in the mid-20th century. The first was Adolf Hitler, who drove a generation of the best scientific minds in Europe — many of them Jewish — to seek refuge in America. (Of Germany’s Nobel Prizes in science won by 1932, about a quarter were won by Jews, who made up less than 1% of the German population.) Many of these scientists came to America and formed the backbone of its scientific establishment. After the 1965 immigration reform, the United States continued to attract the best minds in the world — many from China and India — who would come to study, then stay and build research labs and tech companies.

The second force was the two world wars. By 1945, Britain, France and, most of all, Germany had been devastated, with millions of citizens dead, cities reduced to rubble and governments crippled with mountains of debt. The Soviet Union came out of World War II victorious but lost around 24 million people in the conflict. The United States, by contrast, emerged from the conflict utterly dominant economically, technologically and militarily.

The third force that propelled the United States forward was the visionary decision by the U.S. government to become a massive funder of basic science. During the 1950s, total research and development spending in the U.S. reached nearly 2.5% of gross domestic product, the most of such spending on the planet. And it did so by creating an innovative model. Universities around the country, public and private, competed for government research funds. The federal government wrote the checks but did not try to run the programs itself. That competition and freedom created the modern American scientific establishment, the most successful in human history.

All three of these forces are now being reversed. The Trump administration is at war with the country’s leading universities, threatening them with hostile takeovers and withholding billions of dollars in funding. America’s crown jewels of science, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, are being gutted.

The United States’ second advantage, towering over the rest of the world, has ebbed since 1945. During the last decade, China has become the world leader in many key measures of science.

The final advantage that the United States has, and one that China could not match, is that it attracts the world’s best and brightest. Between 2000 and 2014, more than one-third of the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in science were immigrants. In 2019, almost 40% of all software developers were immigrants. But this is changing fast. Hundreds of visas are being revoked, students are being rounded up to be deported, and graduate students and researchers from China now face the prospect of constant FBI investigations. China has created generous incentives to welcome its best and brightest back home. Last month, Nature magazine asked its readers who are American researchers whether they were thinking of leaving the country. Of the more than 1,600 who responded, a stunning 75% said they were considering it.

These are the building blocks of America’s extraordinary strength, created over the last 100 years. They are now being dismantled in just 100 days.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.