When historians write about the challenges to America’s global hegemony, they will point to the rise of China, the first full-fledged peer competitor to the United States in decades. They will also note the return of Russia and its efforts to disrupt the American-led security order in Europe. These are familiar patterns in the rise and fall of world powers. What is new and surprising is that these challenges, far from uniting America, have turned it on itself, with its government tearing down many of the crucial elements of its extraordinary success.

Consider the Nature Index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contributions to the world’s leading academic journals. Its newest rankings show what scientists already know: China is leaping ahead. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, nine are Chinese. But still sitting in the topmost position on that list is an American institution: Harvard. And it is this university that President Donald Trump is trying to destroy.

The Trump administration’s war on Harvard is bizarre in many ways. Claiming to be fighting antisemitism, the administration has demanded that the university cede control over large parts of its academic affairs and hand over private information about its international students. The administration has never explained why it has singled out Harvard (and the problems that it claims to be concerned about are not particularly egregious at Harvard). Its main weapon - the withdrawal of federal research funds to Harvard - is aimed at the parts of the university that have virtually nothing to do with the “woke ideology” to which Trump objects. More than 90 percent of the funds that the government has threatened to deny Harvard are for research in the life sciences, studying diseases, medicines and other such topics. Denying funding for cancer research will not affect people protesting for Palestinians. It will almost certainly knock Harvard off that Nature Index list.

America’s universities have problems, and I have written about them, urging them to abandon fashionable political causes, end the obsession with diversity and marginalization, and return to a focus on excellence. But it is worth noting that these are still by far the world’s leaders in higher education when you consider teaching, research and the academic environment more broadly. This can be seen simply in the tsunami of applications that America’s top universities get from the brightest students around the world. It would be hard to find many industries in which America is more dominant. Xi Jinping and his erstwhile rival for the Chinese presidency, Bo Xilai, disagreed about many things. But both believed that the best place in the world that their daughter and son, respectively, could go for higher education was Harvard.

It’s not an accident that so many of America’s technology companies are in Northern California and Boston; these clusters formed around great universities such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford. But the Trump administration seems determined to destroy this unique advantage. It has proposed cutting government funding for science by more than $25 billion next fiscal year, and it has declared war on the country’s leading universities. The budget bill recently passed in the House of Representatives punishes the very best universities by taxing their endowments - singling them out among all nonprofits - and raises the tax rate massively on the most successful research institutions.

America continues to lead the world in its ability to attract the best students from across the globe. China draws mainly on the talents of the brightest of its 1.4 billion people. But America has had its pick of the best of the world’s 8 billion people.

The results speak for themselves. Of America’s top 10 companies, five are run by immigrants. Bringing in international students also benefits the American economy as a whole, generating more than $40 billion and supporting nearly 380,000 jobs just last year. But the latest Trump assault has been on these very students, putting their visa processes on hold, threatening to scrutinize their social media posts, and sending a general signal that they are not welcome, will be watched and can be summarily thrown out on a whim. We are already seeing the results - internet searches for American PhDs are down between 25 and 40 percent while those for Australian and Swiss PhD programs are up by even more than that, according to the Economist.

Around four decades ago, when I thought about applying to American universities from India, I was impressed by their reputation in research and teaching. But I was also attracted by the idea of America, a truly free and open society, one that welcomed people from around the world and where, in Ronald Reagan’s words, “our origins matter less than our destinations.” In a competitive world, where other countries have caught up in so many ways, this is still America’s unique advantage - if we can cherish rather than destroy it.