As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.

“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.

Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their sights to Beijing.

“It was very obvious what was going on: China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing ... a very adroit game of worldwide offensive, defensive, technology exploitation chess,” Sekora says. “What we had in Socrates could have easily contained China.”

The project was defunded by the Bush administration, and the United States went the opposite route, allowing many key technologies to be handed over to Beijing over the course of several decades.

In this episode, he breaks down why he believes the United States has lost its edge in technological innovation and how this can be turned around.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.