Unlike economics or science, geopolitics is zero sum , Arctotherium reminds us — it doesn’t just matter what the United States is capable of, but what the United States is capable of compared to its competitors:
Objectively, the USA is far more powerful in 2025 than in 1945, but geopolitically it is much weaker.
It’s not impossible for states to deliberately use brain drain for geopolitical gain. This usually takes the form of what I call the “foreign experts model”. You identify specific areas in which national industry is inferior to foreign counterparts, and then invite small numbers of foreign experts in these areas (often many fewer than 10,000) to come and teach locals their skills, usually by paying them. The key components of the foreign expert model are:
- It is demographically insignificant.
- Foreign experts are expected to transfer their skills and knowledge to native students.
- Foreign experts are recognized as foreign. There’s no expectation that they naturalize (though in some cases they do, and because of (1) this doesn’t matter much) and they’re usually excluded from political positions. They may have influence and authority in their domains of expertise, but not over the nation as a whole. This is crucial because giving up control of the state to gain geopolitical power is putting the cart before the horse.
- Foreign experts are paid large sums of money or otherwise rewarded (usually above market value) for their expertise.
An illustrative example of the foreign experts model comes from the history of Saudi Aramco. Saudi Arabia has massive and easily-exploitable oil reserves, but did not have the local expertise to drill them after WWII. Relying on a wholly American-operated company would have left the country dependent on American goodwill and with little leverage. Iran and Venezuela chose to destructively nationalize their foreign-operated oil companies, while Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria allow foreign oil companies to operate autonomously in exchange for bribes and payouts. The Saudis took a wiser path:
At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions. This steadily increased the bargaining power of the Saudi government, which periodically renegotiated its contract with the Americans over decades to get a greater share of the profits in exchange for more oil exploration or diplomatic concessions.
In 1973 and 1974, the Saudi government authorized two big final buy-outs of Aramco. The prices were not disclosed publicly, but the consensus is that the American oil companies were well-compensated, and that’s after they had made enormous profits for 30 years. This left the oil companies on good terms with the Saudis who were happy to employ them as consultants and specialists. Today, 80% of Aramco’s employees are Saudi, as well as all executives, though surprisingly not all board members.
History is full of similar examples. The English government invited German John Hurdegen to serve as “master of the assays of our mines” in 1545, paying him a salary of 40 pounds per year (approximately 32 times the annual wages of an English laborer at the time) and developed several other mines using German expertise. Small numbers of German engineers, surveyors, and managers brought superior German mining techniques to England, where they taught their skills to locals. Contrast this with the approach favored by Eastern European rulers, who transplanted entire colonies of Germans into their domains for their mining (and other) skills rather than having them teach locals.
The Russian state under Peter the Great recruited 60 Dutch shipbuilders and around 750 Western European officers, technicians, and academics to found the Russian Navy. While we lack precise information on most of them, one English hydraulic engineer, John Perry, was offered 300 pounds (approximately 60 times the annual cash wages of an English laborer in 1700) plus expenses and bonuses for completed projects, for his service.
Meiji Japan used European and American military and industrial experts to build up their army and economy and colonize Hokkaido. The total number of “hired foreigners” (O-yatoi, a term coming from Yatoi, meaning “person hired temporarily”) was 2,000-3,000, and their combined salaries reached a third of the national budget in 1874. The Japanese government “did not consider it prudent to let them settle in Japan permanently,” and they were replaced by Japanese students once the latter finished training and learning.
The People’s Republic of China pays foreign experts in many fields enormous sums of money to come to China temporarily and share their skills with the Chinese, despite China having the lowest proportion of foreign-born inhabitants on the planet.
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America has its own history of taking in small numbers of extraordinarily talented immigrants. The two most famous examples are the 1930s exodus of European scientists to the US (where they were extremely important to the Manhattan Project) and Operation Paperclip. Both fit the foreign experts model.
The total number of European scientific emigres in the 1930s, which included such luminaries as Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein, was demographically insignificant—only a few thousand (less than half of the number of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border every single day under the Biden Administration). In fact, the 1930s are the only decade in American history with net-negative immigration.
Far from immigration being America’s superpower, the exodus of European scientists shows how it is possible to gain the benefits of extraordinary talent with almost no immigration at all.