What resources and technologies are strategic? This question is often the focus of policy and theoretical debates, where the label "strategic" designates those assets that warrant the attention of the highest levels of the state. But these conversations are plagued by analytical confusion, flawed heuristics, and the rhetorical use of "strategic" to advance particular agendas. We aim to improve these conversations through conceptual clarification, introducing a theory based on important rivalrous externalities for which socially optimal behavior will not be produced alone by markets or individual national security entities. We distill and theorize the most important three forms of these externalities, which involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, and dependency-strategic logics. We then employ these logics to clarify three important cases: the Avon 2 engine in the 1950s, the U.S.-Japan technology rivalry in the late 1980s, and contemporary conversations about artificial intelligence.

中文翻译：

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战略资产的逻辑：从石油到人工智能

哪些资源和技术具有战略意义？这个问题通常是政策和理论辩论的焦点，其中“战略”标签指的是那些值得国家最高层关注的资产。但这些对话受到分析混乱、有缺陷的启发式以及使用“战略”来推进特定议程的修辞的困扰。我们旨在通过概念澄清来改善这些对话，引入基于重要竞争外部性的理论，市场或个别国家安全实体不会单独产生社会最优行为。我们对这些外部性最重要的三种形式进行提炼和理论化，它们涉及累积、基础设施和依赖战略逻辑。