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OPINION:
America is losing the war for the physical world. While Washington consumes itself with debates over software regulation and partisan grievances, Beijing has quietly cornered the market on the heavy infrastructure that dictates geopolitical power.
The numbers are no longer just worrying; they are catastrophic. As of 2025, China possesses 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. Last year, Chinese shipyards churned out more than 1,000 commercial vessels; American yards built eight.
On the energy front, the gap is widening. China’s power generation capacity is approaching 4 terawatts, more than the U.S., the European Union and India combined. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that our own infrastructure funding gap has ballooned to $3.7 trillion. We are being outbuilt, outmined and outscaled by an adversary that fuses state ambition with unlimited capital.
We cannot close this gap with government spending alone. To reindustrialize at the speed of relevance, we need a mechanism to unlock private capital at a scale that matches the Chinese state.
The solution is the patriotic investment zone.
Modeled on the 2017 Opportunity Zones initiative, which successfully mobilized more than $75 billion, patriotic investment zones would correct that program’s flaw. Instead of incentivizing luxury apartments in gentrifying neighborhoods, patriotic investment zones would strictly target the three pillars of national survival: domestic shipbuilding, critical mineral mining and energy grid resilience.
The fuel for this engine is already sitting in our state capitals. U.S. public pension funds manage trillions of dollars for police officers, firefighters, teachers and nurses. Paradoxically, according to the nonprofit Future Union, these funds have committed tens of billions of dollars to Chinese venture capital.
In effect, American teachers are banking their retirement on the growth of the very adversary threatening their grandchildren.
We can reverse this flow by offering a simple, radical incentive: zero federal income tax on pension distributions derived from patriotic investment zone investments.
Here’s how it would work: Currently, state pension funds pay no capital gains tax, but retirees pay ordinary income tax on their monthly checks. Under a patriotic investment zone structure, if a California teachers fund allocates 10% of its capital to domestic shipyards and rare earth mines, then 10% of every retiree’s monthly check becomes tax-free.
This creates a powerful “double helix” of benefits:
The capital magnet: It gives fund managers a fiduciary mandate to repatriate capital from overseas and deploy it into American heavy industry. It solves the “chicken and egg” problem of financing new shipyards by creating a dedicated, hungry buyer for those assets.
The patriot’s dividend: It aligns the financial well-being of American retirees with the strategic security of the nation. It transforms the “defense industrial base” from an abstract Washington talking point into a tangible line item on a retiree’s bank statement.
Critically, this avoids the “gentrification” trap of previous tax zones. You cannot gentrify a shipyard. You cannot flip a lithium mine for a quick condo profit. These are long-term, heavy-industrial bets that create high-wage union jobs and secure the supply chains for fighter jets and AI data centers.
This is not a “jobs program” in the abstract sense; it is a restoration of the American blue-collar middle class. We do not need a “sandbox for talent”; we need a call to service. By flooding these zones with capital, we create a gravitational pull for skilled labor — welders, nuclear engineers and machinists — revitalizing the very regions globalization left behind.
Whether it’s reopening shipyards in the Gulf of America or breaking ground on refineries in the Rust Belt, the patriotic investment zone structure turns neglected geography into strategic geography.
The U.S. can no longer afford to delay. This is addition by subtraction. We must stop sending our capital to an adversary that controls 90% of the rare earth minerals in our missiles and smartphones. Beijing is betting that America’s capital markets are too shortsighted to build the mines and refineries needed to break that monopoly.
We can prove China wrong without creating a new federal bureaucracy to pick winners. We simply need to empower America’s nurses, cops and firefighters to build the future they will retire into. It is time to stop funding our adversary’s rise and start paying our citizens to rebuild the arsenal of democracy.
• Andrew King is general partner at Bastille Ventures, investing in critical technology furthering national security, and the founder of the bipartisan nonprofit Future Union, which works with the private sector to combat state espionage.
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