Consider the fact that almost all software in the world is written in English. What I mean is that the built-in functions of nearly every programming language (“print,” “if,” “else,” “for,” “class,” “return,” “continue”) are English words, or abbreviations of them. Every coder in the world, whether Chinese or French, Israeli or Bangladeshi, learns to speak at least some English because of this. English speakers are far from the most populous group of people on Earth, and yet all coders everywhere learn to speak our language. This is true because America won. To code is to submit to a staggering American civilizational victory, to acknowledge, just a little bit, the indisputable dominance of America—our people, our technology, our ideas, and, you better believe it, our words.

One byproduct of this staggering civilizational victory is that the Chinese military almost certainly uses open-source software that is primarily maintained by American and Western programmers. And I would be willing to bet that programming languages (themselves very often a form of open-source software) invented by Americans are a fundamental enabler of all sorts of Chinese weapons.