The Tri-Polar Compute Manifold: State Capacity, Control Loops, and Grand Strategy in Major-Power Competition

How do domestic political structures constrain a state’s capacity to build, sustain, and deploy frontier technological power? Aggregate measures of industrial scale and defense spending that adequately described twentieth-century rivalries are insufficient for competition centered on advanced microelectronics and high-performance computing. This article develops a control-theoretic framework—the Tri-Polar Compute Manifold—to model technological state capacity across three regimes: Russia’s analogue attractor, China’s dual-pole scale model, and the American open-loop innovation system. By translating institutional incentives and political coercion into an explicit state-space system, the framework shows how high regime coercion systematically degrades the internal feedback required for sustained frontier performance. Large domestic scale can buffer the resulting lag; it does not eliminate the distortion. An open system with low coercion and continued access to global talent can maintain a structural growth advantage, provided it does not impose on itself the same informational pathologies.