In a world where AI advancement depended only on human ingenuity this would make sense. In that world each political power block would be in an existential race for AI supremacy. In our world compute is the limiting resource. Since the US can control who gets compute, the US already has a defacto supremacy so far as frontier model development. Now if it comes about via human (with AI assist?) ingenuity that compute is no longer a restraint, then the situation is much more dire.