National security would give coherence to the diverse intellectual foundations of the foreign policy for the middle class. This chapter examines the policy’s key intellectual strands—geopolitics, inequality and market concentration—through the writing of key figures who would come to hold prominent positions in the administration. For Jake Sullivan and Jennifer Harris, the economy was an instrument of geopolitical competition, and government intervention had become necessary because the private sector was not investing in the sources of American power. Heather Boushey’s work demonstrated inequality had become unconstrained and had reached the point where only the government had the power to act in the public interest. The New Brandeis Movement, of which Lina Khan was a part, was putting the political back into the political economy with its concern that market concentration had implications for democracy. The administration would draw these strands together in its national security strategy where it made the argument that only by intervening in the market and making critical investments would America prevail in the competition for the future, in a world where there was no dividing line between foreign and domestic policy.