The problem is that you can not ban eugenic tech long term, because the other countries will use this to get better IQ and dominate you.
What if ... both?
PS. Lots of "exponential" all-or-nothing, intelligence related "arms races" around lately ...
... interesting times.-
We can barely manipulate simple organisms without causing negative second order effects to cascade through our systems.
Your approach assumes that the distribution of those SNPs at the population level is immaterial.
What makes an allele attractive at one frequency can expose new liabilities at a different frequency.
No it doesn't.
>> What makes an allele attractive at one frequency can expose new liabilities at a different frequency.
There is a false assumption in behavioral genetics that behavior and intelligence are weakly linked to 1000s of SNPs which would make it rather difficult to stay within normal bounds, but in reality there are a few rare SNPs that dominates high intelligence. The RCCX genes of TNXB, CYP21A2, and C4 being the strongest. Of these I would focus on only two TNXB SNPs and there are many people walking around today who have them.
Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life
TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war.
Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts.
Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.
Similar to putting weapons on drones, it used to be unthinkable and now it's unthinkable not to.
Heck, for argument, "incels" would argue the females of the species have been doing this forever, at least in very broad strokes.-
(To be clear, I think that's an important part of what makes me so uncomfortable with it. I don't mean that as a justification for why it should be fine to do it.)
I’m not sure that gene edited super intelligence is in the near future.
As a society, we have power if we want to use it. It's never perfect, but it can be very effective. Saying it's impossible is just a means - intentionally or not - of preventing people from using that power.
you have no power over China, which is what the GP implies
I don't have any trouble saying this is a race I'm fine with "losing" because I refused to play, because the prospect of living in such a world sounds horrible to me.
From my perspective, it's not that different from the reason I don't own a remote bunker anywhere. I wouldn't want to survive a nuclear holocaust, because living in a post-nuclear-holocaust world sounds horrible.
The fact that other people might do things I would find terrible, and that I might rather let them kill me than willingly participate in the world their activity created, seems obvious to me, but I can at least imagine how someone else might see it differently.
Perhaps it's that many things seem worse to me than death?