The UK recently announced a regulatory regime for fusion, with significantly lighter requirements than fission since safety and proliferation issues are much less troublesome. That would be even more the case for aneutronic fusion. Possibly the US would be silly enough to get in the way but many other countries certainly wouldn't, including China.
As an American this is accurate and depressing.
They’re in a really good position here because they actually don’t. Being a no-carbon power source puts them in an almost new market. The government can (should) regulate carbon fuel away, and pour money into this in a non-market way to tip scales. Energy is heavily regulated but also heavily government funded.
To be fair to your comment though air pollution relating to climate warming has been treated as a tragedy of the commons problem for ever.
They need to prove that the research works to actually produce net electricity - which requires a scientific breakthrough. Next after a research breakthrough - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial product. During that process they need to make this a commercially viable economically viable product that can compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace. They will need to get through serious regulatory requirements. And remember that they need to make this commercially viable to produce electricity at a very low cost - its super competitive at baseload power cost range.
By the time this comes to market the energy landscape will be completely different. It is already moving incredibly quickly.
Like I've said on other post - we need these kinds of moonshots but let's not have them distract against the other important work of deploying already commercially ready technology into the market.