What's interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying whoa whoa whoa I've deployed my business is built on top of unitry. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them.
This to me feels like we have the most expensive boomerang in history and that is we have essentially paid a ton of money and credibility in terms of US brand equity such that we could get a worse deal than we had with the JCPOA.
I think in this moment we have a cabal a group of people in power who no longer have any faith in democracy and are really actively trying to destroy it and to destroy the the uh post-World War II uh rules-based international order in part so they can carve up the globe again in a way that looks very much like that late 19th, early 20th 20th century period.
Trade touches virtually every part of or most of our lives. So, our mission is to fix globalization, but we're not retreating from globalization. We're leaning into it. But we believe that globalization needs to be fixed. It needs to be more trusted, more secure, more fair.
Trade is the lifeblood of growth. This is how we feed ourselves, sustain ourselves, and protect ourselves. So, how do you have both at the same time? How do you have more enforcement and more fracturing as geopolitics play out, but have more trade, more growth, and more economic security?
China's overall plan is to use technology, to use finance building infrastructure for countries in the developing world and then through these services that China gives to the developing world, China wants to bind these countries to it politically and use their agency to counterbalance the west.
The third one was around the destabilization of the middle class of the West. So if you have a rapid sort of outsourcing and a collapse of manufacturing, then the point of view was you're going to have a populist response. And I think we've seen that play out.
Hugging face had to use a Chinese model to defend themselves because the American models refused to help even though it was the American models that were doing the hacking in the first place.
To make that vision real, he had to change China's relationship to the world and introduce capitalism to a society steeped in tradition and communist ideals.
One probable outcome of an openweight model dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes rather than a market product. AI is a public good, which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure.
I remember, you know, back in 2023 and hot on off the heels of of the CO outbreak and uh China being blamed for it that people were saying, you know, China's never going to come back from this. Everyone's hating on China. The world is anti-China. But fast forward 3, four years, what a world, you know, what a difference those years have made.
The more skeptical folks on the timeline are pointing to uh you know ideas such as uh maybe the compute was smuggled in to China against chip controls. Maybe the data was excfiltrated from frontier lab APIs routed through wrapper companies. Maybe this is a distillation attack. Um the open-source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies. It's geopolitical warfare. It's the AI cold war.
I would say that if there's one area in which the wheels might come off China's extraordinary economic advances uh over the past few decades, it has to be employment. China is simply moving ahead so quickly on all of these topics that it now becomes an experiment for what happens to employment and social stability when you have hyper rapid AI adoption and automation adoption throughout the economy.
My concern is that because the Chinese models are open source, it will not be Chinese models used in China and US models used in the US. It'll be Chinese models used in China and everywhere else in the world and US models used in the US.
Allowing one of America's most impressive tech companies to buy Chinese chips made by uh this CXMT company which is a very proficient maker of uh memory chips and does so at a pretty low price uh will be a huge leg up to China and therefore it will be countering America's broad strategy of trying to keep Chinese tech contained trying to keep its advance contained.
Netanyahu is constantly on a war footing and I go back to the same thing. I think the world would be a much better place once Netanyahu and Trump leave the world stage. But Netanyahu is on a war footing. He sees his political survival based on his promise to annihilate or destroy his enemies.
For decades now, the real power in the region has often flowed through water. Three narrow waterways shape the Middle East's relationship to the world, carrying up to a quarter of global trade. Together, they form what may be the most powerful triangle on Earth.
Hong Kong has always been a special case. It's designated as a special economic zone with China. It's got a high degree of autonomy, um, etc., etc., but now the US is treating Hong Kong pretty much as just another part of China.
We are living in a technological cold war where there is an iron curtain increasingly developing uh being drawn up between mainly China and the US. And what is clear to me is that increasingly uh Hong Kong is getting looped into mainland China. This I think may be net bad for the financial services sector in Hong Kong which relies on being a crossber hub not just of funds and financing as you know but also of talent and IP.
No other company, no other country in the world can make these so-called EUV uh machines. And without them, you simply can't make the world's most advanced semiconductors.
For a certain subset of Iranians, they feel like they've tried everything, nothing has worked, the regime, the government like refuses to make significant changes, and therefore maybe a military attack is the only way to dislodge
What we saw in this case was that the military capacity of the US to force the Strait of Hormuz back open was really a lot lower than I think many people thought it could be. This took, you know, several months and ultimately we're getting a reopening through a negotiated outcome rather than, you know, strictly through military force.
the strange thing about this propaganda is it wasn't actually directed at persuading Greenlanders that it would be good for them to join the United States. It was mostly aimed at convincing conservative Americans that this is something that Greenlanders wanted, rather than actually building organic support.
China has demonstrated a willingness to forego money in the name of the common good. In the name of protecting workers and protecting labor. And so even if China is more structurally exposed to AI, even if that is the case, my assumption is that the Chinese government will bend the economy to its will in order to protect Chinese workers. What I know about America is that the total opposite is true.
While uh the US spends 12 times more on compute this from the private sector versus the Chinese private sector uh China is spending 42% more on the robotic sector uh than the United States and apparently this gap is going to widen so this is two very different uh I would say modalities but I think that the robotic race, especially the AI component of it, uh, is a really exciting one and it's where China actually has distinct advantages, not just in the hardware, but potentially the software, too.
The real problem with deterrence is that it requires your adversary to believe you will actually follow through. And historically, the United States has had a credibility problem — we draw red lines and then don't enforce them, which is an invitation for adversaries to probe and push.
Another war in the Middle East. A retreat from the international order. A presidency built on self-dealing and arbitrary power. It's enough to make you think the U.S. is in a steep decline — but Fareed Zakaria thinks otherwise.
The U.S. has been the world's dominant military power for so long that we've forgotten what it's like to have a peer competitor. And the scary thing is that China isn't just catching up — in some domains, they've already surpassed us.
I have no leverage. Trump is me in the Hungarian forest right now. Because he never bothered to consult Congress and offended them. Because he never even signed up or even briefed European allies. Because he did not in any way coordinate anything around intelligence around the Straits of Hormuz, getting expats out of the Gulf, figuring out putting in place the right defense mechanisms.
The problem is what you don't see on the box, the resilience, sovereignty and competition risks that come when a growing chunk of rural New Zealand's connectivity, including some mobile towers, schools and businesses, depends on a single foreign owned satellite provider.
The sort of closeness that we've seen between Russia and China since the Russian invasion of Ukraine is probably the most consequential geopolitical shift that we've seen in the world over the last decade.
We discuss why magazine depth matters for the American industrial base, lessons from Ukraine, and what the rise of neo-prime defense companies will require from Congress.
We recorded this conversation in the middle of the Iranian contingency, and we spent most of our time on what winning actually means in a theater like Iran.
Both sides now openly acknowledge that the US and China no longer see trade and technology as economic issues alone. They see them increasingly as national security weapons.
Amid the barrage of messages and misinformation swirling online and on Capitol Hill, about what damage U.S. military sites incurred during the conflict with Iran, a Times analysis of satellite imagery shows 18 sites in seven countries were hit.
I would say all of this to me means that the rivalry has entered a new phase. The White House is talking about exploring measures to hold foreign actors accountable. That's the phrase they use for industrial scale distillation campaigns. To me, I think the important thing is that politically, geopolitically, this is a step change.
The German chancellor publicly said the United States is being humiliated. The French president publicly said that the US president um the Russian president, the Chinese uh president are all directly against Europe uh acting together against Europe. Those are those are things that at best you usually hear with inside voices.
If you're Iran, this is even before the deadline. I understand that Israel is the one doing the bombing, not the United States. But from Iran's perspective, those bombs kind of feel the same, right?
It allows China yet again to claim the diplomatic high ground from the US presenting itself as a peacemaker while leaving people to draw their own conclusions that the US is a wararmonger.
China is still a highly transactional power. It doesn't have allies with the exception of one and that is North Korea. It has a formal treaty with North Korea signed in 1961. But aside from that, China has no treaty obligation to go in and protect and defend any other country were that country to be attacked.
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Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
