President Trump now appears to have carried out his repeated threats to “walk away” from the Ukraine peace process. While he has blamed Russia and voiced support for Kyiv, his latest remarks at the UN yesterday suggest he has no intention of backing that up with additional US aid. Intelligence sharing will likely continue, but new weapons for Ukraine will now depend on European funding. The move also helps Trump neutralize opposition from isolationist elements within his base.

After his meeting with President Zelensky in New York, Trump wrote in a social media post that, “With time, patience and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this war started is very much an option [sic].” However, he did not say anything about US support.

He even suggested that Ukraine could gain additional land: “who knows, maybe [it can] even go further than that”, adding that Russia is in “BIG” economic trouble and now was “the time for Ukraine to act”.

If this remark was a considered statement by Trump, and not just impulsive bloviation, then one might almost think that it was an encouragement to Ukraine to commit suicide and get it over with. For if there is one thing that this war has demonstrated, it is the tremendous advantages that contemporary weaponry gives to the defensive. This approach has successfully stopped a Russian breakthrough, but it also helped Moscow blunt Ukraine’s 2023 offensive. As a result, the quickest route to a catastrophic Ukrainian defeat would be for Kyiv to exhaust its troops and materiel in another large-scale attack; yet, without such an offensive there is no realistic prospect of recovering lost territory.

The only way Kyiv could recover territory would be if the United States went to war with Russia — something Donald Trump has no intention of doing. He nonetheless risked widening the conflict when he suggested that European Nato members should shoot down Russian jets that entered their airspace. However, he explicitly declined to commit US forces, saying that would “depend on the circumstances.” By contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged that Russian aircraft be intercepted and only shot down if they actually launched an attack — a more conventional, restrained position.

We must hope that Estonian or Polish hardliners do not mistake Trump’s remarks for a green light. As the Georgians and others could attest, Washington has a long history of urging its allies into reckless ventures — only to fail to come to their rescue when the consequences arrive.

Trump left a sliver of hope for an early peace when he said that he would let the world know “in about a month from now” if he still trusts Putin. But for this deadline to work, the US or — improbable as it may seem — leading European countries will have to come up with a new and concrete peace plan. The existing demand for an early ceasefire without any of the other terms having been agreed has been repeatedly rejected by Russia. Some of Moscow’s existing demands (for example, that Ukraine withdraw from all the territory that it still holds in the Donbas) are equally impossible for any Ukrainian government to accept.

The only realistic basis for a peace settlement would be a trade-off: Russia drops these demands on Ukraine, while the West addresses Moscow’s broader concerns. That could mean a treaty halting further expansion of both Nato and the Russian-led CSTO, a ban on stationing European troops in Ukraine, the suspension of sanctions, and the return of frozen Russian assets.

Otherwise, the war will go on. Maybe Ukraine will continue to slow the Russian advance to a bloody crawl, but maybe — as the history of the First World War suggests — a long stalemate will be followed by the collapse of one side. In the present case, that side is very unlikely to be Russia. Furthermore, Ukraine is now totally dependent on European aid, and if the war goes on long enough, that aid may be in the hands of President Marine Le Pen of France and Prime Minister Nigel Farage of Britain. Does anyone really think they would be reliable long-term supporters of Ukraine?

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Anatol Lieven is a former war correspondent and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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