The UK and European Union governments face two interlinked dilemmas in their approach to the Ukraine peace process initiated by the Trump administration. It is not clear from the conclusions of Sunday’s London summit whether they will be able to navigate these dilemmas, or even fully recognize them.

The first dilemma is how to strengthen Ukraine’s position in peace negotiations without simultaneously emboldening Ukraine to reject a US-Russia deal. Such a move might provoke Trump into abandoning Ukraine and handing all responsibility for Ukraine over to the Europeans — who cannot in fact meet this responsibility.

The second UK and EU dilemma is how to make themselves look important and “relevant” (something that the European elites see as vital, though it is not incumbent on the rest of us to do so) without making promises they have no intention of actually fulfilling.

Keir Starmer said on Sunday that he, Macron and Zelensky worked out a peace plan which they would present to Trump. He did not give details of this plan, but announced that the summit had agreed on the following four points: to keep military aid flowing into Ukraine; to have Kyiv at the table for any peace talks; for European leaders to aim to deter any future Russian invasion of Ukraine; and to form a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine and guarantee peace there in future.

Starmer said that Europe would have to “do the heavy lifting” in a peace deal, but also that the British and EU plan is intended to “ensure that we stay in lockstep with the US”. He denied any split over Ukraine between the US and Europe, and said: “let me be clear — we agree with Trump on the urgent need for a durable peace. Now we need to deliver together”.

However diplomatically necessary, this statement is on the face of it utterly absurd given what happened between Trump and Zelensky on Friday, and the European condemnations of Trump and his approach to peace that followed. There is in fact no evidence whatsoever that Trump wants any help from Britain and Europe in making peace. On the contrary, as he said during Friday’s clash in the White House, he is absolutely convinced that he is the only person capable of making a deal with Putin — and he may be right.

As for Ukraine, Starmer’s promise for continued military aid is essential if Moscow is to be convinced that Ukraine can continue to resist. However, nobody in Britain or Europe should deceive themselves into thinking they can successfully continue on their own for very long if Washington pulls the plug.

But another promise made in London is simply a repetition of an old and infamous lie that has done terrible damage to Ukraine and may do more in future: Starmer’s statement of an intention “to form a “coalition of the willing” to “defend Ukraine”, and pledge to send British troops as part of a “peacekeeping force”. Even before Trump, the Biden administration and every leading NATO government had repeatedly declared they would not go to war with Russia to defend Ukraine. This always rendered the idea of Ukrainian NATO membership utterly empty.

Fortunately for the British and Europeans, Russia’s repeated rejection of European “peacekeepers” as part of any settlement means they are very unlikely to be asked to fulfill this promise. If, though, Ukraine continues to insist on it, and Trump loses his temper and walks away from the peace process and support for Ukraine, then Ukrainians may pay a terrible price for European theatrical posturing.

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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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