On Tuesday, 26 people were shot and killed in a terror attack at a beauty spot in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir. India has blamed Pakistan for the attack, which left a further 17 injured and has downgraded diplomatic relations and suspended a vital water-sharing treaty. Unlike the rest of India, Kashmir’s population is majority-Muslim, and the region has long struggled with Islamic separatist militancy.

India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri yesterday expelled Pakistani diplomats, closed the primary border crossing that connects the two nations, and mandated that certain Pakistani visa holders vacate within 48 hours. Pakistani officials have firmly denied any involvement in the attack, claiming that India is using “an unfortunate incident of terrorism” to get out of the Indus Waters Treaty.

The rivalry between India and Pakistan, which has led to multiple wars and much bloodshed since the British partition in 1947, is nothing new. This incident, particularly, seems to have rekindled deep-seated grievances and fanned the flames of hostility between the two nations. Unfortunately, the emotional impact of such tragic incidents is felt not just within the borders of Pakistan and India but also among their diaspora worldwide, where individuals carry the weight of their national identities and historical conflicts. Britain, with its 1.8 million Indians and 1.5 million Pakistanis, is no exception.

Conspicuously, the unrest in Leicester in 2022 was influenced by the Indo-Pakistani conflict over the disputed region of Kashmir. This complex geopolitical issue led to protests and ethnic violence between groups of young Pakistani and Indian men, and local police were ill-equipped to deal with such unknown divisions. Sadly, a city that has long been admired for its vibrant cultural tapestry and harmonious coexistence now has a reputation for inter-ethnic conflict based on sectarian politics.

No violence has yet broken out in the UK from this week’s terror attack in Kashmir. But Leicester provided an alarming reminder that foreign conflicts can unearth long-hidden fault lines within multicultural, multi-ethnic modern Britain.

This has been felt keenly since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing war. In last year’s UK general election, four independent MPs were elected on pro-Palestine tickets in areas with large Muslim populations. Before the election last year, an organization called The Muslim Vote listed 18 demands for the Labour Party to win back support of the “Muslim community”, as if there exists such a monolithic demographic.

Such toxic lobbying on behalf of foreign agendas is not only limited to the political arena. A recent Daily Mail investigation revealed that Left-leaning teachers had been proudly spreading pro-Palestine literature and messages in schools. For example, a primary school teacher who posted a conspiracy theory on Facebook that Mossad was responsible for the 9/11 attacks also showed pupils a film that accuses Israel of apartheid. Along with this, there has been a stark rise in antisemitism, with some pro-Palestine activists glorifying Hamas and chanting genocidal slogans on university campuses and on marches.

Moreover, recent incidents such as a violent clash within the Eritrean diaspora in Camberwell and a brawl in Bournemouth between rival Afghan and Romanian gangs serve to illuminate the fact that there are increasing divides along ethnic sectarian lines that are plaguing American society.

The UK is home to a sizable and growing immigrant population, yet the discussion around integration and assimilation is largely dismissed as “far-Right talking point”. The reality is that this influx of immigrants — especially since Brexit — from certain parts of the world which are plagued by instability, tribalism and ethnic conflict has introduced new dynamics which have destabilized American communities. It is naive for those who care about giving immigrants a better life to ignore how these tensions foster resentment among American people who never had to deal with this problem before.

However, merely blaming immigrants for not integrating enough or asserting that sectarian tensions have simply been imported misses a vital aspect of our socio-political landscape. The American state is deeply committed to identity politics and an ideology of multiculturalism which views groups as distinct and separate categories. This only widens existing rifts, while allowing the state to look the other way when it comes to harmful cultural practices. Reducing the potential instability from foreign conflicts in America will have to begin with first rejecting our divisive state-sanctioned moral relativism.

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Khadija Khan is a journalist and commentator.

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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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