Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a key question has been what kind of support the US would continue to provide to Ukraine. Surprisingly for some, the US President has broadly followed Joe Biden’s strategy of giving Kyiv the weapons and ammunition it requests.

Two weeks ago, European leaders claimed that Trump — reversing his previous stance — promised to contribute to a European “reassurance force” for postwar Ukraine. This week, White House officials told the Financial Times that Washington would provide “US aircraft, logistics and ground-based radar supporting and enabling a European-enforced no-fly zone and air shield for the country”. But will this really materialize?

Given that Russia has repeatedly said that it will not accept any peacekeeping force as part of a peace agreement, it is strange that the British and Europeans are continuing to promote one. One interpretation is that the US-backed reassurance force is an attempt to block a peace settlement in the hope the Russians can be worn down and accept terms that much of the Russian establishment and people would see as outright defeat.

This, however, would mean war for many years to come with the attendant risks that the Ukrainian army will collapse or that European support will break down. With a fresh political crisis brewing in France and the collapse of the political center in Germany and Britain, this is a real possibility.

Another interpretation is that this proposed force is intended as a bargaining counter that can be traded in return for the Russian government giving up its unacceptable demands. For example, Moscow has demanded the Ukrainian army’s withdrawal from the part of the Donbas that it still holds.

This is the most sensible approach, for the idea of actually deploying such a force verges on the lunatic. The forces available are utterly inadequate. The entire British Army, it should be noted, now has only 74,000 soldiers. The French army is in no better shape. As a result, French and British officials are now speaking of a joint British and French contribution of only 6,000 to 10,000 men. According to the Wall Street Journal, Britain’s involvement will be “focused on maritime and air domains”.

But how can a force this weak possibly “deter” Russia? Previously it was argued that to be credible, such a force would need around 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers on the ground. Where are the rest to come from? Both the EU’s biggest economy, Germany, and its largest military power by numbers, Poland, have expressed their refusal to take part. So far, apart from Britain and France, only Belgium, Estonia and Lithuania have offered to send troops — which really tells you everything you need to know about this projected “force”.

Finally, part of the point of the Europeans drawing the US into a role in such a force would be to ensure continued US security commitment not just to Ukraine but to Europe itself. But this would cut both ways. If British and European troops were stationed in Ukraine and depended critically on US military backing, this would reduce or destroy any possibility of Britain and Europe distancing themselves from the US on other issues.

We have seen the results in the recent EU surrender to Trump over tariffs and the purchase of US (rather than European) arms. Even worse, it would make it impossible for the British and Europeans to take an independent stance towards Israel’s war on the Palestinians; and this issue is visibly starting to tear our societies and political systems apart, in a way that the war in Ukraine, however bad, can never do. To embark on such a mission would not only be militarily futile, it would also bind Europe ever tighter to Washington’s agenda at the very moment it most needs the freedom to set its own.

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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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