A major diplomatic breakthrough was achieved on Wednesday when Governor Maura Healey signed an executive order making Massachusetts the first US state to legalize haggis. Since 1971, any American hoping to eat the Scottish dish has been forced to eat an ersatz version without the quintessential ingredient of sheep’s lungs, due to USDA regulations. The Scottish government, with an eye on the lucrative export market, has long lobbied to overturn the ban. Where it failed, though, the Tartan Army has been triumphant.

Well, not quite — the executive order was a bit of fun. But it is still a testament to the extraordinary success of Scottish football fans as cultural ambassadors. The team has played its opening two games at the Boston Stadium in Massachusetts, most recently losing 1-0 to Morocco on Friday evening.

Following a welcome parade with bagpipes in Boston, the Scots staged a takeover of the city. They planted traffic cones on the heads of multiple monuments (the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow has worn such a crown since the Eighties). They set the record for the loudest crowd noise ever recorded at the World Cup, then turned up en masse to watch a baseball game, then drank the pubs dry, then started handing out Irn Bru in a local park.

The conquest of Boston is especially significant because the city is the epicenter of Irish American culture. In the US it is the Irish who wear kilts and play bagpipes, the Irish who drink more than anybody else. Not anymore. And now, Boston and Glasgow are set to be formally made twin cities.

Expatriate Scots, meanwhile, have another reason to be grateful to members of the Tartan Army: they have instigated a return to a cultural norm. When I moved to the US 20 years ago, I quickly discovered that there were no disadvantages to being Scottish in America, besides the inability to make myself understood at a drive-thru. Americans didn’t know much about us, but what they did know — Braveheart and Craig Ferguson, whisky and golf — they really, really liked. They even had a special word for Celtic accents: “a brogue”.

For a long time, then, we could coast along on Sir Walter Scott’s two-century-old branding job. But in the last five years or so, a different and less appealing image of Scotland has emerged.

It may have started when Nicola Sturgeon justified putting a burly male rapist in a women’s prison on the grounds that he had declared himself a lady. It continued when her successor, the hapless Humza Yousaf, was reported to the police under his own hate crime law. Just the other week, my Texas born-and-bred son walked into my office to show me a clip of Sturgeon explaining that she had not noticed the massive camper van parked in her mother-in-law’s driveway in Dunfermline — which, coincidentally, is my hometown. As he has visited numerous times and is well aware of the complete absence of luxury American-style RVs from the (very narrow) streets, he thought this was hilarious.

From romantic Highland warriors to patient zero for woke excess and general laughing stock is not a great arc. Thanks to the Tartan Army, the texts from friends linking to the latest scandal or absurdity have stopped and I am receiving heart-warming videos instead. Alas, given my homeland’s track record for winning at football, I am doubtful that the Scottish fans will be around for much longer. But in Boston at least, the memory of this most good-natured of invasions will surely endure. And one day, perhaps, Americans might even be blessed with the taste of real haggis — sheep’s lungs and all.

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Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.

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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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