Britain’s Royal College of Defence Studies is reportedly banning Israeli officers from entry, citing opposition to the escalation of Israel’s operation in Gaza. The move singles out Israel, even as officers from China — a non-ally and arguably the greater security threat — continue to be admitted. Beyond being unfair, it risks becoming a serious strategic miscalculation.

The college is more than a classroom: international officers swap ideas, challenge assumptions and give Britain’s defence establishment new perspectives. With relations already frayed by UK criticism of Israel and talk of recognising a Palestinian state, shutting out Israeli officers risks deepening the rift — and cutting Britain off from valuable expertise.

In the past two years, few Western militaries — Britain included — have faced such a diverse, quickly-evolving set of threats as Israel. These officers can therefore bring practical lessons from the front line of contemporary conflicts.

For one, the country has been fighting a grinding urban campaign against Hamas, an enemy that embeds itself in dense civilian areas and operates a vast network of fortified underground tunnels. No other Western military has faced urban warfare at this intensity. The IDF has had to innovate in clearing tunnels and integrating intelligence with frontline manoeuvres — precisely the dilemmas British and Nato forces would face in any future conflict with jihadist groups.

Hezbollah, once considered the world’s most powerful terror group, was quickly brought to its knees by Israel’s use of intelligence, long-term planning, and smart offensive and defensive doctrine. In its war with Iran, meanwhile, Israel swiftly seized control of Iranian airspace, disabled its costly defence systems, and destroyed much of its long-range missile arsenal. Israel’s layered defences — the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow systems, and the navy — intercepted 99% of drones and 90% of missiles, learning and improving under fire, while the air force flew over 1,000 long-range missions without losing a single plane.

Israel’s successes in confronting enemies while simultaneously defending its own population hold critical insights as Britain strengthens its missile and drone defences against Russian, Iranian and other threats. Today’s battlefield also demands a strong command of technology such as AI, electronic warfare and advanced drones. Understanding how to fight this kind of conflict is crucial, and Parliament has already admitted that Britain lacks Israel’s standard of defence, leaving the UK exposed.

Further alienating Israel also signals that ideology trumps strategy and national security. Out of political convenience, Keir Starmer’s government has appeased Left-wing activists rather than standing by an ally and providing our forces with the insight they need.

The Royal College of Defence Studies was designed to expose Britain’s senior officers to global perspectives, not to narrow them. At a time of increased threats, it would be reckless for Britain to fight tomorrow’s battles armed only with yesterday’s knowledge.

---

Dr Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer and researcher focusing on antisemitism, extremism and defence.

limorsimhony

---

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.

---

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

miquelvilam

---