In contemporary Washington, leaks are political warfare by other means — and the body count has been rising at the Pentagon. Over the past week, the Defence Department has been racked by internal conflict. Three of defence chief Pete Hegseth’s top advisors were placed on leave and then fired, allegedly as part of a leak investigation. Then, Hegseth’s chief of staff — who allegedly ordered that investigation — was out the door, too.

In addition to massacring the senior political staff of the Pentagon, this battle has now drawn in Hegseth himself. Over the weekend, a former defence spokesman (who was appointed to that position by Hegseth) wrote a piece for Politico essentially calling for the former Fox News presenter’s ouster and warning that future scandals would be coming. Coincidentally, The New York Times reported on Sunday about the existence of yet another Signal chat in which Hegseth allegedly talked about operational defence details with his inner circle (including his wife and personal lawyer).

If the first Signal group chat controversy risked inflaming tensions between hawks and restrainers in the Trump administration, the current leak battles seem to be the ratcheting up of this struggle. This Pentagon meltdown comes amid fierce internal debates in the Trump administration about Iran policy. Hawks prefer a more assertive stance toward the regime, while many restrainers warn against geopolitical escalation. Reportedly, President Trump decided not to back a planned Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities — with Hegseth and JD Vance warning against intervention — and the Trump team seems to be hoping to strike some nuclear deal with Iran.

This policy tug-of-war intersects with personnel power struggles. Many restrainer voices in the press have continued to push for the removal of the hawkish National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and the three fired Hegseth aides were identified as restrainers. Dan Caldwell, one of those purged staffers, posted a statement to X on behalf of himself and his two colleagues, attacking their treatment as “unconscionable” and pledging to continue supporting Trump. Shortly after that, Caldwell wrote another post slamming “Iran hawks”. Even through the fog of administrative war, the stakes of Iran policy for both sides seem relatively clear.

When it comes to war, the President’s own impulses are conflicted. Influenced by the Vietnam War of his youth as well as the Iraq War, Trump seems deeply averse to long-term military conflicts. In the Trump White House, “regime change” has the same taint that “appeasement” had in the George W. Bush administration. At the same time, Trump admires a politics of strength and swagger. That means taking out Iranian generals, launching airstrikes on the Houthis, and boosting the defence budget to $1 trillion.

With his background in cable news and relative distance from the rigidly formulated ideologies of the Beltway policy communities, Pete Hegseth could seem in some ways a complement to Trump’s own heterogeneous impulses on foreign policy. As of yet, he has straddled both camps, but that has also meant that he has drawn the ire of both sides — hence, the current leak war.

However, Hegseth’s exit would cause the battle between the two sides to grow even fiercer, and a protracted Pentagon civil war could paralyse the Trump administration’s ambitious reform efforts. Perhaps realising these political dangers, the White House has stood strongly behind Hegseth. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the anti-Hegseth leaks and said that the “entire Pentagon” was working to sabotage him.

Trump’s politics of strength make him especially resistant to any idea of capitulating to the press, so the side (whether restrainers or hawks) that becomes too identified with leaks could see themselves frozen out. In Trump’s White House, the persona of the president matters far more than any ideology, so those of a more ideological bent will have to learn to compromise — or risk exile from the corridors of power.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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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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