Nearly 10 years ago, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton watched her presidential hopes go up in flames after a humiliating defeat by Donald Trump. Since then, the two have had nothing but bad blood.

But in a surprising op-ed published in the Financial Times earlier this week, Clinton threw her support behind the President’s 20-point Gaza peace framework. “There is no alternative framework waiting in the wings. No rival coalition is quietly preparing a more viable proposal,” Clinton writes in her piece. “The 20-point plan is not the one many of us would have drafted, but it remains the only framework backed by sufficient leverage, political engagement and potential resources to move the parties towards implementation.”

She urges the world to support the so-called Board of Peace, arguing that “the choice for governments is not whether this process is ideal. It is whether they are prepared to help shape an imperfect framework from within or stand aside while more destructive actors shape what comes next.”

It’s unclear what spurred Clinton to write this piece: there are always all sorts of private considerations for any politician, let alone a Clinton, to engage with an issue as thorny as peace in the Middle East. But the publication of the op-ed is a sign that at least some Democrats are begrudgingly coming round to an unpleasant reality: it’s Trump’s world now, and we all just live in it.

This is demonstrated in every international issue, from the ongoing negotiations over the war in Ukraine to the question of whether the United States will be able to resolve its dispute with Iran without further bloodshed. As much as Democrats enjoy all the speculation about the 2028 presidential race, Trump, absent some kind of unforeseen crisis like a health problem, will continue to rule the United States for another two and a half years. The only way to make progress on issues that the federal government oversees is to find a way to work with him or influence him towards a better outcome.

There is, after all, now bountiful evidence that Trump is not an ideologue. After allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to convince him to go to war with Iran, he is now distancing himself from the Israeli leader. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were involved in more than one shooting in Minneapolis, Trump chose to de-escalate the situation.

One benefit of having a former reality television host as president is that he can’t stand seeing a dip in ratings. And he’s willing to be flexible in his beliefs to recover his popularity — something he’s shown by making peace with New York City’s democratic socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani was an early adopter of the strategy of working with Trump. During the mayoral election campaign, the President threatened to cut funding to New York City if Mamdani was elected. After one cordial meeting between the two, that threat disappeared, never to be seen again.

Whatever motivated Clinton to come out in favour of the Gaza Board of Peace, it’s clear that many Democrats have now concluded they can’t simply wish Trump away. He’s the man with the power, and if they’re not at the table with him, all their treasured causes may be on the menu.

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Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

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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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