In the last 24 hours, Pakistan has vowed to retaliate after India launched a series of strikes on sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Given that these two countries are both nuclear powers, any escalation poses a global risk. That is why Western leaders like Keir Starmer and Donald Trump have urged dialogue and de-escalation.

However, one Nato ally has broken ranks: Turkey. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently issued a statement condemning India for taking “provocative steps” against Pakistan and its civilians. India, of course, denies targeting civilians. But Turkey’s statement is significant in that it supports Pakistan’s call for an independent, “neutral” investigation into the 22 April terror attack in Kashmir — an investigation that India has already rejected.

The larger question is why Turkey is openly siding with Pakistan, particularly when most of the Western world has chosen neutrality. Reports suggest a growing Turkish military presence in the region: a Turkish naval vessel has been spotted in Karachi, and a Turkish Air Force C-130 landed in Pakistan earlier this week — officially for refuelling, according to Ankara.

This is not a new alignment. Ankara and Islamabad have previously signed a deal for the sale of 30 helicopters, and Turkey has assisted Pakistan in setting up a domestic factory to produce Nato-standard artillery shells. Most notably, Turkey recently deployed an advanced anti-submarine warship into Pakistani territorial waters as a gesture of solidarity.

None of these moves is likely to put a smile on Indian PM Narendra Modi’s face. Yet the truth is that Turkey’s ties with Pakistan run deep. Earlier this year, the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fondly talked of the “unshakable spirit of brotherhood” between Turkey and Pakistan, driven largely by a shared belief in Islam. But, Turkey and Pakistan also have a robust defence partnership, collaborating on joint defence programmes, research, and even co-production of military equipment such as drone technology.

Turkey’s support for Pakistan may not directly pose a threat to the West, but it certainly creates tensions between Western nations. That is especially in light of India’s growing strategic relationships with other Nato members like the US and France. India, along with Japan, the US and Australia, is a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or QUAD, and France happens to be a major supplier of military hardware to India. In fact, between 2019-23 France supplied 33% of India’s imported arms. Moreover, it has provided India with 36 fighter jets — one of which is reported to have been shot down by Pakistan earlier this week.

Meanwhile, Israel, a non-Nato Western ally, is expressing unequivocal support for India. In response to India’s military escalation, Israel’s Ambassador to India posted on X: “Israel supports India’s right for self defense. Terrorists should know there’s no place to hide from their heinous crimes against the innocent. #OperationSindoor”. India also uses Israeli drones, rifles and guidance technology, which further binds the nations.

Turkey’s open support for Pakistan highlights a growing divergence within the Western alliance — one that reflects deeper cultural, religious, and strategic rifts. As India becomes increasingly aligned with key Western powers like the US, France, and Israel, Turkey’s positioning not only raises questions about Nato unity but also complicates the West’s ability to present a coherent diplomatic front in South Asia. With nuclear tensions rising and global alliances shifting, what we’re witnessing may be less about regional skirmishes and more about a slow but significant realignment of global power blocs.

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

---