With his decision to strike Iran’s key nuclear sites on Saturday evening, Donald Trump could forever change US foreign policy. The two states had their rough exchanges in the past, but have never faced each other in a protracted direct confrontation. It is now up to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, to decide what the next phase of this conflict will look like, and for the US to decide on whether to keep responding militarily in the next round. The long-term prospect, however, looks like a strategic disaster.

The US military operation may be a tactical success for Israel, but that does not mean it is a strategic victory against Iran. Militarily, the success was not as spectacular as Trump claimed. Iran’s three key nuclear sites have been clearly damaged by the missiles, which included two of those bunker buster bombs which only the US has and which were never previously deployed. But Iran reportedly moved 400kg of uranium stockpiles elsewhere before the strikes. Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that the stockpile is still intact, but insists that Iran no longer has the capacity to turn it into nuclear weapons.

Iran may respond lightly. It could attack a US base and warn the White House beforehand, thereby keeping diplomatic channels open. Conversely, Khamenei could choose to escalate. The regime is facing an existential threat from Israel and Mossad, which is operating inside Iran to instigate a change of leadership. In this scenario, the regime could decide to go on a suicide mission. It could use its remaining missile stockpiles and activate its proxies in attacks on multiple targets globally. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, as backed by the country’s parliament yesterday, could cripple global trade, possibly bringing China into the conflict. Indeed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has already asked Beijing to intervene if Tehran attempts to close the waterway.

Regime change is not an official American objective — yet. But with the help of Mossad, events inside Iran could eventually lead to a change of government. If Israel and the US jointly assassinate Khamenei, it is likely that Iran would remain an enemy of the West, whoever comes into power afterwards. Who, then, would take over? Will President Masoud Pezeshkian or the military be ready to lead this vast country? Without an orderly transition, chaos and new militias are likely to emerge.

So far, US interests are not fully aligned with Israel on regime change and something may have to give. Benjamin Netanyahu may have a short-term interest in a weakened and unstable Iran, but it does not guarantee Israel’s long-term security if it produces more armed militias which cannot be controlled.

Geopolitically, the US strikes have also opened new uncertainties. Iran’s foreign minister has travelled to Russia to hold talks with Tehran’s strategic ally. Iran may explicitly call for Russian assistance, as Moscow has used Tehran’s drones in its war in Ukraine.

America’s strikes on Iran will only make nuclear capability more appealing for Tehran. This is true both under Khamenei’s regime or the nationalist military rule that is likely to follow. Immediate US and Israeli success could be dwarfed by long-term violent instability in the Middle East and shifting geopolitical alliances.

This is an edited version of an article originally published in the Eurointelligence newsletter. 

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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