Jerusalem

Here in Israel, people are conflicted. The mood is a mixture of satisfaction and relief about the IDF and Mossad’s recent success in hammering Iran, combined with fears that matters remain unresolved.

On both points, their instincts are correct. Operation Rising Lion was an extraordinary success, but the job is by no means done. Some journalists and analysts have begun referring to the “12-Day War”; really, there’s no such thing. This war began decades ago when Iran started assembling proxies to attack Israel, and it’s far from over. The Iranians have not surrendered. Their threat remains.

Indeed, it may yet become far greater. Yesterday afternoon, the Washington Post reported that Tehran officials considered the 21 June strikes, in which Washington dropped bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, less damaging than expected. And according to Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran could resume uranium enrichment within months, potentially moving closer to a nuclear weapon.

Grossi rejected Donald Trump’s assertion that the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities. While acknowledging the damage inflicted on the sites during the airstrikes, Grossi stressed that the damage was “not total”.

“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing left,” he said. Clearly, Iran’s nuclear program remains to some degree intact.

On Saturday, Grossi told CBS News that Tehran could have “in a matter of months […] a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium”. He added that Iran still possessed the “industrial and technological capacities […] so if they wish, they will be able to start doing this again”. More to the point, Iran may also have the necessary materiel. Before the strikes, the IAEA assessed that Iran had a stockpile of about 400kg of enriched uranium.

Just days before the US airstrikes, satellite images showed trucks leaving the facilities, possibly carrying enriched uranium stockpiles — the crucial ingredient for any path to a bomb. Tehran has already been enriching uranium to 60%. If it wants a bomb, it needs to enrich this uranium to 90% — so-called “weapons-grade” levels, for which it then needs functioning centrifuges.

Even if the facilities aren’t destroyed completely, Israel can still prevent the Iranians from accessing what is left. Its military now controls Iran’s skies and could, from the air, create a cordon sanitaire around the sites, bombing anyone who tried to get close to them. Yet the possibility of a small hidden facility with sufficient number of centrifuges to enrich the uranium, and a surrounding infrastructure to weaponize it into a bomb, cannot be discounted.

Experts I’ve spoken to estimate that Iran could convert its 400 kg of enriched uranium into two bombs equivalent to those the US dropped on Hiroshima 80 years ago. These are backwards by modern standards, but more than enough to cause catastrophic damage.

The Iranians should be calculating that unless they are caught on the brink of developing the bomb, it’s unlikely the US will strike again. Trump came to power rejecting greater US involvement abroad, and has already angered his base over the matter. He wants it done and finished.

Meanwhile, the Israelis will continue to monitor the situation, desperately trying to find uranium — if it did indeed get out — and striking Iran if they feel it necessary. But that’s nothing new these days. We are where we were two weeks ago and two years ago and 20 years ago. Iran and Israel will fight on until the other is defeated. We can only hope this comes from the fall of the mullahs, rather than in a cloud of radiation.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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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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