Former US national security advisor Jake Sullivan has claimed that Donald Trump’s peace deal with Iran is an “unalloyed win” for the Islamic Republic.

Speaking with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, Sullivan said the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Iran and the United States on Wednesday gave “significant advantages” to Iran and indicated that “the United States has basically lost this war.”

The agreement signed between Trump and Iran says the Islamic Republic will never have a nuclear weapon, and commits to the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to the US blockade, as well as the creation of a $300 billion fund for Iranian reconstruction. However, Sullivan said that the US was now effectively paying “reparations” to Iran and has “ended up in a worse position today than we were before the war started”. He added: “Essentially what you’re looking at here is a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a massive financial windfall to Iran, and then a commitment to negotiate a set of nuclear issues that at present are completely unresolved.”

Sullivan served as the US national security advisor from 2021 to 2025 under former president Joe Biden, and previously helped negotiate the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which limited the Islamic regime’s stock of nuclear material and relieved US sanctions on the country. Trump derided the agreement as the “worst deal in history”, and withdrew the US in 2018 during his first presidential term.

In the UnHerd interview, Sullivan argued that the Obama deal had put Iran’s nuclear program in a “box”, and that Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to “move forward again”. Yet with the MOU, he said, Trump has been forced to recognize “the same reality we had to acknowledge a decade ago”, namely that Iran will not accept a complete end to its nuclear enrichment program. The MOU’s reference to Iran’s “nuclear needs”, Sullivan stated, was a pullback from Trump’s previous declaration that the country could not have a civilian nuclear program.

“We have to recognize that the US actually could have gotten all of the statements Iran made on its nuclear program in this deal before it went to war,” he said. “And [the US] wouldn’t have had to pay to reopen the Strait of Hormuz because the Strait wouldn’t be closed.”

While Sullivan celebrated the end of the war, he cautioned that Israel may be a “spoiler” to negotiations due to widespread opposition to the deal. Further, pointing to Trump’s deal to end the war in Gaza, where second-phase peace plans have stalled, he argued that the Iran peace deal may be left “open-ended”.

“Maybe they reach some interim deals about specific things like down blending the stockpile, but I don’t think you’re going to see a comprehensive nuclear deal,” Sullivan said. “I think that will just drag indefinitely.”

Watch the full interview here.

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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