For the first time since Donald Trump’s election, Emmanuel Macron yesterday traveled to Washington to meet with his American counterpart and discuss potential peace plans in Ukraine. While he gently corrected the US President, who claimed that Europeans had not paid for the war effort, both men got along well, with Macron regularly having kind words for his host, “dear Donald”.

This cordiality is nothing new, starting as soon as both first took office eight years ago. In fact, they provided perhaps one of the most surprising political shots of 2017. On Bastille Day in Paris that year, they sat next to each other, enjoying France’s world-renowned military parade.

This visit marked the beginning of liberal standard-bearer Macron’s attempts to become Europe’s “Trump Whisperer”, by having the former mogul’s ear and doing damage control for French or continental interests. “Le Bromance” as it was dubbed in the press, included muscular handshakes, hand-holding, and eventful but largely harmonious official visits.

And yet, for all of his efforts, the French President had little to show from his charm offensive. In his first term, Trump left multilateral organizations, ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and slapped tariffs on European goods. The new administration seems even more committed to upending the transatlantic relationship, notably by threatening a slew of tariffs on EU member states. In this context, it is hard to see how any whispering might attenuate the upcoming blows.

This is not the first time that Macron has vastly overestimated his capacity to overcome political and diplomatic challenges by relying on his bonhomie. While his charm managed to win over many influential domestic backers early on, the same cannot be said on the international stage.

Aside from his Trump whispering, Macron famously spent hours on the phone with Vladimir Putin in the weeks leading up to the war in Ukraine. He was even “reasonably optimistic” after meeting Putin in Moscow two weeks before the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. In the months that followed, he continued to hope for a breakthrough with Putin, in the process alienating many of his Central European partners.

Yesterday, it seemed, Macron had shed some of his illusions. The objective was damage control rather than a decisive breakthrough. He highlighted that both countries shared the objective of attaining peace in Ukraine. But while Trump wants peace — and Ukrainian minerals — at all costs and as soon as possible, Macron tried to frame the conversation differently. He reminded Trump that Russia was the aggressor, and that a good peace would be lasting with tangible security guarantees — namely from America. These are subtle framing attempts which are unlikely to have a significant effect. On his Truth Social platform yesterday, the US President barely acknowledged the points made by Macron, focusing instead on how “everyone expressed their goal of seeing the war end.” And with many outlets concentrating on Macron’s “fact-checking” contribution, the exchange might yet provoke Trump into lashing out.

But while this meeting is unlikely to stir much change in US policy, it has sent a positive signal back to Europe. With a growing chorus of European leaders now singing Macron’s tune on European strategic autonomy — a list that now includes Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s victorious CDU — the French President is probably wary of gloating. He will want to reassure partners in Europe that he will continue to do what he can to maintain the transatlantic relationship, rather than giving in to the temptation of blurting: “I told you so.”

Ultimately, Macron’s best chance for a diplomatic breakthrough will be in Europe. The transactional nature of the Trump White House means that the Europeans will have to step up to guarantee their own security. And in that endeavor, Trump has been an unlikely but efficient salesman for Macron’s pitch.

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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