Only Donald Trump was able to “break the deadlock and start the dialogue” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

Speaking at Chatham House in London, the former Dutch Prime Minister praised the US President’s diplomacy since coming into office in January. “He broke the deadlock when it comes to Ukraine, he broke the deadlock with Russia,” Rutte said. “And I’m of the opinion that it was only the American President who was able to do this, to start the dialogue again with President Putin on how to end this terrible war and he did.”

Rutte’s comments come as Trump’s plans to end the war swiftly have hit numerous roadblocks. On 2 June, a second round of talks between Ukraine and Russia failed to result in a peace agreement or even a temporary ceasefire. On 6 June, Russia launched what it described as a “massive” aerial bombardment of Kyiv, killing five and injuring 80. The Kremlin said it was in response to “terrorist acts by the Kyiv regime”, after Ukraine attacked Russian military sites. Last night, Russia fired a record 479 drones at Ukraine in an overnight barrage.

Last week, the US President said an hour-long call with his Russian counterpart would not lead “to immediate peace”, even suggesting that it may be better to let Russia and Ukraine “fight for a while”. Still, Rutte praised the US leader for his role in the negotiations. “And no criticism of his predecessor [Joe Biden], I respect all the politicians in the US and we work with everybody […] But him doing this is incredibly important because it is the only way to bring the Russians to a position where they want to end this.”

Rutte also dismissed the idea that Trump’s foreign policy is volatile and that his “America First” agenda could threaten Europe’s safety. “It is clear that he closely coordinates with European allies including the UK Prime Minister,” he said. The Nato chief also said he did not fear the US removing its security umbrella from Europe. “It is in America’s interest to have a safe Atlantic, Arctic and Europe,” he said. “And they have more things to think about like the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East and sometimes Africa, so it’s only logical that we [Nato] spend more for them to pivot more to the Indo-Pacific.”

It is not the first time Rutte has demonstrated a willingness to extend an olive branch to Trump. In 2018 when he was the Dutch Prime Minister, he became known as “the Trump whisperer” after talking the then US President down from a tirade against the European defence establishment. After Rutte’s intervention, Trump left the conference calling it “a very amazing two-day period in Brussels”.

Just last week, the Nato chief once again made a gesture to Trump, saying that the alliance would attempt to make each member spend 5% of GDP on defence, a figure the US President has consistently called for.

Today, Rutte explained why: “The world we thought we were entering after the fall of the Berlin Wall is definitely gone. The idea that we would have a peaceful living together with the Russians is gone.”

---

Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

MaxJMitchell1

---

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

---