Most people recognise anti-Zionism as a Leftist phenomenon in America. But they are less attuned to how Right-wingers have adopted the ideology, given that conservatives are frequently assumed to be axiomatically pro-Israel.

Chris Brunet, who made his name through his collaboration with Christopher Rufo in breaking the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal, has recently publicly split with a number of former comrades and associates within anti-woke conservative circles over the issue of Israel. So pronounced is this rupture that he is now the subject of admiration from far-Right commentator Nick Fuentes and his following of Groypers, while Rufo has today written an essay condemning — without directly referring to Brunet — “anti-Semitic ideologies […] on the fringes of American conservatism”.

According to Brunet, after “years of intentionally avoiding the topic” he became “redpilled” following the mass rape scandal within Israeli prisons holding Palestinian inmates. Another turning point for the journalist came when Republican congressman Brian Mast wore his IDF uniform as a jibe against Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib flying the Palestinian flag.

Even though the bulk of the American Right composed of differing streams — from evangelical Christians to foreign policy neoconservatives and MAGA Republicans — has been and continues to be pro-Israel, there has always been a section which has taken a more critical approach. This is largely under the banner of “paleoconservatism”, a particularly reactionary stream of American conservatism once spearheaded by the likes of Pat Buchanan and Russell Kirk.

Their gripe with Israel is part of a general conflict with neoconservatives, whom they see as more loyal to abstract “globalist” values than to the concrete heritage of the American people, and as giving special consideration to Israel in matters of foreign policy. Buchanan proclaimed in 1990 that “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory” while Kirk, in a more lukewarm fashion, said of the intellectual genealogy of neoconservatism that “some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”

Leftist anti-Zionism is generally premised on international solidarity with the Palestinians — a small, dispossessed and occupied people whose national and civil rights have been negated by Israel, which ought to be rectified. Beyond that, this outlook views Israel and its conduct towards the Palestinians as symptomatic of a hypocritical, American-led liberal order which aggressively preaches human rights against “official” enemies such as Iran or Russia but sponsors the abuses of its Israeli allies. Because Right-wing anti-Zionism is based on an “America First” nationalist isolationism that holds Israel as a baleful influence on raison d’etat, its proponents oppose the neoconservative stance that the countries have a shared national interest.

Ever since the 7 October attacks which ignited the current bloodbath in the Middle East, the fractures within the American Right concerning Israel have only become more blatant. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Darryl Cooper and Brunet have condemned Israel in the same vein as their isolationist forebears, thus putting themselves at loggerheads with establishment conservatives such as Ben Shapiro who believe that Israel is defending Western civilisation. Just as the paleoconservatives — wrongly — argued that the Iraq War was fought on behalf of the Jewish state due to the undue influence of the Israel lobby, they similarly claim that Israel’s belligerence is a deliberate ploy to entice America into fighting yet another “forever war”.

It is rational to ask whether wall-to-wall military and diplomatic support for Israel serves or undermines America’s national and international interests. That question is not antisemitic. But some neo-paleoconservatives have tried to attach the issue to a wider narrative of Jewish omnipotence, Jewish disloyalty and discredited World War II revisionism. In doing so, they make the task of distinguishing between opposition to Israel’s military conduct and antisemitism far more difficult.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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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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