Syria’s new President Ahmed al-Sharaa has claimed that Donald Trump could “play a big role in achieving global peace”.

Speaking to presenters Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their podcast Leading, the transitional President said that “Trump has brought a positive message” so far and could be a key player in stemming global conflict, especially if he ends the Ukraine war.

When asked what he thought of the US President, Sharaa said: “He is focused on domestic policy [and] revitalising the US economy. He’s also interested in peacebuilding in the Middle East as it has caused quite a bit of instability over the last two decades. It’s a promising start.”

Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ousted Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December and Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has kickstarted a moderating effort both politically and personally. He has condemned the previous regime’s sectarian brutality and has set up a new transitional parliament which he claims will lead to elections within four years. For the interview with Stewart and Campbell, Sharaa wore a suit and tie in a marked change from his previous trademark military garb.

While speaking warmly of Trump’s credentials for establishing peace, Sharaa was less supportive of the US leader’s controversial comments about “clearing out” Gaza and turning it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East. “I believe no power can drive people from their land. Many countries have tried to do it and they have all failed, especially during the recent war in Gaza,” Sharaa said. “The people endured pain, killing and destruction yet they refused to leave their land. It would be neither wise nor morally or politically right for Trump to lead an effort to force Palestinians out of their land.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Stewart remarked on the turn of fate that had led to the interview with the former al-Qaeda member. In 2003, as Tony Blair’s communications chief, Campbell was central to the decision to invade Iraq and the resultant planning, while Stewart was working as a diplomat in the region. Sharaa, conversely, was an Islamist rebel in Iraq who was ultimately captured and arrested by US forces.

Just as he spoke of Trump as a peacemaker, Sharaa gestured that he aims to play a similar role in Syria and the Middle East. He said that Syria’s violent revolution had ended with the toppling of Assad and that it was time to rebuild the nation. He added that he was focusing now on “economic development, striving for regional stability and security […] and establishing strategic relationships” with Western countries.

“I believe that a revolutionary mindset cannot build a country,” Sharaa claimed. “You need a different mindset.”

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant Editor, Newsroom.

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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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