Today was “a historic day for German-British relations”, Friedrich Merz said after his first visit to the UK as German Chancellor. That’s no exaggeration. Merz and his counterpart, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have signed the first bilateral UK-Germany treaty since the Second World War. Among the crucial agreements in areas such as defence and infrastructure is a promise to tackle illegal migration to Europe together.

It’s easy to be cynical about “friendship treaties”. They often contain little more than warm words and symbolism. However, the agreement signed between London and Berlin today goes far beyond that, outlining 17 projects which are specific enough to be deliverable yet sufficiently high-level to withstand changes in government on either side. Remarkably, a “Joint Action Plan on Irregular Migration” is a top priority, second only to defence and security cooperation.

Germany has agreed to tighten its legislation on people smuggling by the end of this year, and the new law will make facilitating migrant routes to the UK a criminal offence. This will enable German authorities to crack down on activities such as storing boats intended for Channel crossings in warehouses and closing other loopholes for gangs operating in the country.

This is more than a symbolic act. Approximately 37,000 people attempted to cross the English Channel in small boats in 2024. They do so after travelling through continental Europe to reach the French coast, so solutions can’t be limited to bilateral agreements between France and the UK.

Illegal immigration is a pan-European issue, which requires coordinated approaches to be effectively addressed. It seems leaders are waking up to this reality now that new Right-wing parties are beginning to pose a real threat. The language in the UK-Germany treaty is remarkably robust. Common aims are listed as “deterring irregular migration to Germany and the UK” and “delivering secure borders”.

Of course, “taking back control of borders” was a central Brexit promise, and it’s also what the majority of German voters want, according to polling from earlier this year. But delivering this without hampering the other aims of closer cultural, economic and security cooperation between two of the largest economies in the world is a difficult circle to square.

There was an 80% drop in German school trips to the UK following Brexit. In German airports, British citizens often face long queues because they aren’t allowed to use the e-gates. Academic, political, cultural, and economic exchanges have been hindered by excessive bureaucracy and rising costs.

The Bilateral Cooperation Treaty aims to strike a workable balance by facilitating mobility between citizens of both countries, without restoring pre-Brexit freedom of movement. E-gate use for UK nationals will be tested from August and rolled out for all travellers as soon as possible. Group travel for schools will become visa-free, and a Joint Expert Group will identify ways to extend this to other contexts like academia and scientific research.

Such pragmatism seems a mile away from the mutual breakdown of relations post-Brexit. Crucially, though, the treaty doesn’t break promises to either electorate. It separates practical cooperation between Germany and Britain from political ideology. There is a recognition that Europe faces many new challenges as a continent, most notably on defence and immigration. Merz called security the main “thread running through the treaty”. Starmer, in turn, thanked him for his “decisive action” on illegal migration and for “disrupting the route to the UK”. Mainstream politicians are beginning to get the message from their voters: cooperation between countries with common interests isn’t a license for open borders.

It appears that leaders have finally come round to the more nuanced debate on immigration that their electorates have demanded for years. That’s not just good news for UK-German relations, but also for democracy itself.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. Her latest book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be released in May 2026.

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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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