This week, Reform UK has been caught in something of a tailspin. The breakdown of relations between the US and Ukraine has thrown foreign policy back to the top of the agenda, and the insurgent Right-wing party has struggled to find an answer.

Nigel Farage appeared first to side with the White House over the Trump-Zelensky clash on Friday. But after JD Vance appeared to belittle Britain, the Reform leader criticised the US Vice President’s comments as “wrong” (four times). Elsewhere, the rest of the party has struggled to find what the line is, never mind sticking to it, which points to some of Reform’s broader strategic problems.

Reform has made phenomenal progress in UK politics. It is routinely polling in the mid-twenties, and the party’s momentum is growing by the week. Questions remain, however, about where its ceiling is — and issues such as Ukraine play into this. These test the boundary between what might be called the Reform base — the party’s most committed voters — and those it wants to win over.

So far, Reform has attracted the voters most sceptical of Ukraine and Western support, which tracks with Farage’s own record. He has been a longtime critic of EU and Nato expansion, and has been accused of echoing the Russian argument that such expansion “provoked” the conflict.

The same is true of support for Trump. Reform has been the party most supportive of the US President and has gained the voters who share that view. However, that creates a problem if the party wants to attract more moderate voters. Even on the Right, Tory voters are largely ill-disposed towards Trump, and support for Ukraine is as close to a cross-political consensus as this country has. Standing against that tide might be important within Reform, but it does nothing to expand support.

It highlights a recurring issue which has plagued Farage’s party. Beyond Brexit and immigration, Reform has failed to find a more popular platform. Ironically for a populist party, it has struggled to always grasp popular sentiment. In its early days, for example, Reform became the main political voice of lockdown scepticism and flirted with vaccine scepticism, but these were two positions rejected by the overwhelming majority of Brits. Add to that the party’s Thatcherite tendencies, and such positions will hinder its ability to consolidate the current polling position.

The mixed messages this week also point to a bigger internal problem. Despite promises to professionalise, the party remains chaotic. It is unclear who is deciding which lines to take and whether anyone is sticking to them. Each MP seems to be riffing their own position rather than following message discipline. That simply isn’t sustainable for a serious political party.

In politics, you have to know when you walk with the majority and when you differentiate yourself. So far, Reform has had success when it has found core issues with broad appeal, such as immigration. Staking out a minority position on other issues may fire up the base, but it is unlikely to help it broaden support. On an issue like Ukraine, where the public has proved committed and consistent, it seems foolish to pitch yourself against them. In this case, it’s indicative of the bigger challenges that lie between Reform and power.

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John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator. His Substack is Joxley Writes.

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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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