When the war in the former Yugoslavia began, the European Community established a committee of legal experts to advise on recognition of new states. This committee said a state is “a community which consists of a territory and population subject to an organised political authority [and] characterised by sovereignty”; the existence or disappearance of states is “a question of fact”; and recognition should merely declare that this fact exists. In the former Yugoslavia, as in Gaza today, the humanitarian suffering was enormous and and serious allegations of international crimes were made.

In 2006, James Crawford, the leading expert on the international law of statehood, concluded that, even if one could imagine the international community deciding to treat a new state as existing “notwithstanding the facts”, such a possibility could not apply to Palestine then.

Until two days ago, the British Government had not supported the notion of that recognition of statehood “notwithstanding the facts”. It has now changed position with a statement that makes little legal or political sense.

To begin with, the territory of Palestine is not defined. Past British governments criticised the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) for rejecting offers of less than 100% of the West Bank and Gaza. To say now that Palestine is a state holding all of that territory would vindicate those who said no to peace then. If they were right then, why not try again? Cash in the 100% and demand more seems a sensible strategy.

Effective government, or “organised political authority”, is another factual prerequisite of statehood. The British statement says it wants Hamas out and welcomes improvements by the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it does not identify any single authority as the effective government of the state of Palestine.

If the reason for the new approach is the right of self-determination of Palestinian people, which the International Court of Justice has indisputably recognised, how can the Government justify its recent change of policy on Western Sahara? This territory has been under Moroccan occupation since 1974 and the Sarahawi people are entitled to self-determination, yet the UK Government last month chose to support what is, in effect, Morocco’s annexation plan.

Perhaps the most perverse aspect of the Government’s statement involves the conditions for recognition. Conditional recognition of statehood is not new. But conditions have normally been applied to the entity aspiring to statehood — for instance, by requiring it to renounce the use of force or protect minorities.

The Government statement instead imposes conditions on Israel. It says Britain “will recognise” the state of Palestine in September “unless” Israel does certain things. So if Israel meets certain conditions, including a ceasefire, Britain will not recognise Palestine. It is impossible to square this bizarre conditionality, which features in neither the French nor the Canadian statements, with the principles that govern recognition.

Additionally, the British Government’s approach creates an incentive for Hamas to prolong the war so it can be said Israel did not meet the ceasefire condition. The condition is for Israel to “agree” to a ceasefire, a formulation which some lawyers may have thought leaves room for manoeuvre, but good luck to ministers trying to explain this as the reason for non-recognition in September.

While the Labour government demands the “immediate release of the hostages”, this does not appear as one of the conditions. Elsewhere in the statement, the Government says it will assess before the United Nations General Assembly how far “the parties” have met “these steps”, but it is not clear who and what it is referring to. There is no diplomatic advantage to be gained from this ambiguity. Hamas leaders know British recognition is in the bag regardless of what happens to the hostages because, having set such high stakes, Keir Starmer won’t be able to resist pressure over recognition for long, if at all.

This matters for the future of the rules-based order, as the Western legal position on this conflict is now incoherent. For example, it is said both that Israel is the occupying power in Gaza and that Israel should not be in Gaza, making Israel the first occupying power in history which cannot enter that which it occupies.

According to the British Manual on the Law of Armed Conflict, military occupation requires two things: the former government must be incapable of exercising any authority, and the occupying power has taken over as the new government. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, these conditions ceased to be satisfied. Some started clamouring for the rules to be interpreted differently so it could be said that Israel was still occupying Gaza. This suited Hamas: it was running Gaza, but could still blame Israel as the “occupying power”.

Recognition will beget new contradictions. For instance, UNRWA claims that 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are ”registered refugees”; how can they continue to have that status if they are said to live in the territory of their own sovereign state?

It is tempting to justify recognition as a reaction to the shocking humanitarian crisis in Gaza, settler violence in the West Bank, and the Netanyahu government’s failure to articulate a post-war political vision. Some Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, are attempting to provide such a vision and their efforts deserve support. But how does the gesture of recognition by the UK help? It is hard to see how the present legal incoherence can produce a lasting political solution.

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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