It is by now widely accepted that Covid-19 policies had a devastating effect on the mental health of young people. Those days are over, yet the establishment’s assault on the psyche of young people hasn’t let up. If anything, it’s been ramped up, as we’ve moved from figuratively “waging war on the virus” to the need to prepare for an actual war with Russia.

Indeed, a recent youth study published by the German branch of the oil giant Shell revealed an alarming fact: the greatest fear of young Germans is the outbreak of a full-scale war in Europe. According to the study, 81% of young people share this fear. In 2019, the figure was just 46%.

It would be easy to write this off as a natural consequence of the current geopolitical turbulence in Europe. But the truth is more troubling: even though the study doesn’t go into details, it’s clear that young Germans don’t just fear a Nato-Russia war: they specifically fear a Russian attack on Europe at some point in the near future, as some German commentators have pointed out.

This is the result of a relentless and highly irresponsible political-media campaign waged in Germany against Russia over the past years, aimed at demonising the latter — and specifically at inflating the Russian threat against Europe, and Germany in particular. Take this recent Bild headline: “Russia is ready to attack us in 2030!” The article quotes the head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, warning about “a direct military threat from Russia — and very soon”.

“By the end of this decade at the latest, Russian forces will probably be in a position to carry out an attack on Nato,” Kahl said. “The Kremlin sees the Federal Republic of Germany as an enemy,” he added, pointing out that Germany is the second largest supporter of Ukraine. No serious person believes that this is a realistic scenario: Russia has neither the means nor the intention to attack Western Europe. Yet young Germans are now being exposed to this kind of geopolitical fearmongering on a daily basis, so it’s hardly surprising that it is having an adverse effect on their mental state.

This is compounded by repeated appeals by the country’s political leadership about Germany’s need to “prepare for war”, with talk of “building up homeland security” and the “eastern front” — and even of reintroducing conscription and compulsory military service. For example, the leader of the centre-right CDU, Friedrich Merz, recently said that “over 700,000 young people per year” need to be “registered” for military service — including women — though he didn’t specify what this would mean in the event of a war.

Meanwhile, the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) warned of increasing Russian activities in Germany. “We are observing aggressive actions by the Russian intelligence services,” he said, noting that Russian espionage and sabotage in Germany in particular are increasing, “both qualitatively and quantitatively”. He failed to provide any evidence, however.

Ultimately, just as during the Covid era, the German political-media establishment has embarked once again on a full-scale propaganda campaign aimed at stoking a climate of fear — based on irrational, unfounded and ultimately logically baseless claims — for the pursuit of political goals, in this case justifying a new military build-up against Russia. And just as during the pandemic, young people are the ones paying the highest price. Having been robbed of their best years during the pandemic, they are now being terrorised by irresponsible — and potentially self-fulfilling — war propaganda.

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Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

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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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