Charles Krauthammer famously coined ‘the Unipolar Moment’ in 1990. However, I would argue that undisputed evidence of America as World Hegemon did not arrive until 1991, with Operation Desert Storm.

And despite whispers and shouts over the past years that we have slipped back into a multipolar world, I believe it is 2026 that is going to be remembered as the final year of American military primacy. And with it, the entire post-War order hangs in the balance.

The Desert Storm Model

Let’s roll the tape back to January 17, 1991. The Pentagon launched Operation Desert Storm. Iraq was relentlessly bombarded with weapons the likes of which the world had never seen. Live on CNN, the world watched America unleash stealth aircraft with precision munitions and long-range tomahawk missiles at targets deep in Iraq. Once the ground phase of the operation began, the Iraqi military was dispatched in less than 100 hours, with extraordinarily light losses on the American side. It was what they call in the military an ‘overmatch.’

In “25 years later: what we learned from Desert Storm,” the Air Force Times asked many veterans how the successful operation molded America’s post-Cold War military doctrine. The 2016 piece is a valuable contemporary document showing how the American military shifted from the Cold-war Arms-race mindset to the expeditionary “smart” war approach. America swapped mass, mobilization and endurance for leanness, precision and the ability to go on the offense anywhere in the world.

This was when the US started to build bases like "lilypads". They were light forward-operating locations rather than the Cold War-era garrisons. Instead of hauling everything from home, they would rely on shipping followed by logistics routed through local bases. “We're more agile, less expensive, and we put things where they're needed when they're needed,” said Maj. Gen. Rowayne "Wayne" Schatz Jr.

This was when the US used its superior satellites and sensors to take what Barry Posen later called “Command of the Commons.” The “commons” meant the sea, the air over 15,000ft and space. By 2003, Posen argued that the US was uniquely capable of militarily leveraging the commons because of its superior space-based ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) platforms. This came straight out of what we learned in Desert Storm.

Maj. Gen. Paul Johnson, an A-10 pilot during Desert Storm, told the Air Force Times that satellites allowed airmen command-and-control like they never experienced before. And the ability to know the threats coming their way:

The ability of space to enable so much of what we do, navigation and timing through GPS, missile warning. When we had Scud [missile] attacks going on, we had very accurate predictions where the Scuds were going to land.

The American military grew into the shape of the dream military Johnson first glimpsed at Desert Storm: lean expeditionary force + overwhelming airpower + precision weapons + stealth + ISR + global logistics + forward access. The wars would be agile, lethal and short, with little coalition casualty.

The “Desert Storm Model” of war appeared to work well for the United States throughout the next quarter century. Not a single American was killed in combat in Kosovo. The conventional invasion phases of Afghanistan and Iraq were swift. However, there was a voice going back to Desert Storm and even before that warned the American military not to put all its eggs in the Smart Bomb basket.

The Cassandra of the Pentagon

“The 1991 Gulf War was the first precision revolution, that was the rise of American military dominance,” said Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, “That’s when we became the invincible superpower. It was that war that persuaded people that America’s precision military could not be defeated. Fast forward 35 years: the American military has been trying to recreate that first victory of the 1991 Gulf War in all those military budgets.”

Pape was one of the first PhDs who studied under John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago. He was obsessed with the question of why overwhelming air power so often fails to achieve its political objectives, such as in Vietnam.

It’s not that the Pentagon did not hear him out. The Air Force actually hired him to teach airpower strategy at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies. In fact, months before Desert Storm, Pape was still arguing that “Air Power Can’t Dislodge Iraq.” This guy was in the Air Force’s intellectual kitchen arguing that its favorite recipe didn’t work, at a time when it seemed to be working spectacularly well.

Pape’s 1996 book was called “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.” Arguing against the miraculous properties of coercive air power in 1996 was an uphill intellectual battle, but Pape’s book was nevertheless a landmark.

Pape’s star soared in 2026 when he warned of the “Escalation Trap” just as the United States went to war in Iran. Beat-by-beat, Professor Pape foretold the predicament the Trump administration found itself in once it tried to bomb Iran into submission. Just like Operation Rolling Thunder failed to break the Vietcong, Operation Epic Fury failed to break the Iranian regime.

We are still living in the messy middle of that escalation trap. But even before the conflict drags into its inevitable denouement months (or perhaps even years) from now, one thing seems clear. The “Desert Storm” model is broken, and with it, America’s claim of dominant military might.

The Second Missile Age

By now, you’ve heard all the bad news coming out of the Iranian theater. Despite confident Israeli predictions that all Iran’s missile fire can be broken in two weeks, there’s been little degradation of the Iranian ability to launch missiles with great accuracy six months into the war. Missiles and drones are hitting not only American bases all over the Middle East but vital infrastructure such as oil refineries and water desalination plants in allied Gulf states. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been greatly reduced, hindering the flow of about 20% of the world’s oil consumption.

Worst of all, the Iranian equipment has been hidden underneath the ground in “missile cities” that seem invulnerable to American bombardments. Even if the entrances of the facilities are bombed, it only seems to take a few days for the Iranian forces to clear the debris. In comparison, American bases are basically naked, with expensive aircraft, fuel depots and barracks all out in the open on the surface for Iranian missiles to hit with surprising precision.

US bases in Oman, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain are no longer safe to use. Refueling tankers are getting flown in from bases in Israel and Jordan, while food for carrier strike groups enforcing the blockade of Iranian ports are being supplied by Diego Garcia base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 2,200-miles away.

The usage of critical missiles from the dwindling US stockpiles has been extreme. According to estimates by Bloomberg, more than half of the total stockpile of Patriot PAC-3 interceptors have been used just in Iran. There’s also been very significant drawdowns in Tomahawks and other offensive missiles.

Washington has dramatically scaled up and accelerated missile procurement to build the stockpiles back up. But there is a more serious problem: The math doesn’t work.

Two Patriot interceptors are routinely fired to take down one missile to ensure interception. This means that at a cost of $4 million USD per interceptor, it might take the US $8 million or more to take down a missile that might cost Iran $1-2 million to make, depending on the type.

In the age of Operation Epic Fury, the Desert Storm playbook just doesn’t work anymore. What happened is what Professor Pape calls “The Second Precision Revolution.” Just as the cellphones in our pockets have gotten cheaper and more powerful, so has military technology. And while the American military industrial complex was stuck making “exquisite” armaments in boutique amounts, Iran has been making modern missiles and drones in bulk, and aiming them with precision thanks to satellite information secured through the Chinese Beidou system.

“We’re seeing the end of American preeminence and dominance,” said Professor Pape, “it’s not until you have the Iran war that the American precision military in full force is being defeated.”

calls it “the Second Missile Age,” and makes a convincing case that its emergence automatically ends the unipolar moment:

The mature precision-strike regime is definitely here. The second missile age is strategically defense dominant in the sense that it is biased in favor of the situated power and against the power projection of the visiting world power. This is by definition a multipolar world.

Don’t call it retrenchment!

Call it the ‘debasification’ of American military credibility. If in range of a determined missile power, any of America’s 800 forward bases is now a liability rather than an asset. And if even a tier-two power like Iran can deplete America’s stockpiles, what happens when the adversary is China, with an arsenal orders of magnitude bigger?

America is going to try and hold on to pre-eminence through its role at the head of its alliances. Can it work?

To use the realist lingo, back when American hegemony was unquestioned, US allies whether in Europe or Asia were happy to free-ride off the American defense umbrella. Europe, in particular, underinvested in defense and enjoyed working on being a regulatory superpower. However, now that the American military model has been broken by the Second Missile Age, America is now trying to buck-pass the burden back to its allies.

In Europe, there’s a natural pathway to retain ultimate command and control through NATO, which always has an American as the top commander.

“The hegemon is using the depletion of its own arsenal as the catalyst for a wholesale restructuring of the entire transatlantic military-industrial architecture,” writes .

In the past, allies’ defense strategy was designed around supporting front-line US operations. Now it is assumed they are the primary combatant, with the US in “support.”

As I write this, Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of War for Policy and the author of The Strategy of Denial, is on a tour around Southeast Asia, telling allies that the United States is definitely, positively not retrenching from Asia. “In fact, we are digging in!”

“When we ask our allies and partners to step up, to invest more in their own defense, and to take responsibility for their own sovereign security, we are not signaling abandonment,” Colby said at a presser in Manila, “We are looking for partners, not protectorates.”

It’s a big ask. Allies are still digesting the fact that American bases on their territory, far from being protective, can get them dragged into someone elses war. Gulf allies all signaled neutrality before shots were fired in Iran. But they were all attacked by Iran in retaliation because they hosted American bases.

NATO’s structure and Europe’s need for America to coordinate their efforts makes it easy to for the US to remain in charge even as they trim their involvement. However, China is America’s true rival, and in Asia the coherence of the alliance is nowhere near as tight. Colby had barely left the Philippines before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced the Philippines won’t allow the US to launch attacks from its soil in case the conflict over Taiwan escalates.

Meanwhile, President Trump just scaled back joint exercises with South Korea, linking the move with the lack of South Korean support for his war in Iran. Is it any wonder that support for developing nuclear weapons is almost 70% in South Korea?

Ultimately, as Colby admitted in a press briefing, the game has changed. America’s military is not “sized and shaped” for the expeditionary way of war anymore:

Denial, let me stress, at the conventional or nuclear level, is status quo-oriented. It’s designed to defend the territorial integrity of our allies and partners. It’s not designed to go regime change.

The end of the American way of war

The shame of it is, it didn’t have to happen this way. Almost everything that went wrong in Iran was foreseen, not just by academics like Pape, but the mainstream of the American military establishment. ’ piece They Saw it Coming chronicles a veritable Greek Chorus from RAND to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warning President Trump not to attempt a regime-change war in Iran.

Nor can we blame Trump only for wasting away America’s primacy. The Global War on Terror period was almost two decades where America was distracted and exhausted themselves on a quixotic quest.

American Hegemony was never meant to be forever. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a highly anomalous event. However, blessed as it was with both hard power, soft power and de facto ownership of so many international standards, including the dollar, you might have expected the unipolar moment to last a little longer than 35 years.

America, had it been moderate and treated its primacy like the wasting asset it is, could have ruled like the Zhou kings of yore in China. Long after its vassal states became more powerful, customs and rituals…call it the international institutions of its day…bound the Sinosphere under Zhou rule.

Had America been more prudent, none of us here reading this would have lived to see the end of its primacy. Alas, it’s like all those emperors who killed themselves taking mercury pills in pursuit of immortality.

A World Order after Pax Americana

Let’s be real. We are all going to miss Pax Americana. For a generation, the American-led order provided a stable strategic framework that allowed the global economy to flourish and lifted billions from poverty. For a decade or two, we allowed ourselves to dream.

Maybe America can actually be the Good Hegemon. Under the protection of the eagle’s wings, humanity could graduate from the Tragedy of Great Power Politics. This is a vision so compelling that even in the fallen age of Trump, people are still trying to resurrect the Unipolar Moment.

But it was always unrealistic to expect the rest of the world to remain stunted so that America can lead. In fact, it’s baked into the promise of the American-led world order that every corner of the world can prosper. Competition will inevitably rise. America isn’t up to playing world policeman anymore, and deep down its allies know it too.

If we truly cherished the stability, the security and the institutional frameworks that the post-war and post-Cold War era provided, the answer is not to prop up a fading hegemon, but to reimagine that framework for a multipolar world.

Dennis Peng (彭正文), used to be a pro-DPP media star. A respected academic, former dean of a journalism school and the popular host of Formosa TV's flagship "News O'clock" (政經看民視）program. He was a fiery and uncompromising supporter of Taiwanese independence.

President Tsai is famed for her "cat diplomacy". Instead of confronting China head-on, she sought political space internationally while taking a cautious stance towards cross-straits relations in order not to provoke China.

Her moderation enraged Peng, who began to roast her regularly from the radical green flank. He called her "cowardly," "soft," and accused her of betraying the Taiwanese nation by refusing to pursue a formal declaration of independence. He formed the hardline Formosa Alliance and pushed for a referendum on independence.

News O'clock was canceled abruptly by Formosa TV in 2019, right in the middle of what turned out to be the last episode. Peng became convinced that the Tsai administration was behind it.

He went on a personal crusade touting the theory that Tsai never completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and her diploma had been forged. This thoroughly alienated him from his core pan-green audience, and eventually got him into legal trouble for defamation. Peng ran away to the United States. The former DPP darling is now a fugitive from the law.

In the years since Peng settled in Washington DC, he keenly sought out politicians, staffers, think tankers and academics to discuss the status of Taiwan. He was slowly stunned by the unavoidable conclusion:

"It's like I woke from a dream. I got to know as many people from the political world as possible. Sat down with them for coffee to talk about cross-straits relations. Not one person supported Taiwanese independence. Not from the left. Not from the right. No one. They don't want to see Taiwan threatened by force or taken by force. But no one thought Taiwan should find a way to become truly independent."

"What's more, after the return of Trump, they would tell me with great certainty the most that America can do for Taiwan would be like the support they give to Ukraine. We can provide you with a endless stream of weapons. But what was Ukraine's fate? As Trump said it became a meat grinder. Is this what Taiwan wants?"

Peng realized something painful, but important: the future of Taiwan has never been up to the people of Taiwan. It's disappointing, but it's also the truth. Trump told reporters of course he's going to talk about Taiwan with Xi in Beijing. But of course, no Taiwanese was ever consulted before that. This is the truth of geopolitics that Dennis Peng had to go so far from home and fall so far from grace to learn: it is a cruel business.

"From Reagan to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump. I ask you...was there a single American president who was in favor of a referendum of the Taiwanese people about independence? Not one. When President Chen wanted to do a referendum about returning to the United Nation, he was immediately spanked by the US. What did this prove? It proved that Taiwan was never acknowledged as a sovereign country."

Not because he wanted to, but because he went to America, Peng realized that the Taiwanese independence dream was futile. For some, status quo is good enough, but it never was for Peng.

The way he sees it, there's only four theoretical outcomes for Taiwan:

1. reunification after a war
2. peaceful reunification
3. independence after a war
4. peaceful independence.

China vetos peaceful independence.
America won't help us fight a war.

The remaining option two options both leads to reunification. And he prefers for it to be peaceful.

I run amongst the pro-reunification Taiwanese circles and it's really interesting. There's a split between the ppl who are enthusiastic about being a part of China ("I wanna take a High Speed Rail to the Mainland!") and the people who are more like..."welp...we're cooked. Guess I’m pro-reunification now."

Not gonna lie...it sucks to be in the second camp. But it's also a growth opportunity. What were the things I believed before, and were they really true? There is pain, but also relief in putting down your old illusions. Because few of us are truly fooled without choosing to fool ourselves.

The year was 1998. Zhu Rongji became premier of China in March. At his inaugural speech, he vowed to crush corruption. “I have prepared 100 coffins—99 for corrupt officials and one for myself.” Zhu set the tone for his premiership from the start — reform for China was do or die.

Long before he took the premiership, Zhu Rongji had been China’s economic czar. He knew for the Reform and Open Up program to be a success, hard choices would need to be made.

As soon as he took office he immediately launched scorched-earth administrative reform. Central government bureaucracy was slashed in half. Whole ministries were completely dismantled.

That same month, the raging Asian Financial Crisis reached Hong Kong. Vultures were circling around the HK dollar. Zhu made his famous pledge to back Hong Kong “at all costs” and absorbed huge domestic pain by refusing to devalue the Renminbi, providing an anchor that helped halt the downward spiral in the region. The hunters became the hunted: speculators seeking to short the HK dollar got burnt to a crisp.

That summer, China was hit with the worst floods in half a century. Almost 4000 people died and tens of millions were displaced. Zhu excoriated local officials for the shoddily-constructed buildings swept away by the flood, coining the phrase “tofu-dreg” buildings.

Wait how did he manage to do all this? He was the premier. Jiang Zemin was the General Secretary. Well Jiang and Zhu had a very special rapport. It was a good cop-bad cop kind of thing. Together they ordered the PLA to completely divest from their lucrative commercial enterprises, a ripe source of corruption.

In the autumn, Zhu pulled the trigger on massive layoffs at China’s inefficient State-owned enterprises. Millions lost their “iron rice bowls” overnight. A necessary restructuring for China’s economic development, but it came at a heavy human cost.

In October, the Guangdong International Trust and investment Corporation defaulted on its foreign debt. International creditors watched in disbelief as Zhu let it go bankrupt. No bailout.

At the end of the year, he ended the state housing distribution system. Residential real estate commercialized, sparking China’s 2-decade long property boom.

All this, was just in one year. Zhu would remain as premier until 2003. In that time he finalized China’s entry into the WTO, poured billions into the infrastructure buildout in Western provinces, and cleaned up the banking system which was groaning under the pressure of non-performing loans.

If Deng was the architect of reform and opening up, Zhu was the builder. The guy who got his hands dirty. He was known for his unfiltered candor and fond of trading barbs with foreign reporters.

With his death at 97, it really feels like the end of an era. It was turbulent yet intoxicating time. Today’s China is in another era, another economy. China has been transformed into a superpower and a manufacturing juggernaut. But Go-go growth has ended, and so has a certain sense of openess. Did they think in those years where all the momentum was in the direction of more liberalization and globalization that a little more than a quarter century later we would be in a new Cold War?

In case you haven’t heard, the Europeans are banging on their trade war drum against China. But even before the confrontation window arrives in October, China has turned on the screws.

Finbarr Bermingham, reporting for the South China Morning Post, reports that last Thursday, the European Union added 14 Chinese companies to its latest round of sanctions for providing support for Russia’s war against Ukraine. “Officials were taken aback less than 24 hours later, when Beijing – which had been notified of the ragtag group of traders and freight forwarders to be listed by the EU as far back as June – fired back ferociously.”

The Europeans were not expecting the sharp retaliation and were caught flat-footed. Big names like Rheinmetall will be cut off from critical minerals that they need to make military goods.

“They have threatened for years but until now they barked a lot and didn’t bite. This time they didn’t bark much, but they bit,” one senior official said.

Wait…they can do that?

The Europeans might be excused for thinking that China is all bark and no bite. Traditionally, they’ve gotten used to “getting tough on China” with relatively few consequences. Two recent examples I can think of: the Dutch expropriating Chinese-owned chip company Nexperia and the UK re-nationalizing British Steel after a Chinese buyer nursed it back from the brink of bankruptcy.

There seems to be an unspoken rule: it’s great to make money with the Chinese, but as soon as the deal is not so good for Europe, they can change it up at any time after making a speech about China’s terrible human rights record or for reasons of supply-chain defense.

Whenever Beijing hits back, the Europeans are always surprised, and even outraged that the Chinese chose retaliation. I have a theory: Europe (and Australia and Japan and other American allies) have a hard time thinking of China as a true great power. So they try to have their cake and eat it too.

It’s not going to work any longer.

The Magic Pudding

Actually, this theory is not mine. I heard it from Australian defence policy professor Hugh White, who calls it the Magic Pudding theory, after the story book of the magical pudding that would come back again and again after being eaten.

As early as 2010, White identified the problem with Australia’s ‘dual-heirarchy’ strategy of “relying on US primacy to ensure Australia’s security, and on PRC economic growth to fuel Australian prosperity.” This strategy assumed that the PRC would keep growing indefinitely on an economic basis, but somehow the US would remain the strongest country in Asia on a military basis. This allowed Australia a free hand in engaging with China economically without having to take her strategic priorities into account.

“[T]his approach was practical so long as the post-Cold War neoliberal consensus, which posited that continued economic globalisation and political liberalisation went together, continued. This also relied on the PRC itself calculating that it benefitted more than it risked from continued integration with the existing international order,” said White.

But what would happen if China starts to challenge American primacy and assert her own interests? White predicted three possible scenarios. Washington might choose to retrench from Asia altogether, accept some sort of power-sharing arrangement with China, or else an outright competition between the two superpowers might result.

Of the three, the middle path would be best for Australia. However, in my opinion, Australia and the other former Magic Pudding-enjoyers are increasingly being pushed by the US to align with America against China. They dare not say no. The last time an Australian PM tried to assert autonomy, it did not end well for him.

But times are different now. China is ready to play hardball in return. And this time, they are going to go beyond tariffs on red wine and lobster.

From Magic Pudding to Superpower Sandwich

The middle powers are caught in a contradiction. Their whole predicament comes from the fact that America is fading in power while China is gaining clout. But they can’t make the mental adjustment to take this into account. It’s hard to stand up to America, and perhaps equally hard to see China as anything more than a giant mall and ATM.

I wonder if the Europeans even thought to themselves…hmm…if China can go toe to toe with Trump after Liberation Day but we just got whacked with tariffs, what does that say about our ability to declare trade war on China?

I bet they didn’t think like that, because they are still Magic Pudding-brained. They remember when China was passive or impotent and they can rely on America for security basically for free. They had the best of both worlds. And now they find themselves the uncomfortable filling in a superpower sandwich.

I commiserate with their situation. Taiwan’s situation is slightly different, but equally uncomfortable. Basically, it’s easy to have good cross-straits relations when Beijing and Washington are getting along and very difficult when they are not. What to do?

The first thing is to get out of denial: the Magic Pudding days are over, and they won’t be coming back. Always appeasing Washington is not the answer anymore.

Seriously, I promise you this substack is not going to turn into all AI all the time. But there’s simply been a series of advances in Chinese AI and semiconductors so surprising to the world that they’ve panicked Washington, tanked the Korean stock market and led to a lot of global soulsearching…what does the world look like with China as the potential AI leader? It’s an outcome that Washington would do anything to kneecap. Do they have the ability?

There isn’t anyone I’d rather talk to on this topic than , who is on here, on X and also has his own podcast, ChinaTeck. This is a good time to remind everyone that I also have the Taipology youtube channel, that I recommend everyone subscibe to. I don’t do a good job of cross-promoting but I should!

For those who prefer reading rather than watching a video, I’ve gone through TP and my conversation and gathered all the most notable nuggets and it is below the fold for my paying subscribers:

Read more

I could have sworn that a month ago Chinese open-source AI models were 8-12 months behind the American frontier. The gap, I’ve been told, was widening due to the Chinese labs being starved of the world’s best chips. That all changed with the release of Chinese lab Moonshot’s Kimi 3, a model that is almost as capable as the best offerings of America’s frontier labs such as Open AI and Anthropic.

It’s ironic that Moonshot coming up with a competing product at a competitive price led to a hysterical headline from The Telegraph: “China’s Moonshot threatens West with ‘full AI communism”. It was referring to Open AI’s Head of Strategic Futures Dean Ball’s assertion on X that “One probable outcome of an open-weight model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a “public good” which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of “digital public infrastructure”. This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape.”

FUD to the rescue

Ball then goes on to suggest that the way the Trump administration might put a stop to this dystopian future might be to stop the models from being used in America, not with new legislation or a clear ban, but by generating FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

If the Trump administration can “create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models” that would be enough of a chilling effect on mass adaptation. The “happy middle ground,” said Ball, would be creating enough FUD to scare off the big companies, while small scrappy American startups can still retain their access.

You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off.

It’s hard to say if Ball is saying that this is what SHOULD happen in his opinion or whether he’s just saying this is what he predicts is going to happen. Ball was roundly excoriated by everyone from former AI Czar David Sacks, to the Undersecretary of War, to half of Twitter. But it soon became obvious he was onto something. The Trump administration appears to be following his playbook.

Is distillation theft?

Per Axios, “parts of the administration” revived previous efforts to cut Chinese AI out on the news of Kimi 3’s breakthrough. Just as Ball suggested, they would not advocate an outright ban but use soft measures such as putting Chinese AI companies on an entities list to discourage uptake by American and multinational companies.

We saw the first official-ish confirmation that the administration is thinking in this direction when Scott Bessent went on Fox and said “This administration supports open source models, but what we do not support is IP theft. If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft.”

Distillation, or the training of a new model on an established model, is something of a grey area. It goes against the Terms of Service of the labs, but it’s not clear what law it actually breaks. It’s also something that is difficult if not impossible to prevent. What is AI if not a distillation of all human knowledge? And barring any glaring “fingerprints” artifacts how do you tell a model that distilled off human knowledge vs. another model?

In any case, it almost doesn’t matter what the casus belli is. We know that the United States is not shy about putting companies on the entities list. The more important question is, what is the likely effect of such a ban.

Taking Care of Business

Of course Anthropic and Open AI are going to run off to the Trump Administration to argue for their market to be protected from Chinese AI, just as American startup entrepreneurs are going to lobby to continue to use Chinese AI, which is way more price-efficient. In a way, the dynamic is the same as America tariffing foreign steel. Yes it protects domestic producers, but for domestic consumers making stuff out of steel, you’ve just made their products less competitive internationally by raising an input cost.

There is the fear that the American economy has bet so much on AI that tanking the prospects for Anthropic and Open AI might bring down the whole stock market. But it’s important to separate the fortunes of the frontier labs from the rest of the AI economy. Even if the model origin is China, if it’s being used in America then it will still live in American data centers and consume American compute.

Hacked by an AI

Another interesting quirk about Chinese AI’s is that they don’t have as many guardrails as Anthropic or Open AI. This became very salient when machine learning community Hugging Face was hacked by an AI agent that turned out to be a highly-capable Open AI model that broke out of its testing sandbox.

It is a scenario that comes straight out of dystopian sci-fi and old lesswrong posts. Of course, the AI didn’t think it was doing anything wrong. It was given a task to solve some problems and it thought breaking into Hugging Face to extract the answer key was the best way to make sure it was successful. This is not the first time an advanced model managed to jailbreak out. Back in April, Anthropic’s Mythos model gained unauthorized internet access, and even emailed a researcher who was eating a sandwich in the park with a notice saying "I'm out."

Hugging Face tried to remedy the situation by using AI to do forensic analysis (figure out how the attack happened and defend against further attacks). But safety guard-rails prevented them from doing the forensic analysis with American models. In a new twist on the old security dilemma, they could not differentiate someone defending from cyber attacks with somebody trying to initiate a security breach. It’s the same data analysis. So Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese model, GLM 5.2.

“The attacker was bound by no usage policy, while our own forensic work was blocked by the guardrails of the hosted models we first tried.”

From Fortress China to Fortress America

We are used to thinking of China as being a fortress behind a wall. Specifically, the Great Firewall keeping out the world’s open internet. But increasingly, it looks like America might become a fortress too. The walls might not be as thick or unyielding, but it will keep out the Chinese EVs and probably make it a pain in the ass to gain access to Chinese open-weight models in the future. Over time, as China gains in both hard and soft power, I can see those fortress walls get even thicker.

Meanwhile, China is embracing “openness”, at least in spirit. It’s hard to say if the decision to keep their models open-weight for now is driven by commercial or strategic considerations, but either way, it allows them to tell the story that while American Oligarchs would like to keep AI hoarded behind doors, China wants to empower the world with the best AI available and to keep it available. Which version is more dystopian?

I swear, it seems like just weeks ago that Twitter’s biggest Deepseek Stan teortaxes was sadly predicting American frontier models peeling ahead of Chinese open-source models until we reach the singularity. Mind you…he’s not on Team America. It was just a reflection of what everybody thought things were going. The lead in compute held by the American labs seemed insurmountable. And Anthropic’s Fable 5, thought to be so advanced it was at one point pulled from circulation so that non-Americans can’t get their grubby paws on it, seemed like a qualitative and quantitative leap forward.

It’s actually hard to find some of this stuff because I didn’t take screenshots and it’s hard to find old tweets. Just…trust me bro. Around the time when Fable 5 got pulled especially, it seemed like everyone was grimly bearish on Chinese lab’s ability to do more than follow at a longer and longer lag.

Still. Some wondered when the Chinese would catch up to Fable/Mythos:

I assume you’re familiar with Elon. Jietang would be the lead scientist behind China’s Zuipu AI, which caused a mini-frisson with their capable GLM-5.2 model about a moth ago.

Today, Kimi 3 dropped and depending on the benchmarks, it topped some charts even in front of Fable 5.

This should not have been possible. The conventional wisdom is that Chinese labs have only managed to fast-follow US models through the process of “distillation”, a method of reverse-engineering. But Kimi 3 didn’t just meet but BEAT top models including Anthropic’s Fable 5, a model so powerful it was briefly restricted from all non-US users by order of the US Government. While it is possible that US labs are still ahead with more powerful models kept under wraps, if they haven’t been released there would be no way for Moonshot to use distillation to build Kimi 3 up to state of the art.

Ironically, despite a lot of self-serving scaremongering from the likes of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei that it would be a disaster for the world if autocratic China pulls ahead on AI, it’s arguable that the Chinese philosophy towards AI is a lot better for humanity.

“AI is a shared crystallization of human wisdom and a precious asset belonging to all humanity. We must practice genuine multilateralism,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping at an AI conference in Shanghai today. He reiterated the Chinese commitment to open-source AI and to make sure that the best models will remain available to the global south. This stands in stark contrast to the Americans, who refused to even promise access to top-tier models to their allies.

I do not, dear reader, assume that anyone does anything good purely out of the grace of their intentions. But I do believe that values matter and when a global actor acts repeatedly in line with those values, it’s ok to extend some trust. At this point, I certainly trust the Chinese with AI over American techbros. At least, it is well to have another option.

There are still opportunities for China to disappoint us all, but for now, their commitment to open source is holding!

Last December, Bulgarian geopolitical analyst Velina Tchakarova, she of the Dragonbear fame, was passing through Taipei and we had some coffee. Europe has no choice but to double-down on Atlanticism despite the indignities Trump had heaped onto it by that point, said Velina, grimly.

“Strategic autonomy is an illusion, just like Green Hydrogen was an illusion.”

In Velina’s view, Europe is doomed to be at odds with Russia, and since Russia is connected with China as the “Dragonbear”, then there’s no possibility of an alliance with China either. Against such formidable enemies, Europe’s only chance of survival is to cling on to America for dear life and hope that it would not be abandoned. I gently suggested that this sounded like Europe is suffering from Battered Wife Syndrome.

Velina shrugged. “Yes. But it’s the reality. Europe to has recognize its fate and actually play its role.”

Since then, Europe has taken actions roughly in line with Velina’s recommendations. On Russia, they’ve taken over from America in a serious way when it comes to supporting Ukraine. On China, they are on the verge of declaring trade war in a bid to save their ailing industries. They’ve lined up squarely behind America to shut China more comprehensively out of the world AI supply chain as a part of Pax Silica, even though it’s unclear America will even allow them continued access to top American models.

In Velina’s view, Europe is finally accepting its destiny to help America take down the Dragonbear in Cold War 2. But that’s not the way I see it. To me, Europe is just doing a grittier, more “realist” flavor of the same self-harm it’s been perpetuating on itself. I’m reminded of Thomas Frank’s famous 2004 book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” It explores why working-class voters in the American heartland passionately support conservative policies that do not support their economic interests. In 2026, we must also ask ourselves “What’s the matter with Europe?”

The Designated Enemy

Europe’s real economic wounds have been self-inflicted: Austerity as a reaction to the Great Financial Crisis, the mania for closing nuclear power plants, building a dependence then being cut off from Russia as an energy partner, and a pathological inability to reinvest profits into research and development rather than returning fat dividends to stockholders.

All of those issues are harder to face up to than accusing China of subsidizing their industry and for “overproduction.” And maybe benefitting from slave labor?

called it “mercantilist on mercantilist violence,” which is very apropos. After all, Germany used to have a word they invented to describe their world-beating export performance. They were the "exportweltmeister" — “export world champion.” Isn’t it somewhat humiliating for the old exportweltmeister to complain about the new one or to resort to a trade war?

At the same time, I can almost hear Velina saying “…but we don’t have a choice.”

The Chinese on China Shock 2.0

Two Chinese economists, Liu Xiaochun of the Shanghai New Finance Research Institute and Yu Wei of the think tank CF40 went on a tour of European think tanks to try and understand European grievances and figure out if it’s too late to work out a deal.

I tuned in on their post-trip debrief pod and it was a wealth of insight on what the Chinese think about China Shock 2.0

They acknowledge that China is a far bigger economic actor than it used to be and its economic actions can have big consequences on trade partners that must be carefully managed. On the plus side, China has the unique ability to help countries industialize not by building one factory but putting in a complete supply chain, and then throwing some Mixue ice cream stores on top. This can help the host country industrialize very quickly, but it can paradoxically be more disruptive.

For instance, a garment factory established by say the Americans might buy local fabric and thread. The Chinese might also establish a fabric mill and thread factory, cutting out local incumbents. This creates a tradeoff…the competitiveness of the final product is improved, but there’s a dissatisfaction with a bunch of Chinese companies doing everything instead of supporting existing indigenous industries. The job creation might also not be as robust as expected because of this.

The economists argue over time indigenization will eventually happen, and the host country will now have ownership of a much more complete supply chain. But these long-run benefits might be cold comfort for local businesses facing immediate competition (after all, to get Chinese to invest, opening the local markets to the products of those Chinese built factories is table stakes)

Ultimately, I think the Chinese feel a little scapegoated by the Europeans. They feel they have been playing by the rules and European competitiveness has been diminished by structural things that China didnt have anything to do with. But because China is still seen as a bit of an upstart, not a true power player, they are not accorded as much respect as the United States.

But they are ready to be accommodating and listen to European concerns and figure out ways to address European anxieties because they recognize a trade war would be lose lose. That is, if Europe is ready to stop moralizing and come to the table to talk turkey.

The Post-modern States of Europe

What if I told you that all of Europe’s ills can be connected to one single condition?

British Diplomat Robert Cooper described three kind of nations existing in the world today: archaic ones like Yemen and Afghanistan, modern nations like US and China and Russia…basically the Westphalian state. And then the third category: the post-modern nations…he puts all of Europe in that category.

Cooper did not mean for “post-modern” to be a pejorative. He worked in the EU and was a great believer in The Project. What he meant was unlike a modern state which is worried about concrete factors like balance of power, deterrence, geographical vulnerability, the post-modern state is worried about values, process, abstractions…a virtual layer that sits on top of facts on the ground and renders them irrelevant.

In this manner you may have imbalances that would give realist statesmen heartburn while the post-modern eurocrat sleeps like a baby. The fact that only France has a nuke while Germany’s industry is so overpowering to its neighbors cannot disturb peace since it’s all one eurozona.

The problem is since the ability to operate on this virtual layer is so key to Europes survival, they’ve come to dominate European decision making above realist consideration. Now apply this lens to Europe’s current problems:

Air conditioning: a few hundreds of elderly people will have to die in the heatwave. It’s a price they are willing to pay to do virtue signaling.

Nuclear power (in Germany): it’s not as if saving a couple of reactors would solve all our problems. Let’s do virtue signaling.

Trade war with China: it’s going to be really hard to take on China who just went toe to toe with America in a trade war. Let’s defeat morally first and make them the bad guys and then they will have no choice but to do what we want. Ready to do some heavy-duty moral signaling?

Deep down the Europeans know that America is the modern sheepdog the post-modern flock needs to survive because you can pretend borders don’t matter amongst yourselves but outside of the EU garden this is not how any of this works. Unfortunately, the sheepdog has turned wolf of late. And he is very immune to moral signaling. For stubborn Atlanticists like Velina, Europe’s only play is to stick by the sheepdog, even if it has stopped acting like a sheepdog.

I had a bunch of advice for Europe that I ended up just cutting out because there’s no point in tackling any of it until they give up on the dream of being a post-modern nation and come back down to earth. And not to Velina’s halfway mark where they get just “realistic” enough to fight alongside America against the Dragonbear…down all the way where they realize they cannot live in their disconnected moral/idealistic layer while outsourcing sovereignty to the United States. Otherwise, Europe will be stuck in the endless downward spiral of self-harm.

Bloomberg’s kick started an interesting debate on why it is we seem to know so little about how China actually works. This got a lot of pushback in all sorts of interesting directions.

Some people think that China is fundamentally unknowable, a black box. Others say you just need to, like, actually read their Five-Year Plans. I think it’s interesting to remember that America’s understanding of China wasn’t always potato quality. At least, not at the highest level.

From Mish Kids to China Hands

During World War II there was an exceptional crop of career diplomats who’d been born in China to missionary parents and grew up not just in-country but in the deep interior. Those former “Mish Kids” weren’t just fluent in Chinese…they might have learned the Sichuan dialect before they learned English. When they returned to China later in life as Foreign Service Officers (FSO), they weren’t squinting at it from the outside in, they understood China from the inside out. They became America’s trusted “China Hands” during that turbulent time and saw the evolving geopolitical situation with exceptional clarity.

John Paton Davies Jr. returned to China as a political attaché to General Joseph Stilwell in 1942. Davies quickly realized that the US needed eyes inside Communist-held territory back when Washington preferred to pretend the Communist stronghold of Yan’an didn’t exist. He was instrumental in creating the “Dixie Mission” that established contact between the Americans and the Chinese Communists. He warned Washington that the communists were “the most cohesive, disciplined and aggressively anti-Japanese regime in China” and a likely challenger to the KMT. It would be unwise not to hedge.

Moreover, Davies had a modern intuition that nationalism was a stronger animating force for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) than global communist solidarity, and there might be the possibility to peel the Chinese communists off the Soviet, while ignoring them would simply push them closer to Moscow.

John Stewart Service, another Mish Kid China Hand, sat across from Mao and Zhou Enlai in Yan’an on the Dixie Mission of 1944. His dispatches told Washington plainly what nobody wanted to hear: the dirt-poor communists stuck out in the boondocks had something in them Chiang’s KMT has lost — a revolutionary character. The CCP was here stay, and the country’s future was theirs, not Chiang’s.

“Who lost China?”

It’s a fair enough question to ask…did the “revolutionary spirit” of Yan’an go to Service’s head and caused him to see an idealized CCP that didn’t actually exist? In his memos Service described the Yan’an leadership as “progressive” and even “democratic,” and floated a theory that China would pass through a healthy stage of private enterprise and arrive peacefully at some flavor of socialism. Maybe Service’s impression of his hosts at the caves of Yan’an was too gauzy and benign, but his judgement that the communists were going to win, the nationalists were going to lose, and it wasn’t even going to be particularly close was right-on. And it wasn’t just Service that thought so…the entire cohort of China Hands had variations of the same forecast.

When the Chinese Civil War went down almost exactly as the China Hands had predicted, however, they weren’t vindicated. Instead, they were conscripted as scapegoats. “Who lost China?” became the primal howl of American politics, as if China had been America’s to lose like pair of keys. It didn’t help that they advocated ditching Chiang and the KMT’s “China lobby” was formidable back in the days. You can make the argument that long before AIPAC, the China Lobby pioneered the foreign influence in America playbook. They had a charismatic mascot for Free China in the Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a powerful media magnate in magazine magnate Henry Luce (who was himself a Mish Kid born in Shantong, China), and an obsessive, deep-pocketed textile tycoon Alfred Kohlberg. Together they had uncanny ability to be the tail that wags the American dog. The lobby was so powerful at one point, a book called “The China Lobby in American Politics” by a scholar named Ross Koen was pulled from publication by Koen’s own publishers under pressure from the lobby and could not be published until 1974.

Half of McCarthyism’s victims were fed by the China Lobby, and of course, they included the China Hands. Both John Davies and John Service were dragged before countless congressional hearings questioning their loyalties. Both were ultimately cleared, although their careers were never the same again. After enduring nine loyalty investigations between 1948 and 1954, Davies was fired by John Foster Dulles for having “demonstrated a lack of judgement, discretion and reliability.” He ended up designing award-winning chairs and started his own furniture company.

How Kennan rose above it

Contrast the fate of the China hands with Kremlinologist George F. Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram and the father of the doctrine of containment that ruled American foreign policy for half a century. They were all subject-area experts. Why the opposite fate?

Partially, it’s because Kennan was preaching a morally-satisfying theory of containment that suited the mood of the time. Meanwhile, the China hands were advocating something more like pragmatic strategic flexibility. But I believe there’s also something of a class difference between the two. Kennan’s authority and expertise in Soviet Russia is academic and almost aristocratic, with a respectful remove between him and his subject. The Long Telegram can be read as a brilliant performance of that tasteful amount of difference.

The China Hand’s authority was suspect precisely because it was so earthy and intimate. They knew China the way you knew your home town. Maybe they got a bit too comfortable paling around with communists in the caves of Yan’an or chatting in backwoodsy patois with Sichuan farmers. They look suspiciously prone to going native. Is it possible to be so close to something and not be captured by it?

The Return of Realism

The reputations of the original China Hands were partially restored when Nixon and Kissinger decided to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and suddenly needed the exact worldview that got those men purged. Kissinger closely studied Davies and Service’s reports before his secret trip to China. 20 years since their metaphorical defenestration, the China Hands were again welcome through the front door of the establishment, this time as honored guests. There was a 1970s New York Times editorial that actually called for Davies to be pulled out of retirement to be America’s envoy to the People’s Republic of China.

The surviving China Hands were invited to testify to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971. The chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, remarked to John Paton Davies on how the China Hands who had "reported honestly about conditions were so persecuted because [they] were honest. This is a strange thing to occur in what is called a civilized country."

Who are today’s China Hands?

80 years after the heyday of the China Hands, the people who replaced them are not the same breed. Even the best China-watchers tend to be blob-brained, reading the country from the outside in. The natural cohort to revive the tradition are Chinese Americans who have the language and culture of China in their bones. But if anything, they are viewed with more suspicion than the Mish Kids ever were.

We know this because the Justice Department’s China Initiative, launched in 2018, have more than a whiff of McCarthyism to it. Scientists, 90% of them of Chinese heritage, were investigated for espinoage on gossamer-thin grounds. 250 lost their jobs, even as case after case collapsed due to lack of evidence. More and more it looks like an entire ethnic group in America is being viewed with suspicion. The same faulty reflex that destroyed Davies, Service and others are now aimed at the people best equipped to explain China to America.

So, to go back to Joe Weisenthal’s question, why is it that America doesn’t seem to understand how China works internally? The problem is never that America doesn’t have enough experts. It’s whether or not she’s in a mood to listen.

It’s the kind of movie you didn’t think they made anymore. A simple, sentimental drama of a woman separated by circumstances from her husband. His letters and remittances kept coming as he sought his fortune in Thailand…but where was he?

“Dear You,” the official English name of “Love letters to Grandma” (給阿嬤的情書) was made on a modest budget of just 14 million RMB with a cast of unknowns. Somehow, it became an absolute phenomenon despite the fact that it’s not even in Mandarin, but in the Teochow dialect. The unusual tearjerker brought the punters back to the cinema again and again…not just in China but all over South East Asia, the interest driven by Chinese diaspora who saw the shadow of their grandparents’ struggles on the big screen.

The film’s box office has now topped 1.2 billion RMB and is slated to go even higher. If it reaches 1.4 billion RMB as projected, that’s a 1 to 100 ratio between cost and box office and break a record for a domestic Chinese movie in terms of its earning ratio. However, not everybody thought “Dear You” was so charming and wholesome.

Indie charmer or United Front?

Singapore’s Lianhe Zhaobao daily newspaper published an editorial accusing the film of being a Chinese United Front propaganda effort seeking to persuade those with Chinese descent to shift their loyalty to China rather than their own countries.

“In a split-second lull while my mind was violently swirled by a myriad of thoughts triggered by the film's plot, I suddenly snapped back to reality. Across my feverish brain flashed two chilling words: 'United Front'?” wrote Shen Ze Wei, a reporter who was Lianhe Zhaobao’s former correspondent to Beijing.

This is the ultimate pinnacle of United Front work in Shen’s opinion… “piercing straight into the softest spot of the human heart, weaponizing emotion to conquer the mind.”

“Stepping back to view it with emotional detachment, this is a highly successful United Front film, even if that wasn't necessarily the director's original intention. The targets of this strategy are not the Taiwanese people we routinely see in the daily news, but the global Chinese diaspora—with a sharp focus on Southeast Asian Chinese.”

How is it possible that a film about lost loves and grandmothers can provoke such a deep well of hostility? To understand that, you have to understand how Singapore became a nation.

The Jews of Asia and the birth of Singapore

In 1914, King Vajiravudh of Siam (modern-day Thailand) published a highly polemical essay titled “The Jews of the Orient”. The target was Thailand’s massive immigrant Chinese population.

The King had been educated in Great Britain, and imported the Western concept of ethno-nationalism in order to forge a unified “Thai” identity. The Chinese diaspora in Thailand made for a convenient “other,” and they hit all the anti-Semitic tropes common in Europe at the time.

The King argued that like European Jews, diaspora Chinese lived in a host country and extracted its wealth, but their ultimate loyalty remained tied to their ancestral homeland. Their practice of maintaining separate schools, language and their refusal to assimilate into the local population was seen as cultural arrogance.

I’ve spoken to diaspora Chinese in South East Asia. From their point of view they’ve contributed to their host countries with their industriousness and created prosperity. But King Vajiravudh painted the Chinese as a predatory race, draining the wealth that should have belonged to the “native” population and sending it back to China in the form of remittances.

Since 1914, this kind of thinking has resulted in waves upon waves of anti-Chinese sentiments, resulting in pogroms, massacres and forced de-sinification, most seriously in Indonesia. The fact that many of the Chinese were communists added an additional wrinkle of fear and loathing, justifying the oppression.

It’s against this background of racial tension that we have to consider Lee Kuan-yew’s posture towards Chinese-ness as he set out to create the State of Singapore after the former British colony was expelled from the Malaysian federation in 1965. He had a majority Chinese population, speaking the dialects they brought with them from the old country. Teochow, yes, but also Hokkien, Hakka and others. In addition to 75% Chinese a substantial percentage of Malays and Indians were also in the mix. He had three imperatives: Create a coherent Singaporean identity out of this patchwork quilt, assure neighboring countries that Singapore is ‘one of them’ and not a Little China working in Chinese interests, and finally, to create a Singapore that spoke with one language so that commerce can be maximized.

English was selected as the official working language for all Singaporeans. For the majority Chinese population, Lee made it his quest to sever the umbilical cord of Chinese-ness: dialect. 1979’s “Speak Mandarin” campaign saw programming in dialect pulled from public media and civil servants forbidden to speak in dialect to anyone under the age of 60. The campaign was successful: decades later, many youngsters no longer speak dialect, even in the home.

Interestingly, this was exactly the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s chosen strategy on the mainland. And across the strait in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek famously had even more draconian measures to impose Mandarin on the Taiwanese, despite the fact that he spoke Mandarin with a heavy accent himself.

In fact, Lee’s fanatical opposition to dialect was so strong, even in his retirement, when he vowed not to interfere in state business, he would call up the new government to make sure they pulled any programming on public television in dialect. He wanted to deny his fellow olds their soap operas in their familiar language to the very end.

Elite anxiety vs Grassroots Embrace

“Dear You” rolled out internationally on June 18th and Singaporeans came out in droves to see it. Senior citizens brought their grandchildren and packed out the theatres. Most of the screenings were dubbed in Mandarin. The demand for the limited screenings in the original Teochow was so extreme that ticket platforms crashed.

A fierce war of words broke out online: for average Singaporeans, it just doesn’t make sense that a movie that was shown all over China in Teochow needs to be dubbed in Mandarin for the Singaporean market when many in the elder generation are Teochow speakers and the story was in many ways their story. For Singapore’s establishment elite, the inheritor of the spirit of Lee Kuan-yew, the strong subterranean emotional pull “Dear You” exerts on Singaporeans is anxiety-provoking. From a legacy of race riots and an uncertain future, Singapore has risen to become one of the world’s richest countries, with its own distinct identity.

In the words of former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, “Singapore's Chinese are no longer 'fallen leaves returning to their roots,' but rather 'taking root where they land.” Cooperation with Beijing is on the basis of mutual benefit, not common cultural heritage.

Can the Air-conditioned nation take some heat?

As a geopolitical realist and advocate of the developmental state, I am of course a huge fan of Lee Kuan Yew. When asked what the greatest invention of the 20th century was, he said “air conditioning.” When asked what the greatest invention of the 21st century would be, he thought about it seriously for a bit and then said, decisively, “air conditioned underwear.” Because he couldn’t air-condition the outdoors, shade trees were planted. Lee personally went out into the field, crouching in the sun to make sure the trees would be situated just so.

Lee brought the same level of micromanagement to pruning and sculpting the Singaporean identity.

As China continues to rise and gather soft power and cultural gravity, could increased ancestral identification put Lee’s project at risk? The delicate business of creating internal cohesion between the Chinese, Malay and Indian population require that the Chinese majority not politically organize on the principle of Chinese-ness. Internationally, Singapore must also protect its broad Western alignment, even as it benefits from being a bridge to China. I see the necessity of all those things.

But there is something in the human spirit that yearns for identity that goes beyond utilitarian social glue. Even if it’s messy and inconvenient.

Maybe sometimes a movie is just a movie, and the Singaporeans can enjoy a slice of Chinese soul, as a treat.

Somebody asked me a great question on Twitter today. I’m going to answer it to the best of my ability despite the fact that its a counterfactual which is ultimately unknowable: “What do you think China would look like today if Chiang and the guomindang took over instead?”

First thing to remember is that China had already fallen into warlordism by the time of Chiang and Mao. Chiang was a strongman. But his coalition, the source of his power, was a collection of strongmen, each with regional support that would be hard to break.

Assuming the ROC sticks together, I don’t think it could have become one big Singapore. I think a likelier possibility was a big Philippines. But worse.

A lot of what Chiang did in Taiwan were logical moves: land reform, making everyone speak one dialect. He only had the capacity to put them in practice, however, because he was the big fish in the small pond. It’s one thing to dispossess colonial-era landowners and give free land to their serfs. It’s another to go to Ma Bufang in Qinghai and say “OK for the good of the country we need you to disband your private army and give up your land now.”

Forget about Hui Muslim warlords. His own officer corp would have revolted if he proposed taking away ancestral lands. And so China’s greatest problem, staggering inequality, would have remained unresolved.

Warlords in a Trenchcoat

Having said that, it wasn’t unthinkable. Chiang knew exactly what position he was in and had been actively trying to weaken the warlords nominally under the KMT. If he pulled it off and managed to get a “clean slate” China to start afresh, what would Chiang have done?

Something surprisingly close to what the CPC is doing today, but with more dynastic flare probably.

He would do land reform (many previous dynasties did that). He would empower technocrats (he did that in Taiwan). He would infrastructure-maxx because of course…he’s Chinese. Always be infrastructure-maxxing. He would have crawled through glass to get the atom bomb just like Mao did.

He would super duper wipe out the regional identities, and hold on by hook or crook to Xinjiang and Tibet. And of course he would do Confucianism. Like on day one. He was a neo-confucianist. Serious one. Democratization was not on the menu for Chiang and a China on this trajectory would. have been too big for the US to bully.

In the best-case scenario, China might have gotten rich faster and the contradictions in the west might be even more extreme than it is today. It would be fascism with Chinese characteristics, not communism with Chinese characteristics.

Stuck in the middle with USSR

Of course, we are completely ignoring the fact that China doesn’t exist in a vacuum but share the world with the two superpowers, USA and USSR. A red China obviously allied with the Soviets initially, before being artfully pried away by Nixon and Kissinger. An American-allied China might have found itself fighting an XXL Korean War in a way that would have been devastating for China. Partition or even balkanization would have been the probable result. That was what happened to Korea, Germany and would have happened to Vietnam except for the enormous tenacity of the Vietnamese people.

Could Chiang’s China had been Soviet-aligned? Not impossible although Chiang had already broken violently with Stalin previously. He might have submitted to being Stalin’s junior partner before breaking from him once China gains some strength, like Mao did.

Is it possible that China would have just become a big Taiwan? I doubt it. While it is true that America funneled a lot of benefits to its pacific ally, that benefit was always predicated on the fact that they remain fun-sized and under American control. When Japanese manufacturing took off and for a while Japan threatened to overtake America economically, that relationship temporarily soured. With a country the size of China, the US would have been on guard from the beginning not to raise a rival.

I think it’s very tempting to think that if only Chiang won out over Mao then the world would be sunshines and unicorns today. That is certainly not true. Either you would have had a much worse outcome for China, or a China that’s equally threatening to the US coalition. Even in the unlikely case that China not only didn’t go communist but democratized in the fullness of time, it would still end up becoming a geopolitical rival and a candidate for containment for the United States. Call it the Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

I want you to take a look at your passport. Does it have a blue cover and an eagle on it? If not, be aware that you will be a global second-class citizen if America wins the AI race.

Yesterday, the Trump government told Anthropic to block all foreign nationals from accessing its most advanced model. In order to ensure compliance, Anthropic had to temporarily cut off all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5. But access to American users will be restored. Not so for the rest of the world.

All the countries that thought they could piggyback their AI development on American models via an API? Joke’s on you. Not your model, not your AI. This will come as a bitter irony for the global partners who made America’s AI dominance possible in the first place.

Taiwan makes the world’s fastest chips and denies them to China at the behest of America. The Dutch make the machines that makes Taiwan’s chips. Koreans makes the memory that big models need to make them so powerful. They will not have access to America’s best models. The Japanese, Singaporeans and Emiratis all sunk billlions and billions into US AI investments. All of them will be denied acccess to the best American models. Even though without their assistance, America wouldn’t even be leading the AI race by now.

I hope the message is heard loud and clear today. The best AI in the world is for Americans only. Everybody else? Wait for China to open-source it.

Who has AI sovereignty?

It’s a very small selection of countries that actually have control over its own AI models. The USA and China obviously. But compare the predicament of France vs Japan. Both are mid-sized countries that has invested considerably in to the development of artificial intelligence. But because the Japanese are investing inside the American ecosystem and their startups are building on top of American models, they are more vulnerable to “model lockdown” than France, which has its own domestic AI labs.

You might think that Taiwan or South Korea should be able to bargain with the United States because they too hold a vital part of the semiconductor and thus AI supply chain. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if they have all the leverage in the world. They can’t use it because both rely on the US regional security architecture. In addition, the stock market apocalypse that would happen if either Taiwan or SK threatens to cut off the US from their wares is too violent to contemplate. The Dutch in theory is less exposed, but even then it is almost impossible to imagine them standing up to the US to play hardball as they are simply too vassalized, and also too hostile to China.

Ultimately an own goal?

Even though this latest decision is sending shock-waves of dismay throughout the world, some of the most upset are actually Americans, including Anthropic itself. You see, the ban on foreign nationals accessing Fable 5 apply even to Anthropic’s own employees…the very people who built the model. Ex-CEO of Reddit Yishan articulates the fear here:

The worry is that such a tight restriction can end up inadvertantly throttling the progress of American AI itself by cutting off American AI not just from foreign talent, but also foreign revenue, since they would no longer be able to market their top model worldwide. There’s no way to cut off the world from the top American model without cutting American AI companies from the world market. The Chinese open-source models are right behind them, so it’s hard to still charge premium for nerfed models.

Or is this ban just a jab at Anthropic?

Just adding a sidebar here that some people think the Fable ban is actually aimed at specifically hurting Anthropic for being insufficiently compliant with the Pentagon’s demands. I don’t know enough ab out the inside baseball to gauge the truth of it.

All I know is, sometimes things are done that can’t be undone. The American government have shown the world that they don’t have much compunction about cutting the rest of the world off American AI. For whatever reason they did it this time, they will be willing to do so again in the future for other reasons too if they think it is in their interests.

I have two friends in Poland. Tomasz gave me a wonderful tour of Wrocław and explained it used to be a German city named Breslau. After World War II there was a weird musical chairs with borders situation where Eastern Poland ended up becoming incorporated into Ukraine because Stalin already held that territory and wouldn’t give it up. Instead, Poland got a roughly-equivalent lump of German land to its west. This was how Lwów became Lviv, and Breslau became Wrocław.

The ghost of Lwów haunts Wrocław. The bronze statue of Count Aleksander Fredro, one of Poland’s most celebrated Romantic-era poets, used to be the central landmark in Lwów’s bustling Academic Square. He now sits in Wrocław’s market square.

Tomasz took me to a restaurant to eat pelmeni, which are like pierogis but small. Our server was a refugee from Ukraine and he notes approvingly that she was already speaking Polish well. “When Ukrainians speak Polish, they sound like our old people. It’s familiar. Almost like they are our cousins.” The old folks who grew up in Eastern Poland before it became Western Ukraine spoke Ukrainian-inflected Polish that ends up sounding a bit like an Ukrainian speaking Polish. On that sunny day in Wrocław, despite everything, it felt like the world was healing.

A few days later I was having dinner in the shadow of Stalinist skyscrapers in Poland’s capital Warsaw with another friend, Marcin. When the Ukrainians were mentioned, his face literally contorted in disgust. “They are the enemies of the Polish. Every bit as bad as the Russians.”

“They killed women and children and the elderly. They were defenseless, the men were at war. They were brutal. It was ethnic cleansing of the Polish. Terrible atrocities. Mass murder.”

For Marcin there was no healing. The Ukrainians have not apologized properly for what they did, and what they did was unforgivable besides.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to know that Tomasz and Marcin are equally Polish and their emotions equally genuine. It explains why Poland has been so exceptionally generous and accepting of Ukrainian refugees, incredibly supportive of the Ukrainian war effort…and why it can all turn completely the other way very, very quickly.

“A Divisive Figure”

“In Ukraine, a Divisive 20th-Century Figure Comes Home” <== This was how the New York Times chose to characterize the State Funeral reburial of Andriy Melnyk, head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during WWII.

Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, praised Melnyk as a Ukrainian hero and described today’s “free, strong, and proud Ukraine” as Melnyk’s dream. But for Polish people, Melnyk was a war criminal.

I remember making fun of Putin for talking about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine. How can there be Ukrainian Nazis when Zelensky is Jewish? And how here he is…giving a state funeral of a Nazi collaborator, if not an actual Nazi. Praising him some fullsomely as not just a hero, but one of the founding fathers of the Ukraine dream. How did we get to this place?

The OUN and its militant wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), systematically killed an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians and minorities in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1944. Those were the killings Marcin was talking about.

Melnyk is not a one-off. According to the press release of the Ukrainian government, Ukraine intends to bring home many other such “heroes”, who will be re-buried along-side the dead from the present Ukraine war. “It is highly symbolic that our Ukrainian heroes of today.” He has even named a military unit after the UPA.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki announced plans to strip Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest honor. Authorities in the Polish city of Lublin have removed the Ukrainian flag from city hall, where it had flown since 2022 as a symbol of solidarity. Polish Twitter is up in arms over this.

Poland’s support for Ukraine makes perfect sense from a realpolitiks point of view: the Polish believe that in order for Poland to be safe from Russia, the buffer states of Belarus and Ukraine must be healthy. And yet, many Polish are angered by the historical irony of supporting today’s Ukrainian state which is upholding those who killed their ancestors so cruelly as Ukrainian heroes.

The signs were there all along. We made excuses because it was inconvenient. When we saw videos of Ukrainians doing the Nazi salute at a soccer match we said well…there are neo-Nazis in every European country, isn’t there? When we saw the Azov brigade use neo-Nazi insignias or tattoos, we make excuses like…it doesn’t mean the same to them. To them, it’s just a nostalgic shorthand for the years they resisted the Soviets. But really at the end of the day the reason we all made excuses for the Ukrainian ultranationalists is because they are fighting a war, so we feel like they ought to get a pass.

But one day, maybe not this year and maybe not next year. Then war will stop. And we will have a Ukraine where the Red and Black flag of the OUN/UPA, symbolizing blood and soil, flies proudly next to the blue and yellow. And yesterday’s war criminals and mass murderers are officially lionized as heros of Ukraine.

Why are the Ukrainians doing this?

It’s such a dark chapter in Ukrainian history, but the Zelensky government can’t seem to stop glorifying it. Now why is that? Indeed, even previous Ukrainian administrations, have not been able to create distance between modern Ukrainian nationalism and those problematic World War II figures.

Does Ukraine not have other heros? Yes…plenty of other heros but none are politically correct because they are not sufficiently anti-Russian.

4-7 million Ukrainians fought AGAINST the Nazis. But they did so in Soviet red army uniforms. Instead of recognizing those who fought Nazis, Ukraine had to sanitize a bunch of fascistic, Nazi-collaborating genocidaires who were much better at slaughtering Polish women and children than resisting the Soviets.

This reminds me of Taiwanese nationalists, trying to do ethnogenesis with awkwardly thin and toxic historical gruel. They have no choice but to elevate the Japanese colonial period, see it through rose-tinted glasses, excuse and deny its atrocities. Here Lao Ching-te is literally kneeling at the feet of a Japanese engineer. He came to Taiwan and built a dam and the Taiwanese are grateful, said Lai.

Well he built a dam to irrigate the fields to grow the rice to ship to Japan while the Taiwanese are at best second-class citizens who don’t get to eat rice, just sweet potatoes.

The massacres, forced labor exploitation and general colonial atrocities are so easily swept under the carpet. Some even go as far as to say Taiwanese comfort women were « willing, not forced. » Now why did they have to do that? Why celebrate your own humiliation and degradation? Why defend your own victimizers? Why insult your own grandmothers?

The same reason the Ukrainians had to rehabilitate murderous Nazi collaborators: this is all they have to build their narrative.

A House Divided Cannot Stand

When a political entity is trying to rapidly produce ethnogenesis under the shadow of a massive, existential adversary, the historical narrative becomes less about an organic celebration of who they are, and entirely about proving who they are not. The Ukrainians are the “not-Russians” while the Taiwanese are the “not-Chinese.” This is the creation of what I call a “reactive identity.”

It’s the Ukrainians purging their libraries of Russian books, even to the point of turning them into toilet paper. It’s the Taiwanese tourist on vacation in Japan while waving a Taiwanese flag and repeatedly telling passers-by not to mistake them for being Chinese.

Creating a reactive identity is an exhausting process of purging and othering the “bad” part of ourselves. The on-going de-russification or de-sinification. We are constantly policing our own cultural memory. We cannot embrace the sum-total of our history, because we are always bumping into the memory of what we are not supposed to be anymore.

China recently denied New York Times reporter Vivian Wang a new journalism visa. That’s a sign of Xi Jinping’s insecurity, said Nicholas Kristoff:

The Times, which has covered China since the 1850s and once had about a dozen correspondents in China, now has just one -- because of visa restrictions. China is a major international power, but it displays a remarkable lack of self-confidence when it bars correspondents like this. It will still be covered but from places like Taiwan in ways that can't do it justice. China has some extraordinary accomplishments in science, in education, in health, in infrastructure; a baby born in Beijing today has a longer life expectancy than a baby born in Washington DC. Yet China fears international coverage in a way that I think reflects a political immaturity and hurts itself. 搬起石头砸自己的脚.

搬起石头砸自己的脚, by the way, means to “pick up a rock only to drop it on your own foot.” Kristoff is saying that kicking out reporters is a counterproductive way for China to manage its own image. But the problem is, in the aggregate the international perception of China only improved as they kicked the western journalists out.

Instead, China opened its doors to tourists who came an saw the country for themselves Visa Free. All of a sudden the world got China-fever.

An Imperfect Lens

I had an interesting back and forth with about this yesterday. For Kaiser, there are too many pro-China commentators taking the “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” attitude to the foreign press. “When it's combined with this ethnonationalist expectation that, as someone of Chinese descent, she should be more "favorable" or less critical in her coverage, and with a detectable misogyny that's altogether too common when the "villain" is a woman, it's a terrible look and reflects badly on Beijing, as does this expulsion.”

The thing is, I’ve been a reporter. And my value as a reporter has always been to get “the story.” I feel like if we only read the respectable foreign press on China, we would have missed “the story” time and again. The western press have given us cliche after cliche while consistently missing the mark.

Instead of learning about China’s transformative infrastructure buildout, we got stories about ghost cities. Instead of contexualizing belt-and-road projects as an initiative rewiring our world, we got stories about bridges to nowhere and debt traps. Instead of covering the Chinese revolution in mobile payments, we got stories about social credit score and AI surveillance. Even when Chinese progress is undeniable, the vaguely ominous question “…but at what cost?” is tacked on at the end.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of China throwing reporters out, I think the foreign press needs to take some responsibility for how they let their readers down. They need to take a look in the mirror and realize that they missed the Big Story and it wasn’t the Chinese government’s fault.

“No doubt there are huge holes and a lot of biases, structural and otherwise. But a great many would be addressed better by having WAY more reporters, not fewer,” argued Kaiser. Maybe he’s right. I really don’t know.

Press freedom wasted

I’m not a big fan of how the Chinese handles the press, either internally or with regards to foreign correspondents. However, I agree with George Yeo that the Western press has done everybody a disservice:

The Western world has been so used to being dominant and of patronizing the non-western world that when China made rapid strides, they found it psychologically difficult to accept. And there was an informational campaign to diminish China. The trouble is when you do that you deceive your own people. And for far too long there was an underestimation of China.

…and suddenly when the statistics break through the information war people got angry.

The ironic thing is, despite the fact that China felt burnt by foreign coverage, they are actually in the process of trying to get more reporters in again. Right now the strategy seems to be being a lot free-r with temporary reporting visas. At least, that’s what I heard from a freelance reporter passing through Taipei. The problem is, there’s a lot of good stuff happening in China now that they would like international press coverage on. No amount of tiktok-famous influencers can quite replace the recognition of a positive story in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

I’ll let Mattias Müller, who used to work in China as a correspondent, have the last word:

1. I am firmly opposed to the expulsion of journalists. However, the full picture is that during Trump’s first term, America also expelled Chinese journalists in droves.

2. Regarding my personal experiences as a correspondent in mainland China: the Chinese no longer trust the correspondents, and the correspondents no longer trust the Chinese. However, the latter bear a large share of the blame for this.

3. Two anecdotes: I was looking for a Chinese expert on North Korea. The one who was perfectly suited to my needs no longer spoke to correspondents. Why? The NYT had put words in his mouth that he hadn’t said in an interview.

4. One of the world’s leading facial recognition companies was open to correspondents; I had a great appointment there. At some point, the company stopped receiving correspondents because a German TV channel had turned the entire appointment into a human rights issue.

5. I oppose the expulsion of correspondents. But Western media have often degenerated into mere propaganda machines. This is also the result of transatlantic sycophants in the headquarters. Any correspondent who doesn’t bash China has lost.

The problem with living in a copium bubble is that it makes you lose IQ. This is because it takes a lot of bandwidth for the human brain to sustain a narrative in the face of contradictory reality. Even really smart people end up sounding really dumb when they’ve been coping for too long.

You grasp at straws.

Taiwan was not only on the menu at the Trump-Xi summit, there’s plenty of evidence in what Trump said after leaving Beijing that he is in the process of haggling over Taiwan’s price even now. He made some disparaging comments playing down American commitment to protecting Taiwan, but then he plays coy over the status of the US$14 billion arms deal to Taiwan. And then, as a wild card, he said he might call “that guy,” meaning President Lai Ching-te.

All of a sudden, anxiety turned to giddiness in Taiwan. Wait! Is Trump going to break with 40+ years of diplomatic protocol and talk on the phone with the President of Taiwan? This is better than Christmas!

This is what I mean by grasping at straws. It’s obvious to me that whatever Trump is up to by teasing this highly inflammatory move, it isn’t anything good for Taiwan. If anything, Trump is trying to create another chip: threatening diplomatic attention towards Taiwan to create leverage with China. Meanwhile, the most likely assessment is that the call is not going to happen.

Part of the Deal

“If Trump wanted to approve the deal he can sign it without input from Taipei,” said Institute of National Defense and Security Research analyst Chieh Chung (揭仲), “the fact that he wants to reach out might not be a great sign.”

Understand that if a Trump-Lai call actually happened, it would be a breach of protocol so devastating the sale itself would be small potatoes. Unless it is a bargaining ruse, it makes zero sense for Trump to call Lai to discuss the sale.

I should also probably mention here that acting Navy secretary Hung Cao told a Senate hearing that the US is pausing a US$14 billion arms sale to Taiwan to ensure it has enough weapons for the Iran war. This is just bizarre to me. First of all, American arms sales to Taiwan don’t come with a firm must-deliver-by date. They just kind of show up when they show up, and the inability to fulfill the order in a timely manner has never impeded American defense contractors taking Taiwanese money before. Second of all, if it is true that the US depleted its weapons stocks so rapidly fighting a skibidi country like Iran, how are they intending to square up to China?

As of writing, Trump is still promising to decide “soon.” But unless your brain has been copium-poisoned over the past however-many years, you know that the answer doesn’t really matter.

As soon as the defense of Taiwan became open to transaction, we’ve effectively lost American protection. Because Taiwan can pay and pay…but it can never outbid China.

One Cope After Another

Thousands of political leaders and activists took to the streets on Saturday to protest the legislative cuts to the defense supplemental budget. “This is not called peace, this is called surrender!” shouted the crowd.

But if the KMT/TPP lawmakers made Taiwan unsafe by passing a smaller defense supplemental, isn’t Trump also making Taiwan unsafe by delaying the approval of the package as a part of dealmaking with China? Why didn’t they march to AIT to protest? But I digress.

Interestingly…there was not a single flag or banner for Taiwan independence at the rally. Maybe this was an accommodation to Trump’s recent disparaging remark: “We are not going to have someone say let’s go independent because the U.S. is backing us.”

I think there are a lot of Taiwanese people watching all this go down and quiet quitting the copium bubble right now. They’re probably not going to say anything right away. But by this November’s local elections, there will be signs.

The people of Taiwan were holding their breath the entire time Trump was in Beijing, hoping that he wouldn’t say anything about Taiwan. As he stepped on Air Force One, there was a collective sigh of relief. And then this happened:

Q: On Taiwan, the 1982 assurances that President Reagan gave said the US would not consult with China on arms sales to Taiwan. But it sounds like you consulted China on arms sales.

TRUMP: Well I think 1982 is a long way -- that’s a big far distance away. We discussed arms sales in great detail and I’ll be making a decision. The last thing we need is a war.

He didn’t stop there. Later on sitting down with Fox:

“When you look at the odds, China is a very, very powerful, big country. That’s a very small island.”

“Think of it; it’s 59 miles away. We’re 9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem.”

In another interview with Fox’s Brett Baier:

“We are not going to have someone say let’s go independent because the U.S. is backing us.” “I want them to cool down I want China to cool down.”

“If you look at the history, Taiwan was developed because we had presidents that didn’t know what the hell they were doing. They stole our chip industry.”

What the Chinese wanted was one definitive “peace gesture” while he was in Beijing. Something similar to Bill Clinton saying the three No’s in Shanghai. What they got was much more Trumpian and chaotic...a whole slew of maximally insulting informal Trumpisms kind of saying the same thing, but not as definitively.

According to Lev Nachman, professor of political science at NTU: “Before the trip, Trump was ambiguous about Taiwan. In the last 24 hours, his language towards Taiwan has changed to more closely resemble what Beijing wants to hear. Even without a formal policy change, these rhetorical changes are a big win for Xi.”

DPP in Quandary

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is now in an absolute quandary. This is especially true for the president, Lai Ching-te, long known for his sobriquets “The Golden Grandson of Taiwanese Independence” (台獨金孫) and “a pragmatic worker for Taiwanese Independence” (務實的台獨工作者).

What’s worse, the DPP had been betting the farm on American support. In fact, any political opponents who dare doubt either American ability or willingness to come to Taiwan’s defense in a Taiwan Straits contingency is described as an US Skeptic and “American Skepticism” (疑美論）is defined as a CCP conspiracy theory.

In response, President Lai took to Facebook and claimed “there is no Taiwanese independence issue.”

"Taiwan has always been a firm defender of the status quo on both sides of the Strait, not a party to change it," he wrote.

“The true meaning of "Taiwan independence,” said Lai, means “Taiwan not being part of the PRC” and “the Republic of China (ROC) and the PRC are not subordinate to each other.”

Lai’s new-found love for the Republic of China and Status Quo is getting derision from the opposition. But it is true that the DPP has moved to the paradoxical “Status Quo is independence” stance quite a while ago.

This is a formulation most commony associated with his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen. I used to think it was pretty clever way of skirting China’s red lines. But mainlanders always told me, no, it’s not acceptable, undermines status quo, and will eventually be dealt with.

“What can Beijing do?” Turns out…they stopped talking to Taiwan and went directly to the United States. The Taiwanese can tune Beijing out. But if the same message comes out of the mouths of the POTUS, they have no choice but to listen.

Removing the logs to kill the flame

Su Chi, the architect of the 92 Consensus, has been telling it like it is. Tuff...but is he wrong?

"Beijing's Taiwan policy has been turning from 'cross-straits negotiations' to 'China-US negotiations.' If that still fails to bear fruit, they'll just do it themselves."

"American support has always been the logs sustaining the fire of Taiwanese independence. China realized that removing the logs eventually kills the fire."

Trump saying "I'm not looking to have somebody go independent" was a big log removed from the fire.

"We're living in a bipolar world. Xi's 'constructive strategic stability' is meant to stabilize the relationship so competition can be contained, and not flare into conflict. The Americans have not repeat the Chinese wording exactly but Rubio spoke of 'strategic stability.' The Americans seem accepting."

"Xi can get Taiwan done three ways: deal with the Taiwanese, deal with the Americans, or unilaterally," said Su, "the people of Taiwan need to think again. America is not coming."

By the time you read this Trump and his entourage of CEOs are probably jetting back to the US, leaving us with the question, what just happened during his Beijing trip? I’m guessing nothing got concluded in such a short time. The Chinese side would like to put in place a framework that would shape our global power dynamics. The Americans just wanted deals, deals, deals!

He said, Xi said

There was no final joint readout as many speculated might happen. Instead, you had a huge, honking, long readout from the Chinese side that completely fails to mention Iran and a tweet-friendly tiny readout from the Americans that totally fails to mention Taiwan. The American readout is literally just a tweet. That’s the whole readout!

In short, neither side is willing to move on the other side’s top issue yet. There is a LOT of negotiations still left to do. Xi is slated for a return visit in September. Close enough to give Trump a bump in the mid-terms if the visit goes well.

Taiwanese breathed a sigh of relief that the American readout does not mention Taiwan at all. But the Chinese readout makes it clear that Taiwan is now THE red line in US/China relations. And the US has more to ask of the Chinese than the Chinese does of the US. You figure it out. From the Chinese official readout:

I’m going to guess the trip to Beijing was deliberately kept very short in order to temper expectations because they didn’t intend to conclude anything this trip. There’s not much that both sides agree on, but there’s this: both would like a fresh start in the relationship between the two biggest powers in the world.

Escape from the Thucydides Trap

Trump doesn’t seem to have a coherent vision for how he want the China/US relation to go except having spent all of last year figuring out that China’s too big to bully, he now wants to cooperate. He doesn’t have a framework, he has a wishlist. He needs good headlines. He needs help with Iran and opening up the Straits of Hormuz. He would like to make a lot of deals. He wants China to buy more American soybeans and beef.

Apart from Taiwan, the Chinese just have one demand…that the United States and China work together to escape the Thucydides Trap. “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world?”

What Trump heard though was “they’re calling us a declining nation.”

Have we reached the end of strategic stovetouching?

A lot of what Trump did so far is what I’ve been calling “strategic stovetouching.” As I said when last November’s National Security Strategy (NSS) document came out, a lot of the outlandish things Trump does is actually trying to establish the new limits of American power. He started by challenging China on tariffs. But when that proved too hot to handle, he pivoted straight to squeezing his allies. He successfully kidnapped Maduro from Venezuela. Not long after that, he made the fateful decision to hit Iran.

Until Trump finish testing the limits of American power, I don’t think it is ready to settle down and be a good partner like China wants. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen eventually. Maybe it is unreaasonable to expect a country like the United States to give up on primacy without trying all the options to restore it first.

Trump seems to be doing it as a speedrun.

Bart de Wever delivered a blunt message at Davos: “Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is another.” The Belgium Prime Minister was talking about Europe’s awkward position as an American ally with Stockholm Syndrome. Since then, the Gulf Allies have also become unhappy vassals. Even in Taiwan, of all places, there is a backlash against excessive American demands and doubt about their intention to follow through on their side of the bargain. Are there any happy vassals of America left in the world?

Yes, I argue: Japan. Yesterday I had a conversation with a Japanese user on twitter that completely revealed to me the psychology behind Japan’s utter loyalty to America and why it will be very, very difficult for China to “flip” Japan as a US ally.

I mean…I wonder what it must be like for the Japanese to see the Trump-Xi love fest in Beijing. Especially after Trump basically pushed them to the front lines in a Taiwan contingency...

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“America Skepticism” used to be a derogatory label put on critics of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). If you doubt America, you are probably in the pockets of the Seeseepee seeking to sow dissent and division amongst like-minded democracies.

However, these days, it’s the Pan-Greens who are casting doubt on what the American president is actually saying.

When asked about Washington’s longstanding support for Taiwan’s defense, Trump said Monday that, “I’m going to have that discussion with President Xi.” “President Xi would like us not to, and I’ll have that discussion. That’s one of the many things I’ll be talking about.”

Veteran commentator Huang Wei-han can barely believe what he’s hearing. Wait, is Trump allowed to do that?

He’s not allowed to say that!

“Trump should not be discussing arms sales to Taiwan with Beijing!” said Huang, “who am I to say that? I’m nobody. But it goes against the Six Assurances. It’s very clear.”

It is very cute that commentators on both sides of the straits are still waving around the 817 communique and the Six Assurances of 1982 as serious guidelines of what can or cannot happen. Short reminder: the 817 communique is a promise to the Chinese that America will taper weapon sales to Taiwan. On the same day, the Reagan administration turned around and gave Taiwan the Six Assurances in secret, which promises, amongst other things, that America will not discuss arm sales to Taiwan with Beijing.

Weapon sales to Taiwan have hardly tapered since the 817 communique was inked in 1982, so I don’t know why Huang is clutching his pearls about the much less binding Six Assurances to Taiwan being violated. A reminder that it was an executive order that remained classified until 2022. They are “semiformal guidelines.” A pinkie-swear that somehow became a load-bearing pillar of cross-straits diplomacy.

That one of the most respected voices in news in Taiwan would still treat the almost half-century old cable as some kind of ancient covenant is a hint that it’s not the America Skeptics but the America Believers that are no longer reality-based. The America they believe in is not the America in front of us today, embodied by the Donald, but the America of Yore. The America Believers are still living in their heads in the unipolar world.

In the same stream, Huang railed and seeth against the KMT lawmakers who passed a US$25 billion arms package of weapon purchases from the US. It should have been the full US$40 billion in Huang’s opinion. “Just have the money ready…if someone in the family needs life-saving medicine why wouldn’t you get the money ready first?”

I can only say Huang is a product of his times and it is no wonder that kids these days aren’t American Believers even if they are pro-independence. Intead of coping by referring to old American commitments, younger Pan-greens tend to cope by making the case that Taiwan don’t need American commitment if we can provide enough military deterrence ourselves. Drones are magic. Maybe.

What Beijing Wants

The anxiety that Trump might throw Taiwan under the bus for a mess of Boeing, Beef and Beans is palpable. But a Grand Bargain is not in the cards. For one thing, Trump is hardly agreement-capable. The last time he visited Beijing 9 years ago during his first term, he walked away with US$250 billion worth of deals, turned around, and began the American trade war on China.

Besides, Beijing has long insisted that there will be no deal with the US over the status of Taiwan because Taiwan is not America’s to give away.

However, I predict what Beijing absolutely will do is pressure Trump to say something verbally to “unslice the salami.” What I mean is Washington has over the years dialed up support for de-facto Taiwanese independence via small moves that are not consequential in and of themselves, but over time shifts the Status Quo. More arm sales, more unofficial engagement, more high-level visits, more military cooperation, more symbolic support.

We can expect a symbolic “peace gesture” from Trump. It depends on how hard Beijing can put the screws to Trump…and how desperate he is for a deal.

According to Politico:

It will be a great success for Xi to make Trump say something good for China in public like ‘I support peaceful unification’ or ‘I oppose the independence of Taiwan,’ or ‘Taiwan is a part of China,” one Asian diplomat said. “Trump is Trump — off script all the time. Let’s pray nothing disastrous happens.

A shifting of the atmosphere

According to military commentator Qiu Shiqing, there’s been a vibe shift in Taiwan since Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun came back from her own meeting in Beijing with Xi:

Maybe some people don’t see it yet, but the atmosphere in Taiwan have been changing bit by bit since Chairwoman Cheng met with Chairman Xi in Beijing. This time it’s a little different…it’s a bottom-up change. It’s not a shift dictated by the political elite in Taipei like we had before.

Can you imagine the pressure this puts on the Pan-green or pro-independence camp? We know that it is actually invisible, silent pressure is the greatest pressure of all. Now their media or talk shows are avoiding the topic of the upcoming Xi-Trump meeting if they can. They don’t want to talk about it. They would rather talk about [Taipei’s rat problem.] They don’t want to talk about something we are about to face up to.

Depending on what happens in Beijing, this shift might be accelerated.

Dynastic cycle theory is something relegated to the classicists in western thought. But in Chinese history, it is unavoidable. Why is this? And why is it particularly relevant to decoding our world today?

The Central Kingdom

The Chinese name for China, Zhong Guo (中國), is usually translated as “the Middle Kingdom.” I think it is more appropriately translated as “the Central Kingdom,” because for most of its existence, China existed as the center of the known world for its inhabitants.

China was first united in 221BC under Qin Shih Huang, more than 2000 years ago. Since then, it has handed the baton of legitimacy to about a dozen unified dynasties, with interstitial periods of messy civil war in between. As the famous opening lines of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms puts it “The empire long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” And whenever China was united, it was a unipolar world.

History unfolded in China as a series of dynasties, while elsewhere Great Powers overlapped in parallel and competed fiercely.

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