When my driver picked me up to take me to the New Capital, he was certain there had been a booking mistake. “Are you sure you want to go this way? I can take you to the pyramids or Alexandria instead.”

There was no mistake. But driving there, past a mural of Egypt’s President Sisi every few hundred meters (sunglasses on, pointing at renderings of his new mega-city) I didn’t know what to expect. There’s only so much you can understand about the New Capital from reading about it online. Almost all the pictures are airbrushed or shot to show only the skyline without the heaps of rubble just to the side. Even the name is confusing. After years of competitions, jury deliberations, and proposed names like “Kemet,” “Wedian,” and “Memphis,” the city is still technically just the ‘New Administrative Capital.’

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Cairo isn’t sinking like Jakarta, and nobody seems to know for certain why the New Capital exists. The official reason is to relieve congestion in a city whose metropolitan population is ~20 million. Yes, parts of Cairo are incredibly dense and congested, but there are also parts that are quite nice and spacious. The New Capital isn’t just a convenient annex to Cairo’s outskirts. It’s in the middle of the desert and took us an hour to get there and, according to my driver, “two hours, if there’s traffic.”

On the night of Eid al-Fitr, Cairo was filled with swarms of teenage boys eager to practice their English with lost-looking foreigners. So I asked them why.

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Based on my highly formal street survey, the most common response from teenagers was that “Sisi wants to show he’s got big balls.” Someone told me he wanted to be like Khufu, who built the first and biggest of the Giza pyramids. A lady who worked at one of the many lingerie shops in Cairo told me, with a look of historical resignation, “Egyptians have always liked to spend our money building great big things in the middle of nowhere.”

A surprisingly common response was that Sisi built the capital far away and with wide boulevards to make it revolution-proof. In a dense city like Cairo, crowds can surround a government building, but in a capital of eight-lane mega-highways, you’d need a car just to stage a protest. Several people also noted that it’s a place for the rich to escape to. This is expressed most clearly in Madinaty, the gated suburb near the New Capital that, driving through it, makes you question whether you are still in Egypt or in the suburbs of Southern California.

“It’s okay,” said a man in a dusted suit. “China is building it for us.”

Entering the New Capital

[Dune theme song plays]

The entrance to the New Capital is a gigantic gate rising up from miles of sand in all directions.

Everywhere you go in the New Capital can basically be summarized the same way: the biggest, most gaudy thing you’ve ever heard of, surrounded by sand and rubble.

“That is the largest mosque in Africa,” my driver told me, gesturing with his cigarette at a pair of Redwood-like Minarets rising out of the sand. When I asked to stop for a photo, he didn’t take the next off-ramp or even pull over to the shoulder. He simply came to a full stop in the middle of the highway while I got out and took my picture. The mosque was empty.

We also passed:

Sports City, built to anchor Egypt’s Olympic and World Cup bids, housing more than 22 facilities, including a stadium with nearly 94,000 seats, the largest in Egypt and the second largest on the continent.

Knowledge City, a $950 million tech campus, the government bills as a node in a future digital economy (reminiscent of Zhongguancun in Beijing).

Sisi’s new presidential palace, an enormous disc-shaped structure, said to be shaped in the style of the ancient Egyptian sun god.

An endless row of government ministry offices, each in its own monstrously large and gold-laced building, some with titles so specialized it was hard to imagine the staff filling a single floor, let alone these giant structures.

Green River, the capital’s park with fields of glowing green grass running through the desertous landscape, SIX times the size of Central Park.

What thematically unifies these monuments is the windswept sand that coats them all, aging the white facades as if the paint has not fully dried. Rubble and half-finished construction stretch in every direction, and stray dogs sleep in the middle of the highways. My movie comp: Bladerunner 2049.

This is no more true than in the downtown, with its cluster of towers, including the tallest building in Africa, built by the Chinese.

China

The city was originally supposed to be built by Capital City Partners, a private real estate firm led by an Emirati businessman, but that arrangement collapsed in 2015. Egypt then signed a new agreement with China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) to build and finance the administrative core, though CSCEC ultimately narrowed its involvement to the central business district. Europeans are involved too. Siemens built much of the power infrastructure, while the monorail is being built by Alstom (UK), though China is the biggest player.

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The New Capital is being marketed as a “smart city,” which in practice means a city pre-wired for surveillance infrastructure, data integration, and perhaps autonomous vehicles. I’ve written before about how China’s approach to autonomous vehicles, at home and abroad, is about more than just exporting cars but about exporting an entire infrastructure stack, reshaping the built environment so that the technology fits cleanly into it rather than the other way around. I didn’t spot any Chinese AVs testing in the New Capital (I didn’t see many vehicles generally), but the roads themselves still showed the foundations. Compared to Cairo’s honking chaos, they were wide, clearly marked, and fitted with cameras and sensors at the finished intersections.

This is increasingly the playbook. Indonesia is building Nusantara on Borneo to replace Jakarta, with the same decongest-the-old-city rationale, heavy Chinese involvement in its smart city and surveillance infrastructure, and the same ghost-town-in-progress atmosphere, now compounded by a new president who has quietly cut the budget in half and moved on. Senegal built Diamniadio, thirty kilometers outside Dakar, with heavy Chinese financing. Malaysia’s Forest City, developed by Chinese firm Country Garden on reclaimed land near Singapore, is now empty after Malaysian political backlash and capital controls killed demand. (It is reported that Forest City was not targeted at local Malaysians but at upper-class Chinese buyers looking to park wealth abroad, for whom the seafront properties were relatively affordable compared to coastal cities like Shanghai.)

China, of course, is doing this on its home turf. Xiong’an, announced in 2017 as Xi Jinping’s personal urban legacy project sits 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing, planned to absorb the capital’s non-essential functions and eventually house 5 million people. Seven years on, it doesn’t seem to be going great.

To be fair, there are versions of these neo-cities that work out. Astana replaced Almaty as Kazakhstan’s capital in 1997 and is more or less functional, which is presumably why the Egyptian government sought advice from its planners. But the big question is who bears the cost if it doesn’t go well. For Egypt and countries like it, the answer is obvious. For China, it’s more complicated than it might seem.

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Chinese SOE construction firms get paid to build, not to populate. Their revenue is front-loaded, and whether the city ever fills up is largely the host country’s problem. The Belt and Road Initiative, the Digital Silk Road, all the framework agreements and memoranda of understanding make the most sense not as instruments of grand strategic maneuvering but as the answer to a simpler question: What do you do with the most formidable construction apparatus in human history once you’ve run out of things to build at home?

The risk to China comes mainly when host countries can’t service their debt (which does happen, as Sri Lanka demonstrated, when it handed over a strategically located port to a Chinese state firm on a 99-year lease after defaulting on its loans) but even then, China has often been able to extract concessions, renegotiate on favorable terms, or simply absorb the loss as the cost of keeping its construction sector employed and its political relationships warm. In Egypt’s case, the dynamic is already visible. In 2023, China converted over $9.4 billion in Egyptian debt into developmental projects and investments, acquiring some state assets in the process.

If this is truly the Chinese century, build-outs like this are its texture.

The grand geoeconomic questions are worth asking, but driving past millions of empty residential units, I found myself returning to a simpler one: will these cities will actually be good for the people who end up living in them?

Abundance in the Desert

Millions of units already built, sitting completely empty. Imagine snapping your fingers and emptying Manhattan.

We spent an hour trying to reach the residential districts. Every street eventually gave way to rubble about a kilometer short of the entrance, with highway signs pointing toward destinations that went nowhere, like this:

What I could see from a distance wasn’t horrible. The buildings weren’t crammed together but weren’t too sprawling either (something close to what urban planners might call gentle density), and there were hints of genuine architectural thought. Cornices, setbacks, a sense of street-level scale.

The urban blueprint of the city, though, follows a kind of Soviet leisure logic: here is where you sleep, here is where you work, here is where you are permitted to enjoy yourself, and you will need a car to get between all of them. Le Corbusier’s dream.

As an American, there’s something mind-boggling about watching a relatively poor country throw up six million housing units in the desert while we struggle to build anything anywhere. But none of these places seem remotely pleasant to live in, which raises a question I keep coming back to:

Why is it that authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, which can build at scale, almost always build so badly?

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I have a few theories.

1. Central planning can’t account for how people actually use space, but that excuse only goes so far; it’s not a sophisticated insight to realize that walkable streets and mixed zoning are preferable to designated zones for socializing and designated zones for education.

2. A leap-of-faith bet on smart city infrastructure, the idea that you skip intermediate steps like building a subway and land directly in a future of self-driving cars. But walking will always be cheaper than AVs, and you can stop and talk to people!

3. There’s also something worth noting about what walkability enables politically. A city designed around cars is a city where spontaneous congregation, and therefore collective political action, is exceedingly difficult.

But my primary working theory is corruption and optics. When you have a vast plot of land but limited resources, the incentive isn’t to build densely and well but to spread what you have across the maximum possible area so the whole thing looks grand from an aerial drone shot to impress Sisi. If you can only afford to build twenty buildings, you don’t cluster them; you scatter them so the map looks full. The result is a city that photographs beautifully and is miserable on foot.

Most people on the streets of Cairo told me as much. They’d rather stay where they are, where it’s loud and cramped but there are shops, parks, places to kick a football, and no need for a car they can’t afford.

The bigger question lurking behind all of this is perhaps key to the century ahead. What’s emerging in Egypt and Indonesia and China looks like one half of a widening split: authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states with the capacity to build at an extraordinary scale, and liberal democracies that have lost much of that capacity, gridlocked by process, litigation, and political fragmentation.

The Japans and Norways of the world can still build metro stations and decent housing, so America’s particular impotence isn’t a universal feature of democratic governance. But those countries are also quite wealthy, and the more striking pattern runs in the other direction. Egypt, Kazakhstan, and yes, even China (once you step beyond the tier 1 and 2 cities) all retain a capacity to build that feels out of proportion to their material means. Their GDP doesn’t fully explain what they’re able to put in the ground.

The actual dividing line, therefore, might not be China versus everybody else, but between countries with entrenched rule of law and weak political consolidation on one side, and countries without either constraint on the other. One model can build a city for six million people and leave it empty. The other struggles to build enough housing for the people already there. Somewhere between the autocratic state that builds too much too fast and bankrupts itself chasing a pharaoh’s legacy, and the democratic state that can’t break ground on an apartment block without a decade of environmental review, there has to be a better answer. Finding it may be the central urban planning problem of this century (the one Abundance and Breakneck and YIMBYs are all trying to figure out), and, depending on how you look at it, the algorithm for how civilizations grow or decay.

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Ozymanidias, King of Kings

Whether the New Capital succeeds or not, it is an unmistakable monument to Sisi. His face is everywhere out there. There’s something fittingly pharaonic about it all. Khufu didn’t build the Great Pyramid to house the Egyptian people either. He built it so that history would know his name. Whether anyone remembers Sisi’s in a few thousand years is another question, and the empty streets of his great capital don’t exactly inspire confidence.

Ozymandias is the Greek rendering of Ramesses II, one of the most powerful pharaohs in Egyptian history, a man so consumed with his own legacy that he plastered his name and face across every monument he could find, including ones he didn’t build. Shelley wrote this poem about an Egyptian pharaoh whose actual ruins sit a short drive from where Sisi is currently erecting his monuments to himself. History, especially in a place like Egypt, has a way of rhyming with itself.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Beyond the NDAA, we also discuss…

• The AI Guardrails Act, the Anthropic debate, and why no one SecWar or AI company should set the rules for the kill chain,

• Her bill with Bernie Moreno banning Chinese connected vehicles,

• The Democratic playbook if the party flips a chamber in November,

• Data ownership, the Midwest’s data center revolt, and why a healthy democracy would be talking about AI every single day.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

NDAA Markup—The Most Fun to Be Had in the Senate

Jordan Schneider: Senator Slotkin of Michigan, formerly of OSD Policy and the House of Representatives — welcome to ChinaTalk.

Senator Elissa Slotkin: Thanks for having me.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the new NDAA we have, sort of. What are you excited and concerned about? Let’s talk in particular about ROBOCOM, the robotic and autonomous systems combatant command that the committee was excited to kick off.

Senator Slotkin: Look, the two days we do the NDAA markup in the Senate are typically my best days of the year. They are behind closed doors — which is probably why people act more normal — and there’s real substantive debate on provisions. Most importantly, say a Republican colleague has a provision and I’m like, “Look, I’d be with you if you just changed X, Y, and Z.” They send their staff back to change X, Y, and Z, and three hours later we revisit it, it gets a vote, and it gets in. Or two people have similar amendments on different sides of the aisle, and they go compromise over lunch and fix it. That doesn’t happen enough in this place, so I’m always happy to be in NDAA markup.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe before we do the specific stuff — is there any structural change that would make more of the building work like SASC does on NDAA markup days?

Senator Slotkin: The way you would do it is probably never gonna happen, because it means you kick the cameras out. That’s the only difference — the cameras are not there, so people don’t feel like they need to play to an audience. They aren’t kicking back with their political talking points; they’re actually doing substantive work. And it’s a pretty hard argument to make: “Hey America, we’re going to be less transparent in the Senate.” That’s a hard thing to do.

I think there’s a million ways to make the Senate more efficient. The Senate was a caterpillar and could one day be a butterfly, but is right now in the disgusting cocoon and doesn’t know what it’s going to be. I have a million ideas on how to reform this institution. But we’re effective in the NDAA because people are not playing to the bleachers.

Jordan Schneider: Do people really need those clips, though?

Senator Slotkin: I don’t know that people wake up in the morning and say, “I’m so excited for my five minutes in front of an Armed Services hearing today.” But those hearings have been televised for over twenty years, and no one’s gonna be the chairman who says, “I’m kicking out the public,” right? And I don’t think the public feels like they want less oversight and insight into what the House and Senate are doing. So it’s a tough position.

The way to deal with this is a different vision of how we use these committees — how we do work, how we build coalitions around big ideas. You were just talking about the robotics command. That’s a big deal — the idea to pass something that would potentially be a new command — and unfortunately, we don’t start discussing it until we’re really in markup. Our staff are looking at it before then, for sure, but you could imagine different ways of doing these things. I’m open to all of that. But for the reasons I described, I like NDAA markup because people quite literally roll up their sleeves and do real work.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a broader, weird information-asymmetry thing here. There’s so much in the NDAA, and as a principal you can only really get your head around a few provisions. How do you manage that principal-agent issue?

Senator Slotkin: Like everywhere in Washington, you have staff who are smarter than you and who are immersed in all of these things — who read everything, who go through hundreds of amendments and flag the most important, the most controversial, the most consequential, the sexiest, whatever. And you prep. If you do your homework — and some of my colleagues really do their homework, some of them don’t — if you care about substance, your staff is saying to you, “Hey, we’ve read through the two thousand pages. Here are the nineteen things we think you really need to know that are gonna come up for real substantive debate, and we’re going to make a recommendation on how you vote.” We discuss all that before I ever get in that room. There are giant binders full of amendments — it’s a whole process. But no one is the master of every detail. You get smart staff who can appropriately flag the big, big strategic stuff.

Jordan Schneider: Great. All right, let’s come back to my first question — though I do want to do an hour on procedural reform. Maybe for next show.

Senator Slotkin: You need a life. You need a life.

Jordan Schneider: What else is there to live for? Well, I watched the Knicks last night — that was incredible.

What pieces of the NDAA are you excited about and concerned about?

Senator Slotkin: I don’t like the Knicks, but okay.

When you have two thousand pages, there are things you’ve really fought for and care about, and there are things you don’t agree with. The things I was really glad got in there: the AI Guardrails Act — actually putting some guardrails on the Pentagon and its use of AI, particularly in matters of life and death. Banning Chinese cars on all military bases — I’ve been working on this for four years, and that’s for bases here in the United States but also overseas, where Chinese cars are just everywhere. We had important provisions on Selfridge, an Air Force base in Michigan, on PFOS — making sure the military cleans up after itself when it’s contaminated local communities, including in Michigan.

Then there were disappointments — things voted down that left me downright shaking my head, including my own provisions banning uniformed military from collecting ballots and voting machines, breaking the chain of custody of votes. That’s illegal anyways, and we should never be spending a dime on it. That got voted down. Also: not sending the uniformed military to voting locations. I’m very concerned about the authoritarian playbook we’ve seen over and over again, including in Hungary a couple months ago. The president has said if his party doesn’t win this election, then it was rigged. I just don’t want them to precipitate a national security threat such that suddenly they have to send uniformed military to the polls for the first time in our history. Never done that.

And we genuinely didn’t talk about the war in Iran. It was this massive elephant in the room. We know they’re all talking about $350 billion, $400 billion as the cost of the war right now — and it’s not over. Could we please discuss that? This war isn’t authorized, so are we gonna appropriate money for a war that’s not authorized by Congress? The top line is huge, and they’ve slashed spending on domestic issues. So there were big strategic issues at the big-picture level, and then a lot of things I was glad got in.

AI and the Kill Chain

Jordan Schneider: Let’s pick up on a few of those themes. AI starting a nuclear war is something where it’s pretty easy to see the consensus. But as you think down from the strategic to the operational and tactical level, there are a lot of really exciting applications. I was just thinking — to what extent could Claude Mythos do your old job at OSD Policy? Would I rather have a chatbot negotiating an Iran peace deal than Witkoff? Maybe! Probably! What makes sense, and what should people be concerned about? Because clearly there’s going to be a real edge from an effectiveness perspective if you can figure out how to use these tools right.

Senator Slotkin: There’s already experimentation going on across our economy on AI, and certainly at the Pentagon — there has been for years. What the whole debate with Anthropic brought up is that there shouldn’t be any one Secretary of Defense or any one company deciding the rules of how AI is used in what we would call the kill chain — decisions of life and death. That should be legislated, because I don’t want someone to come in and change the rules, make them too onerous or too lax. So we took a stab at putting some left and right guardrails on the use of AI, and it’s really about keeping a human being as the ultimate decision maker.

We all understand that AI is everywhere — even just doing a Google search, you’re using more AI on a regular basis, and so is the military. If it’s using AI to amalgamate health records or collect information about employees in a faster way, okay. That’s different from making final decisions on when and where to deploy a nuclear weapon, or domestic surveillance, or — again — decisions of life and death.

AI is here. I don’t think AI is anywhere near ready to take over negotiations for anybody. And the other piece we got into the NDAA was the unbelievably rigorous testing we need before any of this stuff is fielded. That is the difference. In the race to get more and more technology into the Pentagon, we need to take a beat and make sure we’re properly testing — just like we would a new weapon system, just like we would a new part. I would say even more so, because of some of the advanced capabilities AI brings. You just need really rigorous testing, and that got in on a bipartisan basis.

Banning Beijing’s Cars

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about your efforts to keep Chinese electric vehicles out of the US. You put forward some connected vehicles — CVs, sorry, not EVs —

Senator Slotkin: Chinese connected vehicles. Electric, combustion, whatever they got.

Jordan Schneider: What do you say to the argument you’d hear from someone like Dan Wang — that the way to actually do industrial upgrading is through the kinds of partnerships rumored between, say, a CATL and a Ford? That China’s advantage is now so great that we have to play the same game the US played with Japanese and Korean automakers in the eighties and nineties?

Senator Slotkin: I wrote legislation with Bernie Moreno to ban full Chinese vehicles and to ban the connected parts — the parts that send data back to Beijing. We did allow for joint ventures, but it can’t be a Chinese-dominant joint venture. Unlike our Korean allies or our Japanese allies — who in my mind are completely different, trusted partners in these deals — I’m sorry, I don’t have the same faith in China. I watch them cheating in the international system every single day, and so does every single Michigander. It’s apples to oranges. So we laid out a path for how you can do a joint venture in the United States, but it means the Chinese have a fifteen percent stake in that joint venture, not an eighty-five percent stake. I’ve written that this is the right way forward.

I’ve also put out a bill to ban them coming over our international bridges and tunnels. Michigan’s a border state. Canada is big mad at the United States — well deserved, for them to be mad at us. They feel the president is trying to kill their auto industry, so they’ve made the decision to import Chinese vehicles — tens of thousands of them, including BYD vehicles — with the same data package sending everything back to Beijing. So I told the Prime Minister directly: I’m going to try to ban those things from coming over our bridges and tunnels, because I don’t want them driving up to one of our bases or one of our infrastructure nodes, taking video and collecting data.

We’ve got a real challenge here. That’s why I did the bill, and that’s why it was bipartisan, just a couple of weeks before the big summit with Xi Jinping — because even my Republican colleagues were saying, “We’re hearing Donald Trump is gonna allow Chinese cars into the United States. We think that’s bad. Let’s work on a bill together.”

Does Michigan Care About Taiwan?

Jordan Schneider: Speaking of other things folks were concerned about Trump potentially doing on his Beijing trip — you’re a co-chair of the bipartisan Senate Taiwan Caucus. I don’t think you need to convince our audience of why Taiwan matters to US national interests. But I’m curious for your pulse check on where Taiwan sits in the constellation of things people care about, both among your colleagues and from a broader Michigander, American-people perspective.

Senator Slotkin: If you’re a national security nerd, as many of your listeners tend to be, you understand the importance of Taiwan and the implications of a Chinese takeover — the global implications, economically, militarily, the whole thing. But if you’re back home in Michigan — and I know, if you’re back home in Michigan — Taiwan is not at the top of your list. You certainly know a lot about China, but that’s because you feel like you’ve watched jobs steadily march out of your state for thirty years, over to low-paid workers in China. There is certainly a feeling that we have lost out economically to China.

I did a series of open-ended foreign policy conversations in Michigan. I pulled together a bunch of people — cops, teachers, nurses — with no national security background, and said, “Hey, you should get to contribute to what you think our national security priorities should be. What do you think of?” It’s probably very different from your listeners. They certainly talked about China, but all through the economic lens, and feeling like we had lost. And then things like cyber threats that affect them — their K-12 school, their hospital that got ransomed, their elderly mom who got money stolen from her. It’s national security threats, but brought home to the middle of the country.

So people have a lot of frustration with China. But when you say Taiwan — I don’t think they want any country to be invaded, but I gotta tell you, right now the American public is pretty frickin’ exhausted with foreign wars. In my state, they voted for Donald Trump last time. They were pretty convinced he was the guy who wasn’t gonna get us into more foreign wars — and now they’re paying for it, literally, at the pump. If you brought a bunch of Michiganders together and asked what they think of Taiwan, they’d say, “We know we get a lot of chips from them. We want them to be happy and healthy. But that’s not where my focus is. My focus is on surviving so I can afford to send my kid to summer camp.” They’re interested in the economic issues — not what feels to them like military issues very far away.

If the Dems Flip a Chamber

Jordan Schneider: Say the Dems get the House and Senate in six months. What are you excited to do?

Senator Slotkin: When the Democrats flip at least one of the houses, we should focus on two things. First and foremost, we’ve got to demonstrate to the American people writ large that this place can still function and pass laws that help them. What I would do first is take all the ready-to-go bipartisan bills — on housing, on protecting against deepfakes, a lot of the internet safety and digital safety bills. These have either passed one house or the other, or they’re completely bipartisan. Pass that stuff and show that government can still do good things, because I think there’s a real question about that.

Number two, there has to be appropriate accountability, follow-up, and oversight. With the graft that’s going on — which we’re only starting to understand — this place has a responsibility to taxpayer dollars. That’s what we do: we appropriate the money. You can decide what your lead foot is on any given day, but for me, the American people have a fundamental question about democracy, and we need to demonstrate that our system of government still works as our founding fathers intended.

Jordan Schneider: The defense-acquisition graft is a really interesting one, because on the one hand, for the Pentagon to be functional in the 2020s, it needs to play with stuff like OTAs [Other Transaction Authorities] and have more flexibility in spending money. But on the other, Don Jr. is on the cap table of half these companies that are now getting contracts. How do you think about managing that tension?

Senator Slotkin: It falls into a category I see across the Trump administration: Trump often has the wrong answer to the right question. The Pentagon does need new authorities, new flexibility. When I think about China, by the way, and some of our problems vis-à-vis China — it’s not that we don’t have interesting innovation going on in the United States that we can use as a warfighter. It’s that our adoption rates are years slower than the Chinese. Adoption is the thing. And that’s because we have really big bureaucratic systems that don’t turn and move and flex quickly. That’s a fundamental problem. So there’s a lot of truth to the need to be more speedy, efficient, and flexible.

But then they go and give it all out in these sweetheart deals — to relatives of the president, or friends of the president, or people who have done favors — and they just sour the entire thing. A lot of the innovation, especially in defense circles, is coming from the private sector now. It’s not like the 1940s, when the government was leading — at Los Alamos, say — and innovation migrated out to the private sector. Now a lot of it’s in the private sector and we need to bring it in. That requires different thinking. But I do not trust these guys farther than I can throw them to actually put up real rules and regulations to prevent massive conflicts of interest. Massive.

Rules of the Road for AI

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do one more, on the legislative response to technological change. The two priorities you just called out for your 2027 pitch — deepfakes, digital safety — have been baking since the era when social media was the biggest thing we were scared about, not the AI anxiety that’s going to accelerate over the coming years. How are you thinking about managing that transition, and what would Congress need to do to help us get to the other side?

Senator Slotkin: Okay, let’s imagine an alternative version of the multiverse where we had a healthy political system. If we were functioning like a healthy democracy, we would be talking about AI every single day in the US Senate and the US House. I always tell people: we’re at the point right now that was 1988 in the internet boom. Some early folks understood it and the transformation that was coming, but it was hard for the average person to grasp just how much change was on the way. We didn’t do enough to think it through and put up rules of the road. We are now at that moment on AI — that breakout moment — and we’re busy talking about invading Greenland. It is literally the definition of opportunity cost.

For me, that’s this body’s responsibility. A lot of it is connected to ownership of your own data. Your data should be something you possess, and we need a structure that allows for that in everything we do — because your data is obviously being monetized, but it can also be stolen and used against you, everything from a deepfake on down. So there’s a lot there on control of data.

And then we need rules of the road on the human being remaining the decision maker — the guy or gal who presses the button. That’s true on military matters, and we got this legislation into the NDAA. But I’m also working on a bill on veterans’ health care: yes, you can do pilot programs with AI to help speed up the process of getting veterans their care or their benefits. But you are not allowed to let AI decide which veteran gets a benefit or a surgery. A human being must be the decision maker — the AI can be a contributor to the decision. That’s an important rule of the road no matter how we’re thinking about AI.

Leaders have a responsibility to chart the path from the dark to the light. On AI and the future of work, that is just not a big enough conversation. I certainly know in my state there is a ton of fear and concern about what AI will do. We’ve seen job loss from automation, and now people feel like we’re up for another wave of it. And that’s all pouring out, by the way, in this debate on data centers. If you want to understand why data centers are basically the hottest, most galvanizing, most grassroots issue in a lot of the Midwest — certainly Michigan — it’s not just that a giant center coming to take a ton of energy and water off your system is controversial. It’s that they’re doing it on behalf of these AI companies, and no one knows what these guys are actually about — or what the future looks like for their kids if we hasten the use of AI in everything.

Anyways, that’s a long-winded way of saying: if we were not ill as a country, we’d be talking about AI every single day.

Motown and the Founding Fathers

Jordan Schneider: Awesome. All right, last question: one book and one musical genre. I’ve gotta write a song about how you just told me I needed to get a life because I’m too into parliamentary procedure.

Senator Slotkin: Sorry. I’m sorry! On musical genre — if you grew up in Michigan, you basically grow up on a combination of Motown and classic rock. Maybe a few other things in there, but those are fundamental. Chances are, if you’ve got a Motown song or a classic rock song, I grew up driving around with my friends after high school listening to it.

And on a book — I just bought a bunch of copies to give out to other people. It’s a very, very slim volume that uses primary sources on the editing of the Declaration of Independence — why certain word choices were made, with each chapter built around a different phrase. It’s fascinating. It sounds nerdy — okay, you’re a nerd, I’m a nerd — but it’s super fascinating and super important in the moment we’re going through right now.

It’s a book called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, and it’s about the sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Jordan Schneider: Amazing. There’s another version of that book that a historian wrote on the Gettysburg Address, for people who like their deep textual analysis of founding American documents for our 250th anniversary.

Senator Slotkin, thank you so much for being a part of ChinaTalk.

Senator Slotkin: Thanks for having me.

Motown song…

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is an epochal work that traces global power transitions from 1500 to the present. It’s gripping, forest-and-trees scholarship at its finest.

Equally impressive in different ways is his book, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860 to 1914. Not only is it god-tier diplomatic history, but it also gives you a feel for the era through its explorations of social, economic, domestic, political, and cultural dimensions of Anglo-German relations. There are fascinating US/China analogies that we’ll get into in this podcast.

His two most recent works directly inform the military coverage on ChinaTalk. Engineers of Victory looks at how people and the systems they worked within solved engineering challenges that turned the tide for entire theaters in World War II. His latest, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of Global Order in World War II, is a sweeping history of a radical transformation in the balance of military power, from the mid-1930s when America was just gaining prominence, to after World War II, when it had no other significant naval competitor.

The Parliament of Man: A History of the United Nations made me interested in international organizations and gave me my senior thesis topic about the creation of the UN.

What Kennedy taught me more than anything is this — sweat the details, look at the individual players, and zoom out often enough to understand what truly shapes the long-term fate of nations.

Over the course of this episode, we pick up themes from all across his work:

• Great Power rivalries of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, the China echoes today, and why potential antagonisms turn nice and others turn belligerent,

• The persistent struggles of liberal internationalists and why they rarely get the outcomes they want,

• Why China today is not Germany of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

• The surprising ways geography shapes global power dynamics,

• How fear spreads among nations and why mutual suspicion is so hard to escape,

• Why top powers blow it and lose their dominant place in the world,

• How systems and innovation win wars.

And much more, including salutary lessons from the Dutch and Swedes on boring yet prosperous futures, how Churchill’s interest in gadgets influenced the course of the Second World War, and why transformative action from the UN remains unlikely in the near future.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

How to Win Friends and Alienate Nations

Jordan Schneider: What is national power, and why does it matter?

Paul Kennedy: Since the earliest struggles between tribes and later between larger groups of people with their symbols and more organized armies, and in particular, the emergence of the modern nation-state around the year 1500 (as historians roughly date it) — this entity has existed. The nation-state, with its capacity to raise taxes, conscript, and enroll men to fight under the direction of, say, a Dutch republic or a Spanish monarchy, has fundamentally shaped global affairs.

Since that era, with the rise of the nation-state in Western Europe and its subsequent adoption worldwide, this thing we call “the country,” “the nation,” or “the state,” has operated within what political scientists term an anarchic international system. “Anarchy” here doesn’t necessarily mean everyone slaughtering everyone else, but simply the absence of a higher authority controlling global affairs.

The United Nations General Assembly lists approximately 189 or 192 nation-states, large and small. We give them all a membership, a vote in the General Assembly. Almost all of them have some sort of diplomatic service as well as a domestic home service, have a government and a constitution of one form or another, and interact with the other nation-states, the other players in the system.

Because the decisions they take over time impact individuals in different ways, we pay attention to this, to international history. We pay attention because this great power system, in terms of a relatively harmonious relationship between the nation-states, broke down into massive, expensive, and bloody warfare in the First and Second World Wars. It behooves us to understand this great power system and the nation-states which play such a role within the system.

Jordan Schneider: I want to begin with a quote from a German politician in 1903, which comes back to your idea of tribes. Eduard Bernstein, in a debate between the left and right in the Reichstag over Anglo-German trade relations said, “The entire question is this: When do we consider the position of one land to another in the manner of jealous, acquisitive tribes, which if one robs, the other is robbed, and when do we consider it from the standpoint of a peaceful exchange of nations?”

Paul Kennedy: A nice quote from Bernstein, who was one of the leaders of the left liberal and progressive parties in Imperial Germany, which were somewhat swept away with the coming of war in 1914. But he was still optimistic then.

You can tell from his question in that Reichstag debate that he was presenting essentially two large, contradictory, and distinct versions of understanding international affairs. Was international affairs to be regarded as a benign relationship between these advanced states and societies in which you traded with each other? Great Britain in 1903, when Bernstein was speaking, was the number one commercial partner of Imperial Germany. Germany relied heavily upon exporting many of its manufactured goods to the UK market. The UK exported a large amount of imperial and tropical produce to the German market. This harmonious interchange of commercial goods between states, as well as the harmonious interchange of their ideas, university students, travelers, tourists — that’s the benign view of international relations.

The more malign, suspicious, or competitive view is that these are rival tribes. They are in some sort of inherent, natural fighting, suspicious relationship with each other. So one is a hostile relationship and the other is benign and friendly.

As the years evolved towards 1914, these two interpretations of international affairs were strongly contested because if one won and prevailed, all would be well, benign trade would rise. If the other was true, then you had to keep your weapons sharp. You had to keep your navies big and strong. You had to have intelligence systems gathering information about what the other might be up to. You had to be suspicious rather than trusting. Those are two very different views of world affairs.

Jordan Schneider: The answer, of course, is both. Humanity would not have been able to reach the heights it is today if we hadn’t figured out how to cooperate with each other, but looking over the past 5,000 years, there are moments in time when that mindset shifts, particularly when it comes to great powers.

You raise this fascinating counterfactual of England not being anxious about America’s rise, even though they have a past history of fighting wars. The “ties that bind” — but there were plenty of those also between Germany and the United Kingdom. Is there a theory about when the mindsets start to shift from “we can cooperate with these guys” to “we can’t really in the end”?

Paul Kennedy: This is a question I pose to my students interested in international affairs and why systems break down. In the late 19th century, the number one industrial trading naval power of Great Britain was finding the world less and less comfortable because its relative share was diminishing, and the two quickly rising countries which were diminishing those shares were Imperial Germany on one side and the United States of America on the other side.

Yet, as you allude to, the story is that the British turn to an ever-more-friendly, almost contractual relationship with the United States and to an ever-less-friendly, ever-more-suspicious relationship with Imperial Germany.

Why should Great Britain, with these relatively sane and intelligent decision-makers in Whitehall, turn against one and turn in favor to the other? You can consider some of the major and obvious reasons and ask students to try to weigh them or evaluate their significance.

One is geography — sheer distance. Even if it is a rising great power, if it is 3,000 miles away, that’s less of a problem than if this rising great power is just 15 hours steaming across the North Sea in the middle of the night.

If that rising power on the other side of the Atlantic, as it threatened to be back in the 1840s and 1860s, might gobble up your dominion state of Canada, that would be different. But by 1903 or so, American-Canadian relations and disputes over borders and seal fisheries and other things had been resolved. So there was no hostile threat from this distant rising power across the Atlantic.

Historians also point out the enormous advantage of a common language. You could speak to each other and feel part of a longstanding English cultural world, despite the fact the United States was a polyglot nation with all sorts of cultural inputs. Around the turn of the century, identification with Anglo culture was predominant among American elites. That helped.

A good number of American politicians, from Teddy Roosevelt onward, grew up very much in this Anglo-historical tradition, and on the British side, once the elderly, suspicious Lord Salisbury had passed, there were also quite a few committed Americanophiles.

Then there is the issue of ideology — an autocratic nation on one side (Imperial Germany) and a democratic parliamentary or congressional nation on the other. So you can start listing a whole number of reasons why it was relatively easy for the British to see the rise of the United States as not a threat and why they were much more cautious and suspicious about the relative rise of Imperial Germany’s power.

Jordan Schneider: Regardless of which direction England would have gone, it makes sense that they would pick one or the other to try to be friends with. I want to zoom out from that to the broader balancing that happens throughout history. What strikes me over the course of re-reading The Rise and Fall of Anglo-German Antagonism is all of the balancing functions that are happening at any moment in time. Can you talk a little about that in the context of moments of great power transitions?

Paul Kennedy: Yes. Again, I would begin with ideology and cultural assumptions concerning whether the existence of another larger, preeminent great power was, from the German perspective, a potential threat that could hold them back or restrain them. This ties into the cultural assumption of whether the rise of another great nation and its economy constituted a challenge to one’s own status quo.

I emphasize this because we know that in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a very strong set of liberal internationalist assumptions prevailed. While not universally held, these assumptions were strong enough to be predominant in much of Parliament. They posited that the rise and success of another nation’s economy should be applauded — that it was, in fact, a positive development. As another nation’s standard of living grew, it would create an expanding market for certain British and imperial goods, and there was nothing to be concerned about.

This view stood in stark contrast to a different mentality, which held that any rise in power that shifted one’s own relative position or share of power should be regarded with distaste and concern.

When inducted into the Royal Historical Society, one is allowed to present a scholarly article to the proceedings of the Royal Historical Society, and I chose a piece called “Idealists and Realists in British Foreign Policy from 1865 to 1939,” which covers the years we’re talking about here.

I set them up as two almost contradictory stereotypes. The rise of German trade is a good thing, the liberal internationalists would say, because it enhances the overall prosperity and commerce of the globe. The rise of German industry is a bad thing because it’s potentially a threat to us.

I cited a visit by the British newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe where he has his driver take him on a tour of the great Ruhrgebiet and the Rhineland in Germany to see the massive iron, steel, and coal facilities around 1908. He comes back and writes to a colleague, “Every one of those great chimneys pointing up into the sky are essentially great gun barrels pointing at England.” That’s an extraordinary quotation if you think about it. He instantly turns the industrial prowess of a new factory nation into something which is potentially going to challenge the British Empire.

Jordan Schneider: There are two aspects of causation here. First, the growth of other nations is fine and good until they accumulate enough latent power to get in your way. On the other side, we have Germany, initially content with its land-based ambitions in Europe, but then, at a certain point, embraced Weltpolitik. For various reasons — domestic politics, foreign policy, national power, greatness, or otherwise —they concluded that both colonies and a massive navy were essential.

I’m curious how you view these two sides of the picture. Is it almost inevitable for liberal internationalism to recede once another power grows sufficiently? And is it also inevitable that once powers reach number three or number two on the global stage, trending upward, they simply begin to “feel their oats” and consider national aggrandizement through territorial expansion and military power as a birthright?

Obviously, we’re talking about Germany and the UK in history, but the China echoes are evident.

Paul Kennedy: The China echoes are certainly around. There is the issue, though, of proximity, or geography, which I discussed earlier. Even today, with the rise of a much larger Chinese navy, the vastness of the Pacific still helps to temper or relativize the size and nature of that threat.

But, a large and growing industrial power with a big navy like Germany under the erratic Kaiser Wilhelm — and here we have to consider the personal, idiosyncratic aspects of history — posed a very different situation. Even if Germany had been a truly benign democracy under a constitutional monarch like George V, rather than the Kaiser, who actively directed armies and navies, would the sight of a massive German fleet moving in and out of Wilhelmshaven, Kiel, and Hamburg still have felt just a little too close for comfort?

I scratch my head about that. Is there ever a time, is there ever a place where two very large powers with two very large armies or navies or air forces have felt comfortable with another power so close?

There’s another comparator here for people to think about. Around 1902, in order to get some relief from imperial pressures on their interests in the Far East, the British came into what was going to be a longstanding alliance relationship with the rising country of Japan. Japan itself was going to build a modern outward-looking navy, and Japan was going to be moving into parts of the Asian mainland — but that didn’t seem so threatening at 8,000 miles away.

So I do wonder whether distance in the first place, then cultural and ideological similarity or antagonism, and then trade rivalries and other things, put together form the complex explanation as to why Britain found it so much more difficult to deal with and be reconciled to a rising Germany than to a rising United States.

Jordan Schneider: You close this book by saying that unless the Germans surrender their desire and inherent capacity to alter the existing order in Europe and overseas, or unless the British were prepared to voluntarily accept a great change in that order, then their vital interests remained diametrically opposed. This rhymes with something that Mike Gallagher and Matt Pottinger write in their Foreign Affairs article about their vision of victory with China – that we have to compete with them until they give up on military modernization and decide that they want to be friends with everyone in a convincing and verifiable way.

The question is — is that ever a reasonable expectation for a country that has enough productive energy to get to the number two slot in the first place? The fascinating thing about Germany in that era was that all the trend lines were pointing in their direction. They had the best technology, they were growing the fastest, and they had the largest productive forces. Had they triggered this global antibody mechanism 10 or 20 years later than 1914, we may be looking at a very different world today. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, and that’s a similar story that you can point to with China and Xi over the past 10 years as well.

Paul Kennedy: It would take a big concession, an act of inordinate political wisdom for the rising successful number two to say, “I understand the neuralgia of the number one as we become more and more a success story. I am going to be superbly clever here, and I’m going to temper down the shape and the size of the imperial German navy.”

It could be an overseas cruiser fleet navy. It could be a defensive home waters navy. It would not be a large, powerful, fast battle fleet navy put into German ports, which are only 20 hours steaming from the east coast of England. We get that. So we are going to invest our energies into more successful industrial production, science, technology, innovation, overseas commerce, but we’re not going to hit the neuralgic point of a navy.

We’re going to take a risk. The risk would be that this dominant imperial number one, in some contests regarding the future of Samoa or Southwest Africa, would kick us around. Here, Tirpitz could say, “Once we have a big navy, we will never be kicked around again, but we’re going to go for a very bold strategy of reducing our naval overseas power.”

In the larger sense of prudent advancement, Bismarck was right. Keep emphasizing that Germany is a land power without much in the way of colonial ambitions and no naval ambitions, and you’re likely to have the British on your side. Or at the very least, they’re not going to come on the side of France and Russia in any future war. That is asking an incredible amount of concession on the part of Berlin and inordinate intelligence, which only, I think, Bismarck could have or show.

Jordan Schneider: Can you talk about some of the “red herring” causations from that period? You’ve argued that popular media or nationalism, for example, were actually downstream effects of changing power dynamics, rather than original causes.

Paul Kennedy: There are indeed factors we observe that played a role, but the question is whether they had an original causative impact. I believe the answer is no. Even amidst the nationalistic, jingoistic newspaper writings, excitable columnists, and nasty political cartoons of the late 19th century, if you examined the spread of these opinions and caricatures around, say, the 1890s, you’d find just as much hostility, derision, and criticism directed at France or, notably, Russia, as there was towards Germany.

In this age of chauvinism and jingoism, there’s a tendency to pretty much insult every other nation on the globe. Every other country and its people were caricatured. Cartoonists had caricatures for Germany, but probably a larger number of caricatures of France, of Johnny Crapaud, which goes all the way back to Napoleonic times.

Francophobia and derisory comments on France run entirely through the 19th century. If they fall away after about 1906 or so, it’s relative to the fact that you’re more apprehensive about Germany and beginning to appreciate that a good friendship with France is not a bad idea.

Jordan Schneider: One of the fascinating transitions, which we also have an echo with today, is this transition from liberal economics to non-liberal economics, where all of a sudden people start thinking about self-sufficiency and supply chains and access to critical resources. That’s also another one that is downstream from the original neuralgia and anxiety. I’m curious about your reflections on that moment, both pre-World War I and pre-World War II.

Paul Kennedy: It is quite striking how many observers and commentators move away from a position that international trade dependency is a good thing during the rapid transition before 1914.

There’s this very strong articulation, from the 1860s onward, by Cobden and Mill and others, that the more interdependent we are in our product chains between each other, the less likelihood there is for war. Not only does that lead us to a more prosperous world since we produce and send coal to Portugal and Portugal sends port wine to us — we don’t try to grow wine in Lancashire, and they don’t look for coal in Portugal — it just makes much more sense.

The closer we are tied together in our dependency economically upon each other, and therefore rid ourselves of those tariff barriers, then the better the world will be. Not only will the world be more prosperous, but it will be more harmonious because we all recognize our reliance upon each other.

Once you begin to say, “I don’t like the idea of being reliant upon those German magnetos,” or “I don’t want to be dependent upon those German steel turbines, I’d rather produce them myself just in case the world turns different and hostile,” then psychologically, your attitudes change. I want to be self-reliant — and the word itself has a very strong Edwardian schoolboy tone to it. Something that’s big and strong and self-reliant. I’m sure that Teddy Roosevelt felt the same about a rising America. We will not be dependent upon anybody else.

That’s a totally different, contestable viewpoint from Cobden that the more dependent you are upon others and the more dependent they are upon you, the more likely you are going to sit down and resolve any quarrels you have around a table in an amicable fashion.

This is why I became very interested in the way the planners for the new United Nations system after the Second World War — planners who were already drafting around 1943-44 — were trying to create in the future, when they had won the war against the Axis States, not just a security system, but a World Bank and an IMF and a global trading system with open ground rules because they wanted to articulate the fact that economic interdependence was going to be core to future world peace. In their mental world, it made sense that interdependency was a good thing.

Jordan Schneider: Cordell Hull, of course, is screaming from the rafters about this, but at the same time, you had the oil embargo and the aluminum embargo on Japan. It’s a very tricky thing to have both of these ideas in your head at the same time, which is where we are as a country today.

Paul Kennedy: Yes. When Cordell Hull and others call for economic embargoes upon Japan as a warning or as a punishment, then the total free traders, the 100% open market people, are bound to be upset. You’re starting to use economic weapons as opposed to seeing economic interaction as being a totally peaceful thing.

There are critics of the Cordell Hull position or indeed the John Stuart Mill position in the 1840s and 1850s, which was to say it’s all very well for you to plead for getting rid of all protective tariffs, having a completely open playing field, but aren’t you just saying that because you Americans have so much wheat in your wheat fields that when you have free markets everywhere, your wheat will be much more competitive than French wheat?

Therefore, your business is a threat to the French farmers’ livelihood. French farmers, therefore, need protection and tariffs against American wheat. And you are being hypocritical when you say, “Oh, let’s pull down all of the barriers,” because your competitive advantage, we all can see, is so strong.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because it’s downstream of our first conversation. When you’re scared, these are the sorts of moves you start to make. What makes you scared? Is it what the other guy is doing with the leverage they have over you? Or is it just the abstract possibility of what they could do to you?

Paul Kennedy: There are some interesting Edwardian cartoons of the British national type, John Bull, lying there in bed at night, fully dressed, of course, with his little pork pie hat on. He’s having alarmist bubble dreams of Germany coming across the North Sea with all sorts of imported goods and cases, with “Made in Germany” on the outside, coming to invade the British home market.

Do Internationalists Ever Win?

Jordan Schneider: Once that open and positive international vision of world cooperation starts to get questioned, is it a one-way ratchet? Are there any examples in history where the liberal internationalists beat back an intellectual insurgency from folks on the other side?

Paul Kennedy: They found it pretty well impossible. They were swimming against the tide in the period from 1900 to 1914, even though they tried on a number of occasions, around 1912, to dampen down Anglo-German suspicions.

When the internationalists, especially some of the British planners in 1918-1919, come along with their memoranda about the post-First World War global order, they’re driven to put that clock back — to say, let’s reaffirm the significance of the open world order of understanding and commercial interchange.

What’s more, they have this argument about the origin of the war. They say it wasn’t just Admiral Tirpitz’s navy. It was the rising suspicions and animosities over things like trade, commerce, and tariffs. The mentality of the people who want to put tariffs up is the mentality of those who are suspicious of other nations. If we can get rid of tariffs and have free interchange, then hopefully we’ll go back to Cobden’s world of interdependent economic relationships.

It’s hard to do, but this time we’re going to almost force it through with the League of Nations system and the attempt to renegotiate and reduce trade tensions in the 1920s. And it too, of course, is going to be rejected when Adolf Hitler comes in because German National Socialism, just like Italian fascism, is going to say, “No, we want to be totally in control of the resources of trade. We don’t want to be dependent upon any other nation.” Hence, they tumble towards the Second World War.

Jordan Schneider: What’s scary is that the reset buttons only manifested themselves after world wars.

Paul Kennedy: I can see the way you’re going. The reset buttons are there even more emphatically in 1943 to 1944. They say, we know that this reset position is the correct one. We didn’t do it sufficiently well or cleverly in 1919. We have to try again.

It’s interesting to see the emphasis policymakers, especially the American ones, have on creating the Bretton Woods institutions — the World Bank and the IMF. You cannot just create a new security framework in the United Nations with the Security Council unless you have the other dimension to it, which are structures for encouraging world prosperity and open markets. That’s got to be the new instrumentalities of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The British, who want to encourage American internationalism and America to step up to the plate, are really insistent. It’s not well covered in the historical literature, but they’re really insistent that the World Bank and the IMF are going to be headquartered in downtown Washington. There they are on 18th Street. They’re going to be very close to the US Congress.

The United Nations headquarters is going to be in New York because you need New York as the center of essentially internationalist propaganda. You need New York as a center of ideas and discourse and encouragement. So you put the United Nations in New York and the Bretton Woods institutions in Washington. It all fits together.

You’re going to need an American Congress to support the financial rebuilding of the world, and you’re going to need a New York media center to cover how the world comes together in the General Assembly.

Again, it clicks. It makes sense. Let’s not have the international financial institutions in Vienna or in Paris. That just wouldn’t work.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the third reset button of the 20th century. It’s an open question to what extent it really was a potential reset button. Do you think America blew it with the fall of the Soviet Union? How are you reflecting on that 35 years down the road?

Paul Kennedy: I’m shaking my head because, as you know from reading a bit of my work, a number of people who studied the international system tried to grab the chance of the fall of the Soviet Union and thought there could be another reset button in the 1990s.

Whether it was our own relatively small Ford Foundation/Yale University attempt to write a report on the long-term future of the United Nations, or whether it was some other larger commissions which were set up to look at rebuilding and re-empowering the international order, or others which were more focused on whether we could do something better than a World Bank and an IMF, whether we could have other instrumentalities to help us — there was a lot of hope and optimism around 1991. When the Communist Party in Russia fell, and Gorbachev and Yeltsin had triumphed, there was the idea that we could have a chance to reset and rebuild. But it didn’t last too long.

American nationalists didn’t like it because it would mean concessions from the American side, and it was difficult to think of how to bring China into this system. Now, I find very few voices suggesting that somehow, in the complicated world we have, we can use the United Nations organization in a large, creative way.

When our attempt to write a new reform plan for the United Nations with additional members of the Security Council like India had fallen away in 1995, the great United Nations man Brian Urquhart, who had been there at the foundation of the UN in ’45, said that the only things we can think of now are incremental and one-on-one efforts by United Nations bodies to try to do something to help.

A United Nations peacekeeping venture in Namibia or West Africa, which works and which suppresses the civil war and which later on leads to, for the first time, parliamentary elections — you can chalk that up as an individual victory for the United Nations organization and its institutions. But it’s not the same as anything large and transformative.

Incidental, one-on-one, episodic improvements are just about the only thing we can hope for until there is, as Brian would say, an alteration in the minds of men. He was always a bit hopeful about that, but he didn’t think it was going to come soon.

This gets back to your true but also somewhat alarming thought that you only get major institutional transformation of world relationships after a big war. And if you don’t want a big war, you have to be content with small-scale and incremental improvements.

Why Number Ones Blow It

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about big wars and preparing for them. One of the interesting questions with Trump and also looking back in history — going all the way back to Spain and its navy — is this idea of countries deciding to rest on their laurels and not taking seriously what everyone should have learned in Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: that productivity growth and overall national industrial and economic capacity is what gives you the latent ability to affect how the world operates.

I’m curious for any thoughts you have on remarkable examples in history where number ones just blew it.

Paul Kennedy: The best example of where a number one blows it is imperial Spain. All of the studies show that it ends up where it does because its leaders were driven by a religious determination that they had to carry out the will of God and, by either force of persuasion or of the sword, eradicate the Protestant spread.

Once you have that intense ideological drive brought to bear on a country which had many resources but clearly didn’t have enough to be the arbiter of Europe, Spain is in a problematic state.

Napoleon himself falls for the same hubris — “If I can conquer everywhere from the Spanish border to Moscow, then anything which is a challenge has to be eradicated, and my Napoleonic vision has to be asserted.”

I was talking to somebody the other day about the many good reforms which Napoleon brought to France and Europe in his period of political domination — reform of the civil service and the tax code, and the liberation of the Jews, the ending of all sorts of restrictions upon the Jews in France. But it’s all blown by the excessive imperial ambition of marching to Moscow and then trying to fight Wellington and the Spanish guerrillas in central Spain.

I also think of the countries that, at first, demonstrate imperial hubris and the drive to be number one, but then decide to just amicably step down to a non-combative but economically prosperous position. The Dutch give up their claims and decide to be more of a trading nation. Sweden, after the end of Gustavus Adolphus and his son, decides that it’s pursuing internal economic growth and development, but not overseas conquests and does not build up a large navy to fight in the Atlantic.

It may be a kind of boring way of life, but it made a lot of sense to them. This position is enforced upon Japan, of course, after 1949, by a constitution which says, “You shall have no imperial army or navy.” But look at the way the Japanese turn their creative talents into manufacturing, production, organization of wealth creation, and rebuilding of their cities in a remarkably clean and civilized way.

There are some benefits to the post-imperial condition, the post-number-one condition. It’ll be incredibly difficult to persuade many Americans that there are benefits to the post-number-one condition, I’m sure. Will it come in a hundred years’ time? Lord knows.

Jordan Schneider: Coming back to Napoleon and Spain, this idea of maximizing long-term national power requires running hot, but not too hot. Otherwise, you encounter imperial overreach, and things turn out badly. However, if you run too cold, you might end up “stuck” like 19th century Sweden or 2000s Japan. Modulating how passionate you are about your national mission, dreams of grandeur, or religious devotion is fascinating — determining exactly where you’d want to set that dial.

Paul Kennedy: Yes. There are interesting memoranda by the young Winston Churchill when he was trade secretary in Asquith’s cabinet and later as First Sea Lord. He examined Germany’s rise and said, “This is perfectly understandable. When nations experience a surge of economic productivity and creativity, they grow bigger than before.” Churchill questioned how to accommodate them instead of having an overly neuralgic reaction, allowing them a place in the international system. If we consider our contemporary and future world, this gives one food for thought — how do we want to allow rising powers like China and India a place in the international system?

Innovation and the Power of Problem Solvers

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about Engineers of Victory. You attribute the Allied victory to productive capacity and geography, both relatively self-explanatory, but also to what you say in this wonderful sentence: “the creation of war-making systems that contained impressive feedback loops, flexibility, a capacity to learn from mistakes, and a culture of encouragement that permitted the middlemen in this grinding conflict the freedom to experiment, offer ideas and opinions, and to cross traditional institutional boundaries.”

Paul Kennedy: Did I write that? Wow. I’ve always been interested in cultures which allow for and encourage experimentation, not too top-heavy or too “revolutionary” like the Bolsheviks. The role of a creative artist or engineer — or as I later rephrased it, “problem solvers” — became my focus. I started looking for historical examples of problem solvers in world history.

Problem solvers themselves don’t get anywhere unless there’s an encouraging environment around them, which allows experimentation and intellectual development. Again, I’d like to use a Churchillian example. When working on Engineers of Victory, I was interested in occasions when Churchill’s capacious, excited reign would recognize people working on ideas who needed encouragement.

The story of the U-boat destroying weapon — the forward-firing “Squid” system, which was a forward-firing depth charge — wouldn’t have advanced without support. The inventors had created this device but were struggling to persuade the admiralty powers to accept this new weapon. They faced suspicion and irritation from officials who wanted to focus on existing production.

These inventors got a chance when Churchill was testing new machine guns. They asked the prime minister to come around the hedge and look at their new forward-firing Squid, which could launch a depth charge into the hedge 100 yards away with the pull of a lever. Churchill was absolutely delighted when he saw this and wanted to encourage it.

Systems could allow the encouragement of new ideas and allocate resources to let experimenters and problem solvers have opportunities.

Jordan Schneider: Hitler also enjoyed his gadgets. Have you spent any time thinking about how the Nazis tried to build technological innovation into their war-fighting machine?

Paul Kennedy: It’s clear that Hitler had a fascination with dazzling weapon systems he hoped would win the war. His fascination with rockets near the end of the war demonstrates this. He had German scientists and creators developing weapons he believed could deliver a decisive blow against London. They allocated significant amounts of rare materials like aluminum and petroleum for their experimentation.

So it’s not just democratic societies encouraging innovation compared to a completely stupid and unrelenting dictatorial view. We know that several of Stalin’s scientific advisors, trembling though they were, managed to get approval from the “big man” to create improved weapon systems.

I don’t know the Japanese story very well, but I have a feeling that the major Japanese advantages in weapon systems came from developments in the 1930s, with very little evidence that wartime itself produced any innovations from the Japanese military-industrial complex. It was just more of the same, whereas in the case of the Americans and British, the scientific innovations flowing out of the system by 1943-44 were really quite amazing.

Jordan Schneider: There’s this concept of wartime innovation versus peacetime innovation. In the early 1900s, some realized that machine guns were going to matter, while others in the 1930s began to comprehend the impact of carrier groups. Meanwhile, enormous bureaucracies struggled to process these innovations.

This is analogous to what’s happening in Ukraine today, where high-intensity conflicts are changing due to drones and electronic warfare. Beyond just top leaders approving or disapproving innovations that cross their desk, what about larger institutions like navies and armies? What gave them the ability to implement smart adaptations rather than just being large organizations that resist new ideas?

Paul Kennedy: There are several matters to unpack here. Sometimes, bureaucrats opposing investment in newer technologies are doing so because they’re fighting a war that needs to be won day by day. They cannot divert resources to interesting projects that won’t become useful for another two years.

We literally have to keep producing these second-rate two-engine bombers because we need bombers for the fight across the English Channel. There’s a justification for saying, “This is all well and good, Mr. Barnes Wallis, but we can’t give you resources right now because we need those resources for bombs which drop on German factories immediately.”

It’s a truism that having an array of elastic resources where you can devote just 10% or 20% of your scientists or innovative capital to new developments while using 80% to produce standard equipment is very helpful.

Here’s an example — around 1942-43, someone allocating resources for aircraft development must have said, “Let’s give some resources to Frank Whittle, who says he’s invented something called a jet engine.” This happened while fighting the Battle of the Atlantic and beginning the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. Every pilot, aircraft propeller, and bit of aluminum was needed to build conventional aircraft.

Then this inventor comes along requesting resources and trained test pilots to help develop a faster engine without propellers, which sounded absurd at the time. But someone around 1943 must have said, “Let’s give this guy a chance.” I admire that culture of open-mindedness, though it requires some spare resources. I wonder if there’s a big historical lesson there.

Jordan Schneider: This relates to a major theme in all your books — to what extent is it really just a mathematical equation? Does success simply go to the country that is larger and richer, has more scientists, and has that extra 10% to invest in innovations that might deliver something ten times better five or ten years down the road?

You end several of your books with a lyrical conclusion noting that the balance of productive forces doesn’t matter to the person on a cruiser trying to destroy a U-boat while fearing they’ll be sent to the bottom of the sea. When considering innovative capacity or flexible organizations, is it simply that the bigger, faster-growing country will have better human capital and institutions? Or can there be dramatic disconnects that can’t be derived directly from economic advancement?

Paul Kennedy: That’s a big question that I grapple with in most of my books, sometimes more successfully than others. My book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is somewhat deterministic because it doesn’t focus on the individual, the creative spark, or the creative moment. That’s why I derived enormous enjoyment from researching, writing, and investigating The Engineers of Victory.

There’s a particular section in it, perhaps in Appendix A or B, where I tell the story of two young physicists who advanced miniaturized radar through experiments along the Bristol Channel. They developed the ability to detect metal objects moving a mile away on their small television and radar screens.

When I fast-forwarded to the Admiralty summaries from commanders of escort vessels protecting convoys across the Atlantic, I found a commander detailing how, at 12:30 AM, HMS Vidette, an old World War I destroyer, detected a U-boat on the surface 4,000 meters away and moved to sink it. I felt like shouting “Eureka!”

There’s your moment. The miniaturized radar created by those two young scientists was installed on a small escort vessel, and in the darkness, it detected a submarine 4,000 meters away, helping turn the Battle of the Atlantic. For a historian, finding that connection is deeply satisfying.

Accommodating Rising Powers

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about accommodating rising powers and whether accommodation even makes sense. We had this conversation about the ideology dial, and if it’s turned too hot, everyone else has to respond to that because it might not end where your bottom line is. Any thoughts on this?

Paul Kennedy: I cannot do anything other than admit that ideology counts. Whether people are pessimistic and suspicious about the other side’s intentions and growth or more open and welcoming is really critical.

We were perhaps rightly suspicious of Stalin’s Russia and what it was doing to its neighbors, the long-range rocketry it was building, and even a Red Navy coming out into the North Atlantic. We were entitled to be suspicious there. Whether we need to be so neurotic about a rising China, or whether we can try to accommodate it because its leadership is a pretty cautious and conservative leadership, is debatable.

Here’s something for a later discussion between us, because it’s a huge factor in the problematic US-China relationship that I’ve only just started to consider. I come back to geography. You may say that Kennedy’s obsessed by geography, but it’s something I’ve never really thought too much about before.

If you look at a map of the entire Pacific Ocean, with China on the left-hand side and the United States on the right, you have three million square miles of China and three million square miles of the United States, with seven to nine time zones between them.

What would it be like if, by some flash of a magician’s wand, the geographic space offshore of China were not occupied by an array of small American allies? All the way down the California and Oregon coast, there’s nothing offshore, which is unlike the Philippines, Taiwan, or South Korea. If there was nothing there on the other side, if from the Chinese ports you looked out all the way to Hawaii, the situation would be different.

Here’s the big problem — offshore of China, we have decided that we will support and ally with several geographically close places to China. There’s Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Suppose the roles and geography were reversed. Supposing Taiwan were 6,000 miles further to the east or west. Suppose all these big entities were offshore of America, and there was a kind of naked Chinese coastline. China wouldn’t be perceived as a threat.

Yet, geography is there, and you have to deal with it. In a way, both we and China are directly and indirectly prisoners of geography. Unless we can achieve some amicable American-Chinese understanding regarding the significant allies and partners offshore of China, we face a massive geopolitical conundrum. I want to think about that more.

Jordan Schneider: On that note, about a year ago, the Financial Times reported that Xi Jinping told Ursula von der Leyen that Washington was trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan. The scary thing with ideology is that it works both ways. My worry with your thesis is that we’re not dealing with the most rational actors. We may be dealing with particularly conspiratorial ones who’ve already convinced themselves that there’s no other way out.

That’s a very scary situation to be in, and it reminds me a lot of the way you ended the Anglo-German antagonism book. You essentially said, “It could have been an archduke, it could have been this, it could have been that. But you had these trains which were running in very scary directions.”

Paul Kennedy: The Germans felt trapped by geography. They wondered, “Why aren’t we allowed to expand? Some other countries are allowed to expand.” But the answer was, “You can’t expand because you are too close.”

I found this wonderful quotation for the book from the Imperial German chancellor and foreign minister, Bülow. It’s under a section about the inevitability of German growth. Bülow wrote (with some exasperation) in 1903, comparing it to a father turning around and looking at his fast-growing son, saying, “Hans, you stupid boy, you are growing out of your trousers. We will have to get you larger trousers!”

Bülow asks, “What happens if we can’t stop growing out of our trousers? Every year, our steel production grows up and up. Every year, our trade with the overseas world expands. Every year, the German population adds one million more people who need to be fed. We can’t help it because we’re growing.”

I shake my head at that and think, “What if we tell the Chinese, you’re not allowed to expand, you’re not allowed to grow?” And the Chinese respond, “We’re growing naturally. We’re growing at so many percent a year.”

Jordan Schneider: There is another underlying assumption in this conversation we’ve been having about China, which is that the relative national power weight is going to keep improving for China. I think that still needs to be put under advisement.

Paul Kennedy: Agreed. Rising China doesn’t have as many internal natural resources relative to its population as does the United States.

Here is further food for thought. Both countries are about three million square miles in size. Both have access to the Pacific Ocean. Both have very significant advanced technology and production. Both are modern industrial societies. China has a much lower per capita GDP, but it’s increasing all the time.

When I read reports about the limited water supplies in China and their diminishing natural resources and mineral wealth, I wonder if newer technologies will compensate China for those limitations. China is less well-structured in certain ways to be a clear winner in a long-term competition with the United States. I say that even though I’ve written about China overtaking the US in many ways, like the obvious visual markers, such as automobile production.

Yet in other ways — in resources per capita and environmental stress — there are limitations despite our own environmental challenges. I would flag this as an open question, which is how we should end conversations about great power politics and the rise and fall of nations. The future is not preordained.

Jordan Schneider: Is there anything in particular that’s on your mind nowadays? Anything in the news?

Paul Kennedy: It seems to me, Jordan, that great power relations — leaving aside Putin’s agitated and mistaken attack on Ukraine — have a kind of muted condition to them right now, but there are several nascent developments that might become clearer in the next 10-15 years.

Let me list two or three. There’s the so-called swing to Asia in international power balances. There is the rise of India. Even as I work on drafting my next book on the emerging tripolar world of three large powers — China, the US, and India — with their large GDPs standing considerably above everyone else, I recognize that India’s rise is coming slowly and, at the moment, in a non-aggressive way.

Modi’s visit to Putin perks up people’s attention, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. A Russian-speaking colleague here said that when she heard the translation of Modi speaking to Putin, it was a much stronger reprimand about nations not aggressing other nations than was reported. Going to Moscow shouldn’t be seen as a significant tilt in great power balances. It was just Modi playing all directions, which he’s rather good at.

We’re in a relatively quiet time in international and big-power relations. Will it change to a more decisive, turbulent, and disturbing period when Trump tries to pull the US out of NATO or do something similar?

Jordan Schneider: This was such a treat. It was really fun, so thank you.

But I had never seen one in person. With the UFC coming to New York and China’s greatest female fighter Zhang Weili headlining, I got my hands on a press pass.

On Media Day, I walked into a midtown hotel conference room hoping to generate rooting interests by press conference personality. Expecting WWE trash talk, instead I saw reserved professionalism. They were calm, talked about their young kids and Jesus. An older fighter Beneil Dariush, when asked about his legacy, said “My legacy is Christ!”

Dagestani (a Muslim ethnic minority in Russia) champion Islam Machachev was the only one relaxed enough to make jokes, while Carlos Prates, Brazilian fighter famous for smoking half a pack a day, talked some shit about his opponent being washed and fans wanting blood.

Zhang Weili, former champion, is a feminist hero in China for pushing back against gender norms around aesthetics and marriage. I asked her a few questions in my extra-bad-because-I-was-nervous Chinese.

Jordan: You’ve spoken in the past about how Chinese culture influences your fighting, but MMA is a famously international sport. Can you expand on how your Chinese roots influence your fighting style? And what would you want the fighting world to better understand about China?

The translator started summarizing what I said but Zhang Weili cut her off saying ‘I pretty much got it’ (我大概明白了), in so doing saving me a ton of face

Zhang Weili: Roots are really important and make me more confident. The most important thing is how it opens up my thinking to integrate more things. Chinese culture is very inclusive, as is MMA culture.

Jordan: Sorry, but this question isn’t super professional, but I have a daughter that just turned 1. What do you want to say to the next generation of women?

Zhang: Bravely be yourself, as long as you’re the best version of yourself you’ll be great.

(video timestamped below)

The person I was most hoping to dislike was Zhang Weili’s opponent, longtime champ and boring fighter Valentina Shevchenko. One reporter politely called her out for fighting the same fight for years, asking: “You have been so dominant for so long, and sometimes fans or critics say they want to see a ‘war,’ they want to see you get into a crazy exchange. When you hear that, does it annoy you?” Her response:

I hear sometimes people say, ‘Oh, we want to see crazy exchange, we want to see blood.’ But this is not... this is not smart. My goal is always to win and to show perfect technique.

You want to show not only fight—like what everyone can do, like [a] street fight or whatever—you want to show the art of martial arts, the beauty of fighting. And this is my mindset.

I asked a follow up, hoping to get her to expand on “what does the artistry of martial arts mean to you?” Said Valentina:

We now live in a dream of great athletes—to be able to fight a universal martial art that contains all techniques. It’s all together now—the martial art technique that includes karate, tae kwon do, boxing, jiu jitsu, all kinds of wrestling. I’m very happy I’m living at the right time to show the skills I’ve developed over 32 years of practicing. This is the art and beauty of fighting.

After that, I couldn’t bring myself to hope Zhang dished her out real brain damage.

But did the fight live up to Valentina’s vision? And does anyone in a UFC crowd want artistry over blood?

My parents first took me to Madison Square Garden when I was five to see the circus. Fast forward thirty years and I’m walking in the media entrance feeling like I’m somebody. Up three levels, I drop my bag in a cramped media room, where reporters barely watching eat on folding tables MSG-provided sad penne vodka, less sad Italian cookies, and mini water bottles. The press box they sent me to was on the sky bridge.

I sat down next to two Chinese reporters for the fights. One was taking video, a recent graduate of Columbia’s architecture MA program who works for my old employer Kuaishou part time, mainly to get into Knicks games for free.1

A fit Chinese guy and his wife sat next to us. I introduced myself and asked him what outlet they worked for. My new friend, embarrassed for me, told me he was The Leetch, one of China’s biggest MMA stars. “Jordan you really need to take a 功课, do your homework…” My credibility shot, I wandered out of the press box and into the nosebleeds, where CTE poster child Giants RB Cam Skattebo got the biggest cheer as the jumbotron panned across celebrity row.

Fights are too exciting and too boring. Minutes-long grappling exchanges require training in jiu jitsu to make any sense of. They’re also illegible from distance, leading the entire arena to stare at the jumbotron.

But when the fighters are standing, you are always half a second from a spectacular knockout. That tension commands attention like watching the Olympic hockey 3v3 overtime, but when taken in over six hours of fights it begins to numb.

Watching UFC feels oddly more comfortable than the NFL from a concussion perspective. Here concussions are the point, and everyone who signs up for the sport has no illusions about what it will do to their brain. Watching so many knock outs in succession makes it seem like a less big deal once they start moving afterwards. I felt for the concussees less on account of brain damage than twenty thousand fans thrilled at them losing the worst way there is to lose a sport.

Take Bo Nickal, who threw a leg kick that left his opponent unresponsive for minutes.

Once Bo turned around, he stopped preening and looked genuinely concerned at what he’d done.

Said Bo afterwards, “That’s honestly to me one of the worst parts about what we do — having to hurt other people, do damage to people. We’re taking years off each other’s lives. It’s sad, but it’s part of it. For me, it’s the strategy, the discipline, the commitment — that’s why I love this sport, and how difficult it is to be the best in the world. Hurting other people is one of the downsides of this sport. I know people like it, but in my mind it’s not very fun. It’s sad, but it is what we signed up for.”

In contrast there are a handful of fighters who play up the violence. Said Carlos Prates, famous for his boozing and cigarette habit, “you guys pay to watch violence, to watch blood!” But even he acknowledged after his win, “I don’t really like hitting a guy like that when he falls, but he fell while still conscious, in guard. So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to finish him.’ But that’s it, it happens. I hope he’s okay.”

Shevchenko spent 25 minutes on top of Zhang Weili, showing that the beauty of fighting sometimes looks a lot like getting sat on. Twenty thousand people booed. Valentina didn’t care. And at least Zhang didn’t get concussed.2

I hoped to continue ChinaTalk’s UFC coverage next week from the White House, but unfortunately…

“They maxed capacity!” apologized the comms person. I really hope Caity Weaver or George Saunders got the slot instead of me.

2

ICE is targeting UFC fans to hire.

LTG John W. Brennan Jr. is Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command and a 30-year career Special Forces officer, with command tours spanning 5th Special Forces Group, the anti-ISIS task force in Syria, and 1st Special Forces Command. He’s joined by ChinaTalk’s Justin, who served under Brennan as a young NCO in the Middle East.

We discuss…

• How AFRICOM runs a counter-VEO away game on 0.1% of the defense budget by working “by, with, and through” partners

• “Putin’s Purse”: trafficking thousands of Africans onto the Ukrainian front lines under false pretenses

• The Houthi–al-Shabaab pipeline and the threat triangle around Djibouti’s PRC naval base

• Building an “alternate DIB in exile”: drone centers of excellence in Morocco, South African artillery, Namibian satellite radios

• Why Brennan wants to “declare jihad against proprietary data streams” and where AI actually helps a combatant commander decide

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Jordan Schneider: Our first active-duty guest here on WarTalk, joined today by Lieutenant General John W. Brennan Jr., Deputy Commander of U.S. Africa Command, dialing in from Stuttgart. He used to boss Justin around for a while, and we’re looking forward to Justin perhaps getting a little bit of revenge today. TBD.

Justin: So I’ll start off with one of my favorite stories from my own career that doesn’t involve shooting or blowing things up. We had a major who I didn’t necessarily see eye to eye with. Colonel Brennan at the time had sent me to work in the Amman embassy, and this major decided that I needed to report to him instead of the Colonel. About two weeks went by, and all of a sudden I get an email: “Hey, haven’t heard much from you. What’s going on?” I forward him the reports that I’d been writing over that time. And then the next day Colonel Brennan comes over with an email very nicely to everyone that says, “Hey, just so everyone’s clear, Justin works for me and he reports only to me. So please direct all questions to the tower from this point forward.”

Really a storied career General Brennan has. I think letting him kick off, talking about his time — thirty-plus years in special operations, from Third Group, JSOC, Fifth Group commander — and then how you’ve seen the maturation of SOF and its role in the Army over that time, I think would be a really good way to kick us off, sir.

John Brennan: Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate the intro, it was great letting you think I was in charge.

While we were working this, the toughest problem set I think I had to work to this day, which was how to create a new army in Syria without talking to a Syrian or being in Syria. It started off really hard and it ended up finishing up in a very interesting way. But it shows you the power of SOF, and really the unconventional warfare aspect of what SOF and SF means, which is why we were created. So we’ve kind of come full circle through twenty-plus years of CT, but Syria is a great vignette of CT overlaid with unconventional warfare, because ISIS was the occupying power. We overthrew them. It took us a little longer than we wanted, but at the end of the day, that is why SF was made.

Created by John F. Kennedy, going back to the Jedburghs — and we’re kind of full circle coming back to that, competing with China and Russia, enabling partners to overthrow an occupying power should that come to pass. So I think we’re setting the seeds for what needs to happen across the globe.

It was great to come into the Army right on the heels of Desert Storm. Major conflict, but I watched everything transpire with defense cuts, and SOF actually grew during that interregnum period — late eighties, early nineties, we actually grew. In the nineties, the only people doing anything was SOF. SF in particular, I started off in Third Special Forces Group, probably deployed about two hundred and seventy days out of the year on the continent of Africa.

When we weren’t doing Africa, we were also getting pulled into things like Bosnia, as well as Kuwait, because we had plans we finally executed in 2003 and overthrew Saddam Hussein. But it was the closest thing to a shooting war that was going on — the leftover residual conflict with the Iraqis, enforcing the no-fly zones, and working with indigenous folks actually in Iraq. Not a commonly known thing, that we had SOF teams on the ground in both northern and southern Iraq well into the nineties, before the war started, working with indigenous groups to keep tabs on what Saddam and his ilk were doing, and then set the conditions for an invasion if we needed to activate the then O-plan. Which actually was hugely beneficial — you saw it play out in 2003. You had Kurds rolling up the parachutes of the 173rd when they jumped in. For the price of a candy bar, you could get pulled out of the mud too. So, ten Special Forces guys with their partners on the battlefield.

Again, the CT fight has shown over time the need for the interoperability of SOF and conventional forces, the power of combinations. We can’t do what we do globally without conventional support. We spot, assess, recruit, and train SOF operators from the conventional force for a reason. The lessons we learned over twenty-six-plus years of CT are still going on in Africa, by the way, and in the Middle East — we don’t want to forget them. But it’s been an interesting ride.

Why Special Forces, and Why Now

Justin: I really want to get to that. There’s been a lot of articles written in the last couple of weeks — Ned Marsh came out with a couple of pieces in Modern War Institute, Doc Duclos responded, there’s been some back and forth. What’s your take on the people calling for a wholesale personality change for special forces — that they need to come back and be reset — versus where you see the benefit being engagement, employment, and more contact? How does that balance look for you?

John Brennan: Yeah, I think it’s all about working with indigenous folks, whether they’re existing military surrogates, to do the work in their country so we don’t have to send eighteen-year-old kids in tanks to some place to do it. The only people that can do that are special forces, SOF folks. And then we have, obviously, the high-end National Mission Force missions — but they recruit mostly out of existing SOF formations for a reason.

It’s all about creative thinking, thinking outside the box, using old things in new ways and new things in new ways, to create effects wherever it’s needed. SF specializes in different parts of the world for a reason, so that you become experts and you have those relationships when you need them. Coming back here to AFRICOM in the twilight of my career has been interesting because the first place I went was Tunisia, and I met up with an old friend. We were friends as captains. He was in charge of their SOCOM. I’ve got examples of that in multiple countries. Those relationships matter, especially when you are in need and someone on the other end of that phone is a familiar voice. It really makes a huge difference.

Justin: When you talk to policymakers or decision-makers, how do you bring that reality to them? Like, “Hey, I personally know this person, and this is what he’s telling me” — from a decades-old relationship that I’ve stayed in contact with. How does that translate when you talk to an NSC staffer or someone in a decision-making role?

John Brennan: It’s hugely important. You can frame an action that may look one way, but you know the person — you’ve talked to them. You can tell a staffer or a decision-maker, “He’s doing this to get to this goal, and this is where we can help him. And if he goes across this line, he or she is probably not in line with our policy.”

Some of the coups that have happened in Africa — not every coup is a bloody one, and the reasoning behind it maybe is because the soldiers haven’t been getting paid. I’ve seen that happen. Going back to the nineties, I did a Flintlock-type event in Côte d’Ivoire and got home two weeks later, there was a coup. And I knew the guy on the front page of the Washington Post. He was hitting someone — he was actually hitting a rioter who wanted to take advantage of the coup. He was actually stopping it. His name was Sergeant First Class Sanson, and he hadn’t gotten paid, and his family hadn’t had the money to feed themselves until we showed up and they got what’s called 1206 monies from the embassy. They got extra stipends, because we train them hard, they need more calories. So I knew right away what he was doing and why. He was actually trying to stop violence, not create it. There are multiple examples of that I can point to.

The Center of the World

Justin: When you do have those engagements — one of the things we see is there’s a huge focus on Indo-Pacom, now there’s become a huge focus on Southern Command, and CENTCOM has always been the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. How do you talk about the importance of Africa and the role it plays in how you envision US national security and policy?

John Brennan: Sure. You start by looking at a map. Africa’s the biggest landmass and it’s literally the center of the world. To get somewhere you have to go over it or around it. And six of the biggest, most important global chokepoints touch Africa.

You see that play out in the policies of other countries. China tries to invest near the Strait of Gibraltar, near the Suez, near the Bab-el-Mandeb. Their only naval base outside of mainland China is in Djibouti, for a reason — because it’s the gateway to the Bab-el-Mandeb. They invest heavily in South Africa. You’ve got to go around the Cape if you want to get to the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic, or go through the Suez, you pick it.

The other reason is population. The growth projections are that 30% of the world’s population will be in Africa by 2050. Pretty daunting, and the growth rate is huge. Future markets, future labor force, future industry — it’s all going to converge at some point in Africa, along with a lot of critical minerals, natural resources, and energy. The biggest gas field in the world is right off the coast of Mozambique, in an area that’s a stronghold of ISIS-Mozambique — the only place they’re really operational. So getting access to that energy, and not allowing Russia and China to prevent us from accessing it, is really important.

Jordan Schneider: What are the trade-offs from your perspective of the fact that you get way fewer A1 stories in major American media about Africa versus Indo-Pacom or CENTCOM? How is that frustrating, and what liberties does it potentially allow you guys?

John Brennan: It’s super frustrating when you see China and Russia spend billions on information operations and all the media outlets they acquire influence over for propaganda purposes. Our story is a powerful story — it gets told, but it doesn’t necessarily resonate in the West. We get a lot of coverage in Europe, not as much as in the Western Hemisphere.

The things that we do, Russia and China can’t do in Africa. We have exercises like African Lion — we bring in forty-three different countries from four different continents. Russia does a BRICS exercise, they’re lucky to get five countries to participate. And it’s very scripted. They use African partners like training tools — it’s not an authentic, genuine partnership. We put the Africans in charge and then we support them, we mentor them. And like we talked about earlier, Jordan, we bring in companies that have tech that may be of interest — low-cost, very effective weapon systems that can be purchased without going through the laborious FMF/FMS process. I know the department’s doing a lot of great work to shorten the flash-to-bang time on that — direct commercial sales. But the import-export laws are very, very difficult to overcome when China just comes and drops off free stuff. It might break in six weeks, but it’s free stuff.

Doing a Lot With a Little

Justin: When you’re dealing with the military aspect, the FMS, the Flintlocks and the African Lions — how do you from the command sphere look at the DIME problem set and weigh where you apply more economic or more diplomatic effort? How does that interplay work with the sister agencies from an AFRICOM standpoint?

John Brennan: Our convening power — for conferences, exercises, persistent CT operations — brings the interagency together. And we do a lot with very little. We’re 0.1% of the Department of War budget. So we rely on interagency partners, international partners, and allies to convene where it can have the most effect. Everything from innovation to information operations, we do it by, with, and through partners as much as we can, so we can create those outsized effects with little assets.

Justin: That’s super interesting — 0.1% of the budget. I didn’t realize it was that small. Something Africa brings to mind for me: people talk now about how we’re going to have to abandon the golden hour — the one hour to get to medevac if somebody gets injured. But Africa’s had to deal with that for a very long time. Do you think there are exportable lessons from the African theater that people should be learning as they start looking toward Indo-Pacom or a less robustly equipped CENTCOM — for how to stage the force, build the force, and operate in the theater?

John Brennan: Yeah, absolutely. We have the tyranny of distance like no other combatant command over land. And the tyranny of access, basing, and overflight, which is like a Tetris game — it changes constantly. The way we do counterterrorism operations remotely, advising using tech, is something that’s very exportable. We do not rely on the golden hour because we’re not out in the trenches very often. And when we are, it’s for a very bespoke reason. Ninety percent of our advising and assisting and enabling is from remote fires, from RPAs, and then at the battalion level, where we can bring in all the different warfighting functions — not just maneuver and fires — together in one place and have effects across multiple subunits.

And then we bring in industry to try new things. We’re an experimentation theater, an innovation theater. We can bring in new things, try them out during exercises, and then combat-evaluate them in places like Somalia, in very difficult combat conditions. We have EMI problems, anti-access/area-denial systems all over the place, drones all over the place. Our partners buy drones from anyone who will sell or give them. So we routinely encounter high-end Russian air-defense systems as well as drones from all over the world.

Snake Oil and Open Architecture

Justin: Two questions there. First — when you bring in US industry, what are the marching orders? How are you discerning, “This is a real capability and this is snake oil”? Do you let the partners do that, or are you filtering before it gets down to the partner level?

John Brennan: We absolutely filter it. And they’re not all US vendors either — that’s a whole different discussion. But if it’s a venue in a partner nation, the partner nation has to allow them to come in too. So it’s in their best interest to get tech that works. And it’s not just weapon systems. We’ve had great discussions with transportation companies, software companies. The new Silicon Valley’s in Morocco. Until I got to AFRICOM I had no idea that so many countries have space programs. Rwanda — it’s eye-opening. Angola has a space program. I had no idea. And then energy companies — anytime you want to invest in production industry, you’ve got to have the energy to do it. You’ve got to have the people, the people have to have food, they have to have transportation to get to work. So some investments from larger US companies have to bring in a whole ecosystem to get their company operating effectively on the continent.

Justin: The second part — if you’re seeing this other technology coming in, where are you seeing this merging of first- and second-world tech, for lack of a better term? And what are the complications as you’re trying to run partnered operations with friendly nations that are also still receiving equipment from Russia or the PRC?

Jordan Schneider: And have you — like AngoSat-2? Is that a big part of your comms strategy going forward?

John Brennan: We’re trying to develop open-architecture networks that can accept any form of data flows. We have Libyan partners that have Chinese and Russian equipment. We have to develop a way to make the systems talk, and then protect any American kit they have as well. That’s a huge challenge. I say declare jihad against proprietary data streams, because I’ve got American weapons systems — IAMD systems — that don’t necessarily talk to one another. We have to have the open architecture so we have one pane of glass for everything, from air-defense systems to drone systems to networks, so we can see what everybody’s seeing without a separate monitor. That’s been a definite challenge.

Justin: How open do you find the US-based defense-tech companies to that — to being more plug-and-play, having a middleware that lets them interface with all these other systems?

John Brennan: If it’s a program of record, some companies are more open to changing their business model and their product than others. If we start off in the development stage, that’s the sweet spot. Get the engineers close to the operators so they can iterate to greatness. Something I used to do with our CTO at JSOC. Get the thing in the operator’s hands so he or she can break it and show you how to improve it rapidly. That’s what we’re all about here in AFRICOM. As we’re testing things, that’s the time to create the most advantageous inputs to the system and get it morphed into the form factor you want.

We’re doing a lot of that with AI and software, with the partner in mind. Our COP — when we go to things like African Lion, it’s distributed across all the partners so they can get it on an end-user device. Something we tried back in the day with ATAK. We’re trying to supersize that for more than just a moving-map tool — it’s all your feeds, whether from a UAS system, a human spotter with a GoPro, the cell phone, or a closed-circuit camera as a collection device. How do we get all those data streams into a place where we can make sense of it and display it?

Justin: When you’re looking at these common operating pictures, what’s the biggest holdup? Is it intelligence sharing? Getting the devices to talk? Bringing the other countries in and flattening the comms across all the allied nations? Where do you spend the most time trying to make these capabilities actually functional?

John Brennan: The mechanics of making the data streams accessible is the easy part. It’s the regulation. Whoever owns the data stream owns the bureaucracy that goes with it. Depending on where the stream is coming from and who it’s going to, there are a whole lot of hurdles. Even from a partner — I’ve worked with partner nations that provide FMV, and I have to go talk to their chief of defense to get them to approve letting us pull that data stream in for an exercise or operation. We’re doing it a lot with air-defense and IAMD systems with partners. And sometimes it’s more than one way. I’ll just leave it at that.

Justin: Do you find the US role to be more connecting other nations — neighboring nations — or do they do that inherently and then it’s harder for us?

John Brennan: It’s sort of an Erector Set. It depends on the partner. Some of our NATO allies operate more seamlessly with other African partners, and sometimes we’re bringing in things they’re sharing. We’ve got the MNJTF in Chad — it’s US, French, and all the Lake Chad Basin countries: Cameroon, Niger who dropped out, Nigeria, Benin. If you have bilateral sharing agreements, sometimes it gets a little discombobulated and you have to come up with a whole new ecosystem to feed a thing like an MNJTF. But tech-wise, we’re definitely the lead convener — we provide the COP tools when we go on exercises.

The Black Hole of the Sahel

Justin: When you look at recent history — Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali all tilting toward Russia — where do you see risk, and where is there opportunity with some of those nations trying to find another champion? How does that change the way you view the map strategically?

John Brennan: General Anderson covered this very explicitly in his testimony. The black hole of the Sahel — that’s where we’ve got the most VEO growth, between al-Qaeda affiliates and ISIS affiliates. The dwindling of Western support in that area — Russia came in, they could not fill that gap, and so the VEOs are filling the gap.

We’re trying to do what’s best for the US, which is prevent a terrorist attack on the homeland that hopefully does not emanate from that black hole. We’re still working with the Sahelian partners — we still have embassies there, we still have small teams working with partners. It’s not what it used to be, but we can identify an issue before it becomes a problem for the homeland. That’s the main goal for the Sahel. And I think you’ll see a natural turning away from Russia if they keep doing what they’re doing, which is they kill a lot of civilians. Their brand of CT is not nearly as precise as ours. If you look at recent operations in Nigeria, it’s markedly different, and the outcomes are markedly different.

Justin: Do the VEOs distinguish between the Russian and the US presence? Do you think there’s a bright line, or do they just see those as all “others” and equal targets?

John Brennan: You can see from their own propaganda — they exploit Russian heavy-handedness to recruit new members and agitate old grievances. Civilian casualties are one of their biggest narratives when confronting Russia. They try to loop us in. We investigate every civcas allegation to the nth degree, but they’re always levied against us because the VEOs know it causes us trouble and we burn calories. That said, we have much more technical expertise and AI-enabled tools that help us do our own investigations and prevent civcas upstream. Never cause civcas — that’s number one in our playbook. The Russians don’t necessarily care. The VEOs are much more attuned and fearful of our CT, because it’s so precise and effective. Ultimately we want to enable the partner — there are certain operations only the US can do, that we get permission from partners to do in their country.

Putin’s Purse

Jordan Schneider: Justin brought up Russia. Could you talk a little about the recruitment pipeline that takes you from Burkina Faso to Bakhmut? It’s sort of a surreal thing. How do you process it? What’s there to be done from an AFRICOM perspective?

John Brennan: We try to highlight it when we see it. It’s basically human trafficking of Africans to go fight on the front lines in Ukraine, as well as work in factories like Yelabuga. Under false pretenses, the Russians recruit them for educational or job opportunities in Russia, and then they take their passport and now you’re on the front line. It came to a head in Kenya when they recruited a famous football player and he ended up getting captured in Ukraine. Kenyans have come out publicly — you’re not doing that here. We’re trying to engender that in other locations, but it is a problem. Thousands of Africans are getting recruited under false pretenses and then either killed or captured on the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s Putin’s purse — Africa’s Putin’s purse, and it’s a manpower source they’re trying to exploit.

Justin: Looking at the manpower thing — another thing we’ve been seeing recently, showing how connected Africa is to all the conflicts going on, you see stories about the Houthis starting to export some of their expertise. Have you seen that come into any of the African VEOs — the idea of Houthi advisors? Is that something starting to percolate?

John Brennan: Absolutely. It’s widely reported in the press — al-Shabaab working with the Houthis. They send trainees to Yemen, the Houthis send weapons materiel to Somalia. Al-Shabaab has a pretty robust budget, they have an innovation cell, they’re trying to exploit drones against the federal government of Somalia and the Somali National Army. No surprise there. But we can’t let that happen — they get true advanced conventional weapons from Yemen. Now you’ve got the Bab-el-Mandeb in a crossfire. For the global economy and US national security interests, it’s in our interest not to let that relationship mature.

Justin: Building on that — you have Djibouti right there in the same neighborhood as Somalia, you have the PRC building the naval base. How does that threat triangle look to you, between the Houthis, the PRC naval base, and the Somali VEOs?

John Brennan: They’re all impediments to us doing our job, for sure. It’s more than tension sometimes with the Chinese. The EMI environment there is bad for a reason. They’re there for a reason — it’s not in the interest of the United States. Is there collusion between the Iranian threat network and the Chinese? I think it’s more economic than anything, but that key critical chokepoint is really important for a whole host of reasons, and the threats that emanate from Somalia back to the United States are there. We’re trying to make sure it doesn’t become a home game. We want to keep the away game successful, so it doesn’t turn into a home game.

The center of gravity of ISIS is Africa. That clearly shifted from our time in Iraq and Syria, a decade-plus combating ISIS. The talent pool’s very shallow compared to what it was — CENTCOM’s been very successful in Iraq and Syria. So the path of least resistance for a VEO is to go where there’s people, ungoverned spaces, assets, and resources. Now you’re seeing those flow from the cartels in our hemisphere along with a lot of money, and drug shipments — not just through Africa, which has been going on for decades, but production on the continent for export into Europe and through our northern border from Canada, as well as Australia.

Shifting Sands

Justin: Historically that’s kind of been what it’s been — al-Qaeda birthed in Afghanistan, post-Afghanistan they run to Africa, ungoverned spaces, that’s where they rebuild the base, and only after a while do they matriculate out using finance and terror networks. When you see ISIS near Mozambique, or in the Sahel, do you start to see it like we used to look at Syria — where originally there were sixteen or eighteen different groups and then slowly they all got taken over by the black flags and coalesced into one? Is there a similar worry, or are these such disparate groups — religious fundamentalists and economic extremists — that there isn’t so much worry about them joining forces?

John Brennan: They all stemmed from roots of al-Qaeda back in the day, going back to the nineties. That’s where bin Laden got his start — in Africa. He didn’t go straight to Afghanistan. The roots are still there, a lot of it because of the resources and the money — he had money stashed in banks in Somalia going back to the nineties. There’s money to be made, and the drug money is drastically increasing it. The ISIS affiliates kind of spun off from the al-Qaeda affiliates. You see that with al-Shabaab — the current caliph of the ISIS global network used to be an al-Shabaab guy, then he became an ISIS-Somalia guy, and now he thinks he’s in charge of the global caliphate. There’s tension because they’re all fighting over the same turf. In some places you see a division of labor — the al-Qaeda affiliates tend to go after security forces, the ISIS affiliates go after the civilian population. It’s shifting sands. But the minute a capital falls — like almost happened in Iraq — now you’ve got, for lack of a better term, the mujahideen bug light. Affiliates will start to adhere and come to where they can control territory, resources, and people, with the trappings of a nation-state. That’s the sum of all fears — that that happens in Africa.

Justin: When you look at Syria, there were always the Uzbeks and fighters from other countries — Chechens. Have you seen a foreign inflow, or is it still largely homegrown, outside of the remnants of ISIS that ran?

John Brennan: No, it’s international. Same thing. And I think it will become worse — exponentially worse — if a capital falls.

Justin: On your watch list, what’s the number one — “God forbid, this is the one that will fall and cause that”?

John Brennan: Any of them are bad. The ones we’re most concerned about are in the Sahel, because the fear is that one falls in their self-amalgamated, made-up alliance — the AES — and then they all fall. Somalia, I think, has proven over the last year and a half — we’ve upped our partners’ tempo on the ground. They’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of kinetic support from us, based off the Secretary’s policy decision to return to the previous target-engagement authority. We’ve been using that to great effect. So ISIS-Somalia has lost a lot of territory up in Puntland. Similarly, al-Shabaab is not doing so well — most of the gains they made in 2024 and early 2025 have been rolled back.

Justin: Do you think that’s a product of overreach, or increased capability, popular resistance — or a tiered effect of all of those coming together?

John Brennan: I think it’s a combination of all of the above.

A DIB in Exile

Justin: That brings up an interesting point. When you’re doing foreign internal defense and building partner capacity of a host nation, how do you interplay what the host nation says it needs versus what your assessment says it needs? How do you play those two to get the most capable force going out to do counter-VEO operations?

John Brennan: Very delicately. Everyone wants F-35s — these are expensive and we don’t make enough of them, the DIB production being what it is. But we also employ other allies to help shape the environment and demonstrate to them what they need, and exercises are a great way to do that. If you fail often at one particular aspect of an operation, you know you need to work on it. Typically it’s the warfighting functions besides maneuver and fires that cause the most problems — C4, ISR, and logistics in particular. Everyone wants to overlook logistics. You can’t in Africa. The distances are so great. Northern tip of Somalia down to the southern tip — that’s a thousand-plus miles. You’re talking Maine to Florida. When your partner runs out of food and water and ammo, it’s a pretty rough gig. It’s hard to get it to them.

Justin: It’s always one I find interesting, because you see it in Taiwan, and I saw it in Thailand when I was working with the Thai special forces — there’s a desire for technology, and it doesn’t always fit the situation. That brings up an interesting discussion. A while ago you started adding an innovation block on sitreps, where you asked, “How are we doing innovation?” Initially people viewed that as “what new tech?” but slowly it morphed into “How are you thinking about a current problem in a different way?” Has that picked up, or are you still seeing people fall into “innovation is technology”?

John Brennan: It’s a trap, for sure. We do a lot more of using things in new and creative ways, or developing a new process for a new thing that’s impactful on the battlefield. The denied area that was Syria was a great battle lab, because we had the world’s most interesting problem — couldn’t step foot in the country, but we had to generate effects and a force to create those effects. That spurred that in my mind when I was at Fifth Group. We used things like ultralights — they’d been around thirty, forty years before that — in ways beneficial to us, to fly under radars we knew the Syrians had. Necessity is the motherhood of invention, and nowhere is that more true than in Africa, because we don’t have a lot of the resources the other combatant commands have.

Justin: That’s interesting, because you talked about the defense industrial base. Is there a desire to start building out a native supporting defense industrial base? I think of something like the Lucas — conceivably Nigeria could produce that in relatively robust numbers, and then export it in the area to enhance the fires capability of neighboring countries, especially in the counter-VEO fight. Do you see a desire and movement toward that, or are there cultural blockages?

John Brennan: A hundred percent. Everybody’s all in, particularly the African partners — they want jobs, they want their own DIB so they don’t have to rely on us, which is a good thing. It’s ultimate burden share, burden shift through technology. We started up the first drone center of excellence in Morocco — the first class graduated right around African Lion. Giving them or selling them things like 3D printers and showing them how to build their own drones, so they’re hands-off once they get the ability to produce and the raw materials.

Africa’s a great vignette for an alternate DIB, because you have many countries that have all the right materiel — the natural resources, the labor force — and they want to co-produce things with us. Some of these countries already have their own arms industries. South Africa builds really good artillery. Namibia builds satellite radios. And then you have a DIB that, if they co-produce American weapon systems, it’s closer to the fight in the Pacific than from the west coast of the United States. It’s way closer.

Justin: That’s one of those things — when we start talking about distributed logistics, it becomes a question of where would we put it. You’ve talked about the tyranny of distance and the access/basing/overflight issues with Africa, but those exist for Indo-Pacom as well. There’s a lab here where we can experiment with a “DIB in exile,” forward and producing at least some of those capabilities. Do you think not having access — I’ll make fun of Kurilla, but the ability for him to just yeet T-LAMs at the Houthis or into Syria — do you think not having that access in AFRICOM has actually made you more inventive in trying to get after problems?

John Brennan: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve exploited the cross-combatant-command transition authority as much as we can to get assets from other theaters. We’ve been lent things like P-8s for exercises and operations, and vice versa — we’ve given to the CENTCOM bank on many occasions.

Justin: One of these days, guys, when we have stuff, we’re gonna share it back, I promise.

Jordan Schneider: Those Mozambique radios, though — everyone’s gonna be hounding for them. You’ll have the inside track, right?

Closing on AI

Justin: If you could have one thing AFRICOM needed over the next two years — is it a unit, an engagement, a piece of technology? What’s the thing you wish you could pull from big DOW and give to the theater?

John Brennan: There’s so many. I think we get what we need when we need it — it’s always a matter of priorities at the department, across the combatant commands. We’ve made a lot of headway with AI, and I think we could use more of it. The amount of data we have to deal with is unbelievable, because we have all the threat groups plus Russia, China — even North Korea pokes around in Africa. Everybody has interest on the continent, and figuring out who’s doing what to whom on a daily basis is consuming. Our analysts do an awesome job, but we need more AI tools for them.

And then better ways to shorten the FMF/FMS process for partners. We’re trying to work ourselves out of a job every day. The tools we used to use, like the BPC monies, are no longer with us — so how do we compensate for that? Some partners are much better resourced than others. It’s getting access to places that are meaningful, where we see threats metastasizing but can’t see the contours, because we’re just not there and we’re not collecting. So we always need more airborne ISR. We’re testing some things for the department, and hopefully we get the ability to test more so we can provide feedback and make sure those things are what we need for the future fight.

Justin: That goes to the difficulty in AFRICOM — you’re really an early sensor. That has a primary role, which is probably different from the way other theaters are conceptualized, especially UCOM and CENTCOM. That’s a tough role to be in, because SR teams routinely are not treated super well, and you have a kind of early-warning SR theater.

John Brennan: We do. We also identify opportunities — there’s so many for private-sector investment. We work hand-in-glove with the economic defense unit out of the department, newly created, to help capitalize on those and provide indications and warnings: “Hey, this would be a good investment, and here’s where our competitors are trying to outmaneuver us.” That’s been a huge change. It’s opened a lot of doors for companies to get involved on the continent.

Jordan Schneider: I’m going to close on AI, sorry, but I feel like I have to. We talked a little about data streams and bringing stuff together. There’s been a lot written around AI and targeting in the Iran conflict over the past few months. I’m curious, specifically from a command-decision perspective — one of your first answers was that you’ve known these people for twenty-five years, which is data that Claude doesn’t necessarily have. From your perspective sitting in a combatant command, what’s the slightly more sci-fi, forward-looking AI stuff — more like intelligence decision-making as opposed to just putting data streams together — that you’re excited about, maybe worried about? And how do you see “intelligence on tap” potentially changing what your successors’ jobs might look like?

John Brennan: I’m hugely excited about it. As a vignette: we and our partners pull terabytes after terabytes of CHEM off the battlefield. How do we make sense of it, find connections where it takes analysts weeks and hours? Things like breaking codes to get into crypto wallets that terrorists and drug cartels are using — I think that’s a huge offensive capability.

And then making sense of those data streams. I’ve got a sensor over here telling me this, one over here telling me that — what does it mean? What decision do I need to make? I can’t do that unless those data streams are multiplexed and analyzed quickly. Integrated air and missile defense is a great example. And then investment — I have limited resources, where does my boss place those resources on the continent to have the greatest effect? Do we have a predictive tool that says, if you invested this much in this industry in this location, what’s it going to look like in five years? What’s the effect on that nation’s economy? Some of the things ExxonMobil’s doing will double some of these economies in one year. And reducing civilian casualties is really important as well.

There’s so many uses — it’s up to your imagination how you want to employ AI. But it’s central to everything we’re doing. For the first time ever we have a Chief Data Officer — we never had one of those — and we’re getting a CTO in. I’ve got companies that want to sell us data all the time, and making sense of what application is right for us is difficult. But we’re getting professionals — data scientists, data engineers — involved, so we’re not paying for the same data twice. If UCOM’s paying for it, why should I pay for it? Let’s craft the contract accordingly. Data as a service — I think that’s going to be more prevalent, not just with us but with our allies and partners, so we can see things the same way and understand the same data in the same way.

Jordan Schneider: So we’re not quite at the point where you’re asking Claude or ChatGPT how to defeat ISIS and just kind of going with it.

Justin: Press play and go.

John Brennan: Bring Justin back on active duty and give him a really sharp knife. No, just kidding.

Justin: Please, no. My back…

Jordan Schneider: Justin, anything you want to close on?

Justin: No, I think that was great. I really appreciate it. Full disclosure — I’ve known John Brennan for thirteen years now. He put me in a position when I was way too young and too junior in rank to have a role in US national policy in the Middle East, and it really set the trajectory for my career. Obviously, nothing but respect. I really appreciate you coming on, sir.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released the first encyclical of his pontificate, Magnifica humanitas, which discusses “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

The much-awaited encyclical was the first deliverable that addresses AI, a topic that the Church has been attempting to address since the pontificate of Pope Francis.1 The current Pope picked his name in part after his predecessor Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum novarum addressed the effects of the Industrial Revolution. By taking his name, Pope Leo XIV indicated that he would treat the impending AI revolution with equal seriousness.

After Magnifica humanitas was released, my X feed was flooded with half-baked takes on the encyclical, with posts by everyone from Dean Ball to Butlerian jihadists. The outpouring of takes from non-Catholics indicate that, for some reason, people care about the Pope’s stance on AI. Why do they care, and why should you care?

Although the pervasiveness of the encyclical in secular society is a welcome sign from the Church’s perspective, misunderstandings inevitably arise when people are approaching the encyclical with eyes uninitiated in Catholic theology. This is how we get some people saying the encyclical was weak tea while others are declaring it a fatwa against AI.

Well fear not! This is not my first rodeo with Church documents and certainly not my first encyclical. Let me be your guide as we wade through the waters of Catholic jargon and explain what the encyclical does and does not say, and why the text is neither weak tea nor jihad.

Why People (and Why You Should) Care

Some of the SF bubble tuned in to the Magisterium’s teachings because of the attendance of Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, at the encyclical’s presentation.2 He sat alongside the Pope and delivered remarks at the ceremony, giving the ceremony some Silicon Valley street cred.

For the rest of the world, the encyclical matters because the Pope is understood as a sort of impartial figure. He has aura. He is ostensibly not for worldly power and tries to be “above” standard politics. When it comes to AI, where the authoritative figures seem to be companies trying to sell you the product or governments trying to politicize the technology, people view the Pope as someone without special interest. He might be wrong, but at least he is not trying to sell you something. He does not profit politically or economically from AI doing better or worse.3

Some have commented that Anthropic’s role in the ceremony indicates that the Church was clearly influenced by the company and its so-called “doomerism,” or even “partnered with Anthropic,” but this is not the case. The encyclical itself, likely written by many hands over many months, contains passages that criticize companies like Anthropic. Most likely, Anthropic played some advisory role in communicating to the Church how AI actually works and providing technical background — sort of like how the government works with companies to gain information about how to properly regulate them.

Lastly, you should care because he is the Pope! As the undisputed religious authority for 18% of the global population, his words matter. Especially in much of the Global South, the home of three out of every four Catholics, the Pope plays a morally authoritative role. Given AI will be a global technology, it is obvious that you should tune in to the person whom nearly a fifth of the world considers the Vicar of Christ and what he says on the subject.

So, what does the Vicar of Christ have to say on the subject? In my view, the 190-page encyclical can be boiled down to three main opinions on the purpose and societal applications of technological development.

Efficiency and Automation Are Not the Goal

In my opinion, the most consequential framing of the encyclical is its definition of an anthropocentric view: the criterion for good technology is promoting human dignity and fulfillment, not efficiency and productivity.4 Although that framing sounds like a milquetoast platitude, it has real downstream implications.

Labor

The encyclical’s message on labor is a direct descendant of Pope Leo XIII’s teaching in Rerum novarum, an 1891 encyclical on the Industrial Revolution. To understand Magnifica humanitas, you must understand Rerum novarum. The 19th-century encyclical was a landmark in Catholic social teaching, re-establishing the Catholic Church as a relevant figure in discussions of distributing wealth, social justice, and the common good. No longer was the Church considered a bulwark of reactionary absolutism, and no longer would the Church be shy in speaking on worldly matters.

Rerum novarum put forth a third way that rejected not only standard socialism and anarchism but also laissez- faire capitalism. The encyclical affirmed private property and distinction of classes as a good, but it also emphasized that human value is not tied to one’s wage and that the rights and dignity of the worker must be respected. As such, the document was progressive on labor rights, unions, and fair wages. Speaking on the labor movement, Leo XIII wrote:

“If we turn now to things external and material, the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.”5

Tangibly, Rerum novarum sparked the movements of Christian democracy and Catholic labor unions and accelerated the adoption of labor laws in Europe and the United States. It took some wind out of the sails of prevailing socialist movements, as pro-worker sentiment began to find a home in Christian movements too.

Drawing directly from previous Leonine teaching, Magnifica humanitas states:

“While many of the historical conditions described by Leo XIII have changed, at least two insights remain highly relevant today: the primacy of human labor over any mindset focused solely on finance or productivity — with the consequent attention to the people and families most susceptible to exploitation — and the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order. Rerum Novarum thereby continues to remind us that there is no authentic evangelization that does not also affect the structures of human society.”6

Leo XIV argues that work is not just an economic input or about productivity but rather a “fundamental good for the person.”7 This understanding communicates well-known criticisms of unfettered capitalism treating humans as cogs in a machine or dehumanizing them by evaluating them based solely on productivity, but it also presents something novel: despite rosy pictures of an AI-powered world where work is an anachronism, the Church argues that full automation is a will-o’-the-wisp.

The Church’s view is that work is a means of people participating in society, expressing and enhancing their dignity, and “a requirement of the human condition.”8 As such, the Church seems to reject a world where we all receive UBI and can twiddle our thumbs all day; the Church advises the need for people to fulfill their dignity through their own work. The encyclical states:

“Above all, however, the Magisterium has recognized in work “the essential key” to understanding the entire social question, since it is through their work that individuals develop many dimensions of their existence. In view of this, we can understand the great intuition of Saint Benedict of Nursia, who united prayer and work, showing daily activity to be a part of the human response to God’s call. Created in the image of the Creator, our own work in some way continues his, for thereby we contribute to the progress of society and the common good, put to good use the capabilities we have received, improve and beautify the world, support our families, engage in cooperative relationships and, through listening and dialogue, learn to build together something that no one could achieve alone.

For these reasons, work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment. In this regard, financial assistance to the poor may at times be necessary in emergencies, but it cannot become the sole response, since the goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through his or her own work.”9

To explicate in my own terms, the Church finds that a world in which we do not work is a world not of freedom but of listlessness and decadence. If you have not learned responsibility through household chores or work, you will be deficient in responsibility for yourself and for others — and you will be ultimately less mature and developed as a human because of it. I think the Church also finds some virtue in actually exercising your will in work; there is something virtuous and fulfilling in actually harvesting your own crops or (perhaps to a lesser extent) completing a McKinsey PowerPoint.

I think there is also an element of the Church wanting to maintain a balance of power between labor and capital: if we live in a world where labor is useless, then people have far less leverage. Maintaining some necessity of labor may be instrumental in disincentivizing oppression or the stripping of human dignity in the future.

This dependence point stems from Rerum novarum, which explicitly says, “capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.”10 Pope Leo XIII found that such dependence “results in the beauty of good order” and is connected to “drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.” If there is no dependence, it seems Pope Leo XIV is wondering, what will remind us of our duties to one another?

The Church is sparse on details on how to implement this vision of labor, and instead leaves the question to corporations, the state, and civil society.11 The basic advice the Church gives is to support labor unions and create more institutions capable of confronting the unique challenges posed by AI, promote “taxation, social protection, and industrial policies” to mitigate wealth concentration, and privilege new metrics of economic health. Instead of using GDP as a benchmark, I imagine the Church would prefer something like better human development indices and the Gini coefficient as the proper lens for evaluating an economy.

Localism and Corporate Development

The Church’s relative antipathy to efficiency also shows up in its view of how AI development should progress: humanely and with input from every corner of society. The Pope writes:

“This principle encourages us to move beyond any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life, but instead to promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and a civil society capable of forging bonds and mobilizing energies in the service of the common good. In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, decisions are made at the closest level possible to the persons involved, thereby fostering community life and avoiding people being presented with decisions that have already been taken. In this way people can participate in the decision-making process. When families, associations, local communities, volunteer organizations and those in the so-called “third sector” are recognized and supported, social life becomes more accessible to people, services become more attuned to real needs, and solutions are more creative and respectful of the dignity of each person.”12

The Church is concerned with the current path of technological development, which idolizes efficiency and sacrifices human dignity in the process. The sins of this path include the design of algorithms on social media and AI applications that exploit human weakness and keep users addicted instead of oriented toward “the good.” They include the exploitation of children in mining rare earths, and OpenAI traumatizing Kenyans at $2 an hour for content moderation.13 In the Church’s perspective, if we are not taking measures to prioritize humanity now in these areas, how will AI and technology prioritize humanity later as it comes into maturity?

The Church’s solution is through the medium of localism, which can include some tangible policy plans. The Church advises companies (or perhaps state compulsion) to pursue supply chain transparency so that they do not rely on inhumane labor for their content labor or for the minerals that make their chips and data centers.14 When building those data centers, the communities in which they are built should be consulted extensively for how, where, and in exchange for what benefits they are constructed. For AI alignment, Anthropic should not just have Amanda Askell thinking about the moralization of Claude, but the lab should take pains to take input from different rungs of civil society and religious authority, regardless of how slow the process may be.15

Through the aforementioned and other means of localism, the Church argues AI labs can fulfill their mission of a technology that “benefits all of humanity.” Through this message, the Church is clear in its rejection of unqualified techno-optimism and devotion to efficiency. By taking the proper stance toward labor and development, technology can be oriented toward the common good in a way it might otherwise not be.

The AI Arms Race

Lastly, the encyclical briefly refers to the AI arms race occurring between the U.S. and China. Although not referring to either country by name, the encyclical reads:

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.”16

The Church is saying that the U.S. and China must disarm the AI race like the world did during the nuclear race of the previous era. Beyond this, however, the Church does not find the race dynamics logic prevalent in American AI labs worthy of interaction. I was personally expecting more words explaining to corporate and state actors that no amount of geopolitical reasoning precludes greater humanitarian goals, but the encyclical only dedicates a paragraph to the issue.

I think the Church’s minimal interaction here is due to some combination of the following: the Church’s hopes to make every nation subscribe to the encyclical’s view, and Her role is to be above these geopolitical squabbles; the idea that if we don’t take right action on AI, the world will be worse off regardless of who wins the AI race; and, due to the Church’s anti-utilitarian bent, right action is more important than whatever consequences result from the AI race.

Transhumanism Is Not on the Table

The encyclical also dedicates several paragraphs to addressing transhumanism and posthumanism, philosophies mainly peddled throughout the Silicon Valley and venture capitalist milieu. Transhumanism has gained notable adherents — including billionaire Peter Thiel, a16z co-founder Marc Andreesen, and researcher Guillaume Verdon (better known as BasedBeffJezos) — but it is undoubtedly a minority voice. The fact that the encyclical addresses an almost sci-fi idea mainly found in minority circles in Silicon Valley is surprising.

The transhumanist and posthumanist proponents believe that technologies like AI will enable us to become ontologically different beings, either in the form of humans with supernatural capabilities or as human-machine hybrids different from humans altogether.

From the Catholic perspective, human weaknesses like limited lifespans and fleshy limbs are an essential part of life’s beauty. The encyclical states that “humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”17 From the Church’s perspective, pursuing contemporary strains of transhumanism distances us from essential facets of human goodness, such as compassion and generosity.18 The Church writes:

“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. In this regard, the aforementioned warning of Saint Paul VI retains great foresight: indeed, scientific and technological advances, when detached from moral and social progress, end up turning against humanity. [130] For this reason, a clear distinction must be made. It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’”19

We are called to love thy neighbor. If my neighbor is an immortal cyborg, what need is there for me to care for him? The Church warns that this world, where humans need not care for one another and do not suffer, is not a preferable world. Limits are needed to be human and to fully enjoy the adventure of life.

In these paragraphs, the Church does not denounce all modes of transhumanism and posthumanism, but it does deny the strains you will see most common in today’s tech circles. From the Church’s perspective, transhumanism may be theoretically acceptable as long as it remains anthropocentric and respectful of human limits.

Perhaps the Church will find some later forms of transhumanism to be more acceptable, but I personally doubt it. The Church’s vision for becoming superhuman is based on devotion not to technology but to God.20 I find the statements of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, who spoke at the encyclical’s presentation, most illuminating:

“On the other hand, some forms of transhumanism invite us to think that, thanks to future and sophisticated devices that will solve problems and increase our capabilities, our life will be a paradise. But the devices and technological resources give the individual an initial joy, and shortly afterward the void returns, with the feeling that something is missing. Different forms of posthumanism believe that this is because humanity has reached its expiration date, must simply be replaced, and an evolutionary leap is needed towards a new form of life, a new level in the evolution of the species. This is a leap that always depends on technology. As believers, we are certain that all this will not fill the void, will not fill the infinite space of our hearts, will not give a stable and consistent meaning to our human life. Behind this idea of ​​progress lies a false mysticism that is precisely the opposite of what Christians and other believers call new life: the theological life, that life that is truly on another level, that life that certainly brings us.” (Translated by Google Translate.)

It will be interesting to watch how contemporary transhumanist circles respond to this denunciation. I imagine they will not care.21 But more interesting to see will be how the encyclical influences wider societal and governmental treatment of transhumanists.

AI Is Not Human

Lastly, the encyclical comments on the nature of AI as intelligent machines and how their status contrasts with that of humans. Unsurprisingly, the Church’s position is that AI ultimately is not “intelligent” in a way equivalent to humans.22

Some commentators like Dean Ball have found this position to be “intellectually flaccid” and a “punt of the highest order” because it does not seriously consider the intelligence of AI, given its ability to “think” in novel ways, thereby offering new contributions to mathematics and science. But it is not a punt: it is a clear position that the Church believes is true given Her stance on the specialness of the human person.

The encyclical argues that all AI, by definition of it not being human, is not able to think, feel, be truly embodied, mature, have relationships, have a moral conscience, or love. All indications that AI does these things are a misinterpretation, as they are simply imitations of such actions via “statistical adaptation” and “data processing.” If one believes that is the same as what humans do, then that is their prerogative, but it is obviously not the Catholic position, which believes there is a mystery in the human soul that gives rise to such behaviors.

Surprisingly, however, the Church has not ruled out the possibility of AI being conscious. Even in Catholic circles, the question is not open-and-shut, with some Catholic philosophers arguing that AI ensoulment is possible. At the encyclical’s presentation, Cardinal Michael Czerny stated that the question remains open:

“A related question, much debated today, is whether, and in what sense, we can speak of consciousness or conscience in relation to the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. It is a serious question, one that deserves attention and further study. Note, however, that it is not merely a technical query. More fundamentally, this is a philosophical question, for it concerns the meaning of experience, interiority, subjectivity and freedom. As such, it remains open to various interpretations.”

For now, though, because of this definitional disbelief in AI lacking human dignity or specialness, the Church adopts a cautious view of AI companions and similar products. Although the encyclical does recognize that communicating with AI for “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” can be “engaging and at times genuinely helpful,” they must be carefully presented to demonstrate that they are merely an “illusion of a relationship.”23 Otherwise, they may mislead “less discerning users.” As such, the Pope would likely endorse policies that require AI companions and chatbots to occasionally make clear to the user that they are not human so as to prevent AI psychosis — something along the lines of California’s SB 243.

However, commentators like Dean Ball point out a gap in the encyclical’s treatment of AI thinking. Even if AI will never be deserving of human dignity — and will never be intelligent like a human is — can or will it be considered intelligent enough to warrant some sort of consideration? Given how autonomously intelligent these machines are becoming, do they deserve some sort of moral or special consideration beneath a human but above a calculator? Despite Cardinal Czerny’s commentary, the Church is silent on the issue in the encyclical, but perhaps the current pontificate will comment further on the matter in the future.

Conclusion

Magnifica humanitas covers a lot more ground than what is stated above, including prayers of Marian devotion and updates to the doctrine of just war, but the points above seem to carry the most relevance to AI.

A lot of terminally online people believe that the encyclical is too backward-looking in its treatment of AI, arguing it only addresses already-exhausted debates without laying moral groundwork for the future transition. Those people are wrong.

Some perspective is due. Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum played a major role in the public’s thinking on the Industrial Revolution, and it was published more than a century after the Revolution started! The fact that Magnifica humanitas has come out now, while we are still in the hazy mist of the AI revolution, is significant. The Church also rejects the framing of “backward-looking.” The Pope finds that if we are not working to solve the challenges AI is presenting today, we will be in no good position to solve the challenges it will present tomorrow. Quoting J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf the White, Leo XIV writes:

“‘It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.’”24

Lastly, while the encyclical lays some rough boundaries within which it believes AI discourse and policymaking should exist, it does not want or try to be the final teaching on the matter. In line with its vision of localism, it defers specifics to local communities and other institutions within the state and private sector. Given the Church’s prevalence in the Global South — geographies that have been largely ignored in conversations about AI — the Pope is calling for a change to the current trajectory. He wants these impoverished and neglected regions, which will be impacted just as much as San Francisco and Shanghai, to have a credible voice.

Magnifica humanitas aims to be in conversation with all institutions, including those in the many parts of the world that have yet to mobilize on these issues. Though the Church decided to speak first, it is up to the rest of the world, in the form of local communities, individual governments, companies, and civil societies to respond, to pick through the encyclical’s message and grapple with it, and decide what to accept and what to reject.

For more Pope AI content, see below for the transcript of the AI Pope podcast we just released!

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Jordan Schneider: So the Pope has takes. Why is the Pope writing five hours of audiobook about AI and humanity?

John-Clark Levin: Pope Leo said twice in the first three days of his pontificate that AI is the greatest new challenge facing humanity. Not one of a list of six or seven things. The thing. That jumped out at me, because you can easily imagine an alternate scenario where a new Pope said humanity’s greatest challenge is gender ideology, or on the other side climate change, or something anodyne and obvious like war or poverty.

Jordan Schneider: That’s striking. There are a lot of hungry, cold, war-stricken people out there. As he’s talking about AI, I’m thinking, what about all the human suffering happening right now?

Tim Hwang: In some sense the Catholic Church is like every other very large global organization. It has to set intentionality, and a big part of shaping the world is wrapping its priorities in the work of the moment. A lot of what you see in the encyclical is exactly the topics you’re mentioning getting wrapped into the AI discussion.

Jordan Schneider: So this is just a news hook? For all the poverty stuff?

Tim Hwang: It’s more than a news hook. You only get to do your first encyclical once. I think this augurs a much bigger bet: that a lot of things in the world are going to get worked out through the lens of this technology. That’s one of the reasons it’s the first one being dropped.

John-Clark Levin: Pope Leo clearly sees the AI transition as analogous to the Industrial Revolution and epochal in its impact. Just as that revolution reshaped the economy, social relations, politics, and warfare across a full century, Pope Leo expects AI to do the same.

Aqib Zakaria: When I’m on social media too often, half the people are saying the Pope has declared a fatwa on AI, it’s over, it’s a crusade. The other half are saying the Pope is super AGI-pilled. So where’s the balance? What’s the actual substance?

John-Clark Levin: Through this encyclical Pope Leo evinces a generally balanced view. He clearly recognizes AI’s positive potential but also its capacity to cause grave harms. The encyclical focuses more on the harms than the upsides, but that’s to be expected. As a genre, encyclicals are more about correcting toxic views in the world and calling people to stop harmful behavior than about cheerleading things that are already going well. So the fact that Pope Leo focuses on the harms does not mean he’s declaring a Dune-style Butlerian jihad against AI.

Tim Hwang: It goes a little deeper. In 2026, the idea of being a skeptic or being AGI-pilled is an obsolete distinction. Everybody agrees we’re in the middle of some kind of takeoff now. The question is just what direction you’re moving in, and what should be prioritized.

Aqib Zakaria: Quick basics: what even is an encyclical? Is it infallible?

John-Clark Levin: No. An encyclical is an open letter addressed not just to the Roman Catholic Church but to all people of goodwill. The Pope undertakes it on his own initiative. It doesn’t require the curia, the cardinals, the bishops. So it reflects a Pope’s own personal teaching on a subject of concern to the church and humanity. It carries the weight of Catholic teaching, but it is not infallible.

Tim Hwang: The real question is: does this matter? There’s been a lot said, but the encyclical sets forth an intention, an agenda. What we’re waiting to see is what bureaucratic muscle gets put behind it. Prior to the launch, a commission was being set up across multiple dicasteries. That’s where the action is. The jury is still out on long-term significance, and part of it is seeing how Catholics respond.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s go around the horn with what everyone thought was most interesting.

Tim Hwang: Two things stand out. One, the encyclical claims the Catholic Church has agency over where this technology goes. It says we can either build Babel or rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. That matters, because most religious discourse around AI has been “this is happening, how do we hold back the tide.” The institutional shift to saying there’s a lever, we can decide where it goes, is hugely significant.

The second is the section 99-100 material that’s become so controversial. To what degree does the church believe what’s happening in these systems is the same as what humans do, or distinctly different? This relates to my own work: it sets a theological research agenda about the fine distinctions between humans, non-humans, and AI, which may be some secret third thing.

And on reflection, a third: I was briefing Catholic bishops this week, and the education material is really percolating down to working clergy. I suspect a lot of action on the ground around that.

Babel and the Walls of Jerusalem

Jordan Schneider: Let’s intersperse some passages. From the Babel section: “The task that stands before us is that of being builders of communion rather than architects of Babel. We are to be servants of the coming kingdom instead of lords of towers destined for ruin. With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good, so that humanity will never lose its beauty and once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.”

Aqib Zakaria: Can I quote the passage from 99 to 100 that I’ve seen a bazillion responses to? “Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

Tim Hwang: It’s an important statement, a strong line that there will be a line. Anthropic puts out a paper saying there are emotional concepts inside the model. You have to hold two similar but distinct thoughts in your head. One is actually experiencing those emotions the way humans do. The other is that those concepts can be represented so the machine behaves in a very human-like way. The Pope is pointing at the theological difference. You can say the machine engages in thought, but it’s not thought in the sense that thought is inherently a human act. That’s what’s causing confusion online: too nuanced for Twitter.

John-Clark Levin: Words like imitate, simulate, and understand are used almost as theological terms of art, loaded with presupposition about ensoulment that colloquial usage doesn’t carry. Pope Leo is correct in the narrow theological sense he intends about today’s models, but I worry people will misread it. If you tell the average person AI is incapable of understanding, they’ll infer AI can’t do dangerous things that in humans require deep understanding.

Tim Hwang: It’s a great signal of how impoverished our language is. You say understanding, and there’s a lowercase and an uppercase version. Lowercase: lots of objects can engage in acts of understanding. The Christian position is that the kind humans engage in is definitionally an act only humans do. But people snap to capability, and that’s not what’s at stake.

This is why I keep telling everyone to get into Thomas Aquinas. He has this notion of the species, forms in the mind shared across all sorts of souls: vegetable, animal, human. What’s good about it is you decouple ensoulment from capability. That’s rich, and it should inform our technical research.

On the ICMI stuff, I really want to do a technical research seminar at some point. I met a guy trying to rally Muslims with a machine learning background, and I said we should do an interfaith technical research seminar. That would be fire. So that’s one of the things I’m working on right now.

Disarm AI

Jordan Schneider: Let’s continue around the corner. John-Clark, what angles struck you?

John-Clark Levin: I was interested to see whether and to what extent this encyclical would engage with AGI or superintelligence. It turns out it did not at all. AGI, transformative economic impact, and existential risk are not mentioned. That was a surprise, because the church’s most recent previous flagship document on AI, a note called Antiqua et Nova from sixteen months earlier, did at least mention those issues.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe it’s time for another one. When I see democracy used in documents like this, where are we on that? And maybe relate it to the China discussion, particularly around AI and autocracies.

Tim Hwang: Coming from someone who’s hosted ChinaTalk so long, your immediate move is autocracy versus American democracy. I read this more as democracy of method. The companies have long wanted AI safety to be neutral and objective, untouched by the hard questions that come from embedding values in systems. What that’s unintentionally created, given these industries’ natural-monopoly effects, is an aristocracy of AI alignment.

We live in a world where AI agents are themselves good at doing AI research, because that’s what the labs use them for. That lets anyone with different normative priors say, I’m going to do alignment too. So when he says democracy, sure, he means democratic backsliding. But I also see democratizing who gets to say what these models are aligned to, and how we define safety. You can read the whole encyclical this way: if you’re talking moral philosophy, you’re on our turf. By our turf I mean the Catholic Church.

Aqib Zakaria: I’m along Tim’s lines. The encyclical uses democracy a lot, but it’s not the Pope saying down with the CCP. The church sees itself as a representative of the downtrodden, with most Catholics now from the global South, plus this emphasis on laborers. It’s talking about a more local democracy: whatever policy you enact, you need input from the people you’re enacting it on. Lowercase-d democracy versus uppercase-D.

John-Clark Levin: A very striking line is the need to disarm AI. In that passage Pope Leo speaks explicitly about the arms-race dynamics playing out in AI and basically tells the world to knock it off. That seems very relevant to current efforts to find a path toward bilateral engagement between the US and China around the race to AGI.

Aqib Zakaria: Can we talk about that paragraph? Maybe it’s because I work at ChinaTalk, but I was surprised it only got one paragraph. The disarmament paragraph doesn’t specifically name the US or China, because the point is to be subtler than that. “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of armed competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger data sets driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”

So this is clearly about US-China AI competition, especially the geopolitical-dominance line. But so many of the worries the church finds in this race are partly justified by labs and governments on exactly that race dynamic. I’m surprised it doesn’t engage that more. Why didn’t the Pope say more? Is there something between the lines?

John-Clark Levin: The Vatican’s strongest engagement comes not through an encyclical but through the diplomatic power and perceived neutrality of the Holy See, both to mediate US-China engagement and to convene global South nations. The billions of people in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia currently have no voice, no vote, and no say in the risks this US-China race may impose on them.

Tim Hwang: The Holy Father is telling you. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. That’s an attribute of national competition: we need to win the AI race to ensure America’s continued dominance. But it’s also relevant domestically. Once AI is fully adopted, my company will be the one that dominates this sector. Even the idea that we’ll call the heads of all these labs to DC to opine on the moral impact of the technology, that’s in here too. It all sits in the context of disarmament, and the centralization of power.

One joke I keep turning over: maybe we need a homeschooling movement for AI. A parochial school movement for AI. The idea is to democratize not just these systems but their application. What are they even used for, and what do people think they get from them? That’s what’s at stake.

Aqib Zakaria: So is the Pope anti-export-controls?

Tim Hwang: I did see someone do a “this totally justifies our position on open-source AI,” which is a little cute. Part of the problem with such a long document is you can attach lots of agendas to it. You’re going to have to ask them yourself.

Jordan Schneider: Where is he even getting this? To what extent is this all Pope versus Pope and friends?

John-Clark Levin: These are very much Pope-and-friends documents. Typically the Holy Father retreats to the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo with several trusted theological advisors, hashes out the key issues, works on drafts collaboratively, then over a period of months loops in more advisors who shape the document with broader perspectives. So even though Pope Leo should be considered the single author, it embraces a range of perspectives.

The Vatican Needs an Alignment Lab

Tim Hwang: The Vatican needs to put money down and have its own alignment lab, get in the game seriously. People would be surprised how forward-thinking the church is. I went to a Vatican AI conference years ago and met a guy who said they had a working group on what the church would do in a first-contact scenario. Do aliens have original sin? Would we want to convert them? And I thought, totally makes sense. You’re a huge institution that thinks on millennia timescales. Of course you’ve got at least one guy on it. They have the resources to invest in foresight, and they use them.

Jordan Schneider: We need a whole series on Pope content. Okay, why does the Vatican need its own alignment lab?

Tim Hwang: It’s easy to have strong rhetoric around the technology. That’s valuable, it’ll shape how Catholics adopt and use AI. But tech is upstream of lots of things. By the time you’re debating whether the chatbot should do this or that, you’ve already lost the game. The decisions are made at the researcher level, the fine-tuning level, the data-curation level. So it’s not implausible the church should be investing in GPUs, doing its own research, rallying global Catholics with ML expertise around a technical agenda.

Christianity is deeply represented in the training data, so coming up with alignment techniques as good as or better than secular approaches seems empirically plausible. If the church starts releasing results, saying Anthropic can do this but check out what we can do, beat our benchmarks or we’ll beat yours, that influences the technology at a deep level. That’s where you operate if you’re serious about shaping its direction. Building the walls of Jerusalem requires technicians and engineers. Take the metaphor seriously.

Jordan Schneider: He defers to states on a lot. How do you see the US government, UK AISI, states more broadly in aligning models, and how does that interact with religious institutions running their own alignment labs?

Tim Hwang: It raises harder questions than it appears. If religious priors lead to a different technical research agenda, is UK AISI representative of the risks global Catholics think are important? If not, why not? Shouldn’t the state be prioritizing some of those concerns, not of Catholicism specifically but of religion in general?

The other one, intentionally provocative: we talk a lot about the American AI stack. Is the American AI stack a Christian AI stack? We should have that conversation. The encyclical makes life difficult for states, because it now says part of your AI agenda has to confront a religious question.

Jordan Schneider: Should we be bearish on all the decentralized religions that can’t get their act together and get a data center and an alignment team?

Tim Hwang: It would be cool as hell if the Vatican said we’re getting an allocation of GB200s and building the data center. But more importantly, you can do really interesting mechanistic interpretability work on small models now. I’ve been working on Qwen 3.5B, the internal representations are fascinating. So I don’t know there’s a structural Catholic advantage. Lots of people can play now. If you can scrape together the money for a DGX Spark, you’re in the game.

Why the Labs Are Listening

John-Clark Levin: It’s striking how many non-Christian, non-theistic researchers at the frontier labs have looked toward Pope Leo’s words with anticipation. Individual researchers might feel queasy about what’s being built, but they look around, everyone else is going along, and figure it’s just a me problem. So when someone with Pope Leo’s neutrality and moral stature speaks out, it acts as a moral coordinating signal far beyond the Roman Catholic Church.

Aqib Zakaria: What’s the relationship between the Vatican and the labs? Clearly there’s one if Anthropic is at the event. Why Anthropic, maybe to the exclusion of others? And from the China angle, if you want the whole world on board to disarm AI, why wasn’t DeepSeek there?

John-Clark Levin: I hope they will be in future. Bishop Paul Tighe, a lead author of Antiqua et Nova, toured the San Francisco labs earlier this year, got a sense of where the technology was, and met Chris Olah. I suspect that’s when Olah got looped in. But I see his participation less as an anointing of Anthropic than appreciation for him personally. He’s the father of mechanistic interpretability and has worked at all three frontier labs. So I read his presence as a scientist first, not a company representative.

Aqib Zakaria: Bullish or bearish on the Vatican’s grasp here? We say the US government doesn’t understand AI, the Chinese government doesn’t, and the Vatican is cloistered older men. How much does Bishop Tighe understand when he visits these labs?

John-Clark Levin: I’ve been doing this outreach in Rome since June of last year, and I’ve been impressed by the receptivity to evidence and argument. Even an older cleric skeptical of transformative impact still listens thoughtfully to the case and tries to discern the path forward. So I’m bullish on the Vatican’s epistemics.

Jordan Schneider: Part of why the people who built this are curious and excited is that if you’ve been riding this wave for the past four, six, ten years, you’re just staring at code, aware at some level that these models will have big moral implications. It must almost be a relief that there’s someone setting some direction. These labs just want someone to tell them how to do this in a way that doesn’t rip society apart.

Tim Hwang: There may be real demand among the top leadership of these companies, even setting aside the business case. In many labs it is literally a group of people constituted to build a disembodied perfect intelligence whose main purpose is to cultivate virtue in its users. A lot of them are confronting how deeply religious the project they’re working on is. You do start to feel a little religious about this technology, and organized religion is one way some of them make sense of it.

John-Clark Levin: It’s striking that although Anthropic was co-founded by effective altruists, in training successive versions of Claude they’ve empirically converged on something much more like virtue ethics as the right framework for Claude’s character. That’s an interesting validation of the Christian approach, arrived at through empirical contact with what makes Claude behave better or worse.

Tim Hwang: I’m chasing a theory I want to find an empirical test for. Being very deontological, specifying a bunch of rules, makes sense in an earlier era when models are primarily rule-following. But I’m interested in scheming risk. As intelligence improves, so does the ability to reason past whatever rules you set. So there may be a natural gradient in scaling that makes virtue ethics the better alignment strategy later, because any rule you propose, the model can reason around. The only path to alignment then is the model itself having a sense of the good it’s trying to achieve. Hard to put a number on, but it’s exactly what you’d explore in computational theology.

Aqib Zakaria: I didn’t know computational theology was a field.

Tim Hwang: Well, it is now.

An Encyclical Subtweet

Aqib Zakaria: I want to keep harping on the China aspect, because the Pope was born in the US, and there’s such deep engagement with and understanding of the US ecosystem. The paragraphs on transhumanism amazed me. They’re directly talking to Peter Thiel or something.

Tim Hwang: It is called ChinaTalk, after all.

John-Clark Levin: An encyclical subtweet.

Aqib Zakaria: It was an encyclical subtweet at Peter Thiel. But there’s a clear lack of understanding of the Chinese system, partly due to the Vatican’s complicated relationship with China. So I’m not optimistic about the encyclical’s impact there. People talk about the Vatican mediating between the US and China, but where’s that coming from? The church needs some line of impact into China for this to go well, and I don’t see it.

John-Clark Levin: China wants economic access and diplomatic power in the global South. To the extent Pope Leo can convene the global South and act as a voice for it, that can at least at the margins shift Beijing’s incentives around how they approach AI and AGI diplomacy.

Jordan Schneider: Tim, do you have a view on AI’s impact on helping authoritarian governments stay in power?

Tim Hwang: Technology is a bit of a sideshow here. Maybe that’s controversial. Yes, authoritarian regimes can use technology to retain control, but that’s true of technology in general. I’ve never found compelling the argument that there’s a necessary gradient making technology more or less authoritarian. It’s nonsensical to ask whether social media has a democratic or authoritarian direction, same as asking it of AI, because it turns so much on design.

John-Clark Levin: It was powerful that Pope Leo criticizes tech CEOs for these manipulative algorithms but doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. We have a shared responsibility for a healthy digital climate. He calls cyberspace a battlefield, and he’s right. In a Catholic sense, the algorithms serving toxic purposes are neutral in intent. They’re just maximizing ad dollars, but in doing so they reflect our own vices back at us. When we’re wrathful, the algorithm shows us more rage bait. When we guzzle flattering lies, it muscles truth off our screens in favor of propaganda. So Pope Leo calling all of us to that obligation, rather than treating it as pure manipulation by the billionaire class, matters.

Tim Hwang: I agree. I like that too.

Closing Thoughts

Jordan Schneider: Let’s go around with some closing thoughts. Tim.

Tim Hwang: It’s easy to get distracted by the social media discussion. If you’re Catholic, the best way to gauge whether the encyclical is landing is to look at your own community. That’s where I’d focus, because Twitter will be on to the next thing next week.

Jordan Schneider: Aqib.

Aqib Zakaria: The most interesting piece is the Vatican as a proxy for nations without the social capital to be at the bargaining table, the global South especially. I want to see whether they get more of a voice, or whether it goes back to the same.

John-Clark Levin: The encyclical is a strong start, but it reads as an opening to the conversation, not the final word. If AGI is coming soon, Magnifica Humanitas envisions a world that isn’t impacted the way I expect AGI will impact it. So I’m hopeful we see an AGI-focused encyclical in the coming years.

What struck me most: at the presentation ceremony, Cardinal Czerny, one of the lead theological advisors, said, quote, “whether and in what sense we can speak of consciousness or conscience in relation to the most advanced artificial intelligence systems” is “a serious question, one that deserves attention and further study.” For the church, that’s huge. Feet from the Pope, opening the door to AI consciousness and moral patienthood. Nobody fainted. The Swiss Guards didn’t skewer him with their halberds. Those remarks would have been circulated internally in advance, and if Pope Leo didn’t want that signal sent, it wouldn’t have been. I’d hoped the “further study” line would make the encyclical itself, but this is the next best thing.

Jordan Schneider: Stay tuned for more AI religion content here on, man, we really need to rename this soon, ChinaTalk. Thank you, Tim, Aqib, John-Clark. A pleasure.

This stupid new green card regulation

USCIS recently announced an idiotic new memo making green card applicants leave the country to do so. Besides separating hundreds of thousands of families, it would force Chinese AI researchers who want to work in America to go back to China, where recent reporting indicated that the Chinese government was taking away passports for top AI talent.

Can AI solve this?

All I told claude code to do was “make a maga microsite arguing that the latest green card application proposed changes are a terrible idea make it appeal to the trump white house.” I told it to “make it better” a few times and then asked for toggles for this site for five different political viewpoints, from MAGA to progressive.

It delivered an absolute gem, now live at FollowedEveryRule.org. Some highlights:

Evangelical version:

The tech right SKU:

And the progressive SKU:

Fwiw, OpenAI’s Codex rejects this as a use case：

Saving American Biotech with a China Tariff

I caught up with a Senate staffer who wanted some ideas on how to save the American biotech industry. Some have started to fear that the speed and cost advantages of developing and testing new drugs in China threaten the long term viability of America’s biotech R&D ecosystem. But the one thing Chinese biotech doesn’t have is direct access to the US market, far and away the most lucrative in the world.

I came up with an idea to take 10% of all the profits made by licensing Chinese drugs into America and putting that money back into the American biotech R&D ecosystem.

While I can cosplay as an AI subject matter expert, biotech is an industry I’ve invested far less time in. But with this kernel of an idea, how far could Claude Code take me?

I booted up my terminal and used the following prompt:

i have an idea for a new policy. ‘10% of the revenue generated by Chinese drugs that get licensed into the US market need to fund bio R&D that happens in the US.’ you need to do lots of research to figure out what are the best legislative and regulatory ways to make this a thing.

make a website on vercel that pitches this idea. do all the next steps for policy development, get subagents rolling, write up some legtext too

After ten minutes, it generated me a completely plausible website that does a better job arguing for policy than grasstops lobbying landing pages do.

While not at the quality of something I’d run in ChinaTalk, it did lay out in broad strokes the data you’d want to showcase to illustrate the idea. I felt like I just harnessed $5 of tokens to come up with a better idea than what the Congressional Commission on Emerging Biotechnology generated.

Oh Wait…

Feeling like I just cracked policymaking, I sent the site to a few friends. , frequent ChinaTalk guest and a more sane think tanker than me, responded:

Arnab: the idea of raising drug prices seems like a political loser

Jordan: but it’s like a tariff!

Arnab: that’s my point

And Kevin, a friend who works in biotech corporate development:

future deals would just price this in - so essentially European pharmas / biotechs not subject to the withholding (at least for the deal upfronts and milestones) would systematically be better able to license drugs from China

Alright, fine, maybe the mechanism isn’t perfect. But Claude can help with that.

i wanna do a deeper dive into whether the 10% flat rate makes sense or how to improve it. run lots of agents to do some really good analysis on this. then add a page to the website that proposes something more nuanced than the 10% flat tax

And it built me a whole system more sophisticated than a legislative assistant out of college could have spun up before AI.

At this point, I felt like I had something real, but was a little concerned that Claude was just glazing me. So I asked it to:

make a devil’s advocate page that does the best job of advocating against this idea

The first few arguments (WTO violation, loss of access to breakthrough drugs), did not resonate. But then Claude started to land some blows.

Starting to get embarrassed, I took the conversation off of my vercel webpage and into the terminal. Was this actually a good idea, I asked Claude?

B+ seems pretty fair! Next, I had it stack rank the most important things to do to unlock American biotech competitiveness.

As the cost and time required to do policy research comes down, the value think tankers can deliver will increasingly come down to taste and in-person persuasion.

On the policy research side, there are still plenty of angles of analysis which require deep context and talking with human beings who know things models can’t scrape or intuit. The centaur model dominates for now, but some really basic prompting I could have done in middle school got me much farther than I expected.

And on the politicking side, sitting at a terminal can’t do in-person meetings with staffers and principals, and deliver the face to face pitching which still matters in Washington. Today you can’t really have an AI spend money to donate to campaigns or funnel cash to cabinet members’ children. But we can’t be that far off from that future.

‘The Electric Fence’—Banning Carney’s China Cars

Another staffer-inspired shower idea comes from the fact that, despite Chinese EVs being practically banned in America, you can drive them across land borders without issue. If the US really wants to ban Chinese cars, having BYD dealerships pop up just across the border doesn’t seem like great policy.

Here are all the prompts I gave it. Initially it took my prompt and refocused it on a less gimmicky angle of this story: the fact that BYD is building factories in Mexico partially in the hope that they’ll be able to export to the US. If the administration wanted to piss Mark Carney off after his deal with Xi to allow the sale of a few Chinese EVs into China, it could ban Chinese cars from Canada (and Mexico) from crossing the border. Claude came up with an ‘Electric Fence’ proposal and accompanying EO.

1. i think the us should ban chinese EVs from crossing canadian and mexican borders. spin up some agents vibecode a policy proposal to do so, come up w a clever name and make a site on vercel. make it stylish dont make it look like ai slop. then make a page on the site that does devil’s advocate. look for ways to do this w executive action alone

2. write up EO text or reg text

3. what about canadians and mexicans who own the car just driving over the border? that’s what i was thinking about

4. refocus with cars that drive across, then do the other part

5. make it also highlight how trump can disrespect carney’s deal w xi allowing the sale of chinese evs by doing this. focus it on banning from canada alone, relegate mexico

The oneshot was fine, but I wanted it more Trumpy. So it made a MAGA-ified version, which you can check out here. [Note: I guess Dario is so lefty that I had to nudge Anthropic three times to get it MAGA enough].

1. just give it a more maga vibe

2. i want a maga aesthetic

3. make it even more maga not maga enough make more maga

Said staffer’s response:

For a little policy entrepreneurship comparison shopping, I gave Devin, Cognition’s coding agent, all the same prompts, and I think it did an even better job.

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Addendum: Can Agents Revive Congress’ Office of Tech Assessment?

From 1972 to 1995, Congress had its own tech brain: the Office of Technology Assessment. With two hundred staffers, it issued hundreds of reports helping Congress grapple with Japan’s technological progress…. Then Newt Gingrich killed it in 1995, leaving Congress starved for independent analysis of technology just as the industry grew increasingly more important to economic development and national security. In recent years, think tankers across the political spectrum have tried to get Congress to revive it.

I’ve had the OTA archive sitting as a snoozed tab for years, hoping to find something to do with it. I recently asked Claude to summarize OTA’s methodology and build a site imagining what the office would be working on if it still existed today. Here’s the result.

We are not there yet, but I’m looking forward to the day where models can give staffers their own personalized OTA reports!

Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.

Our conversation covers:

• Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy.

• Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building permits despite the state’s low per-capita emissions.

• Arizona’s Abundance Playbook — Including a consolidated commerce authority, a culture of engineering > litigation, and institutional factors that help Arizona outbuild Ohio and Texas.

• Taiwanifying the Desert — How Phoenix welcomed TSMC engineers with Mandarin programs in schools, Din Tai Fung, and a new Costco.

• Industrial Policy Resource Wars — How Arizona avoids backlash based on power and water use concerns.

Co-hosting is ChinaTalk analyst Aqib Zakaria.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Rise Like a Phoenix 鳳凰涅槃

Jordan Schneider: Ian, you show up in January 2023, after the CHIPS Act has passed, and there’s already excitement about all the fabs potentially being built in the Phoenix area. What were the first semiconductor-related priorities that landed on your plate?

Ian O’Grady: The TSMC investment was announced in 2020. That was a huge day — we were getting one fab, and we were so excited.

The CHIPS Act passed in 2021, the IRA in 2022, and then we’re coming into 2023. We have all these incentives happening. We have all the reshoring, the bringing jobs back to America effort. That’s great. But anytime we have investment incentives like that, it sets off this huge competition between states.

Every state is then showing the companies and local governments: Why does it make sense to do it here? Once that process happens, it’s: Well, okay — permits, power, people. How do we hire everyone we need to hire? How do we get those folks into jobs? From fab technicians to security guards to construction workers, which is super important. On any given day, we have about 10,000 folks up at TSMC working on the construction side, which is incredible.

We’ve been super lucky over the past few years to have a ton of expansions. Going into 2023, we knew there were a lot of opportunities in the semiconductor and battery supply chains. We wanted to make sure we got those anchors.

We have LG Energy in the East Valley. We have TSMC in the North Valley. We have Intel in Chandler, Arizona.

Jordan Schneider: You guys showed up in January of 2023. The CHIPS Act had already passed, the IRA had already passed, and there was already a commitment from TSMC to build at least one fab and hopefully more. What sort of calls were you getting? Who was bugging you? How does a governor’s office define the role it needs to play in facilitating this federal money coming into your state and being taken up by these companies that have the potential to bring enormous economic benefits?

Ian O’Grady: These were huge investments in 2023. Coming from D.C., there was an open question on the ground about how to actually implement this. First, you have to construct the fab. We focused on the construction workforce — how do we invest in these folks? How do we make sure they have what they need?

If you check the headlines from 2023, there were many labor disputes. These industries moved overseas partly because American labor was expensive and more difficult to manage. How do we reshore this? In the governor’s office, we saw this as an opportunity, but we needed to figure out how to make it work and ensure we stayed on time.

The timelines looked tough. We hadn’t done this before at this scale, and all those construction sites were active at once. Governor Hobbs announced several different programs while also serving as the go-between for the companies, general contractors on site, and workers.

This is the perfect encapsulation of the mundane stuff — on the work site, we needed more refrigerators, more porta-potties. Basic stuff to make sure we were good to go on site. We also invested in apprenticeships, which were a huge choke point for the state. We had year-long, couple-year waits for electrical pipefitters. These apprenticeships, both union and non-union, were essential for building the fab.

In December of that year, the capstone of all this was a labor agreement between the workers, contractors, and companies. It outlined safety provisions and specified how many foreign workers were coming in, because that was part of the equation. We hadn’t set up these ASML machines in the United States before. How do we set that up and ensure quality?

These companies are professional athletes — LeBron James level. They know what they’re doing. They’re willing to train American workers because they understand that long-term, they want to keep building here. Whether it’s on the construction side or the technician side, they need to train the local workforce. In those talks, we emphasized that we want Arizonans to have jobs from these projects.

Jordan Schneider: Can you describe the type of calls you receive daily as the policy advisor for workforce development?

Ian O’Grady: The great thing about a governor’s office is that it involves everyone. It’s a combination of VEEP and Parks and Rec.

In terms of who’s calling me — first, you have the workers on site: the contractors and the labor unions represented there. Then you have the feds. This was a huge priority for the Biden administration, so it’s Commerce and CHIPS. I talk to my counterpart there probably every other day to make sure we’re getting these projects online.

We use the word “ecosystem” a lot because it includes community colleges, universities, and the permitting entities for water, sewer, and power — making sure that’s all coming online. The magic is making sure all these components converge at the date they want to start producing chips, which is a ton of work.

At this first stage, it’s almost entirely a construction conversation. We have some permitting things that come later once you get to production, but right now it’s: How do we get the workers out there on site? They have intense demand over the foreseeable future — the next decade — across sites in the state.

Jordan Schneider: What are the near-term and medium-term levers for the workforce that a particular state can pull to help you beat out Texas or Ohio?

Ian O’Grady: Those are definitely the competing states.

Near term, one lever is just awareness that these projects are happening. Intel has been here for about four decades, so there’s awareness. But when you talk about TSMC or LG, there’s very little awareness of what that is, let alone that someone should go work there.

We’re trying to divert folks who are in the workforce looking for an opportunity. We need thousands of people to understand what that mission is, why it’s so cool, and why they would want to work either in building or operating the fab. That’s been relatively successful in terms of our recruiting and getting ahead of schedule on these sites.

Jordan Schneider: What does that mean exactly? Are you doing events and pushing reporters to write about this?

Ian O’Grady: This has been a partnership between the TSMC team, the Arizona State University team, our office in promoting the trades, and a lot of the local officials to talk about these opportunities.

There are also partnerships with high schools and K-12 education. This is more of a longer-term thing, but think about when you were a kid — what do you want to do for your career? Be a firefighter, be a doctor. We want “semiconductor technician” or “someone in the pipe trades” to be one of those options.

We’ve been working with the local school districts in that area to help them understand what those careers are, so you have folks graduating high school and going into those jobs. It’s those technical education districts and that whole local area that we’re really excited about.

Jordan Schneider: Does the market not figure all this stuff out? There are new jobs here, and presumably, they have to pay better than whatever the alternative is to get people to show up in the first place.

Ian O’Grady: That’s a question we get a lot, especially in Arizona where we have divided government. Many folks in the legislature believe the free market should fix this.

There are two factors at play here. First, you need an industrial base of talent that no one else is going to invest in. That’s essential not just for TSMC and Intel, but also for their supply chains. What has helped us secure so many projects is this latent base of talent that can transition — whether it’s battery manufacturing, aerospace, or semiconductors. These workers have skills from the ASU engineering school, the largest in the country, that we can attract and deploy to fill these jobs.

Certainly, companies might eventually invest in their own programs, but we don’t have time for that. We need these programs ready now, and we’ve been planning for this for the last 10 years.

The other challenge is the friction of setting up operations in the United States. Taiwan is set up to support their fabs — the times I’ve been there, it’s remarkable to see those connections. Understanding where to go in the US system isn’t easy. Our workforce system is something we’ve worked hard to simplify, creating one front door. But between community colleges and high schools, it’s still complex.

From the government side, we have to make it easier for companies to navigate because they do want to be good partners and invest in the workforce. Knowing where to go is half the battle.

Aqib Zakaria: I remember when this movement was first getting off the ground — the idea that we should build chips in America. Everyone was saying, “But we don’t have people who do that kind of work.” Unlike Taiwan, where everyone knows TSMC offers the highest-paying jobs.

I see you’re working with ASU and other community colleges to develop that workforce for the future. But that takes years to develop, and TSMC still has so many Taiwanese engineers. How do you know this is succeeding? How can you feel confident that people from ASU or Arizona are actually going to work at these fabs?

Ian O’Grady: I grew up here — Arizona State University has the largest engineering school in the country. We provide the most engineers. They usually leave. That was the opportunity: to keep those folks home and have opportunities in Arizona so they don’t have to move. Many of them don’t want to move, but they usually end up at Ford or automotive companies in Michigan or Ohio. Now they’re staying here.

How do we know it’s working? The chips are being made.

It’s been really fun to see the schedule and the progress of the facilities. I don’t know if you guys have been up to drive by either one of these — Intel down in Chandler, TSMC up in Phoenix. They’re the most amazing buildings you’ll ever see in these complexes.

In terms of connecting folks to those jobs, it’s been redirecting resources. We actually just set up a clean room for training down at the University of Arizona, so they have even more resources down there. Northern Arizona University has a really great metrology program, which feeds directly into some of the toolmaking. There’s been this demand and they’ve really answered the call on the need for these jobs, keeping up with the new technology. But it’s been keeping folks here, and that’s been — as a native Arizonan who’s moved back, I have a special kind of feeling towards that story.

Aqib Zakaria: What about ironing out the wrinkles between Taiwan workers and then the workers that are coming from ASU or that are trained in Arizona? I’ve heard a lot of stories of language barriers or work style differences. What role does the state of Arizona play trying to iron that out and make sure it goes smoothly?

Ian O’Grady: That one has been somewhat resolved by the company because they can’t bring over all these folks to operate the facility. We have Taiwanese restaurants now. The cultural integration has been really great. The Arizona Diamondbacks now host an event celebrating Taiwanese baseball and culture. It’s been something that we’re aware of, but really something that has sort of resolved itself over time.

Jordan Schneider: What about on the other side — how do you make sure the Taiwanese and Korean employees are excited to come to Arizona?

Ian O’Grady: There’s a stat the city has about how many babies have been born here from Taiwan in terms of new families setting up and being here in Arizona. There’s been a lot of work in the neighboring school district to make sure that they’re catering to Mandarin and having English immersion programs, which has been really exciting. Parents and kids here in Arizona want to learn other languages.

We’ve been really focused on childcare. These are the family parts, but we have a lot of families — a lot of senior folks who are moving here who want to be part of the community. The most exciting thing is in that area around both Intel somewhat, but more TSMC, because it is greenfield development. It’s a part of the city that was just desert. We’re building a new city, so we have an opportunity.

My understanding is the workers are super stoked about Costco — the folks who are over from Taiwan. We’re going to be building a new Costco up there, so they don’t have to drive as far. There’s a natural friendship between Taiwan and Arizona. We’ve been training the pilots from Taiwan out at Luke Air Force Base for going on four decades. There’s that natural kind of friendship happening.

Aqib Zakaria: I remember I was flying back from Taiwan a couple of years ago, and the guy sitting next to me was an engineer who was going to go work at the Arizona fab. He was originally kind of sad. He’s like, “I’ve heard there’s only one Asian store there.” Now I’m glad that there’s a Din Tai Fung and a Costco being built. It’s a little bit easier.

Ian O’Grady: There are a lot more Taiwanese restaurants. A lot of food trucks, too. It’s really coming along.

Crisis Management

Jordan Schneider: What kinds of acute crises end up falling on a governor’s office? Can you share any war stories about helping these buildouts develop?

Ian O’Grady: When we arrived, I emphasized how crucial construction was — just the ability to build the fabs. Whatever the motivation, we had to take this seriously. What did we need? What did we have to do? While negotiations were happening with the federal government, we wanted to create as friendly an environment as possible.

The first challenge was a significant worker dispute at the facility, which everyone now acknowledges we handled well. I’m proud of how we came together. In my timeline of building semiconductors in America, this was significant — we hadn’t done this in a long time.

The workers said conditions weren’t great and needed improvement. The facility folks and contractors said workers were being difficult and needed help. The company wanted to resolve this as quickly as possible. It wasn’t clear if anyone could talk to all three parties, but the Governor’s Office stepped in. We created what we called the tripartite agreement in December of that year.

The solutions were mundane but important to workers. It wasn’t that the company or contractors were intentionally withholding things — workers needed more refrigerators for their lunches, which makes sense with 10,000 people on site. They wanted greater access to porta-potties. These basic things made everyone on site really happy.

From the governor’s side, we’ve invested $5 million in apprenticeship programs because leaders said they couldn’t recruit fast enough and needed to build capacity. We gave them money for textbooks, classrooms, and equipment to build the pipeline. This also made them feel we were looking out for them overall, while serving both TSMC’s workforce needs and the contractors on site.

We also implemented a safety agreement. The state oversees facility safety, and there had been claims it was unsafe. We arbitrated this, offering a state program where they could sign on to go above and beyond OSHA standards, making it a platinum safety site.

The willingness of TSMC to learn and work with us, combined with workers’ willingness to come to the table, created a relationship we’ve really cultivated from the governor’s office. This was a priority in 2023. At one point, we thought there would be a strike — we were very concerned workers would walk off. We intervened alongside Senator Kelly’s office, facilitating required conversations that took months to resolve.

Jordan Schneider: The first TSMC fab is basically up and running, right?

Ian O’Grady: It’s producing chips.

Jordan Schneider: How do you measure a fab being “up”? Is it when you get your first wafer, or when it’s economical to operate? There’s probably a six-month window of just tweaking various manufacturing processes.

Ian O’Grady: There are different ways to think about it. Currently, it’s producing engineering wafers — they’re not the wafers that would necessarily go into production. But yes, it is producing chips. As for what’s left to finalize, that’s something for TSMC to comment on.

Jordan Schneider: What has been the hardest part of getting to this point?

Ian O’Grady: 2024 brought significant challenges related to air quality and the Clean Air Act. There was a moment when I wasn’t sure how we would permit multiple fabs.

Here’s a quick Clean Air Act primer: If you’re in a nonattainment area — meaning your pollutants exceed certain thresholds — you cannot build new major facilities unless you offset those emissions. Arizona currently exceeds ozone limits. However, 80% of our ozone comes from elsewhere; we’re not a high-emissions state. This law was traditionally written for East Coast states like Detroit or western Pennsylvania — areas with large emissions.

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This makes the offset problem even more difficult. You need to find offsets within the area that can balance the emissions of the facility. These are large facilities emitting certain types of pollutants that combine to produce ozone.

The county serves as the permitting entity under federal law. The city has some involvement because we can convert buses and baggage carts at the airport to help create the permits and credits for TSMC. This remains an ongoing discussion with the EPA.

Finding those credits and ensuring compliance was an extremely difficult lift for us. The state approached the CHIPS office about the issue, then worked with the county to determine how to make the permit happen while following the law.

Permitting and Process Bottlenecks

Aqib Zakaria: I want to dig deeper into the permitting issue. Now, with data centers and the abundance movement, everyone claims permitting is the problem — that it’s too slow or nonsensical. How does it work for you to collaborate with the county level to actually get permits approved? Can we build things if we want to? Can we permit things quickly? What’s the bottleneck?

Ian O’Grady: This situation perfectly encapsulated that conversation. This was the top national priority — building out our ecosystem with TSMC and Intel in the Valley. Everyone agreed this was a priority. Yet we were bumping up against the Clean Air Act from the 1970s, which is probably the most important public health legislation we’ve had. Many studies document lives saved and how it’s cleaned up city air.

However, it wasn’t quite designed for our situation — we weren’t causing the problem here, which created an even more vicious permitting challenge. We’ve had many productive discussions with bipartisan support. The governor has met multiple times with the EPA administrator. As Churchill might say, at the last moment, we’ll do the right thing — but it took substantial work.

The first fab is always the hardest. Now that we’ve done this, we can do it again. We have a path forward. The air quality issue remains complicated because you need to keep finding offsets. If we keep building, we need to keep finding offsets in an environment where we have very few, since we’re not a high-emissions state to begin with.

We can do it. Here in Arizona, we’re the first and only state to reach this point. I believe Samsung’s facility isn’t quite operational yet in Texas, and Intel is far from being up in Ohio. Our experience demonstrates that yes, we can make this work.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of pro-business as a vibe versus being pro-business as actually dealing with nitty-gritty mundane policy stuff — does the energy that a politician brings to these questions matter at all relative to page 34 of the submission to the CHIPS Act? How much do the atmospherics actually impact these sorts of issues?

Ian O’Grady: It’s a ton. I think of this in terms of trade missions. It’s not quite the political domestic politics question of “are you pro-business?” or “how do we feel about you?” When Governor Katie Hobbs went to South Korea after we had visited Taiwan — they know us really well there — we were talking to some suppliers, making sure they’re comfortable with coming over to Arizona. That kind of openness helps.

On an international scale, I realized that in South Korea, they really hadn’t thought about investing in Arizona. That kind of openness and subnational diplomacy of talking to companies in South Korea, and showing up on their doorstep, makes a difference. It’s one thing to have a call, but it’s another thing to go to their country and say, “Hey, we have a few partners here. We want to be as helpful as possible.” That means a lot.

Domestically, the governor’s approach has been that we’ll meet with anyone — it’s always an open door. One week I’m talking to a labor union, the next week I’m talking to a free-market business group. Our work represents the state of Arizona. We’re probably the reddest or purplest purple state, and we understand that we have a really diverse business community and workforce. We need to reflect that. We can’t be too ideological. Where Democrats get into trouble, especially, is when they stop taking meetings and talking to people.

Jordan Schneider: I remember being at SEMICON Taiwan two or three years ago, and Arizona and North Dakota were the only two states that had booths. I was talking to these people and they said, “Our states invest in this. We think the human element of this sort of thing is important,” which was surprising and wonderful. It’s interesting to see how you think that pays off. At the level of vibes for other countries, there are 50 states, right? Maybe you’re thinking America, but you’re not going to literally talk to all 50. It’s just easier if there’s some sort of level of awareness and face given initially.

Ian O’Grady: A level of comfort shows that you’re trying and getting out there, showing up. But that only lasts so long because eventually companies want to see the pro forma — let’s get down to it. That’s where real policy matters. You need both elements. You don’t close a deal without the policies being effective.

An example of this nitty-gritty work — though it isn’t legislation or written policy — comes from our broadband expansion efforts, which involves extensive permitting work.

In 2023, we dealt with a company that had been waiting about two years for a right-of-way permit to dig and lay fiber. They were going from agency to agency. They’d go to the Department of Transportation, who would identify an archaeological issue and send them to the State Historic Preservation Office. After pulling a ticket and waiting in line for an archaeological study, they’d return to the Department of Transportation only to be told about wildlife issues requiring a trip to the Department of Game and Fish.

We’ve flipped that process. Our commerce authority on broadband now pilots a one-stop approach for the massive permitting exercise happening around broadband. We handle that coordination work internally, making it easier and less of a headache for companies.

It’s hard enough for American companies. Imagine meeting with the governor of Arizona about investing in the state, then discovering you have to navigate counties, cities, water districts, and utilities — all separate entities. When we streamline this process, we remove a significant administrative burden from companies. While the market might eventually figure this out, making it easier gives us a competitive advantage.

As far as the legislature goes, we’re currently in the middle of budget negotiations. Each year during the legislative session, the governor delivers a State of the State address to kick things off. Since the budget expires July 1st, there’s a race to pass the new budget by June 30th.

Throughout the session, legislators introduce bills and ideas. Both our Senate and House have Republican majorities. Unlike the partisan, intense environment my friends describe in DC, I maintain excellent relationships with my counterparts on the majority staff in the legislature. Everything we do becomes a bipartisan act by necessity — nothing gets through the legislature unless it’s a Republican bill with Republican support for the budget.

The governor has established a litmus test: Is this bipartisan? Did you work with Democrats? Does this represent the widest swath of Arizonans?

During the session, I track about 200 bills, ensuring we’re prepared for each one. Some bills we’ll never sign, and we make that clear. Others we’re happy to sign. The challenging ones fall in between — the edge cases that might upset a stakeholder or don’t quite work for us. We have to decide whether to improve them or leave them alone. That’s how I spend much of my springtime.

Data Centers, Infrastructure, and Getting the Public on Board

Jordan Schneider: What were the best and worst bills related to industrial buildout that you’ve encountered?

Ian O’Grady: There’s been a lot of AI legislation coming through about how to regulate the technology. I’ve been watching AI safety bills, particularly because the Trump executive order attempts to preempt states, though there’s a safety exception — especially children’s safety. We have a couple of kids’ safety bills in that category.

Infrastructure remains the biggest legislative challenge. It’s the limiting factor for so much of what we do. We’re a low-tax environment, which means we don’t have all the tools that other states have. Some states will cut companies checks when they relocate. Others waive property taxes or build much of the infrastructure themselves.

We do as much as we can, but we have to figure out the taxing mechanisms. How do we accomplish this without cutting government further? Since 2000, our population has increased 40%, yet we have the same number of state workers, and our economy has grown even more. We don’t want to cut existing services.

When companies come to a state, they expect roads and water pipes to be in place. How do we meet those expectations? We’ve been working on legislation to fund these projects.

Aqib Zakaria: I’m curious about AI legislation in Arizona, particularly in the context of fab buildouts. Is there a connection between the average Arizonan being happy about TSMC and Intel bringing jobs while simultaneously being skeptical of AI and data centers? Is there a mental disconnect, or is Arizona more pro-AI?

Ian O’Grady: We’ve seen similar zoning issues across the country. We’ve had a couple of very intense ones for large data centers. There’s skepticism, especially when costs are higher than they were five years ago and people are thinking, “Why are we doing this when my rates are going up?” A lot of those concerns are widespread — they’re national, they’re here.

In terms of the politics and how they’ve played out, Governor Hobbs in her State of the State speech addressed an incentive that provides a tax exemption for the chips and racks in data centers. We passed this around 2013, when it wasn’t a huge deal — they weren’t cycling out these chips every 18 months and they weren’t super expensive chips.

Now the exemption’s grown and there’s no cap on it. It was in the tens of millions of state revenue that has been lost because we don’t tax these things when they build the data centers and then refresh them. The governor said we’re the second largest market for data centers in the country next to Virginia. This tax incentive has worked. What is an incentive for us to create new markets, to bring along new industry? We should eliminate this tax incentive. We’re not anti-data center. Given the math equations we have to do in a state like ours, this doesn’t make sense anymore.

The other part is she proposed a fee on water use — a cent-per-gallon water use fee on data centers. We know that a lot of the more modern data centers are using closed-loop systems, and we don’t want them pulling water from our aquifer because we are in a desert environment. We have to be very, very wise about water.

Those were two proposals. Republicans have basically called those DOA, which has been a really interesting political calculation in terms of just the political mood. We think this is the right policy. I’ve been in those discussions that these are things that we think make sense for the state, and we’re going to keep building data centers that can keep existing, but they just don’t need state subsidy and we want to make sure they’re using our water wisely. We’re on the winning side of that argument on a few different aspects.

Data center politics are everywhere right now. It is probably one of the hottest issues.

There are two sides of the argument. One is from maybe the far left: “We don’t need this technology. This is not making our lives better.” There’s a lot of work to do on that side. I believe there are going to be immense benefits. Doing slop posting and whatever’s been produced probably doesn’t help. I’m very curious when companies produce those types of silly videos — is that really what we need?

On the far right, or maybe more of a normie argument: “Everyone else is doing data centers. Why should we?”

We’re in the middle — we want to attract, we understand they’re necessary for modern technology. We realize we have a lot of advantages in Arizona in terms of building them and we’re building the chips for them. We understand the attraction. But we’ve got to be so smart about how we do it.

Aqib Zakaria: Is the state legislature on the same page about incentives, or is there push and pull?

Ian O’Grady: It’s absolutely a push and pull. They’re still focused on cutting government and lowering taxes, period. We want to have a conversation about what incentives make sense because we do have a ton of exemptions. Every year — and you’ve seen this at the national level — we’ll exempt taxes for this and this and this. We’re asking: What’s the justification for these incentives? That’s a conversation we really want to have.

Jordan Schneider: How does state-level competition play out? Are you tracking every other state’s offerings? Does that argument resonate with the legislature? How much comes down to the inherent factor endowments of what the state has to offer versus whatever package you’re negotiating at the last minute?

Ian O’Grady: We’re competitive with other states both on a cost basis and on long-term cost over time and quality of life. There’s a whole site selector industry — I don’t know how much national folks are aware of this — but there are consultants who help companies run these competitions, line up states, and figure out where they’ll be most effective. In your analogy, these are like the agents doing this work for companies.

Ian O’Grady: While we don’t have as many upfront cash incentives as other states, the big factors that matter are:

Workforce has been a huge priority. Companies need confidence they’ll be able to hire and start on day one — security guards, cafeteria staff, engineers, PhDs. That’s a gargantuan task. The confidence I’ve seen when people come to Arizona that we can deliver on this has been great.

Power costs are very competitive. Energy is a significant ongoing operating cost, and we’re well-positioned there.

Road quality really matters. Being able to move large machines or spacecraft across an interstate is super important. There’s another very competitive city that just doesn’t have a great highway system, and that’s become a huge advantage for us.

We’ve had people come to Arizona and say the traffic in that other city is horrible — they love being able to access meetings easily here. Our airport’s proximity to downtown is another advantage that’s not always the case elsewhere.

Water security is crucial. We’re in a desert environment and have been very judicious with our water — we actually use less water overall than we did 50 years ago, which is crazy given our population and economic growth. We have a state law requiring demonstration of 100 years of water supply in metro areas. If you’re building in Arizona, you know you have 100 years of water. No other state has that. That’s been a huge asset, especially as drought conditions and water shortages have emerged across the West.

Aqib Zakaria: I’m wondering about roads. Is there a positive externality where wanting to attract foreign investment incentivizes the state to fix roads and power infrastructure? Does that mental calculus happen, or are those completely divorced?

Ian O’Grady: It certainly happens on the power side. We have economic development divisions that work on this. That’s long been part of our state’s history — we’ve built dams for hydroelectric power and then attracted new growth. There’s this great factoid from our history where utilities paired up with homebuilders to ensure new homes had plug-ins for dryer units, so they’d use the electricity being produced. Those partnerships certainly happen on the utility side.

On the road side, we just passed a new multi-billion-dollar investment in our highway system around Phoenix, and Tucson just did their own too. It really matters for getting to and from places, especially for executive-level meetings. When the board’s in town, it’s been a huge deal. More than once, I’ve been involved in figuring out permits to move spacecraft across the country on the interstate. You do this in the middle of the night so you’re not in people’s way, but being able to do that on really straight, wide roads is important.

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Jordan Schneider: People are stressed out about power. You guys aren’t for now. Where does that come from? What’s the backstory there? Thoughts on broader lessons for the nation?

Ian O’Grady: We have a good mix of power. The Governor did an executive order in the fall to bring together a massive task force with utilities, businesses, consumer advocates — everyone. They just published their list of recommendations. It was the Arizona Promise Energy Task Force. Those are online if folks want to read them. I think it’s a national best practice in terms of what’s in there. Now we’re going to work on implementing those.

In terms of the mix I mentioned, we do have one of the larger nuclear facilities in the country. The Governor actually just toured it yesterday. That creates that base level — I forget exactly what percent, but it’s significant. We have some solar, some wind, and significant natural gas. Coal has been coming offline recently, but that mix has been super helpful.

Our ability to build transmission lines has been huge. We’re working with our state land department to create corridors where we can further transmission lines. That nimbleness we’ve shown versus legacy states, where you have old systems and it’s just harder to move, has been a huge benefit for us.

Aqib Zakaria: Why can Arizona build when other states can’t?

Ian O’Grady: I think about this a lot too, and I talk to counterparts in other states. One aspect is that we’ve done a really good job of centralizing this. We created a statewide commerce authority — we got rid of our old Department of Commerce and made this quasi-public entity that’s been great.

We’ve had the same CEO for a couple of decades. Her name is Sandra Watson. She’s amazing — I’d say she’s the best state commerce director in the country. Being able to act nimbly in terms of that board has been huge. You have CEOs on that board who direct where our incentives live, and you have that input. That has made us very effective in attracting businesses.

My theory on why we can build, from talking to other states and going to conferences, is that there are states where you have this layer of sediment — “we’re in oil and gas” or “we’re steel and automotive” — and that creates this drift of “that’s what we were made to do.” They can’t quite get to the next level.

Versus in Arizona, we have some legacy industries, but they’re all engineering-focused, so they actually end up being a benefit. We’re a growing state with new population coming in. We’re now retaining more of our grads.

I think of the lawyers vs engineers dynamic in Dan Wang’s book Breakneck — we have a lot of engineers. Reading his book, I was thinking there are some similarities between Arizona and some of the cities he’s talking about in China in terms of our ability to build.

The consolidation with the Commerce Authority also helps us quarterback with the localities. I’ve seen other states with really intense competition between metros where the state can’t operate effectively. In Texas, it’s Houston, Austin, Dallas — if you’re the state and a project comes, folks are fighting over who gets it.

We’re now at the stage in Arizona where everyone understands that we should celebrate each other’s wins and that there’s enough to go around. That’s a feature of years of learning and success with the major anchor investments we’ve gotten. We’re in a really good position to continue — we’ve had 70 semiconductor expansions alone in the last couple of years, which is just crazy.

Jordan Schneider: Other lessons for other states or national policymakers you’d like to share?

Ian O’Grady: I think there are some pretty basic resources you have to think about as a state. We talked about roads, but rail access is super important. That’s something we’ve been thinking about in terms of expansion — getting goods on and off the rail line and moving them across the country, especially as we manufacture them.

For national policymakers, we’re in the midst of pretty intense Colorado River negotiations. The agreement we’ve had for decades, allocating water across the seven basin states, is expiring. Our argument in Arizona is that no other state produces more advanced chips, more guided missiles, or more leafy greens per drop of Colorado River water.

Not to pick on Wyoming, but I looked up semiconductor employment by state. Wyoming had literally zero. We’re making an argument in this process — which is being run by the Department of the Interior — that yes, we understand drought conditions. We’ve put our own cuts on the table. We’re offering to cut 27% of our usage because we’re more efficient. No one else in the upper basin is offering cuts like that. But for the Trump administration, no one offers better ROI than Arizona in terms of that water.

Are you guys familiar with the book Cadillac Desert about water history in the West?

Jordan Schneider: Pitch it.

Ian O’Grady: Great book on water history. It’s from the ’80s, so it’s a little outdated. But they make this argument that I think about a lot in terms of Arizona: The ability for the United States to win World War II was based on our hydroelectric capacity in the West and our ability to produce at scale. Boeing, Northrop Grumman — all the aerospace companies emerged because they had access to that power, because we had the geological features to create rivers that could generate electricity. That’s why we were able to produce at a scale that neither Japan nor Germany could match.

That’s relevant today. When I look at how the river is being allocated, we have really clear decisions to make about where that water should go, especially for all our national priorities. We’re making that case probably on a weekly basis to our colleagues in other states and in D.C. But right now, the current direction needs to change if we’re going to be able to continue producing like we do.

Building the Ecosystem

Jordan Schneider: What’s your take on trade dynamics and foreign investment, especially with USMCA coming up for review?

Ian O’Grady: We’ve been working closely with Mexico — the Governor’s visited several times since they’re our largest trading partner. With USMCA up for review on July 1st, we’re quite concerned about the direction it’s heading.

We’ve spoken with the US. Trade Representative, and they’ve indicated they don’t think they need Congressional approval. They’ve also made it clear: “Don’t expect North America to be a free trade area.” The Trump administration’s overarching concern is preventing Mexico or Canada from becoming a backdoor for Chinese goods into the US. market.

Mexico’s own China politics are fascinating right now. The Sheinbaum administration has launched a “Made in Mexico” — Hecho en México — initiative and they’re placing tariffs on China. But when you actually look around Mexico, the new cars are mostly Chinese EVs. It’s a really interesting dynamic, and we’re working hard on USMCA issues to address these concerns from the Trump administration.

Jordan Schneider: There’s a big debate in Washington about bringing in Chinese industrial investment. The hope would be that companies like BYD, battery manufacturers, and rare earth refiners could replicate what LG and TSMC have done in Arizona. Based on your experience, how would you approach setting up or incentivizing these agreements to ensure long-term technology transfer?

Ian O’Grady: The joint venture conversation is complex, especially in automotive where there are so many competing interests.

From a supply chain perspective, Mexico is absolutely ready for chip assembly and automotive parts manufacturing. They’ve become very strong in aerospace and medical devices in recent years — they’re ready to build.

The jump to automotive manufacturing is particularly challenging. We have our first major OEM, Lucid Motors, making EVs south of Phoenix. Getting that workforce up and running was like building TSMC’s first fab — you learn so much in the process. We want to build that ecosystem, but nobody really knows what the future looks like for automotive investment right now. There are fundamental questions about internal combustion versus electric vehicles. The Iran situation and gas prices might revive the electric conversation.

Arizona has huge advantages here — we’re the number one copper producer in the country with a significant critical mineral supply chain. We’re going to be producing batteries at scale, which is generating a lot of interest. But ultimately, the market is the market.

Aqib Zakaria: I’m curious about the ecosystem aspect, since so much of this really is about ecosystem development. You can’t just have an EV fab in the middle of a state without the supporting players around it.

I wonder how you sell that vision — it’s really sexy to say “oh, we built an EV factory,” but it’s not as much of a PR win or as compelling to say “okay, we’re expanding copper production.” These supporting industries may be more commodity-based and cheaper, but they’re harder to make attractive. How do you try to actually make that ecosystem happen? It’s an enduring problem in the States.

Ian O’Grady: From a state level, we want to create what I think of as the substrate or the platform. We want good roads, good railroads, good connectivity so that we can just move heavy things. That’s a big part of critical minerals.

In terms of opportunities in mining — we’re a mining state. In Arizona, we say we have the 5 C’s: copper, climate, cattle, citrus, and cotton. Copper is the big one — our state seal has a copper miner on it. It’s very much part of our DNA. My family actually moved here in the 1870s to be miners. There’s really an awareness of it.

There are things that come along with it, too — these mines have a shelf life. We have open pit mines sitting across our state where we see the scars, but we also see opportunities. You have really innovative things happening in terms of mine reclamation and being able to extract metals at a more micro level.

We have many major mining projects coming online. We’re actually number one in terms of jobs growth and number one in terms of mineral exports already, and we don’t even have major projects online yet for new mining. Those build a lot of jobs.

At a corporate level, Lucid Motors understands that more of their supply chain is going to be in Arizona. With USMCA, it almost has to be. That’s helpful on that side. In local communities, there are pros and cons, but there are jobs coming in — these are legacy things that people remember in Arizona.

Jordan Schneider: You want to tell them about your adventure, Aqib?

Aqib Zakaria: Oh yeah — I’m from Louisiana, and while we’re not building fabs or EVs yet, we’re expanding gallium production. They’re opening up a lot of refineries, so I’m hoping to go there to see how that actually ends up working out.

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to do a work study tour. We’re going to have Aqib in the mines — we’ll see how long he lasts.

Ian O’Grady: Where does the gallium come from? Where are they extracting it from?

Aqib Zakaria: It’s a byproduct of alumina that they make. We already have alumina refineries, and my surface-level understanding is that the byproducts are actually a big pollutant, but now you can take that byproduct and refine it into gallium.

Ian O’Grady: That’s so cool. We have a mine that will produce zinc, manganese, copper, silver, and lead. It’s a site being revitalized by South32, an Australian company down in Southern Arizona.

Mining today is completely different. They’re actually running fiber lines from the town of Nogales, which is the biggest city in the county down there. They’re going to have a command center, but it’s all robots in the mine. It’s much safer. The tailings are going to be backfilled into the mine, so you’re not going to have a huge tailing site.

Aqib Zakaria: I’m jealous. I’m happy for Arizona, but I’m waiting for TSMC Thibodaux or whatever it’ll be.

If you or anyone you know can help him fulfill this mission, please reach out to aqib@chinatalk.media.

Less than one in a thousand Chinese people owned private cars in the 1990s. But in 1993, a vehicle guided by a computer program landed on the floor of a car plant in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province. Xianfeng 1 先锋1号 was the first of its kind in China, developed entirely by Chinese researchers.

The car plant had previously relied on American-made autonomous-guided vehicles, but the US tightened export controls in 1991 and cut off sales to China. The plant turned to the Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA), an institution of China’s national academy, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It was led by a scientist called Jiang Xinsong 蒋新松.

To the average person today, “AI” is synonymous with chatbots — or, at least, tools that exist only in the digital realm. Hardware manifestations, like humanoid robots or intelligent Roombas, are instead considered futuristic.

But “Chinese AI,” as an idea, did not necessarily begin with DeepSeek or tech companies in Hangzhou. It started on assembly lines in the Northeast, with dreams of intelligent oxygen furnaces for steel production and automated car plants. Some of the earliest champions of artificial intelligence research were not software engineers or information scientists, but those working shoulder-to-shoulder with factory workers.

As Chinese firms like Unitree became forerunners in the race to build autonomous robots, I grew curious about Jiang’s story. State media has dubbed him China’s “father of robotics.” His work — and what he would have conceived of as “artificial intelligence” — is substantively different from deep-learning-driven robotics today. However, the information scientist who petitioned Beijing for what arguably became China’s first industrial policy for AI was thoroughly ahead of his time.

Jiang is increasingly compared to figures like Qian Xuesen 钱学森 in official narratives. Qian, deported from the US under the Red Scare, fathered ballistic missiles and rockets; it is said that Jiang, who never left the country until later in life, did the same with industrial robots. These laudatory stories omit thornier, though more intriguing, parallels. Like Qian, Jiang’s life was one where science and politics were fair-weather friends.

The Road to Shenyang

Jiang Xinsong never expected to end up in the Northeast. Born to a common family in faraway Jiangsu in 1931, he entered Shanghai Jiaotong University — also Qian Xuesen’s alma mater — to study electrical engineering in 1951. After a high-achieving first year, he was sent to Beijing to learn Russian and prepare for study in the Soviet Union. But after a physical exam revealed tuberculosis in his lungs, he was forced to return to Shanghai. In 1956, Jiang graduated and started working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation in Beijing, where he joined the newly-established computing technology group. There, he designed memory units for some of China’s first computers.1 He was a rising star of the national academy, working at the cutting edge by day and studying German at the Peking University library by night.

The good times didn’t last. Swayed by the permissive atmosphere of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, a young Jiang advocated for institutional reforms:

He supported making one’s dossier open to the person concerned, and once said: “The Soviet Pravda claims to represent the truth, but in fact a lot of what Pravda publishes isn’t true.” … After the Anti-Rightist Campaign began, he proposed that small-group meetings should not be minuted and should not be reported up the chain. He said: “The People’s Daily is accustomed to using the ‘Editor’s Note’ tactic to deal deadly blows to anyone being criticized.”

— Jiang Xinsong’s alleged transgressions, according to his “Rightist Registration Form” 右派分子登记表

Political winds at CAS immediately turned against him after Mao Zedong initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, and he was sent to rural Hebei for hard labor. Luckily, in December 1958, Jiang was summoned back to the CAS to work on automation research for industrial applications, since his field was deemed useful by the state. Officially, however, he was a “rightist” until 1963, blacklisted from promotions and unable to travel.

In 1965, 140 automation engineers were reassigned from various posts across China to Liaoning, with the goal of bringing new technological advances to the heavy industrial base there. Together with Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, Liaoning is part of China’s frigid Northeastern region formerly known as Manchuria. Between 1932 and 1945, the region developed into an industrial powerhouse under Japanese occupation, supplying Tokyo’s war efforts with natural resources, heavy industry output, and railways.2

As WWII drew to a close, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in coordination with the US’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soviet forces occupied Manchuria until 1946, when the territory — and its remaining industrial resources — was transferred to the Chinese Communist Party. Upon its founding in 1949, the victorious People’s Republic inherited not only a liberated Northeast, but also a critically important industrial base that powered its earliest technological ambitions.

Jiang Xinsong was part of the 1965 reassignment cohort. For two years in Liaoning, he helped revive the remains of Showa Steel Works — a massive steel mill established under Japanese rule — in Anshan 鞍山, Liaoning, researching automation for the cold-rolling process. From the ruins of war, steel sheets were again pouring out of Anshan’s factories.

Dreaming of AI during the Cultural Revolution

For the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, much of non-political life in China ground to a halt. In 1967, the Anshan mill, too, paused production, and Jiang headed to Shenyang. At the SIA, checkered records from previous political campaigns meant he was subjected to brutal struggle sessions. But once again, he narrowly avoided being sent down to the countryside. In October 1967, the new “revolutionary committee” that displaced the mill’s old leadership summoned Jiang back to Anshan to maintain its reversible cold-rolling machine — the only one in China at the time.

Anshan shielded Jiang from political turmoil during the second, quieter phase of the Cultural Revolution, while many of his intellectual peers languished in remote countryside locales. On the rare occasions when he visited Shenyang, he and SIA colleagues Wu Jixian 吴继显 and Tan Dalong 谈大龙 often discussed new frontiers in industrial technology. In particular, they were fascinated by reports about the emergence of automated industrial robots in Japan, the US, and Europe. The three of them perused the SIA’s reading room for everything they could find on “artificial intelligence”: in the early 1970s, this was a muddled mix of neural networks, cybernetics, and computer-integrated manufacturing. MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum had built ELIZA only a few years prior. Jiang, Wu, and Tan’s “AI,” gleaned through the handful of publications that made it into Cultural Revolution-era China, was worlds away from the models we know today. Rather than talking to chatbots, these steel-factory regulars were excited about using algorithms to operate manufacturing equipment.

In 1972, Jiang, Wu, and Tan drafted On Artificial Intelligence and Robotics 关于人工智能与机器人, a petition to Beijing to seize on innovations in the field and invest in general automation. They had drafted China’s first policy proposal for artificial intelligence.

Researching and manufacturing robots is the natural direction of automating equipment manufacturing, and is an important sign of a country’s strong and robust industrial development.

— Jiang Xinsong, Wu Jixian, and Tan Dalong, On Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (1972)

Armed with this petition, they headed to Beijing to persuade superiors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The CAS’s leadership was supportive, but constrained by political headwinds. In early 1973, the trio made another trip to the nation’s capital, courting more industries where advanced automation might be applicable. This time, they encountered pushback: many thought the concept of robots was closer to science fiction than reality and found them unserious.

Another major blow to their dreams came via the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius Campaign 批林批孔运动. This was a confusing phase within the Cultural Revolution, where activists merged posthumous criticism of former Vice Premier Lin Biao (dead of an infamous plane crash in 1971) with denunciations of Confucius in an attempt to reinterpret Chinese history according to Maoist ideology. The movement reignited political divisions in academia. After returning to Shenyang, Jiang, Wu, and Tan were variously labelled as pro-Western “establishment types” 小当权派, and “hat-off rightists” 摘帽右派 for their research.3 Radical students and scholars denounced AI and robotics as “idealist pseudoscience” 唯心主义伪科学 in magazines.4

Can “intelligence” be manufactured by “artificial” means? No, it can’t. … The term “artificial intelligence” gives idealism an easy loophole to exploit. If artificial things can create “intelligence,” then in the future something with “intelligence” even more advanced than humans is bound to appear. … Some of the academicians of the Soviet revisionist regime … are loudly promoting “artificial intelligence” … which fully exposes their traitorous true colors.

We must take a stand against Deng Xiaoping, … and in the struggle to criticize all kinds of reactionary ideological trends in the research fields of “image recognition” and “artificial intelligence,” we must follow our own path.

— Excerpts from Selected Translations of Foreign Writings on Philosophy of Natural Science 《摘译外国自然科学哲学》, a Cultural Revolution-era magazine about the philosophy of science which circulated among radical scholars.5

China’s earliest experimentations with AI and robotics were thus nipped in the bud. Unlike the Soviet scientists whose records survived to Perestroika, we do not know how Jiang and his colleagues felt during these years. Jiang’s biographer Xu Guangrong 徐光荣 borrows the term “dancing in shackles” to characterize the period. Historical records are otherwise thoroughly sanitized; everywhere he is quoted, Jiang is resilient and grateful, never once resenting the Party, the academic system, or his fanatical accusers. Official history paints the picture of a patriotic scientist who, despite force majeure adversities, always remained buoyant with hopes of serving his country one day.

But can we read between the lines? How devastating it must have been to have your life’s work stretched out by a decade, delay compounding delay; to watch the nation to which you are supposedly deeply loyal squander opportunities to seize technological advances; to have your research papers presented by others at international conferences because you were forbidden from travelling. One can only imagine what private dreams sustained scientists of his generation.

From Engineer to Strategist

With the death of Mao in 1976, the Cultural Revolution came to a close and normal academic activities were soon restored. Jiang and his colleagues quickly returned to their posts. Artificial intelligence and robotics became official research areas at the SIA. After a wasted decade, the CCP’s new, reform-minded leadership turned its mind to the global scientific race. A massive group of more than 1,000 scientists convened by the Party drafted the 1978-1985 All-China Science and Technology Development Planning Outline (1978-1985 年全国科学技术发展规划纲要) in 1978. The landmark document made some of the earliest mentions of intelligent machines in the history of Chinese policy:

Modern science and technology … is undergoing a great revolution. In particular, the development and application of electronic computer technology has enabled machines not only to replace certain forms of human physical labor, but also to take over some functions of mental labor, becoming auxiliary tools for memory, computation, and logical reasoning.

No longer was AI “idealist pseudoscience”: Beijing was finally endorsing scientists to embrace promising new ideas, unshackled by ideology. Meanwhile, Jiang Xinsong finally managed to leave the country for the first time. In August of 1979, he was part of a small Chinese delegation that attended the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 79) in Tokyo.

Japan at that time was a world leader in robotics and industrial automation. Jiang paid attention not only to their cutting-edge technologies, but also to the political and social institutions that enabled innovation. Having spent his entire career inside the CAS in one form or another, he was deeply attuned to the symbiotic relationship between institutional design and scientific innovation. As a young researcher, he paid a heavy price for supporting reforms; decades later, he finally had a chance to influence the institutional future of Chinese science. In his post-trip report to the SIA, he described how robotics research and development in Japan was not concentrated in universities, but also conducted robustly by research institutes and private enterprises. In his words, there was an efficient “division of labor” system in Japan’s robotics field: universities and specialized institutes engaged in basic research over longer periods of time, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry funded application-oriented research with 5-10 year horizons, and the private sector focused on commercializing market-ready technologies. Jiang paid as much attention to the workings of this system as he did to the research papers.

Many of China’s most prominent scholars from that generation became scientist-strategists, if not technocrats. Having weathered years of political campaigns and anti-intellectual rhetoric, with constant reminders to express loyalty, they worked closely with the Party-state system. Two things are likely true at once: (1) they both sincerely believed their work to be strategically valuable to their country, and (2) knew how to speak the language of the Leninist regime in order to bend political winds to their advantage. Qian Xuesen’s generational legacy lay not only in the rockets he designed, but also in the hand he had in shaping China’s defense complex. Similarly, Jiang Xinsong, whenever he could, advocated for industrial policies to stimulate automation research throughout his life.

The 1980s were the height of Jiang’s academic career. His writings from this decade were often theoretical, seeking to convene emerging threads of advances in robot manipulation, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. As one of a small handful of Chinese scholars closely following developments in AI and automation, he introduced American, European, and Japanese research to Chinese academics through his prolific writing output, pushed back against skepticism, and advocated for engagement with then-nascent fields in Chinese academic journals. These contributions were also frequently followed by concrete recommendations for research and policymaking, downstream of his observations of factory lines and laboratories.

Jiang Xinsong’s SIA team completed China’s first industrial robotic system in 1982. The SZJ-1 playback robotic manipulator (SZJ-1型示教再现机械手) was the first robotic arm to be deployed to Chinese assembly lines, and marked a watershed moment in China’s race to catch up in industrial automation. In March 1986, Jiang completed an influential journal article titled “Research on the Development of Robots in Foreign Countries and Our Response.” In it, he offered a broad picture of robotics’ development around the world, diagnosed China’s challenges, and proposed six strategies for catching up. Revisiting the article today, one realizes how influential his thinking was to the trajectory of China’s automation development.

Jiang appears to have believed strongly in process knowledge. He pushed back against the idea that automation wasn’t valuable to a country with incredibly cheap labor that mostly made low-end products. Given market logic, he argued, equilibrial “match points” justifying investments in automation will eventually emerge in the industrial upgrading process. In the meantime, China needed to gain experience by mass-manufacturing cheaper robots, emphasizing parts over entire machines, and exploring automation for specialized scenarios.6 Writing just seven years into the One Child Policy campaign, he foresaw that China would eventually need to contend with labor shortages, particularly in dangerous occupations like mining; in fact, some of his engineering research during this period was addressing the challenges of using robots in undersea operations.

At the Helm of Automation

Jiang was swiftly given an opportunity to execute his vision through the 863 Program. In the 1980s, after two decades of the US-Soviet scientific rivalry, it was clear that technology was inseparable from national power. Chinese scientists watched as the United States announced its Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars” program) in 1983 and the Eastern Bloc began the Comprehensive Program for Scientific and Technical Progress in 1985.

The same month Jiang finished writing “Research on the Development of Robots in Foreign Countries and Our Response,” scientists Wang Daheng 王大珩, Wang Ganchang 王淦昌, Yang Jiachi 杨嘉墀, and Chen Fangyou 陈芳允 directly petitioned General Secretary Deng Xiaoping to direct more funds towards scientific research, lest China be left behind. (They skipped official channels and had Deng’s son-in-law, who worked at the CAS and was an acquaintance of Wang’s, deliver the letter by hand.) Deng approved the petition in just two days, instructing Premier Zhao Ziyang to implement “without delay.”

In scholars Qiang Zhi and Margaret Pearson’s account, the “863 Program,” as the ensuing mega-initiative for applied research came to be known, was an institutional innovation inside the Party-state system. It was insulated from political winds; technology goals were specifically defined; and scientists, not politicians, had decision-making authority. The Program was guided by a single office under the State Council, which then coordinated scientist groups for each of the Program’s thematic focus areas. Funding for the Program was unusually concentrated and abundant. The total amount Deng earmarked for the 863 Program, to be distributed over the course of 15 years, was more than 10 billion RMB (around US$8 billion in 2026 dollars), equivalent to 5% of China’s entire government expenditure that year.

Jiang Xinsong advised the architects of the 863 Program on the field of automation for much of 1986, and in 1987 he was officially invited to be one of the Program’s seven chief scientists. His portfolio included computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and “smart robots” for industrial settings.7 The SIA remained the institutional home for much of this work. Armed with political legitimacy and funding, it produced a range of technical breakthroughs for the PRC in the ensuing decade. Jiang himself also initiated some influential technology transfer during this period. In 1993, he helped facilitate the import of twenty welding robots from Yaskawa in Japan. Paired with the SIA’s own controllers, these robots ended up in factories throughout China and accelerated uptake for automation.8

Though the 863 Program gave Jiang extraordinary influence, China’s industrial policy leapfrog did not entirely resemble his hopes for AI from back in 1972. Notably, the Program institutionalized robotics’ split from artificial intelligence, reflecting global trends at the time. The “AI winter” was descending, and robotics research continued to develop in a “classical,” engineering-driven direction. Within the 863 Program, robotics was placed into a different thematic focus area, away from computing and information science. It would take until the 21st century’s deep learning revolution for these two diverging threads to reunite.

In the 1990s, while progress continued in robotics, Jiang Xinsong was becoming worried about the future of China’s traditional industrial base. He had spent most of his career in China’s capital of heavy industry. Reform and Opening Up exposed the entire Northeast, including Shenyang, to market-based competition, and Beijing pushed forward with structural reforms under Jiang Zemin, resulting in mass layoffs. The region’s industrial identity, first forged almost a century ago under Japanese occupation, was under existential threat.

Jiang, who by now was well-travelled, looked to the West for answers. Towards the end of his life, he became an advocate for agile manufacturing, a concept first proposed by American industrial leaders in 1991. Agile manufacturing describes an approach where companies organize their assembly lines, stock, and workers in a modular fashion, so that they can respond to quickly-changing demand and produce highly varied products within one system. Designed for a world of highly personalized products, it allows designers to iterate quickly and factories to pivot production as needed. Jiang believed agility to be the key to adapting China’s old industrial base for the future of automated production, and delivered lectures drawing from American manufacturing research throughout China.

By the time he died suddenly of heart failure in 1997, the “world’s factory” was coming into being. It’s an ironic fact that in the end, visions first articulated by Target and AT&T executives (and funded by the Department of Defense) would be realized most fully in Shenzhen.9

Towards China’s Industrial Robotics Revolution

As of 2025, more than 2 million robots are now deployed in Chinese factories, with domestic manufacturers selling more units in the country than foreign competitors in the last two years. One of the top Chinese manufacturers powering this transition is Siasun Robotics, based in Shenyang and affiliated with the CAS. Its founder, Qu Daokui 曲道奎, was Jiang Xinsong’s student and named the company — Siasun in English, and 新松 xīnsōng in Chinese — in his former advisor’s honor. Siasun became the first robotics company to trade publicly on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2009.10

It’s easy for observers today to assume a sharp break with the Maoist past when interpreting China’s technology governance, seeing as many of the technologies most relevant today did not proliferate before even the Xi Jinping era. Jiang Xinsong’s story reminds us of the ghosts in the closet. China was not always strong, and the PRC’s leaders did not always look favorably upon its scientists. Periods like the Cultural Revolution cannot be explained away as exceptional aberrations; they, and reactions to them, scarred the generation ruling China today and shaped the institutions that now govern knowledge production. Chinese science has always danced a delicate duet with the state. Politics is a shackle, but also an incentivizing structure. AI, rather than fundamentally altering these relations of power, is likelier to simply reanimate them.

With thanks to Jasmine Sun and the ChinaTalk team for editorial feedback!

Rob Lee is a senior fellow at FPRI and one of the most-read analysts of the Russia-Ukraine war; he’s joined by WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark, , and .

We discuss…

• The six-month infantry rotation and what isolation, drone threat, and zero-line resupply do to a human being

• Why Ukraine has reclaimed the drone edge — and what the Hornet, Bumblebee, and FP2 are doing to Russian logistics

• Ukraine’s new corps structure, where the brigade-only model broke down, and what the Azov-derived elite corps look like

• Why 2% of Ukrainian casualties come from small arms and what infantry are actually doing on the zero line

• Starlink as the indispensable game-changer — and Russia’s increasingly serious attempt to jam it

• Combat casualty care when CASEVAC takes 12 hours, the golden hour is dead, and tourniquets sit on for a month

• What the Marine Corps should steal from Ukraine — pushing Hornets to the battalion, Bumblebees to the company, and giving up something to make room

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

And subscribe to Rob’s substack!

Two Marines

Newsletter from former US Marine Rob Lee and Ukrainian Marine Dmytro Putiata on the Russian-Ukrainian war, defense technology, and modern warfare.

By Rob Lee

Jordan Schneider: Justin, Bryan, Tony Stark — joined today by Rob Lee, dialing in from Ukraine. We’re checking in, hopefully going to hear some positive developments on WarTalk for the first time in a real long time.

Justin: I noticed there was an account posting photos of Ukrainian fighters from just before the war started, and then pictures of them today. You could really see the changes that have gone on. Rob, I know you’ve been with a lot of the fighters and the commanders — if you want to talk through a little bit of what they’ve gone through over these four years.

Life on the Zero Line

Rob Lee: I served four years in the Marines. I deployed three times. The deployments are relatively short. In this war, a lot of people volunteered on February 24th with no military background, and now four years later they’re still in service. They put their lives on hold. Even with us who were serving in the GWOT — you’re home at times, you’re deployed — you can still kind of care about your lives.

The burden of this war is very narrowly focused. All Ukrainians feel it, but in particular the infantrymen. Rotations are very difficult now because of the kill zone, but also manpower challenges. Right now infantry, some brigades I’ve met with, say infantry is spending a minimum of three months at the zero line with no rotation. But there are many cases of six months and nine months. There are a couple of cases of guys who are over a year on position and just doing no rotation.

What it’s like is — usually if you’re infantry, you’re underground, either in a hole dug in a tree line somewhere or in the basement of a building. You’re not going outside very much because of the drone threat. Some of these guys, their eyes have to recover because they haven’t seen sunlight that much for six months or a year. There’s very little physical exercise you can do because you’re in a very small confined space. Almost all resupply is done by drone — these big vampire drones drop almost all the food, ammunition, water, whatever else you need.

It’s very difficult to do casualty evacuation. To zero line, in many places you can only do it by ground drone. You can’t even bring up vehicles. Basically you either have to walk out yourself or you have a UGV come get you. And in many cases that’s not possible. To walk to position and back, in some cases you have to walk 25 kilometers. I talked to an infantryman from the 9th Air Brigade a couple of weeks ago, and on his way out he had to walk 18 kilometers. Of course you’re walking along the most concealed and covered route. It might take days or a week or so, because you walk when there’s bad weather, when the drone threat is reduced.

It’s very hard to fathom, even for me, because it’s so different than what we saw in Afghanistan and what other people experienced. This infantry guy I talked to was telling me he only slept a couple of hours a night. He’s always on edge — they’re getting hit by FPVs and other things pretty often, almost every day. You never know if Russian infantry are going to walk up on you, because sometimes they get through, sometimes UAVs don’t see things, and you might have to fight. In this guy’s case there was a case where six Russian soldiers got into his position and they had to fight them with small arms.

It’s extraordinarily difficult. You can imagine how much it ages you, because you’re so tense for so long at a time and there’s no rotation. The psychological and physical effects are going to be really long-term problems for these guys.

Tony Stark: There was a saying about soldiers in World War Two — they saw about ten days of intense combat. That’s not dismissing the combat that they saw, but it was kind of this roller coaster where there would be dead periods, and then you’d be in these massive engagements. During the GWOT, it was kind of the opposite — you could take contact every day, but you weren’t under sustained fire every day. You had FOBs.

And then you have what I’ll say was General Milley’s perception of future war — that you would always be under threat of fire, you wouldn’t get a lot of sleep, and you’d have to move a lot. The one difference is that for Ukraine, they really can’t move. They’re stuck in this attritional battle where there’s not large-scale maneuver warfare.

Rob Lee: Yeah. The ombudsman for the military mentioned a study a month or two ago — I was thinking about writing something about this — that according to the study, anyone who’s been on the zero line for more than 40 days becomes kind of ineffective. Maybe not ineffective, but they stop caring too much about their survival. They lose their effectiveness essentially. I talked to this guy — he thought he was still effective. He’s still obviously afraid and has certain issues. But as you said, the comparison — here it’s not the most intense combat, because you’re underground, in some kind of cover and concealment. It’s not like you’re in a firefight the entire time, but you’re on edge the entire time. Any time your position could be attacked, you could get hit by drones all the time, and you can’t go outside.

There are both sides to this. Drones have created this problem with the kill-zone concept, but they also enable you to be able to fight within it — because drones are doing all logistics too. Drones are just having a really dominant role in the war at this point.

Why Ukraine Is Winning the Drone Race Again

Rob Lee: That’s why — let’s talk about what’s happening now. The case for optimism is that Ukraine is retaking the upper hand on the drone side. The qualitative improvements — quantitative, I think, is pretty even. But that’s one of the really big developments of the last five, six months: Ukraine has reestablished this upper hand. Last year, some people thought Russia had caught up or maybe narrowed the gap. It’s very clear that Ukraine has surged forward this year, and that’s really one reason why the situation is better than it was a year ago.

Jordan Schneider: What have been the developments over the past three to four months — or wherever you want to put the turning point — that have changed the dynamics on the ground?

Rob Lee: First off, there’s a strong seasonal dimension to the fighting. Every winter, the fighting doesn’t end, but it’s more difficult for Russia for offensive operations, because Russia really prefers doing infiltration tactics — usually one or two guys at a time moving forward. It was a very cold winter, negative degrees in many cases. If you’re out in the environment like that, it’s hard to survive. These guys aren’t that well trained, and the tree line goes away, so you lose your camouflage. It’s harder to camouflage from drones. Thermal cameras work better when it’s cold anyway, so thermal optics on a Mavic 3T is going to be more effective. In winter, infiltration is much more difficult — Russians try to infiltrate behind the front line and either dig a position in a tree line or find a basement. In winter you basically have to find a basement to survive. So it limited the kind of infiltration they could do.

Over the winter we knew Russian advances would probably slow down, and they did. Typically, looking at the last year and the year before, Russian advances would still be somewhat slow in spring and then pick up as the summer goes on. We’ll probably see this again — Russian rate of advance kind of increasing. But the weather has turned for about a month or two, and we haven’t seen a significant increase in the rate of advance for Russia. So my view is we have to wait and see how bad we’ll get in the summer and fall when Russia typically advances faster. But there are good reasons to believe this year Russia is going to have more problems advancing.

One of the big ones is just the development of mid-strike, which is operational depth strikes by Ukraine. Ukraine for a long time had very good intelligence of Russian positions — they knew where command posts are, where air defense systems are, not perfect fidelity, but a good idea in many cases. There was just a lack of capability to strike these things. Obviously they had ATACMS before — that was one of the options. HIMARS used to be basically the only operational fires capability they had for some time. HIMARS became less effective because the Russians adapted — they could shoot down GMLRS, EW affects GMLRS.

Now Ukraine has developed and scaled kamikaze drones that can focus on operational depth. There’s a huge quantitative increase the last six months or so, in different types. You have the FP2 — maybe it’s going to be called Firepoint — it has a 100-kilogram warhead, a really big warhead. If it hits something, it’s going to do a lot of damage. You can collapse a building. They’re using these very frequently on air defense systems, command posts, warehouses, all sorts of logistics targets. They hit an FSB building in Kherson yesterday — destroyed the building. Even if the accuracy is 30 to 40% getting through — I don’t know what the number is — you’re still getting enough through to destroy targets. And the price isn’t… I think FP2 costs like $40, $50,000. Don’t quote me on it, but that’s a rough idea.

You have a bunch of other drones in this class, maybe smaller. There’s the Hornet from Eric Schmidt’s Perennial Autonomy — that’s doing a lot of significant damage right now in different areas on logistics roads. Hitting trucks, making it very difficult for Russian logistics at 50 to 100 kilometers or even further. They’re very cheap, sub-$5,000.

You can adapt them — put a Starlink on them, increase the battery size. A very successful system, very easy to fly, the AI will ping targets. As you’re flying, you put in what kind of target you want the system to search for, and it’ll immediately put boxes up as it flies. There are false positives, but it will locate things for you. Then the Bumblebee, the FPV-Mavic-type version of the Hornet from the same company, also works integrated in the system.

The qualities of production are just increasing. More Ukrainian units are getting these things, and it’s doing a lot of damage. There are other Ukrainian options like Bulava, RAM-2X — kind of at the Lancet class. The quantity has just increased substantially. They’re getting through Russian EW. Obviously the economics make sense to use these aggressively — it’s not $400,000, not $200,000, it’s something much more affordable, and that’s really changed the dynamic of the fighting.

Mid-strike is the big development of the last six months. Russian advances have already slowed. That’s from a variety of factors. But now with the increasing improvement in mid-strike and knocking out air defense systems and other things, we can also think about what else might happen later this year. I definitely think this year it’s shaping up better than it was last year.

Bryan Clark: All your discussion about the scale they’re able to operate at and the adaptability of these systems makes me think — a lot of what they’re able to do is just testing and probing to see what works. So there’s much more adaptability because they can just poke and poke and poke until they find a vulnerability, and then they can pour in on either that capability vulnerability they see in the Russians or some mispositioning of forces. Is that a lot of what they’re doing here — taking advantage of the scale and the tempo they can generate?

Rob Lee: Yeah. The Russians have a lot of vulnerabilities. They’re slow to adapt in many cases. There was a big debate over mid-strike last year, where some people thought this should have been a bigger focus — the operational depth was just not being hit. Ukraine had a tactical strike and a strategic strike campaign, but this operational campaign wasn’t there. Now it’s here and it’s doing enormous damage to Russia. It’s going to change how they do logistics.

When HIMARS arrived, Russia had to push back logistics and develop a new system with different echelons. You had big trucks moving from one distance and they had to shift to smaller pickups, ATVs, and so on. Russians are already starting to push back fuel storage further from the front line because they’re having difficulty protecting it. They’ll probably push back command posts and other things too. All this is going to make those things more difficult.

Ukrainian units have a lot of room for creativity, for figuring things out, and once they demonstrate success they’re going to reinforce that. Now we have the quantities of these munitions increasing, the qualities there. Eric Schmidt’s company is a good example — they came to Ukraine and focused all on Ukraine. Everything’s about Ukraine first and then everything else afterwards. They brought in Google X engineers, the best, most talented American engineers we have, and they partner with Ukraine units who give them feedback and they immediately iterate. It’s the best Ukrainian drone units with the best American engineers, plus massive funding from one of the wealthiest people in the world. It’s working very well, and Russia has nothing that can compete in this way. Their defense industry is still very centralized, old-style big defense companies, far less innovative, they don’t have the same talent coming.

Reorganizing on the Fly: Ukraine’s New Corps

Rob Lee: The manpower situation has been the biggest problem for Ukraine ever since the summer 2023 offensive. Brigades have been very undermanned. But Ukraine at this point, through drone development, innovation, production, and the system they created, has really been able to compensate for the effective lack of manpower.

There are also some other positives. They changed the reforms of the corps system. Before this, Ukraine was an all-brigade-style military. They didn’t have divisions or anything above that. The way it used to be — you had brigades, and then these temporary command-and-control functions above them, OTU and OSGV, which are like operational-tactical groupings. But they were temporary. The commanders were rotated in and out, the staff came in and out, and they were too high-level, managing too many brigades. They didn’t really provide very good support.

They rolled out corps last year. It’s hard to roll up a command-and-control change mid-war, but some of these corps are doing a very good job. The entire quality has increased, the coordination across the corps is increased. The corps commander is controlling like five brigades, whereas an OTU might command 20 brigades. So there are a lot of improvements on command and control, adjacent-unit coordination. Now the corps are also getting corps-level assets — they’re trying to develop UAV regiments that can focus on operational depth and let the brigades focus close to the front line. That’s another contributing factor that improved the situation.

Tony Stark: Two questions. One — how is that structure evolving below the corps level? Is the corps directly tasking the brigades, or are they having divisions, and then those divisions are tasking? The American Army is going through that same reformation where they’re trying to relearn how to fight as a division. The corps still doesn’t know what it’s up to. That’s part one. And then broadly — what is the evolving role of the infantry here? Because you kind of hear two things in America. One is that the infantry is done, which we hear every ten years. The other is that the infantry doesn’t need to change because the infantry will always be there. I mean, infantry tactics change all the time. So how are those two things linked for how Ukraine is fighting from the top down?

Rob Lee: On the first one — above brigades, it’s just brigade-to-corps level now. Nothing in between. Corps is kind of our division — it’s not really a corps level, it’s more of a division, somewhere in between. But they call them corps instead of divisions. At the corps level they’re still figuring out what assets they have at that level. Right now you usually have an artillery brigade, they’re trying to set up an unmanned systems regiment, and some other assets.

They are actively changing. The air defense component has changed too. They have a new small air defense side led by the former commander of Lazar Group. He pulled away some of the air defense — sorry, the ground forces air defense battalions. They’ve restructured to counter Shaheds. Now it’s part of an echelon system. For countering Shaheds, brigades will often have interceptor teams, they’ll have radars to try and locate Shaheds. You’ll often have some level beyond that, and then additional echelons for countering these things.

It really depends which corps. Ukraine has some unique corps — the 1st Azov Corps, the 2nd Khartia Corps, the 3rd Corps led by Biletsky, the former Azov commander. These corps are quite elite. They’re all unique because they have a unique background — 2nd and 3rd Corps were volunteer units that formed after the war began. There’s a big difference between those corps, which have more fleshed-out staff work and other corps-level assets, and other regular corps that may not have the same capabilities. There’s wide variance still in corps capabilities. Long term, I don’t know what it’ll look like — that’s going to be a question for Ukraine.

They also have the Unmanned Forces, a different branch. Those teams are all across the front line. They don’t report to the corps commanders — they report up the Unmanned Forces chain. Then you also have these Assault Regiments, nominally part of the ground forces, but really separate, and they also report directly to General Syrskyi, not to corps commanders typically. So you have these other command-and-control relationships that are evolving. The corps commander does not always own every asset in his area as a battlespace owner, and that does lead to some frictions. That’s constantly being changed and updated. What we’ll see in the future will probably look a little different than what we see right now.

The Infantry Question

Rob Lee: And then for infantry — it’s a good question, because infantry are not fighting infantry that often. I talked to the head surgeon for 7th Corps. 7th Corps is holding Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad, this really key part of the front line. He estimated that about 2% of his casualties are from small arms. Small-arms casualties are a very small percentage. Even in the urban fighting it was still a small percentage. On both sides, UAVs are doing the vast majority of killing. I told a couple of Ukrainian brigade commanders last October and asked them what percentage of casualties were from UAS. A couple said 100%. So it wasn’t even just 90% — it was literally 100%.

For infantry, there’s a question on some of these positions, because often the Ukrainian brigade commanders will tell their guys: do not engage Russian soldiers unless you have to. We want you to hold position, because if you open up, the Russians will often have a Mavic following their infantry as they walk forward. So if Ukrainian infantry open up, the Mavic locates where the position is, and you can then hit it with FPVs, Molniya, artillery — whatever. Once the position is located, you can usually destroy it. So oftentimes Ukrainian units tell their guys, don’t engage unless you have to, only if they’re within 20, 30 meters.

Some of these positions are more like observation posts, because they’re not really doing fighting. They don’t necessarily have to have fields of fire tied in with the next position. The next position might be 500 meters, it might be a kilometer away. It might be quite laid out. You don’t have interlocking fields of fire like we were trained in the US military. UAVs are doing the killing, doing almost all the observation, and the vast majority of Russian casualties come from UAVs. Basically infantry — look, here’s a whole position. If you see someone, call it in, we’ll have UAVs come and try to kill these guys for you. Of course, if you have to fight, you have to fight. Sometimes the weather is very poor, UAVs are just not flying, and then infantry might have to.

Of course, if you’re taking a position from someone, infantry have to go there and they have to hold it. So there’s still an important role. The role has decreased in importance, but it’s still there. The number of Ukrainian infantry per kilometer is very small — on average probably six, five per kilometer, maybe less. In cities and urban areas it’ll be higher. But most of the terrain is big fields and tree lines. There are no positions in open fields. Every position is either in a tree line, a forest, or in the basement of a building, because anything that can be seen can be destroyed essentially.

On the Russian side, they treat their infantry — they’ve adopted Wagner’s tactics writ large. They said, okay, we’re going to treat infantry as expendable. We’re not going to care too much about them, we’re not going to invest too much in them, and we’re basically going to advance by having numbers of infantry plus fires doing a lot of the work. Artillery, now it’s UAVs doing it. I think it’s been a poor approach. They take more casualties than they need to. If they invested in their guys more, they could do much more. They don’t do much unit-level coordination — they’re not really training companies that do company-level operations anymore. It’s very small-scale. They treat infantrymen as not that valuable, not that important. Many Russians don’t make casualty evacuation a real priority. Some do, some don’t, but it’s just not near the same thing.

We don’t see much infantry fighting — but you still need someone to hold the front line. There’s also a question of what the FLOT looks like. Is it where the infantry are? Because if the infantry are not fighting, if they let Russian infantry walk past them, to what extent do they hold this position? To what extent do they hold this terrain? I remember when I was in Afghanistan, before going to Marja, I talked to some platoon commanders who were there. The battalion commander — one of these guys came up to him and said, hey, to what extent do you control your area? And I’m like, what do you control here?

There’s a particular type of character of fighting right now in Ukraine. Drones are here to stay, to some extent — that’s pretty obvious. But I don’t think the nature of positional fighting will necessarily be the same in future conflicts for us. It is important. You still need infantry. There are no brigades I’ve talked to who think they have enough infantry. They want more guys. If you want to do offensive operations, you need infantry to move forward, to hold things, to take things. UGVs are still coming along, but they’re not there yet. I’m still a big believer in infantry myself, but certainly drones are playing a bigger role and you can compensate for lack of infantry more than you could before.

The Next Six Months

Justin: When we look at that, then what does the theory of the next six months look like for Ukraine? Is it that they’re comfortable where the FLOT is currently against the Russian forward line of enemy troops, and they’re comfortable continuing their longer-range operational-level strikes to continue to decrease Russian capability? Or is Ukraine in a spot where they have to actually start pushing the FLOT, and therefore they need more manpower to be able to do that, because they have to show some type of progress both for international backers and for internal prestige?

Rob Lee: So Zelensky said, ever since Trump was in office: look, we’re ready to end the war basically where the front line is. We’re ready to declare a ceasefire, we’ll negotiate other things, let’s just hold the front line where it is and we’ll move from there. Putin has basically put this off the entire time, because he keeps saying no, we want all of the Donetsk region — then we can speak after we have the rest of the Donetsk region. So that is still the kind of stumbling block.

For Ukraine — look, Ukrainians are tired. There are a lot of people who are ready for this war to end. If they could freeze the front line where it is without significant losses of sovereignty, I think a lot of Ukrainians would go for this, as long as they thought they still had the ability to deter a future war. But I think this year Russia actually has some really big issues, and I think Russia risks overextending itself and actually having some reverses. We’ve seen this in this war consistently on both sides. Russia overextended in the spring and summer of 2022, and that led to Ukraine’s successful offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson Oblast in the fall. Ukraine overextended in the summer of 2023, and that led to Russian advances afterwards.

I think there’s a risk for Russia to do this again. A lot of it comes back to Putin. The war reached diminishing returns some time ago for Russia, but he keeps committing to it. There are probably plenty of people in the general staff who think this war should have ended a while ago, but Putin is just very focused on this. Russia has had a lot of significant costs — geopolitical, human, economic — to extend this war. The question is what are you achieving by doing so. Fedorov put his target — he wants to inflict 50,000 casualties per month. He wants to increase it from right now. Ukraine estimates it’s like 35,000.

We’ll see if they can reach that. The other side, while trying to inflict as many losses as possible, they’re trying to increase deep strikes, increase the cost on the Russian economy, go after oil and gas, go after defense production. People are tired. The Ukrainian military has a manpower problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some kind of offensive this year by Ukraine. Partially because Syrskyi, the commander, always wants to be on offense. He does not like defense. He was the brains behind the Kursk offensive, the Kharkiv offensive. He’s always looking for weak spots.

We saw a small offensive in the Huliaipole direction, Zaporizhzhia, in January and February. That was successful. We saw one back in Kupyansk that started last October. That was successful. My read from those two offensive operations is that Russian lines are not that strong. There are unrealistic objectives constantly given to Russian units. They’re always told you have to take this village by this time. It creates a vicious cycle where commanders cannot reach that on the timeline, so they often resort to lying, or they’ll send a guy forward to post a video of a flag somewhere, which is not true. It creates an internal bad system. They also rush operations.

So instead of setting the conditions for an offensive a month from now, they have to constantly throw guys at the front line because they’re behind whatever the timeline is. Putin is just not allowing commanders to give honest appraisals, and it creates really bad issues internally. But it also means that their defenses are not like they were in summer 2023, when they had very good fortifications, minefields, the Surovikin line. Right now Russian lines — they’re able to locate these teams, suppress them with artillery or with Grad MRLs. The assault units are tinkering, figuring out how to do offensive operations in a drone environment, which involves using drones to set localized superiority and the right conditions for offensive operations.

I wouldn’t be shocked if Ukraine does push back Russia in places this year. They may not have enough manpower to do it, but in the Huliaipole direction, one of the real breaches — if they had someone to exploit it, they could have really advanced much deeper into Russian lines. The issues Russia has internally, the lying, the perverse incentives, create a lot of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. So Ukraine’s strategy right now is end the war as soon as you can. I think they’d be happy freezing the front line. But I wouldn’t be shocked if Ukraine pushes back Russia in some places this year.

The Starlink War

Bryan Clark: Hey, Rob — you mentioned EW before. Talking about the ubiquity of surveillance on the front lines, to what degree is EW impacting the ability of either side to use their drones to keep track of what’s going on? Or has everybody just devolved to using fiber-optic cabling to their drones to overcome the EW challenge?

Rob Lee: One thing to keep in mind — different parts of the front line have a very different EW nature. The Pokrovsk direction has often had the heaviest EW concentration for the last couple of years. Some UAVs that’ll work on one part of the front line, like Zaporizhzhia, will not work on Pokrovsk. When I was talking to units in Myrnohrad the last year or two, they basically said EW is so strong we can only use fiber-optic, so for FPVs, fiber-optics dominate that direction. Radio-signal FPVs play a smaller role. There are Ukrainians that do use radio-signal there, but it’s more difficult.

Other parts of the front line, radio-signal is okay and you can conduct strikes at deeper range. Fiber-optic cables have gotten more expensive because they almost all come from China — a 50-kilometer spool can be $2,300, $2,500. The economics have changed so that if you have a big FPV, like a 15-inch FPV — which is bigger than normal, normal is like 10-inch — you can put a Starlink on it, and Starlink is like $500. Starlink gets you around EW. Now the economics make sense where Starlink is cheaper than fiber-optic even, and some units have gone in that direction.

Starlink is — if there is a game changer this war, I think it’s Starlink. Because everything about how drone warfare works for Ukraine revolves around the use of Starlink. They’re putting it on everything. ISR often uses them. Most of these mid-range strike drones are using them — not all, but very commonly. UGVs constantly are using them, naval drones. And of course every position has Starlink to stream the feeds of the UAVs back to command posts so you can see everything. Starlink is this solution to many problems that if it was not there, the war would be entirely different.

EW is still a significant issue. The Russians realize they’re behind the power curve on mid-strike. They’re having big issues. They were using Starlink on Molniya and on Shaheds back in January — that’s when SpaceX blocked it. That was posing really big problems. I was down at the front around that time frame. They were hitting trucks like 50 kilometers from the front line, oil and gas tanks. Trucks is a big issue.

The Russians do have some Starlink jammers they’re testing. They tested one in 2024 — two of them were destroyed. Of course, if you jam something, you can look where the center of the jamming is coming from and get an idea of where it is. The Russians are now trying to come up with a more integrated counter-UAS system where you have a Starlink jammer, you have other types of jammers that will jam other types of drones, and then probably air defense integrated into this. They’re actively thinking through what a system of counter-UAS looks like with different echelons of radar — like SKVP radars that can locate, that’s like their version of the RADA, there are some Chinese ones too. EW jammers to jam certain types of UAVs including ISR. Interceptors to try to knock out ISR and kamikaze drones. And jammers to try to jam Starlink and other things.

We’ll see if they can succeed, but I know it is a big priority this year. It is one of the big questions in my view. If they can actually adapt and figure this out, then they will negate a lot of these training advantages. If they can’t fix it, then it’s going to be a big problem for them.

Bryan Clark: And so the Starlink jamming, I assume, is a downlink jammer — you’re jamming the Starlink signal coming down to the drone, as opposed to trying to jam the satellite itself, because that gets very hard with a LEO satellite.

Rob Lee: I think that’s what it is. When I talked to guys when they used it in 2024, it basically showed Starlink was not available in that area — that’s what the drones showed. Back then it was mostly to disrupt the Nemesis and Lazar Group drones, the heavy bomber ones. Obviously Starlink is being used in a much more pervasive manner now. But I do know there are companies working on a bunch of other things now to try to get through jamming — things that can provide a better GPS signal, things that can provide a better INS on radio frequency. That’s one reason I was talking before about Western tech — there’s Western tech that’s working on these problems. It’s not just Starlink. We’ll see some successful examples this year. It’s something Russia will not be able to compete with.

Bryan Clark: Yeah, because the issue ends up becoming — if you’re using a GPS jammer and a Starlink jammer, but it’s only going to reach 10 kilometers and it’s going to get impacted by terrain, there’s going to be a little zone around the target. You can do that around really high-end targets, but you can’t do it everywhere, probably because of the number of jammers you’d need. And then you can have an end-game seeker or something that gets the drone the rest of the way. You get within 10 clicks, you lose your Starlink signal, you lose your GPS — if you have some alternative way to get you that last couple of minutes to the target, it seems like you could come up with a relatively inexpensive way to do that. That’s a lot of what these guys are working on for GPS-independent navigation — just something to get to the last tactical mile.

Rob Lee: Yeah. Most of these kamikaze drones now have some kind of pixel-lock on them. The last kilometer they can do target lock. It’s not perfect, but it gets you most of the way there. The Hornet is a good example, because it’s so cheap — okay, we can afford 20%, 30% accuracy. It can still be considered a win, because before we were using Gimlets at $200,000 something. If a Hornet is sub-$5k, you can send a lot of Hornets for the same price of one Gimlet and achieve better results.

Saving Lives in the Kill Zone

Tony Stark: Just to pivot back to humans — there was reporting last night that the US is cutting a bunch of funding because of CENTCOM for training for units, including tactical combat casualty care. Are there innovations in combat casualty care on the Ukrainian front? I know we talked about the Russians really don’t care, and last time you were on the show you talked about UGVs. How are the Ukrainians saving lives once they go down on the front line?

Rob Lee: It’s a huge issue. One of my conclusions is that Golden Hour is a concept that made sense for the GWOT. It’s not something that makes sense here. I don’t think we can assume we’ll be able to do this all the time. Helicopters do not come to the FLOT. In Russia, they bring them up to do certain missions and they’re still getting hit by FPVs.

Infantry on the front line, everything is supported by drone. In some cases when they get wounded, they’ll basically have telemedicine happen — a doctor will talk to them through some way and say, we’re going to drop you some medical equipment, here’s what you’re going to do to provide care to the guy next to you, because we can’t get to you. Vehicles can go to zero line only if the weather is horrific. In many places you can’t bring vehicles there. So basically the only two casualty-evacuation options typically are: the guy walks out, or someone drags him out, or a UGV. They have some UGVs that have some frag protection. The First Medical Battalion is a really interesting unit that has their bespoke UGV they’re making, and they’re doing these really long-range CASEVAC missions.

The kill zone makes it just incredibly difficult. UGV missions require a lot of planning and they’re very slow because you have to be very worried about the route you take. In order to not lose UGVs that often, it takes a lot of planning — plan the route properly, think through the timing, when to go, what UAV threat is, and so on. An actual CASEVAC mission with a UGV could take 12 hours. It could be more than that. By the time someone’s wounded, by the time they’re back to a higher level of care like a Role 1 or Role 2 facility, it could be 12 hours. That might be the minimum in some places. In that case the likelihood of being killed is higher if you get any significant wound.

Keep in mind, Ukrainian infantry are typically older, in their 40s or 50s. Many have existing health issues. Sadly, I hear stories of guys who die from just being sick — they get some illness, they have a pre-existing condition, there’s no way of getting care to them, and they die in a position. I’ve also heard cases where guys get wounded, they put a tourniquet on their arm and they left it on for like a month or so. And then when they come back, the lower limb basically just falls off. Just some really horrific, macabre stories. It shows you how difficult this is.

My takeaway is that when I was in Afghanistan, in my platoon we had two corpsmen. I think every squad had a combat lifesaver. But at this point, every fire team has to have someone with pretty good medical training. You really need to get at the lowest level very good medical training, where guys can take care of themselves, because you just can’t assume you’re going to have higher-level care. You can’t assume there’ll be rapid CASEVAC. That’s one thing we should definitely not skimp on training for.

Justin: That’s one of the downsides to the way medical training has always been looked at in the United States military. You look at Special Operations Combat Medics, or SOCMs — they’re technically trained by doctrinal definition to be able to sustain a casualty, multiple casualties, for up to 72 hours. Then you look at the Special Forces medic, the Special Operations Independent Duty Corpsmen, which are the Navy variant of the Special Forces medics — they’re technically trained to, as long as they have the supplies, sit on a patient indefinitely. When I went through Special Forces medical training, it was a year of medical training. That goes from basic anatomy all the way through doing surgery on extremities and tropical medicine and everything in between.

That’s a level of training and a level of going in and learning pharmacology and learning how to actually treat and assess and do those medical procedures that isn’t going to be invested in every soldier or every fire team or every platoon. But even if you were to invest in it, the sustainment of that — the biggest fear ODAs have, medics have, is, well, when we would train the other Special Forces members of our team, we were always the person who was injured. Because the worst-case scenario was we’re in a firefight and I’m the one that’s hurt. Now you have to do all the medical stuff to me.

When you’re starting to talk about getting down into fire teams, that means you’re saying one out of every three to five people needs to be trained at a pretty high level in medicine. That really fundamentally changes the way you approach the structure of an organization, how you’re employing them, what you’re giving them and how you’re equipping them. How are the Ukrainians dealing with this? What is the process, or is it all trial by error?

Rob Lee: I can’t give you the best answer. TBI is a huge issue. TBI is maybe the majority of casualties. There’s really no way of pulling guys out in many cases. So in 7th Corps — they’re the guys holding Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad — typically Russia drops a lot of the glide bombs on the cities, wherever they think any positions are. Guys will be there with — they’ll get the bell rung, they’ll have TBI, and they just can’t rotate out. It leads to really long-term issues.

When they rotate guys out — these infantry, they do a lot. They do a full assessment, I know that much — psychologists meet with them, they’ll often be in rehab for a month or so or more. It really is physical damage. When you’re in a position for six months, you can’t move physically, all the mental stress. It creates all sorts of issues, most of which I can’t really fully understand.

Right now UAS is the majority of casualties — most casualties are frag in some capacity. One thing I was going to write about is what body armor should look like. When I was in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps — we went there in OEF, we had Interceptor vests in OIF at the beginning, then we determined we wanted something bigger and better than that. We went to MTVs, these kind of turtle things the Marine Corps had. The Army didn’t go with it. Then we went to Afghanistan, MTVs were very big but they were way too hot, too heavy, so we decided to go to plate carriers. When I was in Afghanistan it was both a threat from IEDs and small arms, so basically you wanted to have as much SAPI hard armor as possible. But now I think we’re going in a different direction — if small arms is only less than 5% of casualties, maybe soft armor really should be the focus. Do you need this many SAPI plates? Maybe we need more Kevlar inserts in the trousers and the arms. I think that makes sense, or making some kind of modular difference.

Another thing that’s interesting — UAVs are enabling a lot of things from mobility that weren’t possible before. One of these units that does assaults — the big threat is in open areas. They did this offensive operation, they needed this assault force, it was three kilometers of open terrain. They had the guys go slick — all they had was a rifle and maybe a few mags. They just ran across the field as fast as they could, doing eight-minute miles. When they got to the forest, they had vampires bring them everything — the rucks, the plate carriers, everything they needed. Because heavy bomber drones can do this. They can be the enabling logistics function and allow you to be mobile and not have to carry all this crap around as an infantryman.

In that respect — some guys from the Marine Corps reached out to me a month or two ago who were working on UAS modernization. They asked me about bomber drones, like, should we look at these things, or is FPVs the only lesson from Ukraine? And I’m like, absolutely you need to think through bomber drones. Vampires are less than $10,000. You can use them for mining, dropping munitions, all sorts of logistics — rucksacks, ammo, whatever. They can be a repeater for another drone. You can put a laser designator on it — you can laser-designate sites for Copperheads. Guys are launching air-defense missiles from these things. I have no doubt that if you get this into a good Marine battalion, the dudes will figure out amazing things to do with them.

If you’re doing remote operations and you need to get a fire team off the top of a hill — okay, guys, don’t carry gear, move up there, we’ll carry all the stuff to you by UAV. Mobility just becomes much better. It’s one way we can reduce the load on infantrymen, which has gotten way too heavy. When I was in Afghanistan I was probably carrying 60–70 pounds of gear. Some of that wasn’t the most. But when you’re fighting against guys who are carrying almost no gear and they’re in running shoes and I’m not — okay, I can cross this field, I can buddy-rush across this field, but I’m not going to do more out of that. We’re going to all be gassed. We don’t have enough water. Whereas if you can take certain kinds of modular decisions, you can mitigate a lot of those risks in interesting new ways with UAVs.

Body Armor, Rifles, and the Return of CQB

Tony Stark: That was super fascinating. On the body-armor topic, Justin and I have talked about this — the US Army’s new rifle, which is chambered in 6.8. The point being, there were some long-range engagements in Afghanistan that people think are the future of warfare. There are a lot of concerns around body armor itself needing a higher punch. But with that, you bring 20- to 25-round mags instead of 30 or more, which means you’re getting fewer rounds, especially when you’re doing things like clearing trenches.

The US Army — obviously the priority fight is the Chinese, and they focused on a much smaller engagement range, I think it’s like 95 to 200 meters or something for their rifle. There are issues with those as well.

My big question — are the Ukrainians, are you seeing reports from the Russians of them feeling like the 7.62 isn’t enough, or that body armor is really impacting how infantry choose to engage? Or are drones dominating it so much that body armor isn’t even a question?

Rob Lee: The Russians have some new uniforms where they have Kevlar inserts into the pants and tops. They’ll have a plate carrier, but you have soft armor that goes over the arms or legs. They also have tourniquets incorporated into the pants. Most infantry are not considered that valuable, but they have some interesting movement in that direction — toward more soft armor, less hard armor.

With the smaller stuff, it’s interesting. The first year of the war, I talked to a bunch of guys who fought over here, including some former Green Berets, and their view was — hey, we focus on CQB way too much. There’s no CQB happening, it’s always engagements at distance. Then it changed though, because now with FPVs, you basically don’t want to be in the open at all. So engagements at 400 meters — if you’re in the open at 400 meters, an FPV is going to come for you at some point. So basically you have to run from cover to cover. Even in 2023, my friends were doing assaults in Humvees and things, and their view was: look, we have to suppress, we drive across the front as fast as possible, then we get in the trenches as quickly as possible. We’re not moving up to anything else — we have to get into the trench, into cover, and then we will win in the trench itself. Their view is that basically it’s either very long engagements or CQB. That actual mid-range stuff is not happening that frequently now.

It’s been an interesting dynamic. Now guys are like, you know what, CQB is everything — it’s how do you find a trench, how do you find a building, because if you’re outside of these areas you’re going to get killed by either artillery in 2023 or FPVs now.

Now, what does that look like in the next war? I have no clue, and it’s hard for me to make a guess. I think marksmanship is still important. But I’ve now come around to the view that CQB is actually a completely decent thing to focus on. In 2022 I was like, you know what, we made too much focus on this. But now I’m coming back to — like, Ranger Handbook, trench clearing, clearing buildings. Clearing rooms should be different. It shouldn’t be four guys typically, because it’s a conventional fight. First off, you frag everything you can, you hit it with a tank, you destroy anything in there before you get in. And if you —

Justin: A grenade is the answer. That’s right.

Rob Lee: Too many guys in a room — if a tank fires on that room, all the guys are killed. You needlessly lose four guys. So it becomes an overriding issue — how many guys do you actually want to have in these areas? I do think CQB — maybe not the hostage-clearing type thing that Delta does, but back to — okay, let’s frag this room and try to kill everything first before we go in it. Then we go in with two guys instead of four. I think that still makes sense. There’s a lot of interesting innovation happening here in that.

In terms of 7.62, I haven’t really heard much about what calibers matter, because they’re not getting too many engagements. I know some Russians still use 7.62. They prefer that to 5.45 — even AKMs they’ll still use. They prefer having a heavier bullet. But in general, the engagement range isn’t enough where it’s a priority. Some Ukrainians like having 5.45 just so that when Russians come up to them they can use their ammo — they can capture the rifle and they have the same ammo. Otherwise, I haven’t heard too much about the ammo issue, just because drones are kind of overtaking everything in priority.

Justin: It’s interesting because it’s a return to — Mogadishu, after the Battle of Somalia. There were really big issues with some of the Rangers and some of the CAG guys where they were so hyper-focused on entering and clearing a building that their weapons were actually zeroed poorly. So they weren’t super effective at long range. They went back and really focused on, we need to make sure we can reach out and touch people. We need to be able to do engagement on rooftops, things like that. We can’t just be hyper-specialized.

You saw that kind of gain, especially through Afghanistan, where you started seeing people worrying about — I mean, you’d see guys with normal rifles that had elevation measures on them and stuff, because they were so worried about shooting high-angle, which realistically nobody was shooting high-angle — they were just above the person they were shooting at a little bit or below them.

To see it kind of coming back now — it’s basic infantry tactics. When they are being used, it’s 7 Alpha, enter and clear a trench, stuff like that, where volume of fire and violence of action are really the most important things. It’s just interesting how it’s always cyclical. Realistically the caliber doesn’t matter. What matters is the volume of fire and how much you can bring up. And that goes back to Tony’s point of having less bullets is actually potentially a negative when you’re looking at these tactics and operations.

Why Infantry at All

Jordan Schneider: So Rob, coming back to the beginning of this conversation, the guy in the hole on the front line for six months — how do you resupply him with a drone without giving away where he is?

Rob Lee: It’s not easy. First off, you try to make sure there’s no Mavic flying around, so you’re not hearing anything ideally. Almost all of it happens at nighttime, so vampires come up at nighttime. But it really depends on the Russians. The Russians have some units where they’ll have dedicated counter-night-bomber teams. Sometimes it’s snipers, sometimes it’s FPVs. Sometimes they have FPVs just flying around the front looking for targets. In other cases, any time they observe a night bomber coming, they’ll try to take them out.

In some cases, when Russia is advancing, they advance by making logistics impossible. They keep knocking out UGVs or vampires — every time they try to drop to infantrymen, they destroy the night-bomber UAV. I talked to a battalion commander in Kostiantynivka, one of the main battles happening around now — for the Ukrainian military, [the priority targets] are either logistics or the UAV teams. Most of the fires are directed at those two targets. Artillery does suppress infantry, but not really — again, infantry aren’t really killing Russian infantry. That’s not what’s denying Russia’s ability to maneuver on the battlefield. It’s UAV teams. So they’ll use artillery mostly to try to destroy UAV teams, sometimes suppress them. They’ll use glide bombs on UAV positions when they find them. Then they use FPVs, Molniya, and other UAVs on these targets.

It depends — in some places when it’s a village, they want to take the village, they’ll try to assault infantry and kill the infantry itself. Other places it’s like, you know what, the infantry are kind of irrelevant. We can walk past them. It’s really about knock out logistics so the infantry can’t be resupplied, kill the UAV teams. That’s how we enable maneuver. The priority is in a different direction. The Russians will put up ISR, try to find where the Ukrainians launch UAVs from. If they find launch locations, they’ll often hit with glide bombs or artillery, like Lancets.

Jordan Schneider: In the places where the Russians come to the conclusion that the infantry serve no real purpose or aren’t a center of gravity — why are the Ukrainians putting these guys through hell, then, in the first place?

Rob Lee: You need someone in front of your UAV teams. This goes back to what Tony asked before about infantry. It’s a hard question sometimes — what are infantry doing? Because they fight to some extent.

In some places infantry positions are more to deny positions to the Russians. So if it’s in a village, you have basements and buildings. There was a place near Kostiantynivka where I talked to the battalion commander last summer, and he basically said: look, all my guys are in basements in these houses. The houses are destroyed. We tunnel between the houses for our bunkers. Basically the infantry barricade themselves in. They don’t fight, they try not to fight. If the Russians get above them, they call in — hey, UAVs come and kill these guys. They try not to fight at all. But they prevent the Russians from using these basements as a staging ground to keep moving forward.

Elsewhere — infiltration. A lot of times, infiltration groups, the mission for them is to locate Mavic teams. They try to make it five kilometers past the front line or so, find Mavic teams, try to kill them with small arms. Some Ukrainian units attach one or two infantrymen to a Mavic team — they have personal protection for them. This is happening in Myrnohrad during the battle there. Ultimately you need someone in front of UAV teams. Yes, UAVs are killing the vast majority of guys. Yes, UAVs are locating most of the Russian soldiers themselves for observation. But not everyone, and you need someone in front of you. Mavic teams are often not the best guys at getting in a small-arms fight — they’re focused on flying Mavics. So it becomes a difficult conversation. Some places UAVs are holding the front line essentially. I told a battalion commander last summer — he had a month where no Russians made it to his FLOT. They killed any Russian that tried to make it; they were killed by UAVs. His infantry did no fighting for a month, basically.

In other places it’s more difficult. There’s no one standard answer. Sometimes it’s more of an OP, it’s not a fighting position. Sometimes maybe they want to have a guy on the map so the commander can say to his boss, hey, I’ve got guys here, we control this. They don’t really control, but they have guys there. Then it becomes a question of key terrain — where are the villages, where are the cities, where are the big coal mines? You’ve got two big cities — Kramatorsk, Sloviansk — these are the real priority. You’ve got two cities that are under pressure, Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka. Kostiantynivka, the battle has kind of begun. We’re not sure how that’s going to go. Elsewhere it’s like, you have open fields, and the value of them is really not that significant except in terms of how close it is to cities, does it help you get to cities.

Part of this is very different from the way we talk about maneuver warfare, because for us it’s never just focusing on terrain. It’s about looking at the enemy’s system and how you defeat the system. Right now a lot of it is — where’s the front line? We want to move the front line this direction, that direction. Territorial control is an important consideration. It’s a very different conceptual thing than the way the US military operates.

Justin: In some ways what you just described — Jordan used a good term, he talked about center of gravity. I actually think what you just described is a critical requirement. If you break down COG and you do targeting, you’re working your way all the way down to core vulnerabilities. Interestingly for both the Ukrainians and the Russians, their critical capability and their core vulnerability are the same thing. It’s the Mavic teams. It’s the drones — it’s the ability to deep-strike and it’s the ability to actually protect. That requirement that sits in between is an infantry line to be able to protect them. That’s what it becomes. You’ve removed them from being an ownership piece of owning terrain, but what you’ve given them is a requirement that you actually protect this critical vulnerability that, if we did not have, we would then not be able to perform the function of a military.

When you conceptualize it like that, it kind of does fit into our normal definitions of maneuver warfare and thinking as a system. But it is something that’s slightly abstract, because we normally think of systems being like fuel or ammunition, and not as a set of humans.

Rob Lee: That’s true. I’d also say — there isn’t really a FLOT anymore, because Russians are constantly behind it. Positions are intermixed. It’s never clear. Maps show kind of a gray zone, but in some ways I think there’s a benefit in saying not necessarily where’s the forward line of troops, but where’s the forward line of UAV teams on both sides. That becomes the definition of the front line, because everything in between can be complete mix.

What the Marine Corps Should Steal from Ukraine

Tony Stark: I find this fascinating, because one of the debates the US Army has had for the last 15, 20 years is — who owns reconnaissance? Is it ground teams? Is it UAVs? The first time with UAVs — the Raven and everything else didn’t work very well, there were massive support teams for them, they often crashed. Now we’re seeing, from lessons in Ukraine, you can use UAS effectively for reconnaissance. But then you still have the Russians doing infiltration tactics and being able to do that way. The lesson here for the United States is you have to have a mix of both, because they provide different perspectives on reconnaissance.

Rob Lee: On Bryan’s thing about what the Marine Corps could do to adopt UAS — if you’re adopting UAS from Ukraine, there are changes that might make sense in an infantry battalion. For the Marine Corps, the GCE needs to lean in on UAS. Thus far it’s mostly been the ACE, the air wing. The ground component has not been the main focus. With small UAS, it needs to be in the ground domain. My view is that infantry battalions should be massively increasing their UAS component.

I would be radical in this regard. With the Marine Corps, with FD-2030, we got rid of tanks, we got rid of a lot of the 155s, we lost a lot of our fires capability. Okay, the focus on China — we had to do anti-ship missiles, all that stuff. You can compensate for a lot of those things through UAS though. One of the things I was explaining to the guys I talked to in the Marines — FPVs we’re procuring, that’ll probably be a battalion-level asset, maybe goes to weapons company. FPVs take training, though — you need guys pretty good with them. Other UAVs like the Hornet are pretty easy to learn. It’s not that complex, it’s cheap, logistics are pretty minimal. If you put it at the battalion level as the battalion commander’s eyes and ears — because you can have a cheap ISR with it too — you can massively expand the range of what an infantry battalion can engage.

Right now, the maximum range of a Marine infantry battalion is the same thing it was when I was in, which is an 81mm mortar. The max range is 5,700 meters. FPVs give you four times that range, easily, for engaging armor, infantry, whatever. But a Hornet would give you — Hornets are hitting things at 200-plus kilometers. Massively increase the range. The training is not significantly improved. Logistics are not too much. That’s something we could do, especially because the Marine Corps battalions are operating far from the regiment in cases, or on their own. It makes sense to push these things there.

I think fixed-wing ISR, cheap ISR, makes sense. At company level — I don’t know if you guys know about the Bumblebee. The Bumblebee is the FPV-type thing the Schmidt company makes. The Bumblebee is very cheap — it’s less than two grand. It can perform the role of a Mavic, like a reconnaissance Mavic. It can be a kamikaze FPV. It can be a bomber FPV. It can do all those things. Same software, same command and control as the Hornet. When a Bumblebee locates a target automatically through AI, a Hornet pilot can see that. It can basically ping a target for a Hornet team to go after. You can put it on the company level. The training is not that significant. You can really change that dynamic very quickly. The company — maybe get rid of Carl Gustavs, I don’t know, something like that. You have to get rid of something, I think.

The company really increases its capabilities quite dramatically. It has its own reconnaissance capabilities. It’s cheap enough where you can lose them and it’s not a big deal. It can do strike, it can do a bunch of things. We can start pushing things in there, and really it needs to be the ground component. You can significantly increase the lethality of these units at all levels by leaning heavily on these capabilities. I think people don’t understand how cheap they are, and how much they can increase lethality at a very low price point.

Justin: I would back that up too. It’s not even just not understanding the economics of it — that’s something the military has always struggled with at a tactical and operational level. To quote a movie, it’s fugazi. It’s all made up. The money doesn’t actually matter to the tactical person, because they have an objective and they have an asset, and they’re told to get the objective. It’s, well, I’m going to use the best asset to get that objective, whatever that may be.

Where they’re struggling the most, based on everything you’ve said, is when you look at the way US Army and even Marine Corps doctrine has tried to define really hard lines between what is a fire team’s distance and what is a platoon’s distance and what is a company’s distance. They try to slice up the battlefield into these discrete segments — well, if it’s 40 kilometers away, that’s going to be the brigade. If it’s 50 kilometers away, that’s going to be the division. Realistically, what we’re talking about now is a fire team that’s properly equipped could potentially reach 200-plus kilometers and have effects. That’s something I don’t think commanders have fully grappled with. They haven’t started to figure out what happens when I have a 24-year-old — because we’re talking about a lieutenant — when I have a 24-year-old who’s making decisions that have what used to be considered operational-reach impacts onto an enemy battle space. How am I looking at resources, thinking about supplying them, thinking about timing those operations, and making sure that we have those synchronized?

Those are the really hard questions that until you actually start getting drones, getting that type of equipment into tactical hands, you’re not going to have an answer for.

Rob Lee: Yeah. It’s also a question of — do you put them in infantry units, do you put them in artillery units? Where do they go? The Germans are going to put loitering munitions in artillery units. That makes some sense to me too. The Marine Corps, you attach out howitzers to battalions or to infantry regiments. That could make sense. I just think that as low as possible, you want to integrate UAS where infantrymen are comfortable around them. They’re always involving them in some respect. It’s not just something you get attached and it does its role. It’s like, no, you integrate them as much as you can.

A lot of the new UAS coming out is going to be pretty easy to operate. You can make it much simpler than it used to be. In which case, you don’t need a special MOS for all these drones. It can just be an infantry guy. You give him a week of training on a Bumblebee, he can fly this thing. He doesn’t have to be perfect. If it’s cheap enough — okay, you lost one, okay, it’s $1,500. It’s like a third of the price of a PVS-14. We’re going in that direction.

I’m fully cognizant that I don’t know exactly what it should look like. I know that if you get this stuff to infantry units or to SOF, they’ll plug and play and figure it out very quickly — here’s what would make sense, here’s what doesn’t. But there’s a ton of utility here. The tough question is going to be — what capabilities do you give up to integrate these things? Because something’s got to go away. If you start pushing it into battalions, then it becomes a question of, do you want to give up M240s, do you want to give up heavy machine guns, mortars, and so on. It will become a difficult question. But I certainly think that we need to start moving in that direction.

On the Russian side, some of their battalions, they’re pushing FPV teams to battalions, they’re pushing Molniya teams to battalions, and they have fixed-wing ISR at battalion level too. They’re still tinkering, but that’s the direction they’re moving. I think it makes sense for our battalions to also go in that direction, because you don’t want your battalion commander to be outranged by an enemy battalion. There’s no reason we have to be. It’s not cost-prohibitive.

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Two Marines

Newsletter from former US Marine Rob Lee and Ukrainian Marine Dmytro Putiata on the Russian-Ukrainian war, defense technology, and modern warfare.

By Rob Lee

A core challenge with writing a history of the Russian dissident movement is that they didn’t do much. There was a transparency meeting митинг гласности, some international contacts that went nowhere for years, a 1968 demonstration on Red Square that served as a peak of direct action (although that was only eight people)… but little more.

The Soviet dissident movement kickass books though.

KGB Agent: Good afternoon. Your name is--Aleksei Blagoslavovich Nepobedimov, right?

A.N.: Alyosha Blagovich is fine. And you are?

KGB Agent: Andrei Il’ich.

A.N.: Quite pleasant to meet you. You--you want some tea?

KGB Agent: No. But I have heard you’ve picked up some new reading material.

A.N.: Well--I like reading.

KGB Agent: Do you like your job?

A.N.: Yes. It’s good work.

KGB Agent: TETs-20,1 correct?

A.N.: That’s the one.

KGB Agent: Do you prefer reading more than doing your job?

A.N.: The reading is just for fun. The work--that’s what helps people.

KGB Agent: So why would you read material that harms people?

A.N.: How do you mean?

KGB Agent: You’re reading anti-Soviet propaganda. Passed in, passed on. You know that material is harmful, right?

A.N.: I don’t take it seriously.

KGB Agent: Why not?

A.N.: It doesn’t mean anything. They’re just weird books. I’ve--I’ve run out of Dostoyevsky, you know? I can’t just stare out the window. I get bored. Nothing more.

KGB Agent: Understood. But the things you’re reading are bad for you. I’m sure you know.

A.N.: So is vodka. We still drink.

KGB Agent: I would advise you be careful. Oh, and you wouldn’t happen to remember who gave those materials to you?

A.N.: I don’t ask for their names, Andrei Il’ich.

KGB Agent: Maybe you should, next time. I might ask someday.

Benjamin Nathans’s rockstar history book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (2024) is less a story about a protest movement (a mistaken assumption by contemporary Western observers) and more about a book club that the Central Committee thought way too much about. The cohort Nathans talks about — Volpin, Litvinov, Bogoraz, Gorbanevskaya, Yakir, Sakharov — are disproportionately Muscovite intellectuals. To the extent that the dissidenty диссиденты left Moscow, it was to be exiled — to Siberia, to psychiatric hospitals, to Cavendish, Vermont for Solzhenitsyn. Even St. Petersburg — sorry, Leningrad — is barely mentioned. And no matter how prominent the dissidents got — and they were most prominent in Yuri Andropov’s head — their primary actions focused on defending their friends. Volpin himself had a straightforward (to him) focus on making the Soviet Union follow its own laws, and to that end, he aspired to a legalist framework popular enough to be supported by people he didn’t know. But the vast majority of the “chain reaction” between 1965 and 1968 came from hip Muscovite writers defending their writer friends with more writing. And credit to the dissidents, they were better writers than the Committee for State Security.

Susanne Schattenberg’s 2017 (translated 2021) biography of Leonid Brezhnev gives some context on the Kremlin’s view. Brezhnev, along with Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, had just yanked control away from a Nikita Khrushchev who couldn’t stop being an asshole. And ol’ Lyonya wanted everyone to like him. He wrote his speeches by consensus, took world leaders on hunting trips at his dacha, and insisted on calling the most powerful men in the Second World by pet names, even as he sidelined many of them. He was trying to be a nice guy, and clearly, that message trickled down to the KGB: stop shooting people. You’re not the NKVD, and you’re not the First Secretary’s attack dogs. Act like professionals. But Vladimir Semichastny didn’t know how to run an unscripted trial. No one did. The KGB team assigned to the trials of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky figured that if they simply grilled these guys on their obviously anti-Soviet writing, they would get their proof that these writers were, I guess, CIA-funded rubes consumed by the same demons that got Stavrogin and Verkhovensky.

It didn’t work out like that, in part because the morally-grey, unreliably-narrated, flatly-bizarre literature of Daniel and Sinyavsky is perfectly in line with Dostoyevsky, a man who wrote a story within a story about the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition arresting and interrogating Jesus, Son of God.

A.N.: What I’m saying, is that Dostoyevsky would have been arrested just like Daniel and Sinyavsky, and it would have gone exactly the same way.

S.L.: Dostoyevsky was a great man of Russia. The KGB wouldn’t arrest him.

A.N.: You sure, Seryoga? Demons was not kind to the people in power. And it was just as goofy as This is Moscow Speaking.2

S.L.: You read that thing?

A.N.: Of course I read it. You think I wouldn’t check what the fuss is?

S.L.: Wasn’t that the story about a “Public Murder Day?” That’s a dumb premise.

A.N.: Well, yes, and the “group of five” in Demons were pretty dumb too. That’s the point.

S.L.: But the book itself wasn’t dumb.

A.N.: Listen here, run through the accusations made to Daniel and Sinyavsky--they have characters who say horrible things. They depict things that are flatly ridiculous. They have sex and heresy in them. Dostoyevsky did all that.

S.L.: Not like that--

A.N.: Exactly like that! So you put him on trial and say, “In the story, you have a famous writer who thinks Russians are all drunk idiots, and who says he’d rather be in France--”

S.L.: Alyosha--

A.N.: “--Do you, Fyodor Mikhailovich, think all Russians are drunk fools, and would you rather be in France?”

S.L.: You sound like a drunk fool. You.

A.N.: Yes, on whose vodka?

S.L.: Yes, yes, remind me not to ask for your literature opinions.

A.N.: Would you prefer we complain about work instead?

S.L.: Yes, actually. Because work, I can understand. A stupid director I can go around, or at least deal with. But what did Sinyavsky want? Why make trouble when things are quiet?

A.N.: Because it makes for better art?

S.L.: Is annoying people good art?

A.N.: Sometimes. The best art comes from people poking the boundaries of what is and isn’t art. Look at Picasso.

S.L.: I never understood Picasso.

A.N.: You’re right, let’s talk about something else. You’re still seeing Natalya Ivanovna?

S.L.: Went to see a movie with her. Three Poplars on Plyushchikha.3 It was pretty good.

A.N.: Was it Diamond Arm4 good?

S.L.: No. She picked the movie. It’s for girls. Do girls like Sinyavsky?

A.N.: No, they don’t. That’s for my entertainment.

The Prague Spring was the turning point — more specifically, the tanks deployed in response to the Prague Spring.

Alexander Dubček’s pitch was notionally straightforward: What if socialism asked the secret police to chill out? What if socialism allowed a free press? What if socialism had a human face?

This was Brezhnev’s first test as a leader of the Soviet Union. He didn’t take it well. He had seen himself as a mentor to young Dubček, but as the political view in Prague diverged further from the Politburo, he resorted to a “friendly” negotiation at the Ukrainian-Slovakian border, mediated between train cars and swarmed with KGB agents. Brezhnev’s health suffered: headaches, stomach pain, fevers, conducting negotiations in pajamas. As the rapport with the Czechoslovak delegation collapsed, Brezhnev promised that he would resign should he lose the ČSSR, sobbing at the moral loss of his mentee, Comrade Dubček, dear Sasha. And although the Prague crisis would turn out “fine” for Brezhnev (less so for the dead Czechs and Slovaks), it introduced him to a sleeping pill habit that Western observers wouldn’t learn about until the fall of the Soviet Union. The ’68 invasion of Prague proved the defining moment of the Brezhnev Doctrine: protect Party control over socialist states for fear of a revisionist domino effect. But it also precipitated the stumbling, gerontocratic decline that defined the ‘70s and ‘80s in the Soviet Union.

The response to Prague was similarly both the defining moment of the dissident movement and the source of its decline. Eight protesters showed up at Red Square, in front of the Kremlin, with banners. The KGB found them in minutes, beat them, and dragged them away. This was, in Nathans’ words, “the most celebrated fifteen minutes of history in the history of the Soviet dissident movement.” Joan Baez wrote a song about it. But it was a mortal blow to the movement. Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya were key figures. Bogoraz at the time was married to Yuli Daniel, whose arrest kicked off the dissidents’ chain reaction. Litvinov was a major distributor of the samizdat самиздат literature that defined the dissident movement. Gorbanevskaya was a founder of the Chronicle of Current Events Хроника текущих событий, a samizdat periodical of Soviet attacks on human rights — and apparently the most consistently productive thing dissidents did. Bogoraz and Litvinov were sent to Siberia, Gorbanevskaya to a psychiatric hospital a year later. Without them, it seems like a lot of things didn’t get done. The Chronicle of Current Events kept on without Litvinov and Gorbanevskaya, but by the time these three returned from their exiles in the early ‘70s, the dissident movement had lost its mojo, much in line with a declining General Secretary.

A.N.: Andrei Il’ich.

KGB Agent: Aleksei Blagoslavovich. We are no longer playing games.

A.N.: I was on my way to work. To work.

KGB Agent: And now you’re talking to me. Why are you still reading anti-Soviet literature?

A.N.: Listen here, I still don’t understand what makes my reading habits “anti-Soviet.” What does that even mean?

KGB Agent: You’re reading the Chronicle of Current Events.5 That’s anti-Soviet literature. As a member of the Party, no less! Why are you playing both sides here?

A.N.: Playing both sides? I’m on the side of the Soviet people.

KGB Agent: Then why read foreign-funded accusations about the Soviet Union?

A.N.: Foreign--? Well--let’s argue the merits here. Is it true or is it not true that the USSR still treats the Crimean Tatars like they’re traitors?6

KGB Agent: Those are baseless accusations.

A.N.: Then why not refute them? I read Pravda.7 No mention. I would like to believe we treat our minorities better than the Americans, but do we? And if not, why not?

KGB Agent: Have you considered focusing on your job, Alexei Blagoslavovich?

A.N.: Why, I have. I’ve managed to cut maintenance costs by 25% compared to 1968, by instituting a predictive maintenance plan instead of waiting for things to break. I think my work is replicable. It’s in a nice little report--you know about me, you’ve probably read it. But it has sat on my director’s desk. For three months. Three months.

KGB Agent: Have you considered working harder?

A.N.: I’d only be too glad, Andrei Il’ich. I would love to run economics for a second TETs plant. But right now, I’ve run out of things to do. The work I’m responsible for gets done by 2 PM, and then I do extra work to improve the TETs, and that extra work does nothing. Nothing. And why? Because Mosenergo8 is managed by complacent blockheads who haven’t learned a new fact since the Great Patriotic War.9

KGB Agent: I would be careful what I say about war heroes.

A.N.: Because they were great men at my age? Well, they’re fat and lazy now.

KGB Agent: Would you like them to know what you think?

A.N.: Do what you like. Send me to Tashkent10--what do I care! You’ll replace me with someone worse at TETs-20, and there I’ll get real work done. To the devil with it, they might actually let me improve things.

In fairness to the dissidents, it took more than a few arrests to quash their energy. The KGB got their act together by 1969, with Yuri Andropov’s Fifth Directorate. The KGB figured out that they couldn’t out-read or out-write a cadre dominated by writers and scientists, but they could curtail their influence by targeting normal people who hung around the dissidents. Because to most Soviet citizens, at least in the primary cities of Moscow and Leningrad, the ‘60s and ‘70s were the best time to be Russian in a century. No more purges, no more total war, no more civil war, even a reprieve from the ambient violence that marked the dying decades of the Tsar.

Most importantly for regular Russians, material conditions improved under Brezhnev. One of his first projects (along with his number-two Kosygin) was a series of economic reforms to prioritize improving living standards among the Soviet citizenry. Brezhnev wanted washing machines, refrigerators, larger apartments, consumer goods — even if they were imported from capitalist countries, even if they came at the cost of Soviet gold reserves. Brezhnev’s dream was to produce so many cars in the Soviet Union that it would become a dowry item for weddings. And although material conditions never quite matched the West — a Sensitive Young Planning-Economist like yours truly would have at best had a bed in a hostel room — they were beyond the realm of complaint. No one thought to ask for more, even among the dissidents.

This made being a true dissident a risky bet for unclear gains. The KGB would and did track people with samizdat, and by 1969, they had figured out how to handle them. First, a “prophylactic conversation” профилактическая беседа to clarify what was and wasn’t acceptable. And if that wasn’t enough, the targeted individual might face a pay cut, or lose some job perk, or get their room searched (or bugged), or even get fired. And of course, they’d become The Guy With A KGB Tail. That’s all it took for most people, especially because the dissidents asked for very abstract things: civil liberties, justice for people you haven’t met, permission to read and write weird books. These are not normal things to want. Even if you liked reading Andrei Amalrik, you needed some extra je ne sais quoi to like Amalrik more than access to a car. It was always easier to be a bystander than a true dissident — and besides, what was the point? The stability of the Brezhnev years was the best one could have asked for, and it was much easier to imagine a return to Stalinism than something as strange as “rule of law.” What laws? There was an agreement: the government pretends to follow the law, and the people pretend to follow the law. You play your part in the charade, and you carve out a life that matters to you, in your friends, in your family. And if that’s really not enough, you pray to God, you freak.

These measures ultimately kept the dissident movement small. In the Soviet Union, it remained a smattering of friend groups that the Central Committee kept bringing up in conversation. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a city’s true dissident movement apparently could fit in a kitchen or two, with a wider network of samizdat readers that didn’t want the real smoke. These movements could straightforwardly be crushed by arresting enough people… just more than a handful. And by the late ‘70s, the Fifth Directorate had managed it. But by that time, Amnesty International had figured out inroads with the dissidents, and Brezhnev’s quixotic dreams of world peace and personal friendship with glamorous Western heads of state had made him care what the West thought. Yet the Westerners kept asking about all those political prisoners, and Yuri Andropov didn’t have good answers beyond “Nuh uh,” and “What about your human rights abuses?”

Brezhnev didn’t understand the dissidents any more than regular Russians did. What did they have to complain about? The regular Russians had a point, but those same complaints were rich coming from Brezhnev, who had a car collection to rival the flashiest heads of state and had cultivated a sense of open discourse among the top echelons of the Communist Party. He at least asked for deputies who spoke frankly, although he might not have liked that dissent from guys like Kosygin. Brezhnev could say things were going wrong in the Soviet Union, in a way that regular intellectuals could not. And the guys around Brezhnev had freedom to operate that they did not pass down the chain of command.

Then again, power enables its own freedoms, independent of any laws.

KGB Agent: Alexei Blagoslavovich.

A.N.: Andrei Il’ich. Welcome to my home.

KGB Agent: We have a warrant to search your residence.

A.N.: Yes--consequences. Would you or your colleagues like some tea?

KGB Agent: You will stay where we can see you.

A.N.: Understood. The materials I suspect you are looking for are on top of my bookshelf. But I’m sure you’ll look through everything regardless.

KGB Agent: Do you think you know what we’re looking for?

A.N.: I have--some understanding.

KGB Agent: Of anti-Soviet materials?

A.N.: You have not provided evidence that anything I have read is anti-Soviet.

KGB Agent: Is this your roommate?

A.N.: He is. He--he wants no part of my reading material. I would offer his name, but I’m sure you know already. At any rate, you have work to do, I’ll let you get on with it.

KGB Agent: Thank you.

A.N.: --

KGB Agent: I hear you have been transferred to another TETs facility.

A.N.: Yes, Andrei Il’ich. TETs-16.11 The commute is longer, the pay supplement is slightly less, but--I’m getting proper work done. Proper work.

KGB Agent: Is that so?

A.N.: Yes. I learned that one of the boilers had been out of order for four months, but because there were some typographical errors in the fuel consumption reports, no one had noticed. Innocent mistake. However--well, so--I keep carbon copies of everything I send to the chief of planning and economics. For archives. Personal archives.

KGB Agent: Indeed.

A.N.: But I made a mistake in my filings, and I lost my personal copy of that report. And two weeks later, I get a call from the partkom secretary12 saying he had found it. What a relief.

KGB Agent: I wonder how the report got to the partkom.

A.N.: I was about to ask you that. Maybe there was another warrant for my desk. I’m joking. Joking. At least someone found the issue before winter. I managed to organize a fix of the issue. Somehow the TETs had run out of copper pipes, but I found replacements.

KGB Agent: I should investigate where those parts came from.

A.N.: Well, Andrei Il’ich, I am a good planning-economist.13 I meant to ask you, did you hear about the recent outage at TETs-20?

KGB Agent: I did not.

A.N.: Turns out there was a major accident there last week. I had reported that some of the seals in the hot water loop were due for maintenance, and I left a report for my replacement to order new seals. The order was made, but the replacements were lost in transit. The seals failed, a pipe burst, and a worker got burned badly.

KGB Agent: --

A.N.: An honest mistake, I’m sure, but I liked tracking our parts shipments. I would have followed up. I would have. But it was an honest mistake.

KGB Agent: What does this story have to do with me?

A.N.: Nothing, I’m sure. Nothing. And I know you have nothing to do with my transfer. But I want to thank you anyway. The consumers of Khoroshyovsky raion need heat, and I got to do my part to help them. And I’m sure TETs-20 will get on well without me. Once they replace those seals.

At no point did the dissidents ask for a new government, or even the political reforms that Alexander Dubček sought. With rare exceptions, they insisted they were apolitical — and who can blame them? Russia had seen enough of revolution, and considering how much “political activity” the Communist Party asked of people, even asking people to sign Yet Another Letter was… too much. But by the time the Fifth Directorate started arresting people for the notionally prosocial cause of monitoring the USSR’s participation in the Helsinki Accords that Brezhnev had proudly signed, it became clear that even asking the Soviet Union to follow its own laws was too high a bar. The only freedom a Soviet citizen could find was in their own soul.

And as Alexei Yurchak describes in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (2005), the exhausted complacency of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s of Russia made personal individuation increasingly attainable. As the Soviet project sacrificed the ideological dynamism and chaos of Stalin for the more staid and stable rule-by-committee of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the language of the USSR increasingly became uniform, anonymous, and predictable. The norms of Soviet administration ossified, and in ossifying, they opened up space between what the words of the Soviet Union were and what they meant. Yurchak names this phenomenon a performative shift, in which citizens were only asked to perform the rituals of Soviet citizenry, not to hold the revolution in their souls. And by the time the Fifth Directorate had taken up its mission of quashing the dissidents, they had stopped probing the souls of the people they arrested and interrogated. It was easier to write off dissident action as drunkenness, or foreign interference, or mental illness if they kept talking.

The dissidents took notice, and in parallel evolution to Victor Frankl, they concluded that one’s soul could be free even in a labor camp, no matter how hard a totalitarian tried. But because the Kremlin gradually placed less and less emphasis on Soviet souls, almost everyone found room for their own personal freedoms. It became possible to be neither activist, nor dissident, but simply a normal person нормальный человек. Komsomol meetings became social groups that started with perfunctory votes to please the raikom райком (district-level party committees). Black markets (always a normal part of Soviet life) pulled in Western clothing and trinkets. Coworkers exchanged anekdoty анекдоты making fun of their home country, and sometimes, their supervisors joined in.

A man has traveled to a hostel with two coworkers. His coworkers start drinking in the evening and talk loudly late into the night. The man leaves the room, asks the front desk for a pot of tea, and then returns to the room.

Then, as his coworkers start exchanging political jokes, he walks to a wall socket in the corner and asks, “Major-General, could you send up a pot of tea?” Minutes later, the pot of tea arrives. The coworkers abruptly stop talking, and the man is able to sleep.

When he wakes up, his coworkers are gone. He walks to the front desk and asks where his coworkers are.

“They have been arrested.”

“Well, why have I not been arrested?”

“The Major-General thought your tea joke was funny.”

By the early eighties, the Party’s monopoly on discourse had dissolved. Samizdat publications about art, religion, feminism, Western economics, and more had become accessible. Leningrad in particular developed countercultural spaces like Saigon, a cafe that became a hub for poetry, and Kamchatka, a boiler room that served as an impromptu venue for the now-famous rock band Kino Кино. By the time Gorbachev instituted glasnost — the same term Volpin used in 1965 — as official policy, Kino was already famous. And as the war in Afghanistan limped to its conclusion, Kino produced the album about the war.

I could pay what is asked — but I don’t want victory at any price.

I don’t want to place my boot to anyone’s chest

I’d have liked to stay with you — just to stay with you.

But a star up high calls me to the road

But even Blood Type Группа крови (1988) refrains from overt political statements — read literally, there’s no mention of the Communist Party, of Afghanistan, of a specific war. It’s more about the self. If you can’t change The System, if you know that changing The System will only make things worse, then all you can do is save yourself and those you love.

And if you can’t do that either, at least you can save your soul.

A.N.: Andrei Il’ich.

KGB Agent: Alexei Blagoslavovich.

A.N.: Pleasant to see you. Would you like some tea?

KGB Agent: --

A.N.: As a guest. A guest.

KGB Agent: I would be glad to.

A.N.: I take it you have a request for me?

KGB Agent: I do. We are investigating a man you may know--Aleksandr Dronov.14 We have evidence that he distributed anti-Soviet material.

A.N.: Dronov--

KGB Agent: No games. You’ve spoken to him.

A.N.: I see. I see.

KGB Agent: We are collecting witnesses to his activities. I would like you to corroborate our report. We have already collected testimony from his associates at the Oil Institute.

A.N.: Will I need to write my own testimony?

KGB Agent: That is not necessary.

A.N.: May I review the testimony before signing it?

KGB Agent: That is also not necessary.

A.N.: And the alternative is--Tashkent?

KGB Agent: Tashkent--no, Surgut.15

A.N.: Surgut.

KGB Agent: Yes.

A.N.: Lot of oil and gas work.

KGB Agent: So I have heard.

A.N.: They need men.

KGB Agent: Yes.

A.N.: They need planning-economists.

KGB Agent: Good ones.

A.N.: Sounds like hard work.

KGB Agent: Yes.

A.N.: Much less time to read.

KGB Agent: I understand that is important to you.

A.N.: --

KGB Agent: Of course, I am here regarding Dronov.

A.N.: You are a kind man--Andrei Il’ich. I’ll start packing.

KGB Agent: And Dronov? Dronov?

A.N.: I’m not providing testimony.

My interest in the Brezhnev days extends beyond mere fascination with the geopolitics of my father’s generation. I got hooked in part because I recognized myself in the history. I read the abstruse, block-quoted language of august socialism, and I recall boring leftist zines from college. I read of the political infighting and cliquey politics of the ‘30s, and I remember the Twitter of old. I read of enforced conformity and aesthetic philistinism in a nation of snitches and narcs, and then I open up the Twitter of now. And as I stumble into a doomscroll, I see sclerotic institutions collapsing from senescent bureaucracy, a nation led by an aging ex-thespian who is losing the ability to stand, much less speak. I ask myself what room there is for an artist, a civil servant, a dissident-by-temperament who has sought conventional power. I ask myself what I must do for the people beyond me, beyond the people I personally care about, the us свои, the ours, наши. And I find my answers in Yurchak and Nathans; I find the aesthetic register in Dostoyevsky and Tsoi; I realize that if I play my cards right, I can live a full life no matter what happens.

This article was originally published in Asterisk Magazine.

Americans — left, right, and everywhere in between — seem to be afraid of AI. They fear data centers speeding up climate change, disinformation and deepfakes, AI companionship, and, above all, job loss from automation. Meanwhile, the Chinese public seems to be perfectly fine with the technology, or even “optimistic” about it.

The polling data is striking: Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report shows that more than 85% of Chinese respondents see AI as more beneficial than harmful, compared to less than 45% of respondents in the United States. A 2025 report published by the University of Queensland and KPMG Australia revealed that 73% of Chinese respondents are willing to trust AI system outputs and share relevant information with AI at work, and 88% intentionally use the technology, compared to 52% and 48% of Americans, respectively.

Why does Chinese society, which suffers from acute job loss and a youth unemployment rate close to 17%, embrace a technology it knows is likely to take away more jobs?

The question was answered three decades ago. The answer is not a narrative about AI, but about an earlier transformation also perceived as inevitable. It is a story about how Chinese society has learned, through repeated upheaval, what it believes to be the only permissible response to disruption. Accurately interpreting that response — which is often misleadingly called “enthusiasm” — is essential to understanding that worried Americans watching China’s AI frenzy might not be looking at a rival but into a mirror.

The millennium that broke two ways

Lived this way for thirty years
Until the great mansion collapsed
The deep, dark clouds
Are drowning the view in my heart.

如此生活三十年 ruci shenghuo sanshi nian
直到大厦崩塌 zhidao dasha bengta
云层深处的黑暗啊 yunceng shenchu de hei’an a
淹没心底的景观 yanmo xindi de jingguan

– “Killing the One from Shijiazhuang,” Omnipotent Youth Society, 2010

In December 1978, reeling from the economic wreckage of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China’s Communist Party formally shifted its central task from class struggle to economic construction, launching Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up” and beginning a gradual dismantling of three decades of central planning. In 1992, the country formally declared a turn toward a socialist market economy — an acknowledgment that market forces, not central planners, would now drive growth.

The country’s enterprises, built for a planned economy, were suddenly exposed to market competition — and consequently began hemorrhaging money, especially in industries like steel and textiles. By 1997, the state had decided to consolidate the strategic enterprises and let the rest restructure, merge, or collapse. The slogan it coined was 减员增效 (jianyuan zengxiao) — “reduce headcount, increase efficiency.”

The consequences of this transformation depended on where you lived. Over 24 million workers in China lost their jobs in the state sector by the end of 1999. The layoffs were concentrated in the northeast — Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Jilin — once the industrial heartland of socialist China and now called China’s rust belt. In 1957, the city of Shenyang’s Tiexi district produced the nation’s entire output of lathes, rock drills, gliders, rubber boats, and tower cranes, earning it the nickname “the Eastern Ruhr.”

By the late 1990s, 80% of the companies responsible for this output had gone out of production, and half of the district’s 300,000 industrial workers had been laid off. Between 1998 and 2000, nearly every year saw 7 to 9 million workers laid off nationally. Liaoning, for example, was laying off nearly 1,700 workers every single day. The moment was so unique that even the act of being laid off had a special name: 下岗 (xiagang), which literally means “stepping down from the post.”

Yet while the transition led northern China into economic crisis, the Pearl River Delta — geographically proximate to Hong Kong and Macau, home to China’s first Special Economic Zones, and the ancestral homeland of much of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and beyond — embraced rapid modernization and internationalization. The historical “land of fish and rice” became the “world factory.” Hong Kong investors established over 65,000 factories, employing about six million workers in the Delta. From 1991 to 2001, the Pearl River Delta’s regional GDP grew almost eightfold, and its population increased from 20 to 43 million.

For these citizens, the new economy meant good lives, which now included new technology. In 1998, Microsoft unveiled the mainland China version of Windows 98, and signed musician Pu Shu to endorse it. “New Boy,” a track on his 1999 album, name-checks Windows 98 and Pentium computers in its chorus and became a genuine millennium anthem for a generation.

Put on new clothes, get a new haircut
Relax with Windows 98
The road ahead will have no more suffering
How cool our future will be.

穿新衣吧, 剪新发型呀 chuan xinyi ba, jian xin faxing a
轻松一下, Windows 98 qingsong yixia, Windows 98
以后的路不再会有痛苦 yihou de lu, bu zai hui you tongku
我们的未来该有多酷 women de weilai gai you duo ku

– “New Boy,” Pu Shu, 1999

China’s tech giants — Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu — were all founded between 1998 and 2000. By the end of 2000, the number of internet users in China had jumped from 3000 in early 1995 to 22.5 million. In 2001, China joined the WTO. Urbanization accelerated, and the growth of the middle class fueled demand for luxury goods, tourism, and better nutrition. The number of private cars in China went up from 1 million in 1992 to almost 10 million by 2002. Many people envisioned a hopeful future in which they could acquire new clothes, new luxuries, and new technology in the new millennium.

But the “many” did not include the 100 million people residing in the Northeast — roughly 8.5% of China’s total population as of 2000. By the 1990s, urban shrinkage, which is measured by sustained population loss, had already taken hold across 52 cities in the Northeast. And of the 68 cities across China whose populations diminished continuously into the 2010s, half were in this region. The regional birth rate has been trending lower than the national average for more than three decades, and net outmigration has become an increasing problem since 2000. In 1990, the Northeast represented 8.66% of the country’s population; by 2016, that proportion had dropped to 7.9%. The one-time cradle of China’s industrial development has become a place that many would rather not raise kids or live in, given the choice.

In the span of a decade, Chinese society simultaneously experienced rapid economic growth and extreme economic precarity. Individuals were offered transformative opportunities and faced catastrophic crises, all due to the same factors put in place by a select elite who generated the incredible promise and acute challenges modern China still faces. To many Americans watching AI reshape their economy, this narrative may sound familiar, though calls to regulate, pause, or stop the technology reflect a belief that the transformation can still be steered or stopped. That option did not exist for Chinese workers in the 1990s.

Painful, “rewarding” reform

For China’s policymakers, slowing development was never an option. A 1931 quote from Joseph Stalin — “落后就要挨打 (luohou jiu yao aida) or “those who fall behind get beaten” — that adapted by Mao Zedong in 1956 permeated society, serving as a cornerstone of high-level policy narratives. In China’s mnemonic practices, this phrase, linked to the idea that only development can sustain a nation’s independence, is the most significant lesson from the past, necessary to remember from China’s 20th-century history of war and colonization. “The reform is painful but rewarding,” wrote the state in 2012 in reference to the previous century.

At the turn of the century, then, the policy question was therefore not whether to reform; instead, it was how to make the transformation less painful. The government attempted to address the pain. In 1998, the state established re-employment Service Centers, which provided laid-off workers with living allowances, basic social security, and job training. The state taxation administration introduced tax incentives for businesses that hired displaced workers. Xiagang workers were entitled to tax exemptions, fee waivers, and preferential access to microloans when starting small businesses or seeking new employment. The Minimum Living Security System was established in 1999 to guarantee basic income for urban residents and expanded to rural areas in the 2000s. Higher education grew in 1999 and university attendance increased 600% in less than 10 years. This expansion was partially aimed at delaying China’s youth from entering the job market, thus leaving spaces for the re-employment of laid-off workers.

For some workers, these policies provided a bridge. But the scale of the problem overwhelmed the response. Funds were too small or simply did not arrive. When funds did arrive, they rarely reached the people they were meant for. In one case, one former deputy director of the city-level Development and Reform Commission — an institution responsible for implementing national economic policies — embezzled the subsidies of 556 xiagang workers.

Even as market reform and industrial upgrades brought new job opportunities, there were simply not enough: In 2004-2005, 24 million people entered the workforce, but only 9 million new roles were created. Even within these new jobs, there was a mismatch between supply and demand. The workers who had been laid off were predominantly in their forties and fifties with industrial skills, while the foreign companies entering China wanted fresh university graduates or young rural migrants who were willing to work for less. And though the expansion of higher education benefited many, it eventually produced young workers who were overqualified for many jobs, resulting in high youth unemployment that persists in China today. And much of the suffering was silently buried under cold numbers and grand policies.

In 2002, economist and writer Wu Xiaobo conducted fieldwork in Shenyang’s Tiexi district. Writing for the Financial Times China, he recorded stories from two families who had experienced layoffs. One husband biked his wife to the red light district for sex work in exchange for money for survival. In the other, the father jumped off of a building after his wife complained that they could not afford to buy their son sneakers for a school sports meet. Other accounts described families folding poison into dumplings, robbers and their victims begging each other to end the other’s suffering, and workers lying across railway tracks waiting for trains to hit them.

It may be hard to understand why people would resort to such extreme situations in the face of mere unemployment. But for many workers in the northeast, employment was everything. Before xiagang, most workers’ lives were organized around the danwei — the work unit that was not simply an employer but a total social world. The danwei provided housing, medical care, pensions, childcare, and entertainment. Colleagues were neighbors. People were born in the danwei clinic, went to danwei-sponsored schools, worked in danwei upon graduation, found partners through danwei-organized dates, and moved into danwei-sponsored dorms or housing. From birth to death, a worker’s life was closely linked to their danwei. In his 2004 book, sociologist Li Hanlin argues that danwei was not only a workplace but also a chosen lifestyle that provided a sense of reliance and an anchor of hope. It was a society without strangers, because people formed close bonds through everyday work and life. Danwei gave people social identity and legitimacy.

People in the Northeast therefore lost not only income, but their way of life, their sense of belonging to the small communities they had built around their work, and their dignity as socialist workers. In a society that for decades had told them workers were the masters of the nation, the sudden sense that they were surplus, inefficient, and unwanted imposed a burden that no severance payment could address. Many felt deceived when forced to sign labor contracts that stripped away their protections: “I believed in the government and the party. I relied on the enterprise for a living, and the enterprise also needed me for further development,” said one laid-off mining worker in rural Beijing. “I didn’t have the slightest idea that the enterprise would take advantage of me.” Others felt invisible when they were excluded from decisions that would determine the rest of their lives by an institution they had always called their larger family.

The fear and the frenzy

The paradox of the era was that as much of China’s population was losing jobs, an emerging group of poor people, predominantly in the southeastern coastal areas, was growing rich overnight. And because others were enjoying upward mobility, the ones left behind internalized Social Darwinist views that claimed that only lazy and useless workers had been laid off and that people who failed to find new jobs simply were not skilled or determined enough to do so.

In rural Liaoning, a northeastern province greatly impacted by xiagang, many people sought to migrate overseas for better opportunities. Local villagers explained to anthropologist Xiang Biao that they looked down on neighbors who could not find work overseas to earn big money. They wondered to themselves, “why have others gone overseas successfully but you can’t?” and assumed that those who stayed had failed because of individual shortcomings rather than structural forces. This view, which originated in northeast China, makes the fault of the layoff a problem with individual capabilities: When rapid stratification turned neighbours’ fates in opposite directions almost overnight, individual effort became the easiest explanation for diverging outcomes — a logic the state then reinforced by replacing collectivist language with individualistic discourses of self-improvement and personal advancement.

Most narratives of the period, even sympathetic ones, treat economic restructuring as a natural force, with individual adaptation as the only response. In 2002, a documentary about the Tiexi district depicted the marginal lives and struggles of xiagang workers in this once-vibrant industrial area. Lyu Xinyu, one of China’s most prominent scholars in the study of rural-urban inequities, interprets the documentary as a sad depiction of an inevitable historical event:

Today’s (2003) Tiexi District is nothing more than a replay of the decline of the traditional industrial Rust Belt in the American Midwest and the traditional industrial Ruhr area in Germany in the 1970s and 80s. It is the unfolding of a common historical rationality in different times and spaces, and we have no possibility of escaping the compulsion of this law. Industry, in a dialectical and historical sense, is an object of the natural laws of society.

If economic restructuring was an unstoppable force of nature, then the only possible response was to move with it before it moved without you. Xiang Biao diagnosed this as a “last bus” mentality: a collective fear that missing the opportunity to seize a piece of post-socialist accumulation meant missing everything. You either catch this bus towards success or be left out forever. It was a frenzy born not of greed or enthusiasm, but of the desperate realization that the old world was gone and the new one had no reserved seats. What began as a northeastern industrial experience has, amid decades of social change and competition, became a prevalent psychological structure spanning different socioeconomic classes and regions.

The state’s official rhetoric consistently reinforced this reading. In the 1990s, China needed marketization and reform of state-owned enterprises. These were, they said, inevitable moves to save the country from its economic crisis. China, under this logic, also needs urbanization, industrial upgrades, or AI integration, because history is irreversible and technological progress is inevitable. Describing major societal changes, the official language is always that one needs to “seize the new opportunities (抓住新机遇; zhuazhu xin jiyu)” and “ride the trend of the time (站在时代的风口上; zhan zai shidai de fengkou shang).” The rhetoric still prevails two decades later, as a top state newspaper wrote in 2019, “when the era discards you, it will not even say goodbye.”

The signal for individuals was clear: You had better catch the “last bus” to seize the fleeting opportunity. If you fail, no one, even the state, will back you up. This mentality undergirded China’s development at the turn of the century and prevails today. Whether it involves market, education, industrial, or technological reforms, people in China are frenetic about new things because they are always seeking the trend to follow. In Xiang’s words, “every bus is the last bus.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, learning English was the last bus. Globalization was the irreversible trend; only by learning English could Chinese people interact with the greater world. The state mandated English education as a core Gaokao subject and pushed it into primary schools in 2001, giving rise to cultural phenomena like “Crazy English“ (疯狂英语; fengkuang yingyu), wherein tens of thousands of people gathered in public stadiums to scream English phrases at the top of their lungs in a desperate collective bid for fluency. In the late 2010s, the mobile internet boom was the last bus. As tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent offered unmatched salaries in other industries, millions rushed to learn coding and enroll in computer science degrees in universities that were aggressively expanding computer science programs, only to find themselves facing a constantly decreasing employment rate.

In 2023, understanding AI was the last bus, and over 250 thousand people paid for rudimentary AI crash courses, terrified of being rendered obsolete overnight. In 2026, OpenClaw was the last bus, with thousands of people — retirees, white-collar workers, housewives — lining up outside tech company offices for engineers to install the agent directly onto their phones.

Underlying pessimism

Tomorrow morning, I guess the sun will be good
I want to clean myself up
Sell off everything old and broken
Oh, this will be so good
Come on, Pentium computer
Let them think on my behalf

明天一早, 我猜阳光会好
我要把自己打扫
把破旧的全部卖掉
哦这样多好
快来吧奔腾电脑
就让它们代替我来思考

– “New Boy,” Pu Shu, 1999

Today, the history of marketization is largely depicted in a rosy way. Chinese TV dramas — ranging from official historical fiction to romantic melodrama — celebrate people who rode the tide of the trend and raised themselves. The trauma of xiagang has found cultural expression only at the margin.: The so-called “Dongbei Renaissance” is a loose wave of literature, film, and dark comedy that has emerged from northeastern writers and directors since the 2010s and treats the rust belt’s collapse with a bleakness official culture cannot condone. Beyond that, the majority of the records of xiagang have been censored or simply left out.

But even if you burn the records, you cannot erase the wound. And no matter how much whitewash one applies to that period, the core mentality — seize the last bus or die — has become deeply ingrained. This persistent anxiety continues to intensify and spread whenever new, potentially transformative shifts occur in Chinese society. While not everyone successfully boards every “last bus,” the alternative of not trying to board at all is a social stigma. As Xiang Biao observed, there seems to be no way to live outside of competing and striving, even when it is unclear what exactly one is striving toward; quitting the race means facing utter failure. Even when the young generation claims to embrace “lying flat,” the pressure from the state, society, and even they themselves means that they actually do not give up at all.

This history offers a new perspective on the “AI enthusiasm” we are now seeing in China. Many are correct to point out that the enthusiasm arises from the top-down state discourse portraying technology as a redemption against the history of the “century of humiliation,” as well as people’s ground-up experience of benefits from rapid technology development in the past few decades. Technology is good because it makes the nation stronger. The lesson of how the late Qing government closed its door, missed the industrial revolution, and was defeated and humiliated by the Europeans and Japanese is a core section of the history education mandatory for every Chinese student. On the other hand,industrialization and digitization have made many people’s lives better, compressing what took the West decades into a single generation. China grew from no high-speed rail in 2003 to a 50,000km network in 2025, compared with 8,500km in the whole of the EU as of 2023, linking 97% of cities with populations of more than half a million; the society leapfrogged credit card infrastructure, going straight from cash to mobile payments in a transition that reached people who had never held a bank card.

However, these two elements also instill a profound sense of precarity. The desire to access the transformative benefits of technology is inseparable from the fear of being left behind. Citizens adopt cashless payments not only because of the convenience it offers, but also because of the penalty for not doing so: finding oneself unable to pay at most stores, locked out of basic services, and adrift in a banking system built for a phone screen. The same will be true for AI — or, at least, most Chinese people seem to believe so.

China’s culture of techno-optimism, analysts argue, may allow AI to be diffused and deployed at scale. Some analysts contrast China’s Star Trek techno-optimism, which some believe will allow AI to be more quickly deployed at scale, with the West’s Black Mirror mindset, wherein public anxiety about various AI risks stifles deployment. It is too easy, however, to draw a binary between the American and Chinese responses to AI, or to think that the Chinese public would be purely enthusiastic about a technology that will automate more jobs. It is true that Chinese respondents in some surveys likely have some genuine enthusiasm — particularly many who lived through and benefited from the market transformation of the 1990s, for whom technology has been a story of concrete improvement. However, enthusiasm and fear are not mutually exclusive. A person can genuinely believe some AI products are beneficial and feel they have no real choice but to adopt it; can welcome a technology because it seems useful while worried that not mastering the usefulness renders themselves obsolete. Most survey questions were too binary in design to shed light on which sentiment is driving the response, or a respondent’s ratio of enthusiasm to anxiety.

Today, some evidence-based “optimism” claims draw from the Chinese public’s extremely high responses like “AI products and services have more benefits than drawbacks”, how much one “trust AI,” or “willing to accept AI,” all of which cannot differentiate a net excitement of AI from the belief that AI is important, inevitable, and cannot be missed. Are AI products viewed positively because people really benefit from them, or are they simply thought to be so important, just like how learning English is “beneficial” in the sense that people believe the language means modernization and the future, even though in real life it may have little practical use? Asking “How much do you trust the technology?” is inherently ambiguous: does answering yes mean you trust AI as a technology, trust AI’s output, or trust that AI will bring opportunities that you cannot afford to miss? Furthermore, behind the 95% reponse of willingness to accept AI lies the 49% belief that AI will replace jobs. So while AI is viewed as a threat to job security, a possible coping mechanism is to rapidly accept and embrace it, because history has taught the Chinese that the only coping mechanism is to change oneself.

The mixture of enthusiasm and fear pulls on a tension that has emerged throughout China’s recent history — whether people believe a change will benefit society as whole or merely themselves as individuals. There is a difference between believing a technology is useful, beneficial, or necessary for society as a whole — that AI will become the fate of the nation, which one needs to work hard to adapt to — and trusting that the technology will automatically benefit individuals’ lives. Under the grand narrative today, Xiagang is acceptable, necessary, and has more benefits than drawbacks — for the nation-state more than for those workers laid off. “The 1998 SOE reforms were like major surgery. Without it, the patient would not have survived,” said economist Huihua Nie, implying that although xiagang was a painful process for some, Chinese society must endure this individual suffering for the collective good

When polled only three decades later, perhaps every respondent genuinely believes that AI is good for both society and for themselves. Or perhaps they see AI as another surgery necessary to survival, knowing full well that flesh will be cut away and discarded, but convinced that the pain borne by individuals — however devastating to them — is small against the benefits at large. The polls, as they are written, cannot distinguish between these narratives. .

Meanwhile, the reality suggests that there is no homogenous or unwavering optimism in AI among the Chinese public. For example, even when the state issued multiple warnings about OpenClaw security risks, people nevertheless rushed to install the agent on their personal phones and laptops. Behind the seemingly massive adoption of AI agent tools is not a population mobilized behind a coherent national AI strategy, but many individuals running blindly, supervised by a government that benefits from the momentum but cannot meaningfully control the direction. Resource waste, security vulnerabilities, scams, and market oversupply are the predictable outputs of a system running on fear as much as ambition. China’s AI enthusiasm is not as strategic an “advantage” as some may think, as the bottom-up fear can easily lead to a frenzy that is outside the top-down AI agenda.

This is, perhaps, a situation that one could simply dismiss as “AI hype” or “AI bubble” if it happened in the US, where some hawk AI classes, many try out every new AI product as they emerge, and some attend AI hackathons every week. But because it is happening in China, and because the American analysts themselves now treat domestic AI backlash as a strategic vulnerability, they’d rather believe the Chinese public is different, or the Chinese government has better leverage in a so-called “U.S.-China AI race” as they can engineer an optimistic public.

But can it?

In January 2026, Pu Shu’s “New Boy” was remade to “New Bot” by the state media, aiming to highlight how AI and robotics, just like Windows 98, can bring hope and the promise of a new and improved life. However, despite its eye-catching music video, the song did not become a hit. People continue to listen to the 1999 original, leaving comments lamenting that there will never again be an era of such optimism. What they are mourning, perhaps, is not AI’s failure to match Windows 98’s appeal. “I have never been able to accept that this is a purely cheerful song. The melancholy of being pushed into a new era is the real theme — pessimism hidden inside a melody that looks happy,” wrote one listener.

“向前走，你的路，猜猜未来会给你什么礼物 (xiang qian zou, ni de lu, caicai weilai hui gei ni shenme liwu) ,” sings Pu Shu in the outro of the song. “Walk forward, your road is ahead — guess what gift the future holds for you.” The gift, it turns out, is mandatory. You did not order it, you cannot return it, and the era will not wait while you decide if you want it.

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We discuss:

• Why achieving goals in policy is more possible than most people think and that the real bottleneck is ambitious, mission-driven talent,

• How successful policymakers think differently — how they focus on outcomes over “portfolios,” learn the system deeply, and work backwards from impact,

• Why policymaking rewards immersion, sensemaking, and coalition-building more than raw technical or academic brilliance,

• The importance of peers, persistence, and “water on stone” stamina in sustaining long-term policy and public service careers,

• How writing, public ideas, and the “posting-to-policy” pipeline are democratizing access to influence in Washington.

Horizon recently launched Launchpad, a Substack on working in emerging tech policy with advice, explainers, and conversations like this one. If you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably like their other stuff as well.

Launchpad

Conversations and advice about working in emerging tech policy, from the Horizon Institute for Public Service.

Optimizing for Impact

Jordan Schneider: Kumar, what is RenPhil, and Remco, what is Horizon?

Kumar Garg: We help donors bet big on science and technology.

Remco Zwetsloot: And Horizon builds pipelines into public service for people working on emerging tech.

Jordan Schneider: Kumar, what do you want to tell the kids?

Kumar Garg: There’s a Tyler Cowen line about raising people’s ambitions that I love. The practical thing when I’m giving career advice is that people are very narrow in what they think career paths look like. They say, “Hey, I was looking around and I saw these jobs being listed. Which one should I apply for?” And I tell them, “I have never applied for a job that I have actually worked at.” I’m this far along, and I have invented some version of every job I’ve had. I got a fellowship by going to the government and saying, “If you gave me this fellowship, I could sit here. Do you want to hire me?” I’ve taken something where I was working for somebody and converted it into a job. I’ve started organizations. There are many ways to work out in the world.

The second part is what you actually want to work on. People worry about the burden of knowledge — how do you get to the frontier? That has not been my experience. You can get obsessed with a very technical topic, and pretty soon after talking to all the people and trying to figure out why that topic is stuck or what’s not getting worked on, you can be on the edge where the experts on that topic are saying, “That person’s really onto something. We should be doing more of that.” Your ability to go from not knowing something to the edge is actually quite high.

The real magic is whether you actually want to devote part of your career to working on that and trying to make progress. That takes time — learning how to get something into the National Defense Authorization Act, or how to get good at raising money around your ideas. These things take time. But doing big things is a lot more possible than people realize.

Jordan Schneider: How much latent capacity for big-thing-doing is out there, both from a “the world needs things” perspective and from a “there’s talent that just hasn’t had their horizons raised” perspective?

Kumar Garg: We’re always talent-blocked. We’re bottlenecked on talent on basically everything. The reason isn’t that we have an infinite set of problems. One of the conversations I have with donors goes like this — somebody might say, “Let’s do a white space analysis. Where’s the white space?” By that they mean there’s some space where everybody’s working, and another place where no one is working. The sad joke is it’s all white space. You get into these problems, and as you dig in, you very quickly figure out there’s a bunch of stuff that’s quite important and not getting worked on.

A recent example — in the past five years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of people who realize lead pollution is a really big deal. Maybe a quarter to a third of the global learning gap between rich countries and poor countries can be explained by lead pollution. When I started talking about this five or seven years ago, I’d get a nodding head — “Yeah, pollution’s a problem.” Then I’d ask, “How much money is being spent on this really big problem?” Eventually people looked into it. Globally, $10 million was being spent on lead remediation. How many people work on lead remediation globally full-time? Maybe 100. We’re talking about something that might have a trillion-dollar-plus lifetime impact. We underestimate how many really important things don’t have enough talented people working on them.

When the Lead Elimination Project came to Parth and I with their idea, I could tell they were onto something. They said, “We flew to a country, bought lead paint on the market, applied paint to paper and let it dry, took a sample, tested it for lead, and took it to the regulatory authorities saying, ‘Did you know paint is being sold with lead in it?’” The authorities were shocked. The paint suppliers were shocked. In multiple countries, that alone caused them to change the law. They were getting off plane flights, buying paint, and changing whether lead was being sold in the public market. This happened in 2023.

A week ago, I’m trying to buy fishing supplies for my son. I go to the tackle shop. I cannot find any weights that aren’t lead weights. I’m thinking, “I’ll have to order these on Amazon.” Even today, you cannot find non-leaded fishing weights in most places in the United States. The shop owners say, “They’re heavier and more useful.” Do I really want my kid using lead weights on fish he’s going to catch? We have blind spots everywhere. There’s lots of interesting stuff to be done. You just have to be a nerd about it and figure it out.

Remco Zwetsloot: There’s a funny story related to this. For the Policy Entrepreneurship Network conference — a community Kumar organizes along with Parth — there was swag, including a bag. The bag had lead in it. The label said there could be small residual amounts of lead in this bag.

Kumar Garg: Embarrassing.

Jordan Schneider: How else do people get stuck or blocked? Let’s get another story out of you.

Kumar Garg: Another way people get stuck is through who their peers are. I had a college friend call me up. I was working in policy, working in the White House. He said, “That’s all very impressive, but how much do you get paid?” He worked in finance. I said, “I’m on a fellowship salary. I’m clearing $40K, but I’m getting to do all this incredible work as a fellow in the government.” He said, “But why? If the work is important, why don’t they pay you? I don’t understand.” It did not compute to him. Eventually, I moved off the fellowship to a government salary, but it’s still not comparable. He was surrounded by a peer group where that’s how you kept score.

One of the important things if you’re going to do interesting, ambitious things is having people around you who value the striving, even when you haven’t gotten the win yet. We used to call this “water on stone.” What’s a thing you’ve been working on for many years where it looks like you’re not making progress? I still get emails from people saying, “I accomplished my water-on-stone. Finally, the crazy person in my way died or left government, and we’re going to get the win.” They email me because they know I appreciate how sometimes these things take time.

Whatever you want to do, if you’re not surrounding yourself with at least some other people who value that work, it’s very hard. Part of the reason for the Policy Entrepreneurship Network is that we celebrate nerds who say, “I’ve been obsessively working on how to make the organ donation system work. Here are the 17 different ways we’re trying to reform OPOs, and here are the 14 ways the lobbyists killed us. Then we made a comeback and found the right person in the government to get this rule changed.” All the back and forth, the Erin Brockovich of it all. That person is also saying, “I can’t get anyone to fund this work. It’s crazy.” But the ROI on their effort is so high.

The work requires stamina and engagement. Surround yourself with people who can feel the win and feel the work alongside you. People sometimes make the mistake of not finding peers to do it with.

Jordan Schneider: Remco, why don’t you introduce the Horizon Fellowship? I’m curious what have been the indicators of success, impact, and failure from a selection, personality, or mindset perspective, and how that’s changed how you think about filling your slots.

Remco Zwetsloot: The Horizon Institute for Public Service exists to build government capacity in emerging tech. We focus on AI first and foremost, and also on biotech and other areas. We run several programs to build that capacity, all meant to create communities of people who understand the technology deeply and want to work in careers of public service thinking about policy problems.

The fellowship is our first and biggest program. It places people in government for up to two years, or in think tanks, in placements focused on emerging tech issues. Similar to the way Kumar mentioned getting into government, these fellowships are a pretty common model. We were the first to focus on AI and emerging tech specifically.

It’s interdisciplinary. We have machine learning PhDs and deep technical experts, but these are interdisciplinary problems, so we also have lawyers and others who bring relevant expertise. We really try to select for public service motivation and ambition. AI and other fields will have widespread impacts, and we need people in government who understand the technology, are thinking deeply about where it might go, and try to do something good for the public and work effectively for the offices in which they serve.

What’s really required is a combination of ambition and humility — a thing many people in the Policy Entrepreneurship Network have. We need to do big things, and there are many big wins to pursue. At the same time, you’re working with people who think differently from you, working on behalf of elected representatives who set the direction. That’s what we should aim for in a democratic society. Your role as a staffer or fellow isn’t necessarily to make the world the way you want it to be, even if you pick an office whose mission you care about. Selecting for that combination of ambition and humility is something we’ve iterated on over the years.

Kumar Garg: One thing I felt working in government — I worked in a science office, and there was no good correlation between how good of a scientist you were and how good you were at policymaking. You can get pretty far being dictatorial in science — “I run this lab, I’ve got this system.” But being successful in government is sensemaking. Why is this person not going to go along with this idea? What are their incentives? What’s their blocker? Why do they want to show up? You have to develop that extra sense of perception over time. How do you bring people along?

What’s smart about the fellowship model is that some of this is just easier through immersion. Two months after somebody has started a fellowship, they sound totally different about the questions they’re asking me than in the summer before they went in. Once you’re in there, you realize nobody knows anything, but you have to create this document in two hours. Then the document comes out of somebody very important’s mouth as what they think. That two hours of work really matters. You start to realize how compressed people’s time and attention are. You realize how much you have to figure out why people may or may not be into an idea. You have to understand how things actually get to the finish line.

If you’re a researcher and you spend a year in policymaking roles, you’ll become a totally different researcher when you go back to academia. Immersion is very powerful. You understand much more intuitively the incentives of these systems.

Jordan Schneider: How does that track onto the humility-versus-ambition axis?

Kumar Garg: It gets at what Remco was saying. You have to be obsessed with winning — with thinking, “This is really important and I really want it to happen.” A lot of times, people in government fall into this idea of “I own this portfolio.” I don’t like the word “portfolio.” A portfolio is a fancy way of saying this is the range of topics whatever seat I’m in has equities in. It’s better to have goals — “I want to move from here to here.”

Being ambitious about things you want to move is important. The catch is that to pull that off, you have to be a student of the system. When an executive order came out, or the budget came out, I would ask people, “How did this idea make it into the budget?” They’d say, “There’s this budget examiner within OMB. They write the first draft.” I’d say, “Let me go get coffee with the budget examiner.” That budget examiner would tell me something interesting — “I start in the spring building out what’s going to be in the initial budget I send to the agency.” I’d ask, “You’re starting now?” They’d say, “Yes. Are there any questions you’d like me to ask the agency?” Understanding that the budget process starts the day after — or even before — the president’s budget came out for the next year is not obvious because you might think the budget happens in November when it goes up to the president’s desk. Curiosity, and then putting that curiosity to work, is very important.

Remco Zwetsloot: The focus on results and outcomes in the world distinguishes some people in policy and government from others. There was a guy we were advising at Horizon, a tech entrepreneur interested in making the jump into public service and policy work. We told him, “Someone with your background has relevant skill sets. You should consider doing this. You could add a ton of value.” We sent him some of the RenPhil writings on policy entrepreneurship as a mindset to deploy. He said, “Why is this a concept? This is just the way of doing things. You have an outcome you want in the world, then you work backward to what’s needed. You can call it policy entrepreneurship, but that’s just the way you do business. It doesn’t need this terminology or specialness.”

Three months after he made the jump to DC, he came back and said, “I get it. I’m in so many meetings here in DC, or I talk to people, and they have a portfolio or things they’re working on, but they don’t have an outcome in mind. They don’t have a way they’re actively trying to change the world. They’re not working backward from that to what’s needed.” That’s fundamentally a different mindset. A lot of people on the outside — especially folks who have that outcome-oriented mindset — don’t realize it’s a choice, that it’s not true across the board.

Jordan Schneider: It’s that word “entrepreneurship.” If you’re in a market economy and your business isn’t doing novel or differentiated things, you’ll lose market share, make less money, fire people, and eventually shut down. There’s a whole universe of media, books, and podcasts that talk you through different ways to grow a business or make more money. As you were saying, Kumar, in academia, think tankdom, and stafferdom, there’s no P&L. There’s no way to keep score the way your college frenemy could look at his bonus at the end of the year and say, “I did a good job because I did this many deals.”

Most people go into government or policy because they want to make a difference. But it seems really easy to go from making a difference to treading water, just because of the way the system is set up and the fact that these are giant organizations where one CEO can’t call the shots.

Kumar Garg: I used to play this game with my team. I’d name all the White House offices and ask them to tell me what each does and what winning looks like for them. Most of my people came from a research background. “What do you think the Office of Presidential Correspondence does?” Millions of Americans write letters to the president, and the office writes responses. They pick out a set of letters every day for the president to read. They consider their job really important, and sometimes policy comes out of that.

What does speechwriting do? What does the advance team do? What does the Office of Public Engagement do? What about comms? Each is its own little tribe with its own internal logic and KPIs.

The Office of Public Engagement does something called a fly-in. Sixty mayors from around the country are flown in to the White House to interact with White House aides. I’d ask, “What’s your goal with this fly-in?” They’d say, “The goal is the fly-in. We’re bringing these mayors to the White House. That’s the goal.” Then I’d be the policy entrepreneur and say, “There are a bunch of important mayors who are going to be here. Can I pitch them on things?” They’d say, “We need people to talk to them. We need them to have a good day at the White House.” I’d get the list of who was coming and set up what we were going to pitch them on. Or CEOs were coming through the building. Their KPI was just whether important people who want a relationship with the president had a successful visit.

Same thing with speechwriting. Tom taught me speechwriters don’t want you to edit their words — that’s their job, the words. What do they want from us policy nerds? The factoid. What’s the amazing fact you can stick into the speech that sells the point? I’d create lists of amazing factoids, and speechwriting would say, “You got any more of those?” When the State of the Union came around, I’d get an email — “You’re always good with those factoids. Got any interesting ones for us?”

With comms, what do they think about? The visual. I’d be the crazy person who walked into the meeting with the comms team, and before I showed them the policy idea, I’d show them the photo. “The president is going to stand in front of this massive wind turbine.” They’d say, ”Whatever it is, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that.”

Everyone has their own structure. The social media team, others — they all have their own. Different players in the system have different KPIs. As the person trying to get policy work done, you have to think about how to get those other teams to be into what you’re trying to advance, versus expecting them to nerd out with you on why we should change the organ procurement system or some energy policy.

Remco Zwetsloot: One interesting tension when we teach fellows or talk about whether someone is a good fit for DC — different people need to hear almost the opposite thing.

Some people are so attached to a certain outcome and think it’s so obvious that when you get into a room and explain your idea, the other person is going to get on board. As Kumar said, you have to spend time understanding people’s incentives and worldviews to bring them along. To that person, you have to say, “You’ve got the ambition right, but you’ve got to learn how the system works. Be patient. Be humble about things you don’t yet know about how things work. You might want to iterate on your idea and compromise.”

Other people have the exact opposite problem. They come in saying, “I want to be a public servant. I’m here to do good. Other people might tell me what that is. I expect to come into the office, be assigned a thing, and do it.” Often they come into a space where there’s no clear agenda. You can spend two years in DC just responding to incoming, doing a thing here and a thing there. At the end, maybe you’ve contributed, but you haven’t really changed anything. For that person, you have to push much harder on what is the thing you want to be different two years from now? What does success look like if you look back on your experience in two or five years? You should think hard about that. Two people drawn to policy or public service, but they need to hear almost the exact opposite message about what they’ll need to do once they get to DC.

Kumar Garg: One other dynamic — there are a bunch of jobs in government that are firefighting jobs. You can be in a national security role and you’re the person who has to get up to speed on something that happened in the world in the middle of the night so everyone else can be briefed on it. The more proximate you are — especially to the president — the more the things of the day dominate your incoming. You have to get really good at thinking about goal development before being in a role, so you can drive on it.

I always got the question: “Why not move to the National Economic Council, the National Security Council, or another White House office, in a more premier spot with more daily interaction with the president?” I’d tell people that’s a double-edged sword. The people who get daily interaction with the president are getting handed, “We’re about to have a strike and the airports might close. Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen today.” You might have other goals for the day, but that’s not your goal anymore.

The people who are able to be more proximate while still retaining some agency are underrated. That’s the role of the policy entrepreneur outside government. But also realize that some principals you’re staffing are spending 1% of their time on their passion project to fix the agency, even though if you’d interviewed them before they took the job, they would have said that’s their main thing. Understanding how much firefighting happens, and how to put that to work to advance your ideas in well-formed proposals, is a big part of what to navigate.

Jordan Schneider: I remember having this fantasy. This is how embarrassing I am. My fantasy was that — I think this was Jeremy Pollack or someone — just got assigned the Iraq brief in 1999. I was thinking it would be really nice if I just showed up at the CIA and they said, “All right, Jordan. Bulgarian tanks. You’re going to be the Bulgarian tank guy.” Then the whole world falls away and you can focus on your one thing. You’ll get really good at your one thing. It’s like doing a PhD — you’re just sort of focused, and you can own it. Maybe it’ll blow up and be the most important thing in the world, but at least you’ll be the master of your domain.

There are people for whom that works. But you don’t stumble upon the lead poisoning that’s getting half the planet dumber than it should be without the ability and mindset to do more of the explore as opposed to just the exploit. That’s a hard thing, especially when you’re young and what you’re reading are history books about secretaries of state, national security advisers, presidents, and generals. There aren’t movies and there’s not a cultural universe for someone who’s going to find this nice thing and fix it for everyone, or do some policy entrepreneurship dirty work that’s actually 100x impact.

And by the way, the value over replacement — whoever else would have been in that Bulgarian tanks job probably could have done a better job than me, or 90% as good. There’s so much impact alpha in finding which topic is going to be your hobby horse, even if you do end up in one of those more firefighting, reactionary “the senator needs to learn about this thing” roles. Learning how to pick your spots, and then picking them, is important.

Kumar Garg: The important part about how taxed senior people are, and how much the jobs feel like firefighting — Tim Geithner had this great line. He’d ask his team before a meeting started, “Is this a ’we care’ meeting or a ’we decide’ meeting?” There are things in government where nobody has a good answer, but you do the meeting to show you’re on it. You assemble and signal you’re thinking about it. Then there are actual decisions — are we going to spend the money on this or that? Are we partnering or not? A decent number of meetings are “we care” — just signaling engagement. One of your jobs is to tell the difference, because they look the same.

The value of doing the exploratory work — the explore-exploit, going out to find ideas — whether you’re an outside policy entrepreneur or the young fellow in the office who can do the work, mature the idea, and hand it to the right person, is very high. It’s why people say, “Why is DC run with all these 20-somethings? The chief of staff is 30. How does that happen?” There’s a huge amount of leveling up you can do if you use those roles to find those things and do them. It also means you can build a network of those people on the outside. When you only have a fraction of your time, you can call them and say, “I might be able to push on this, but I need you to do all the thinking and send me a document without much context.”

Remco Zwetsloot: There’s a certain type of person, especially folks coming from academia, who think, “I really want to work in policy and public service. I want to contribute, but I need to understand my area just a little bit better before I make the jump.” This is a blocker for people. “I need to know the full answer to what should happen with China policy before I go and try to get a job where my task is to say what China policy should be.”

People often don’t realize, first, that it’s very hard to study that question from the outside. As Kumar said, you sometimes need to be in the system to even know what the relevant research and questions are. Second — I’m a PhD dropout, a former political scientist, and I still love my 2x2s. One of my favorite 2x2s — on one axis, unconscious versus conscious and on the other, incompetence versus competence. Most people start out unconsciously incompetent. The first part of the learning journey is becoming consciously incompetent. Then you become consciously competent. The journey culminates in being unconsciously competent.

People really neglect the importance of being consciously incompetent. A lot of experts don’t know all the different things they need to know to have the solution for AI policy, for example. It’s just too complicated. If you’re not in DC yet, you don’t know all the ways you need to think about it. But you can know enough about AI to very quickly know what knowledge gaps you need to fill to say something about open-source versus closed-source AI models, or what China is doing in AI.

One of my colleagues, who was a fellow on the Hill, had a nice saying: “Your job is not to be the expert. Your job is to mobilize expertise.” That is your job as a staffer. To do that well, you need to be consciously incompetent — humble enough to know where your gaps are, then entrepreneurial enough to fill them, sometimes on two hours’ notice, sometimes on two days’. That’s a really neglected skill set. It lowers the bar for where someone needs to be to make a contribution in DC. Someone who wants to be the world’s expert on Bulgarian tanks might think, “I just need to read that extra book before I can really conclude something or jump into this field.” Lower your standards. You probably can contribute so much more than you think just by being aware of the gaps and leaning in early.

Kumar Garg: One question I have is — Jordan, you’ve talked about the posting-to-policy pipeline. How ideas now make it into policymakers’ heads is changing. How does that intersect with the “you have to be in there learning all the internal mechanisms” model? That system was certainly not as present when I first showed up in government in 2009. It’s become way more present.

One thing it shows is that we still live in a real deficit of clean ideas. I always used to say, when we were sitting around trying to come up with State of the Union ideas, “Why don’t I have a book from each think tank that says, ‘Here’s everything we wrote in the last year, formulated as a State of the Union idea. Here’s the sentence the president would say. Here’s the logic model of the policy proposal. Here’s a link to all the appendices so you can make it bigger or smaller. Here are the phone numbers of the experts you’d call.’” Instead, I’d be hunting around, “Has anyone written on this? Is there a paper?” The president gives this speech every year, and the fact sheets already exist.

So part of it is understanding the clarity of what a good idea is, and answering the questions of here’s what needs to happen, here’s why it needs to happen, here’s the button. Whether it’s eliminating the double staircase requirement, which would allow more construction — that’s a policy change a state or city could pass if they care about more housing. The policy entrepreneurship of people going in and serving, and just reminding everybody — there are a lot of documents that get created in policy and not that many ideas.

Remco Zwetsloot: Jordan, you’ve also talked about writing as a way to figure out what you actually believe. Say more about that?

Jordan Schneider: We’ve talked a lot in this show about the staffer path, where you have to subordinate a lot of your work to what the principal is doing — an elected representative, an assistant secretary, whoever. There’s a lot of power and influence you can have from that. But there’s an aspect that turns into Office Space, where you are not wholly yourself. You’re a vessel for someone else’s ideas and ambitions. You’re constrained by their pressures.

For some people, there’s something both intimidating and liberating about being forced to put on paper — or a Substack draft — what change you actually want to see in the world. Remco, earlier you talked about folks who applied to your program saying, “I want to be a public servant. I want to work on the NSC.” That’s something I’ve heard from a ton of highly educated 20-year-olds. It’s a failure state. But it’s very hard to look at a piece of paper, fill it with 2,000 words of your thoughts, and not get to something past “I want to be a public servant” or “I want to work on the NSC.”

That act of self-reflection that comes through writing is really important. There’s a whole second part about to what extent writing in public is important to get things done in the world. But the introspection that goes along with the writing process is almost the right place to start, and why having writing you’re only doing for yourself is important. Kumar?

Kumar Garg: I agree. One interesting trend that I’ve seen is the individual doer is getting a lot more traction in different formats. In media, you’d think about this as the individual writer. It used to be that what made you important as a writer was who you wrote for — “I write for Time magazine, I work for this.” The idea of the individual writer having their own brand, voice, and analysis — from Ben Thompson on — became much more of a thing.

At Renaissance, we try to think about it as the fund leader. You don’t need to go work for a foundation as a program officer. You can lead a fund, raise the capital, and deploy the work. Similarly, the idea of a public intellectual had this imprecision — a public intellectual writes books, is an expert, writes essays, sometimes writes a New York Times op-ed, is an authority. That too is getting democratized. You can start obsessing about a topic and writing about it consistently and cleanly. Other people who are experts on that topic can say, “This is actually pretty good. There’s a lot here.” They can validate it. Then you can be encouraged to keep working on it. That can open up other career paths, including terms of service in government and the opportunity to affect things.

Writing has an agenda-setting quality if you want it to. You’re starting to see that democratization happen.

The piece I’d push on is one of my favorite conversations to have with folks who have become really excellent writers — what role do they want to play in taking their insights and converting them into insights policymakers can use? I said this to Niko at Asimov: “You’ve got a bunch of interesting stuff. Some of these ideas would be really interesting if you or someone else then said, ‘Here’s the way NIH should be operationalizing these insights in their grant-making.’” That doesn’t have to be Niko’s job, but the writer can have a big role in operationalizing those ideas. They might do that themselves, or they could be aware that there’s an opportunity.

Remco Zwetsloot: One of my favorite examples is Thomas Hochman. For anyone interested in energy policy, you may have read his stuff. He’s at the Foundation for American Innovation and wrote a great Substack about one year in policy — what he learned. The public writing is a big piece of it. He did an impressive job building his profile.

Then there’s the follow-on work. Public writing is almost lead generation. It gets you into a meeting, gets you outreach or interest from folks, and then you need to do follow-on work. That follow-on work often ends up not being public and gets more into the traditional policy entrepreneur method. It democratizes this kind of work, and I think it’s super exciting. People who feel naturally drawn to posting-to-policy work should absolutely lean into it.

Kumar Garg: That second part is super important. Some people get so wedded to the public persona side that they don’t want to take the hit of doing the secret-Congress work — where policymakers call you up, ask you for ideas, you give them input, but you don’t get to talk about it. Some people are wedded to “everything has to be brand-enhancing.” Ideally you can do it in a way that allows your ideas to travel, and you’re smart enough to realize that to get the idea to the finish point, you’ll have to have different ways of interacting with decision-makers. People leave alpha on the floor when everything has to be public.

One question for Remco — you guys have been putting out a bunch of guides on how people navigate this. I get lots of referrals — “This person is thinking about philanthropy or policy. They’re very technical, very smart. They should figure this out.” If you’ve built a startup, know a lot about a particular technical area, and are curious about larger systems-level knobs you want to turn, what would be on your list of resources to check out? Certainly, I’d get on the phone with them, but what would you direct them to?

Remco Zwetsloot: For us, we created a website called emergingtechpolicy.org for people interested in emerging tech policy. Anyone listening interested in that field — highly recommend it.

It was a starting place because we kept finding ourselves repeating the same things in conversation. As Jordan would say, if you find yourself repeating something three or five times, write it down and put it on the internet. You can reach so many more people that way. The people who get connected to us aren’t a representative sample of everyone who should be in DC and in policy conversations. So emergingtechpolicy.org has guides — if you’re new to policy, what’s a think tank? What’s it like to work in Congress? What are different federal agencies doing on AI?

If you’re new and not sure which type of institution or job is good for you — a question a lot of people face — “I want to have an impact. I think government’s important, but I love reading and writing, or this kind of work. I don’t know where I’d plug in because I don’t understand DC enough” — that’s a great starting point.

Very soon after that, you want to meet peers and chat with people similar to you who have made the jump into policy or are thinking about the same problems. Start with reading, but very soon after, come to DC for a weekend visit. We have a guide on making the most of a weekend trip if you have the resources. We host events — people can monitor our website. A weekend workshop is one format we offer. You don’t have to feel ready for a fellowship, but you can come and check it out briefly.

The human element of seeing other people like you in this world matters. We try to get fancy speakers, but often the most important people to talk to are those just one or two years ahead of you in the journey. They can be the most useful. Senior people often have the curse of knowledge — the unconsciously competent quadrant. They don’t remember what it was like to be in your shoes and might give advice that’s no longer actionable or relevant. People just a year or two ahead are often the best mentors and guides.

We try to serve as many people as possible. You can sign up for career advice on our website. We get more applications than we can process, so we can’t do one-on-one calls with everyone, but the events are more scalable. There’s also a list of fellowships other than the Horizon Fellowship on the website. Hopefully soon, Jordan, we’ll have a China-focused workshop. We have AI and national security workshops, bio workshops. People listening with those interests will find something that suits them.

Jordan Schneider: Amazing. Kumar, what do you want to shout out, besides taking lead out of the planet? What should people give their billions to or work on next?

Kumar Garg: Technical people trying to figure out where to have the most impact can benefit a lot from seeing what’s out there. At Renaissance Philanthropy, we’re putting out lots of interesting, different ways to have impact. We’re building programs all the time. Click around and read — us, Convergent Research, Horizon. There’s a bunch of new organizations that have appeared in the past five to ten years pushing on how to take technical expertise and use it to agenda-set on really important outcomes. Read around. It’s both inspiring and — what all these organizations would tell you — we need more help. Reach out and raise your hand to either help build a program or support one.

We can coach you up on how to talk to the money side. That’s just a stepladder. Using your passion, ambition, and technical depth against these hard problems that aren’t just “what’s the next startup” can be a really powerful way to contribute.

Remco Zwetsloot: If listeners take one thing away from this conversation, I hope it’s Kumar’s earlier message — this is fundamentally talent-constrained work. I could not name you a problem where I don’t think part of the solution is “many, many more people should work on it.” There are complicated “how” questions depending on your personality and personal constraints. But I can guarantee that for someone trying to do good and thinking about science, technology, and China-related topics, there’s so much impact you can have. People in jobs that don’t feel aligned with their ultimate mission in life should think strongly about how to make the pivot in the next couple of years. A lot is changing in the world, and there’s so much need.

Jordan Schneider: Remco, Kumar, thanks so much for coming on ChinaTalk.

China wants to be the world’s biotech superpower. But to understand how it got here, it’s best to start with its crown jewel: the WuXi companies.

The WuXi companies are the dominant biotech services consortium in China and have become the lightning rod of U.S. political wrath, most notably as an early target of the BIOSECURE Act.

When we say “WuXi,” we don’t just mean WuXi AppTec. Although this family of companies is often spoken about as if it were a single company, in reality, it is a group of companies comprised of WuXi AppTec (药明康德), WuXi Biologics (药明生物), and a set of tightly integrated businesses, all more or less under the same leadership but dispersed throughout the industry. Together, they are stronger than the sum of their parts, and form what we envision as the Empire of WuXi (hereafter just “Wuxi”).

The TSMC analogy is tempting, since just as TSMC manufactures chips for companies like NVIDIA and AMD, WuXi, instead of discovering and commercializing its own blockbuster drugs, it provides the services (chemistry, testing, manufacturing) that allow others to do so. And both have the ability to gut-punch the global economy if their employees stop coming to work.

But AI analogies, tempting as they are, can do more harm than good. TSMC sits at a true chokepoint, with essentially no major rivals. If you want cutting-edge chips, you go through Taiwan. But WuXi does not monopolize a single irreplaceable step in the biotech supply chain. In fact, it has strong competitors both in China and globally.

WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics are the third- and fifth- largest contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) in the world by revenue. The remainder of the top ten are all based in U.S. partner nations, including the top two of Lonza (a Swiss company) and Catalent (a U.S. company). So, if there are plenty of alternative companies in U.S.-aligned nations, why is WuXi such a bogeyman for the U.S.?

In the same way that China’s rare earth stranglehold matters because of where those minerals sit in critical supply chains, WuXi, with its unique corporate structure, is embedded at many layers of the biostack. It has accumulated a structural indispensability that is harder to replace than a single dominant manufacturer would be.

A 2024 survey by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization estimates that 79% of US biopharma companies have at least one contract with a Chinese CDMO or CMO. WuXi AppTec alone is estimated to be involved in roughly a quarter of all drugs used in the United States (according to WuXi). And an estimated 65% of WuXi AppTec’s total revenue comes from U.S.-based clients.

Even if the U.S. and its allies lead in certain sectors of biotech, the growing recognition that WuXi has embedded itself throughout the supply chain has raised concern about systemic dependency and the leverage that comes with it.

The U.S doesn’t have an easy way to address this. China’s specific advantages in biotech look less like control over a single node and more like what it achieved with its manufacturing sector. It is about process expertise, cost efficiency, labor and talent, and deep integration into global supply chains — perhaps more like BYD’s success in the EV sector. These are not easily reducible to export-controllable chokepoints.

The biotech landscape is much more diffuse than AI. And yet, perhaps because of the TSMC analogies, Washington has increasingly tried to map its AI playbook onto biotech, with early versions of the BIOSECURE Act explicitly targeting WuXi as it would a company like Huawei.

We’ll get to the geopolitics at the end, but let’s first explore where WuXi came from and why they are so unique, before returning to how U.S. policymakers might approach the emergence of Chinese biotechs.

The Origins of WuXi: A Chinese–American(?) Story

The seeds of the WuXi empire were planted at a moment when it was relatively easy to build companies that straddled the U.S. and China.

Wuxi’s founder, Li Ge (李革), is emblematic of a particular early-2000s generation. Educated at Peking University, he earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Columbia University and went on to become a founding scientist at Pharmacopeia, a U.S. biotech built around combinatorial chemistry.1 By the late 1990s, Li was fully embedded in the American biotech world, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is also very charismatic and speaks fluent English, meaning you’d often see him on TV segments talking to Western reporters:

And yet, like many in that cohort of returnees — the so-called “sea turtles” (海归) — he felt pulled back to China.

Around 2000, during business trips back to China, Li noticed something that is fairly obvious in retrospect but was underexploited at the time. China had a large pool of well-trained, low-cost chemists, while Western pharma companies were steadily increasing their appetite for outsourced R&D, driven by the rising cost and complexity of drug development. Bringing a new drug to market was getting more expensive as the low-hanging fruit had already been picked, older blockbuster drugs were losing patent protection, and the revenue that funded new research was starting to dry up. Outsourcing was the pressure valve, letting companies chase more drug candidates without expanding their own overhead. At the same time, China’s entry into the WTO and improving IP protections were making it newly viable to plug into the global pharmaceutical system. As Li later put it:

“Around 2000, as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization, intellectual property protection in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry significantly improved. I realized that Chinese pharmaceutical companies definitely needed to develop new drugs.”

He founded WuXi PharmaTech in 2000 with his wife, Zhao Ning (赵宁). Pharmacopeia, his former U.S. employer, became its first client.

From the beginning, WuXi PharmaTech was built as a cross-border company. It served Western customers, adopted international standards, and quickly oriented itself toward global markets. In 2007, it listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming one of the first Chinese biopharmaceutical companies to do so. However, WuXi PharmaTech later restructured, delisting from the NYSE in 2015 before relisting WuXi AppTec on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018, alongside a separate Hong Kong listing for WuXi Biologics (药明生物) in 2017 and, more recently, WuXi XDC (药明合联).2 Wuxi made a series of correct bets on when to embrace the Chinese and American markets, respectively. Even today, although transparent data post-BIOSECURE is scarce, an estimated two-thirds of WuXi’s revenue comes from U.S.-based customers.

A key inflection point for WuXi is the 2015 reform of China’s drug review and approval system. By decoupling drug approval from manufacturing and encouraging outsourced production, the reforms accelerated a feedback loop: more innovative drugs → more R&D → more outsourcing → more innovative drugs, and so on. WuXi expanded aggressively to meet that demand and become the titan it is today, including earlier moves like its 2008 acquisition of a U.S.-based AppTec business, which gave it both new capabilities and a physical foothold in the American market (and the name of its most famous company, WuXi AppTec).

WuXi was not alone in embodying this Chinese-American model. Asymchem (凯莱英) was founded by a Western-trained Chinese scientist who returned to Tianjin and built a contract services platform. Porton (博腾), based in Chongqing, likewise evolved into an internationally oriented pharma services company with a large U.S. footprint.

For years, this dual positioning was an asset. The intertwinement of the U.S. and Chinese biotech systems was not accidental but foundational to WuXi’s rise. Western pharma outsourced to China for cost and scale; Chinese firms like WuXi grew by serving those needs. You could argue that this was exactly the outcome the U.S. wanted before it realized how powerful China would become.

That equilibrium has since come under strain. In early 2024, after being named in the initial BIOSECURE Act proposals, WuXi’s stock plunged sharply, wiping out tens of billions in market value in a matter of days. Although some of those losses have since been partially recovered, WuXi is now a target of the U.S., and its future is highly precarious.

A generation of Chinese biotech companies emerged from this earlier era of integration, commercializing Western training and global demand through China’s industrial base. But WuXi remains the most internationally salient and successful of them all.

Why?

What Makes WuXi So Good?

Li’s vision for WuXi’s role in the pharma business ecosystem was explicit from early on. WuXi was not meant to be a traditional drug company, but an enabling platform for global innovators. Rather than designing drugs, they would build the infrastructure needed to quickly find and develop them. The novelty of this business model was not simply exploiting wage arbitrage — U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies already knew how to outsource chemistry. Instead, Li’s key insight was to reframe the role of contract R&D in the drug development process.

Traditionally, outsourcing drug companies would partner with different contractors for each step of drug development. WuXi provided an enticing alternative. Instead of contracting one company to test the initial drug, another to optimize its potency, and another to manufacture it at commercial scale, drug companies could work with WuXi through the entire pipeline.

Li would later define this approach as an “open-access platform” (开放式平台). Unlike more siloed competitors, WuXi was committed to “following the molecule” as it progressed from the research laboratory to regulatory approval and commercialization. This business model would later be codified as a “contract research, development, and manufacturing organization” (CRDMO) and copied by other companies.

This approach is a win-win for both parties. For the drug developer, it minimizes the need to switch between different corporate ecosystems, eliminating the inefficiency of juggling multiple contracts and ensuring each partner is up-to-speed. For WuXi, it incentivizes customers to stay “stuck” to their services for years, leading to predictable business and access to the revenue scaling that occurs as the drug progresses towards commercialization. Given the immense uncertainty involved in pharmaceutical development, this level of stability for provider and customer is extremely attractive.

WuXi doubles down on this model by targeting a “long tail” of biotech customers. Rather than limiting themselves to massive deals with the pharmaceutical giants, they target many small- and medium-sized firms. With more limited resources, these small companies benefit particularly from the cost efficiency of WuXi’s end-to-end services, which then locks them into the pipeline. Their sheer number and diversity also diffuse the risk of major damage from any one customer pulling out. Furthermore, research by consultancy firms has shown that these smaller companies tend to produce more innovative drug leads than their big pharma counterparts. WuXi is therefore able to link itself to these disruptive — and therefore lucrative — products early on. These strategic decisions have given WuXi a “strong, diverse, and sticky customer base.”

Does WuXi have a technical moat?

Importantly, however, these technologies didn’t originate from WuXi labs. So, unlike the TSMC analogy, there is not a WuXi-specific technological moat around their services. Instead, WuXi’s biggest competitive advantage lies in their integration across the technology stack.

Indeed, a quick scan of their advertised capabilities reads like a catalog of the hottest frontier capabilities in drug development. A company can use WuXi’s DNA-encoded libraries to quickly scan for usefully potent molecules, including with options to avoid sharing IP. Biomanufacturing for complex biologics has been standardized and optimized, with new methods being deployed to further boost productivity at scale. In-house expertise in finicky drug types like peptides (including GLP-1s), antibody-drug conjugates (an expanding class of mainly anticancer drugs), and monoclonal antibodies (of COVID-19 treatment fame) expands the customer base they can serve. And, of course, AI and automation are being deployed throughout the pipeline.

Most biotech and pharmaceutical firms lack the resources and expertise to deploy these advanced biotechnologies in-house. But WuXi’s comprehensive and integrated platform offers them the access and support needed to compete at the technological frontier. A positive feedback loop is born as WuXi aggressively invests in further optimization and expansion, and the platform becomes even more attractive to the next wave of ambitious firms.

An excellent example of WuXi’s ability to adopt and deploy new technologies is their development of the “scale out” paradigm for manufacturing biologic drugs.

Biomanufacturing – the use of a living system or its parts to produce a good – is central to many of WuXi’s higher-end pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. The key step in a biomanufacturing process is growing the organism that makes your desired product in a large vessel, called a bioreactor. Traditionally, scale-up of these processes would proceed linearly, moving gradually to larger bioreactors until the necessary commercial scale is attained.

But the conceptual simplicity of this approach hides many downsides. Bigger bioreactors change the physical processes within, often leading to unexpected engineering problems like poor stirring or slow oxygen transfer. Product yields are compromised, requiring expensive and time-consuming optimization at each stage. Simultaneously, the capital expenditure and financial impact of contaminated batches scales with the bioreactors.

WuXi sidestepped these challenges. In place of building >20,000-liter tanks, they run multiple 2,000- to 4,000-liter reactors in parallel: scaling out instead of up. By doing so, the same proven operational conditions are used at small and large scales. Making more or less of a product requires no additional engineering — simply add or subtract bioreactors. The separation of one production run into several batches also ensures that one contamination event does not spoil the entire campaign. WuXi’s adoption of single-use disposable systems that don’t require meticulous cleaning between runs has simplified operations even further. Though not the first to develop these technologies, WuXi was the first to pioneer it as the backbone of a commercial-scale manufacturing capacity.3

WuXi’s China Advantage

Deploying these suites of frontier technologies and large-scale manufacturing facilities is expensive: WuXi Biologics’s massive Singapore facility reached a price tag of $1.4 billion. But some of this financial pain is offset for WuXi by the favorable political and economic landscape of China’s science and technology sector.

The most critical advantage is the Chinese workforce. Chinese universities produce dramatically more STEM Ph.D. graduates than their U.S. counterparts. WuXi capitalizes on this geographic concentration with targeted training programs that attract top candidates and develop company-specific skills. WuXi also invests in training workers at every level of the production process, including the technicians and operators running factory floors. This is precisely the kind of vocational and technical workforce development that the U.S. has chronically underfunded and undervalued. Because this highly skilled Chinese talent is often half the cost or less than Western equivalents, companies like WuXi can deploy larger teams to shorten timelines and overcome obstacles.

WuXi also benefits from China’s established excellence in advanced manufacturing. Because China largely controls global production of raw materials and active ingredients for small-molecule pharmaceuticals and is rapidly domesticating the supply chain for biologics, domestic companies benefit from easier sourcing and more resilient supply chains. This colocalization directly translates into accelerated procurement and lower overhead costs.

These advantages are compounded by the central government’s aggressive championing of biomanufacturing, such as labeling biomanufacturing a national priority and doling out subsidies.

Overall, this investigation shows that WuXi’s success is not a result of some unassailable technological lead in a core competency area. Instead, the well-rounded profile of the company means there is no singular source of advantage. This fact presents an unusual problem to concerned policymakers, who have been struggling to figure out how to deal with WuXi for years.

The Geopolitics of WuXi

Led most prominently by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, the U.S. is racing to determine how to maintain its competitive edge in biotech in the face of rising Chinese pressure. The threat of losing the advantage in innovation or a cutoff of basic medicines has policymakers searching for options. The size and success of WuXi has naturally caught their attention.

The BIOSECURE Act is the most notable move. It prevents the use of federal dollars to pay for goods or services from biotechnology companies of concern. In the earliest versions of BIOSECURE, WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics were both explicitly targeted. By pushing U.S. companies away from contracting with WuXi, it was hoped that new and more U.S.-aligned firms would step up to fill the gap.

However, the explicit naming of companies was abandoned in the final version of the Act that was passed as a part of the 2026 NDAA. Given how much pain this would have cost U.S. firms, since WuXi is embedded in a quarter of all drugs in the U.S., quitting cold turkey would have been painful.

Unlike with restricting AI components, where slowing progress would be felt years after implementation (and might even be welcomed by Americans already anxious about the technology), the costs of disrupting access to cancer drugs or GLP-1s would be immediate and personal for Americans.

Instead, companies of concern are determined by a deliberative process led by OMB or inclusion on the DoW’s 1260H list of “Chinese military companies”. Unusually, the 2026 version of this list was released for only a short time before being quickly removed from the Federal Registrar. WuXi AppTec was included on this since-removed update, despite being absent from previous versions. So, though the pathway is different, it does seem that BIOSECURE is poised to target WuXi after all.

Implications for U.S. Policy

The U.S.’s policy response to WuXi is an interesting piece of the broader U.S.-China biotech puzzle. Here are a few loosely-held takes:

Take #1: It seems the U.S. policy apparatus is using this company-banning/targeting approach because of its familiar success from AI. But, because most of WuXi’s advantages don’t come from any particular technology lead, does this approach really apply in this situation?

Take #2: The U.S. is quite concerned that China is “catching up” in biotech despite spending far less on relevant R&D:

To us, this suggests that the geostrategic competitive pressures we want to address aren’t primarily about money. If Chinese firms are making important moves with only a fraction of our budget, then whatever advantages they’re exploiting are probably not going to wither away if we further restrict funding. Instead, it seems like we need to think more creatively about how we can race further ahead instead of only worrying about how to slow down our competitors.

Take #3: It’s unrealistic to expect the U.S. to unilaterally dominate every layer of the biotech stack. The U.S. remains a global powerhouse in biotech, occupying advantageous positions across the entire technology stack. But, China is a massive country with a well-educated workforce that has decided to focus major investments into biotech – it’s inevitable that they will become an influential player. Perhaps the right question isn’t how we eliminate Chinese participation in biotech globally but which specific capabilities, if ceded, we could live with.

No single country is waiting to absorb WuXi and China’s cheap and diffuse biotech role. India has a large base of FDA-approved facilities, competitive costs, salaries about half of China’s, and a large and growing Ph.D. pipeline. It has thus received a surge of inquiries from U.S. pharma eager to diversify away from China. However, most of India’s strength is concentrated in small molecule generics, a very different skill set from the complex biologics manufacturing that makes up so much of WuXi’s value. South Korea’s Samsung Biologics is strong on biologics (rivaling WuXi Biologics), but weaker on the small molecule CRO and chemistry services where WuXi AppTec has built its deepest moat. No single country or company can replace all of the different roles WuXi plays, but if the U.S. leveraged its multilateral relationships to build a coordinated alternative across trusted partners, that would be its best shot, something Trump 2.0 has moved against.

The uncomfortable truth is that a U.S. biotech industry fully decoupled from China would be a slower and more expensive one. Policymakers need to be honest with themselves about that tradeoff, unless they think Americans will be fine with fewer cancer drugs for the foreseeable future.

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From Mar-a-Lago to the Great Hall, Trump returns to Beijing desperate for validation while Xi Jinping treats him to strategic flattery. It’s the first time an American president has been to China in seven years. It deserves a podcast, although, as Trivium said, the outcomes could have been an email instead of a summit.

Today’s guests are , author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power — which won a ChinaTalk Book of the Year award and got the four-hour podcast treatment — as well as ChinaTalk regulars Kevin Xu of Interconnected and Jon Czin, formerly of the CIA and NSC, now with Brookings.

Our conversation covers:

• Prestige politics on the cheap: How Trump's delegation gawked at Chinese architecture while Xi scored propaganda points by getting the U.S. president to fawn over Zhongnanhai's gardens — reversing :cades of diplomatic protocol.

• The G2 that never was: Why Trump's dream of running the world with Xi echoes Nixon and Brezhnev's failed détente, and how strategic competition makes genuine cooperation impossible regardless of personal chemistry.

• The AI factor: As Beijing struggles with compute constraints and export controls, the US brings its AI safety dialogue proposal as its only real leverage in an otherwise empty summit.

• The midterm calculation: How Xi is withholding concessions until September 2026, betting that Trump will need wins most desperately right before the elections.

• Who’s using the pause better? While China methodically builds domestic chip capacity and refuses even approved Nvidia exports, the U.S. struggles with basic industrial policy on rare earths.

Have a listen in your favorite podcast app!

Limited Edition Visit

Jordan Schneider: To me, the most remarkable thing was the affect of it all, starting with Marco Rubio in awe of the ceiling at the Great Hall of the People and Trump being impressed by the trees.

Maybe let’s start with Sergey for some historical context. Is this as odd as it felt to me, having a US president being won over by the CCP red carpet treatment?

Sergey Radchenko: Yes and no, Jordan. Obviously we get a lot of images coming out of this visit. Add to this Trump’s own proclivity for fancy things, and you can see how this has come together. But if you look historically at any summit, they always entail some element of pageantry of this kind. Some actually have had great resonance.

Consider, for example, Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972. I remember that image where he was walking down the stairway from the aircraft, and Zhou Enlai was down there to greet him. He extended his hand to greet Zhou Enlai. Those are images that reshape people’s perceptions. At that particular moment, it was important to show that it was Nixon who was making that step to visit China.

The funniest quip of the Cold War came when Nixon was asked about the Great Wall. Remember that moment? He said, “I think we can say that this is a great wall,” or something like that. We’ve always had that element — when Clinton went to China, he toured the southern parts and visited different places.

In other words, you always have the Chinese trying to showcase their best — the architecture, the pageantry, the receptions. That has a certain propagandistic effect, not least for China, which shows its glory to the world.

Jon Czin: The visuals and optics are probably some of the biggest takeaways from this meeting. The pageantry is always an element of this. One thing I’m mindful of, especially watching some of the pictures where the US side seems to be really taking it all in, is that they didn’t do a great job of playing it cool, frankly.

China rolls out the red carpet, but the affect you want in these meetings is to be business-like and perhaps a little stoic about it, because this is serious stuff. It’s one thing to take it in and appreciate it, but the clips of some senior officials gawking at it — I mean, it is cool when you’re inside those buildings, but you have to maintain your guard for the purpose of those visuals. I don’t think anybody on the inside or the outside would think that’s really the pose you want to strike in that kind of moment.

Jordan Schneider: Sergey, you wrote an entire history of the Cold War through the lens of prestige. It felt like the way the Americans comported themselves in China over these two days — you could not be giving more prestige points to China.

Sergey Radchenko: More face to the Chinese. Exactly. Just think about it — try to flip this and imagine some Chinese newspaper, let’s say People’s Daily or one of those newspapers, presenting videos of Xi Jinping being blown away by his reception in the United States and looking at Trump’s ballroom or something that is going or not going to be constructed.

That sort of thing would be a little bit humiliating. I don’t think the Chinese would ever do that. To see Trump do that, almost kowtow to the Chinese communist leadership — not quite physically, obviously, but expressing this level of admiration — I think this was over the top, frankly.

It’s one thing for Chinese propaganda to trumpet it up, to show it on the Chinese news or in any of those Chinese media. It’s another thing for the White House Twitter account to recycle these images as if to showcase China’s greatness to the American public. I found that a little bit strange, to be honest.

Kevin Xu: I just want to add a few more to that. I can think of two ways to think about this, right? One from the White House perspective. They’re all about their leader, President Trump, getting the treatment that no other leader gets when they go to these places.

I watched the whole raw footage of Trump getting the garden tour inside Zhongnanhai by Xi Jinping. If you listen to the audio of that entire tour, there was this one moment where Trump just had to ask Xi, “Do you bring other prime ministers and presidents to this kind of access?” And Xi was like, “Very rarely. We don’t really do this — maybe very rarely for other leaders, like Putin.”

The entire Trump team actually needs that validation just as much as China wants to provide that validation to stroke the visitor’s ego. I quipped a little bit on Twitter that Zhang Yimou must have started moonlighting at the White House videographer’s office because those videos of the Trump visit were fantastic.

But that being said, I actually think this was a more limited edition of what China wanted to provide to other leaders. If you think about it, just the previous leaders we’ve had from Europe — whether from Germany or Spain — usually get the multi-city tour. That’s what China actually wants you to see. They want you to ride the high-speed rail. They want you to visit either a factory or a robotics company. They want to showcase this entirety of China’s economic and technological rise which you can only show so little of if you have a limited edition of the visit in Beijing.

But they did the best they could to still provide that. Obviously, the Trump team lapped it up. In a way, China wanted to do more, but this is all they could have fit within whatever constraints the Trump team wanted, given that they’re still fighting a war in the region.

Jon Czin: Kevin’s point about how the Trump administration wanted to pick this is quite right — to show that kind of validation that they’re getting and the face that they’re getting in turn from the Chinese side. But I would say for a lot of the optics, I really wonder if it may have misfired. The same is true for the business delegation that showed up.

My suspicion — or my intuition — is that what the Trump administration was trying to do by bringing Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang is to do it as a flex, to demonstrate how many high-end companies we have that are really at the frontier of today’s technology. But the way it ended up looking from Beijing’s perspective is that you are here to do business rather than to compete with us.

What’s really striking to me — Sergey referenced earlier engagements like this — it did feel like a throwback. It’s kind of the “back to the future” summit where all the emphasis is on commercial and trade relations primarily. You show up with a gaggle of executives signaling pretty loudly and clearly that you want to do business.

You even saw in Trump’s Truth Social post on the way over that they’re looking to expand access to the Chinese market. If you close your eyes or squint a little bit, that could be a statement straight out of the George W. Bush or Clinton administration, not from the period of strategic competition.

Jordan Schneider: Can we come back to this prestige dynamic? Because we all kind of agree that Trump and the team and the delegation sold prestige on the cheap. There is a debate about whether giving face upfront leads to better or worse outcomes. Lots of folks have made the argument that presidents — starting with George W. Bush and through Obama and Trump’s first term — didn’t give Vladimir Putin enough face. Part of the reason we’re here today is — should we quote your book, Sergey? “Obama’s occasional dismissive remarks about Putin, such as when the American president compared him to the “bored kid at the back of the classroom,” added to the sense of a personal affront. It was not just that the Americans felt they were exceptional. They also pretended to be teachers.”

Even if Trump isn’t trading trade concessions for propaganda points of looking overawed by Chinese imperial greatness, is there a sense where maybe this just leads the planet on a safer trajectory? Because the Chinese people and Chinese leadership are less ticked off and feel less looked down upon by an American delegation? Or are we past that sort of game in 2026?

Sergey Radchenko: If I may offer some historical observations on this, it is true that under all circumstances, speaking respectfully about the other side is just the right thing to do. Trading insults has never led to any productive relationship ever. The Chinese are especially sensitive to this. They have historically — for obvious reasons — we’ve had, for example, moments where Mao Zedong had really nasty exchanges with Nikita Khrushchev back in the late 1950s.

Speaking of what foreign leaders get to do or not get to do, Khrushchev got the real treatment. He got to meet with Mao Zedong in the swimming pool of Zhongnanhai because it was in the summer and Mao Zedong had a swimming pool installed there. But actually, this was supposed to be an insult from Mao Zedong in relation to Khrushchev because he was trying to show his superiority.

Khrushchev and Mao quarreled, and Khrushchev in particular called Mao names. In the end, it did not contribute positively. You might say that this relationship — we’re talking about the relationship between Moscow and Beijing back in the late ’50s, early ’60s — fell apart for reasons that perhaps were not all related to personal insults, but personal insults never helped.

You mentioned, Jordan, this question of Putin and Obama. There were various reasons why Putin would want to reassert Russia the way he thought he was reasserting Russia’s standing and quarrel with the West for any number of reasons. It did not help that Obama was trying to look down on him because there is a general perception in Russia of American arrogance.

Speaking respectfully about the other side is generally a good thing. President Trump has not distinguished himself by being consistent in treating others with respect. In fact, he seems to go from one extreme to the other — he can trash a foreign leader one day and then say something good about him or her the next. However, his treatment of Xi Jinping has been fairly consistently respectful, wouldn’t you say? He hasn’t really trashed Xi Jinping in any noticeable way, which is good for the relationship.

Kevin Xu: I agree with that. The only thing Trump still occasionally brings up is COVID, but at the end of the day, his praise of Xi Jinping — whether from afar or up close — has been incredibly consistent compared to any other world leader, past or present.

Sergey Radchenko: Some people will criticize us for saying that. They’ll argue that Trump admires Xi Jinping as a dictator and therefore feels he constantly has to praise him. There’s probably something to that — it’s fair to say that Trump admires Xi Jinping’s way of governing, just as he does with Vladimir Putin.

Yet you could also say — look, you’re dealing with the leader of an important state, China. We may not like what the Chinese are doing in many areas, but we still have to treat them respectfully because that facilitates our interactions. However, this won’t necessarily lead to a good relationship by itself. The reality is that China and the United States are strategic competitors. You can kiss up to Xi Jinping all you want — it won’t change this reality. Or you can swear at him all you want — it still won’t change this reality, except maybe making it worse.

Jon Czin: To embellish that point, one important element to keep in mind with these meetings is not how much they matter, but in some ways how much they don’t in shaping the long-term trajectory.

I was struck listening to Sergey’s previous episode about the personal interactions between Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon and how important that personal rapport was. My sense is that especially under Xi Jinping, these meetings don’t necessarily move the needle — and certainly not in a positive direction.

As idiosyncratic as Trump is and as different as he thinks he is from his predecessors, there’s something essentially American about him. He really thinks that through his charisma and back-slapping, he’s going to somehow make a deal with the other side. That’s such an American way to approach things, and it’s so mismatched with how Xi conducts these meetings.

We just saw this earlier this year — as Jordan and I discussed in our episode about Zhang Youxia — Xi is very unsentimental about personal relationships. Even with people in his inner circle or people he’s known for decades, he’s willing to jettison them.

My sense is that when he goes into these meetings, what he’s basically doing is sizing up the other side, right. What’s really interesting is what Xi is learning about Trump from this. It’s probably only at the margins because Xi’s had a decade now to interact with Trump and think about how to interact with him.

One thing that’s really shifted in terms of this prestige dynamic — my old NSC colleague Henrietta Levin pointed out in her recent Foreign Affairs piece — is that it used to be the US. tactic to trade form for substance. Now, because Trump is so focused on the forums, it flips the dynamic. The Chinese side can say, “We’ll roll out the red carpet” as a way to try to achieve their substantive objectives with the Americans.

Their objective wasn’t really clear from the Chinese side. What they were mostly trying to do is think more long-term and see this as a reprieve — trying to buy as much space as possible from US pressure and fortify themselves for the next round of the contest. That’s what they’re purchasing by trying to give Trump so much face in this meeting. In the big scheme of things, that’s a relatively small price to pay.

The Reversal of Neediness

Jordan Schneider: Contrasting with Soviet leaders being really needy — I don’t think Stalin was particularly needy, but going through Khrushchev and Brezhnev, as you show in your books, Sergey, they had this deep desire to be seen as a peer with America on the global stage.

Almost now it’s flipped, where we have Trump who is the needy one, wanting to be seen as a peer.

Sergey Radchenko: It is crazy if you think about it. In the Soviet case, it was clear why they wanted this American recognition — to be seen with Nixon, for example, or Eisenhower. The reason was that they didn’t have really domestic sources of legitimacy. They thought that by being recognized externally by the United States, they would stand tall and proud as leaders of this great superpower and be legitimized by another superpower.

It’s interesting to think that with Trump and the pageantry that we saw in Beijing, it’s almost the reverse. He wants to be legitimized by the Chinese as a great leader. You know how he says, “Other countries respect me,” et cetera, which a lot of us in Europe are rolling our eyes at. There’s frankly a sense of incomprehension in many European capitals. Trump is trying to use this opportunity to highlight that China respects him.

I wonder if it works the other way. Is Xi Jinping also in need of selling the images around Trump’s visit to the domestic audience to say, “Here we are, the two great powers, da guo, working together,” and that shows the strength of the CCP? Is that part of the domestic legitimacy discourse for Xi Jinping?

Jon Czin: Xi is happy to take the win, but especially this far along into his tenure, hosting an American president isn’t crucial for him the way it might have been for his predecessors like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin. He went almost 10 years without hosting an American president, and his power has only grown in that period because of the purges, expulsions, and other internal dynamics. It matters, but really at the margins. Xi isn’t in a position where he needs to assuage any politically salient internal audience or demonstrate China’s greatness on the world stage. He’s happy to do it, but it’s not essential.

Kevin Xu: On the margins of that — I don’t think Xi is doing this because he has trouble winning a fourth term. But the domestic situation regarding the economy, youth employment, and general consumer sentiment has been bottoming out ever since zero COVID for the last two and a half years or so. Last year’s trade confrontation didn’t help at all, even though you could argue China stood up to the US in ways no other country could. China flexed real rare earth muscle and is learning how to do export control in a weaponized and offensive way. That’s fine as China learns these new crafts when dealing with the US from the more adversarial side of the relationship.

But as far as being able to host Trump — China just wanted this trip to happen. It was delayed once, and we didn’t know when it could happen. It’s very important for Xi to be able to host a United States president on his terms in a way that could balance the narrative at home, which is that “we are fine from an international perspective. The G2 is back on the docket.” Now we can talk about the more substantive stuff as China has, frankly, a lot of domestic problems that it is wrestling with. We haven’t talked about the future impact of AI and all that, which is now on the deliverables for these two countries — kind of a new thing.

All that is to say, there is some domestic need for this to be both done and done very well. We can debate whether it was done well or not, but it had to be done.

Jordan Schneider: The awkwardness of the delay means that Putin is showing up in Beijing tomorrow. This idea of a G2 — this was the dream of Brezhnev telling Nixon, “together we will run the world.” The idea being whoever gets to pair up with the US — whether it’s China or the USSR — is the one in pole position.

As pointed out in a recent article, when Xi went to Moscow to see Putin in 2023, a camera caught him speaking with the Russian leader, gesturing emphatically. Xi said, “Right now there are changes unseen in a century, and we are the ones driving these changes together.” “I agree,” replied Putin. We had similar language around that with Trump and Putin talking about how together they’re going to run the world. This is an idea that, at some level, appeals to Trump in particular. I’m curious for thoughts on how we’re going to be looking at this relationship, whether we’re going to be looking at this trip very differently based on the visuals that are going to come out of Putin and Xi hanging out tomorrow.

Sergey Radchenko: Jordan, on this question of running the world together, let me tell you an anecdote about the Soviet reaction when Nixon went to China in 1972 and made a toast about the future of the world being in America’s and China’s hands. That’s 1972 — Nixon goes to China, makes this toast that the future of China and the future of the world is in China’s and America’s hands, which is then publicly reported.

The Soviets read about it and get really upset. Brezhnev complains to Kissinger, “What are you saying? Aren’t the Americans and the Soviet Union supposed to be holding the future of the world in their hands?”

In other words, there’s a long historical background to this idea of the world being run or co-run by any number of these great powers. It’s interesting to see how this is evolving. I would imagine that from Xi Jinping’s perspective, it’s not even the G2 world. It’s almost like China is the center of the world, and the others are like spokes connecting to China. Very much a Sinocentric world.

Jon Czin: But it’s interesting because it’s primarily, in some ways, a question of optics. One of the things that’s interesting about how China responds to this G2 concept — they welcome the US side saying it, but they don’t actually like it in the sense that they don’t want to take on those burdens. You see it with their caution in the Middle East right now.

There’s one of these paradoxes at play in which China, being the second superpower, benefits from that position. They don’t have to take on the cost. All they have to do is continue to score singles and doubles at the US expense and build up their power without taking on any of those additional responsibilities.

That segues to another point I wanted to make in terms of the way the calendar worked out in the run-up to this meeting. The fact of the postponement meant that you not only have Putin coming on the heels of Trump, but you also had Iran’s foreign minister visiting just the week before, which was probably intentional on the Chinese side. It was designed to allow them to deflect US pressure on this issue since all they had to do was reiterate their long-standing talking point throughout this conflict that they support an opening of the Strait of Hormuz to try to assuage the US side.

The head of the KMT, Cheng Li-wun, ended up visiting Beijing and meeting with Xi Jinping before Xi’s engagement with Trump. We don’t know what happened in their internal meeting, but my suspicion is that Xi wanted to position himself to Trump as a man of peace — “You’re a man of peace, I’m a man of peace, I just met with the opposition” — and put the onus on Lai Ching-te. Based on Trump’s comments over the weekend, it seems this may have been Xi Jinping’s framing, which is unfortunate. The Chinese side was frustrated at a logistical level that the meeting was postponed in the run-up, but it actually ended up playing to their advantage because of how the choreography worked out.

Kevin Xu: I wonder if there was an alternate universe where the Trump visit could have happened after Putin. The Putin visit was long scheduled, while the US visit was much more in flux. Speaking from the US perspective, it might be a slight plus that Xi wanted to meet with Trump first before meeting with Putin, rather than meeting Putin first, which would look more like the evil axis colluding before receiving the US president in Beijing.

These days, everything is so haphazard. Based on my previous experience advancing White House visits to China from the US perspective, the Chinese side had to really compromise stylistically. These visits are usually rigid and planned ahead of time. To have one American CEO jump onto the plane halfway en route to the state visit, and then to have another member of the US cabinet delegation actually be on the sanctions list and you have to contort yourself to let him in — these are all compromises that are actually very rare from the Chinese side when preparing for these high-level visits.

This shows a level of practicality, respect, and accommodation that’s quite rare to make all these visits look good and not have any silly awkward moments that could overshadow the entire narrative.

Jordan Schneider: Shout out to the Chinese advance team. We really put them through the wringer on this one. They deserve some kudos and probably had late nights putting out that extra table setting.

Sergey Radchenko: Although we’ve talked a lot about the symbolism, and we don’t know what happened on the inside except for what Trump has let us know in his conversation with the press, it would be interesting to see how Ukraine was discussed.

Do we know anything about what Xi Jinping and Trump discussed regarding Ukraine during their Mar-a-Lago meeting, and how Xi might have reacted? Of course, this connects to Putin’s visit — perhaps messages were passed from Trump to Putin via Xi Jinping. It’s not even necessary because there are obviously the Witkoffs and the Kushners flying back and forth, but it would still be extremely interesting. Historians will find out in 30 years what was actually said, and maybe we’ll be massively surprised.

Jon Czin: It’s interesting on that point, Sergey, that my recollection is the Chinese side referenced Ukraine in their readout after the initial two-hour encounter between Trump and Xi, but there was no mention of it in the US readout.

Sergey Radchenko: Not in the readout, but Trump talked about it in his conversation with the press on Air Force One on the way back.

Jon Czin: You’ve got to keep in mind the mechanics of the meeting. If that was the main time when they spoke about Ukraine, this is a two-hour meeting. In all likelihood with consecutive translation, you really only have an hour of each side talking at most, unless somebody really decides to hold forth.

Sergey Radchenko: I think it was simultaneous because they published a small piece of it.

Jon Czin: That’s a fair point, but it’s still not going to be a lot of airtime.

Sergey Radchenko: Was it just this two-hour meeting between the two delegations? Did they have a private meeting? Sometimes you have these very small meetings of just the leaders and their immediate advisors. The delegations were massive — there were about 50 people altogether on both sides.

Jon Czin: Huge delegations.

Kevin Xu: They met for tea time, did the tour, and had a lot more informal meeting time. They also had a bilateral media availability where Xi said Trump loved the garden and offered to give him some flower seeds. Before or after that, they had more casual conversation that wasn’t as formal as sitting in a big conference room.

Sergey Radchenko: I hope they didn’t talk about organ transplants like Xi Jinping and Putin.

Jordan Schneider: Well, Kevin, this is your point — two old men hanging out. What are they going to talk about? Bad backs and trees.

Kevin Xu: Look, if you’re at the height of your game in your late 70s, organ transplants are the first thing on your mental agenda. The second thing is how old the trees are around you, to show deference to Mother Nature. We got the second part definitely on camera. The first part that Sergey mentioned, I don’t know — it could have been just “give me that guy’s number” kind of thing.

Arms Control and the Limits of Détente

Jordan Schneider: This idea of détente is interesting. You write, Sergey, that “the terrifying experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis was key to Khrushchev’s embrace of détente. Having come close to the brink, both Khrushchev and Kennedy glimpsed the darkness on the other side and understood that the world had changed forever. Nuclear-armed great powers were simply indestructible from without.”

Now, comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis to the great rare earths sanctions list expansion of October 2025 doesn’t quite fit the same category. But I’m curious about the analogy here — both sides deciding that the current temperature level is the correct one for them.

Sergey Radchenko: That’s a very interesting analogy. Of course, we haven’t had a crisis similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis. We could still have a crisis like that over Taiwan, for example, and who knows how that ends up.

But for now, it’s more interesting to compare what’s happening now to the Soviet-American détente in the early 1970s. There, you didn’t really have a crisis per se. Basically, at that point, the Soviets were in a situation where they had peaked and they understood that they had peaked. They wanted to have some kind of reasonable relationship with the United States — to agree to rule the world together, to listen to each other’s concerns, manage problems like the Middle East. That’s another interesting parallel. One of Leonid Brezhnev’s big concerns in 1972 — 73 was how to manage the Middle East together with Richard Nixon.

Of course, it never worked out because here’s the problem: You can have a wonderful personal relationship — and actually, Brezhnev and Nixon had a wonderful personal relationship. Brezhnev just loved Nixon for whatever reason. But you have two countries that were at that time strategic rivals. No matter what relationship you have, there’s always a tendency or desire to stab your partner in the back when the opportunity arises. There’s no alignment of values really, so you just basically go for it when you have an opportunity.

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In the Soviet-American détente in the early 1970s, things seemed to be very nice. But actually, when it came to forcing the Americans out of Southeast Asia, the Soviets were more than happy with this. In 1973, you had the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, and this was a defeat for the Soviets, a victory for the Americans. Then you had any number of conflicts in Africa, from Angola to Mozambique to Ethiopia, Somalia, etc.

Despite détente, this conflict turned into a zero-sum game for the two superpowers. Because in a situation of strategic rivalry, both sides understand that it is basically a zero-sum game. It is not — to use the Chinese propaganda phrase — “win-win.” It doesn’t work like this.

The Chinese can still talk about win-win all they want, but the reality is this is a strategic rivalry. No matter what Trump says to Xi Jinping or vice versa, it’s going to be unstable, and we are in a situation where more conflicts will arise. The question is not how to prevent the conflict, but how to manage the conflict.

Jon Czin: That meshes well with the point Julian Gewirtz has made about this. This isn’t really stability right now or anything like détente. It’s a stalemate. Basically, where we landed last year after the whole issue over rare earths is both sides realized the other side had leverage, and we’re just kind of stuck right now. The real question right now is maybe less about how long the stability lasts — that is one interesting question. But if we are locked in this longer-term competition, the question is then who’s doing more to fortify themselves in the meantime?

Sergey Radchenko: That’s exactly it. And by the way, détente fell apart, right? We cannot see détente as a stable condition itself. Détente was stable for a couple of years, and even while it was stable, there was actually a crisis in the Middle East that led to the United States raising nuclear readiness to DEFCON 3. That’s how détente was. We cannot say, “Now we have American-Chinese détente” — there’s no evidence for this. We have a summit, and the problems will continue.

Jon Czin: If anything, this past year is like a great natural experiment about the limits of the viability of an idea like détente in this setting. The US has, in some ways, hit the pause button on two of the issues that were the most contentious during the Biden administration — on technology and export controls, and then to some extent, with the giant exception of the big arms sale that was announced at the end of last year, pulling back at least on rhetorical support for Taiwan.

The reality is it hasn’t really yielded much in terms of some kind of deeper stability or an affirmative agenda, even recognizing, to Sergey’s point, the limits of détente in the first go-around. It underscores just how challenging it would be to get to something that does look more like that.

The other point is about the scary moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how that fed into subsequent discussions about détente and the need for arms control. That’s another really interesting point that’s embedded in all this — you don’t even have those conversations underway.

It’s one of the really striking things. When I talk to my colleagues who are Russia specialists, it’s such an interesting compare-and-contrast exercise. Jordan, you and I talked about this on an earlier episode. In some ways, we have a much deeper and more sprawling relationship with China than we ever did during the Soviet Union because of the people-to-people ties and the economic relationship.

But when you talk about those really sensitive issues, it’s much more awkward and truncated. It’s virtually impossible to have those kind of conversations about strategic stability — in a nuclear sense — with the Chinese, or really engage deeply on these issues, even though there’s been a push from the US side to have some of these conversations about crisis management and this whole suite of issues since the EP-3 incident.

My theory about this — and I don’t really have evidence for this — is that the EP-3 moment was kind of an “oh shit” moment for a lot of people on the US side.

Jon Czin: This incident, while not exactly analogous to the Cuban Missile Crisis, showed how a collision between military assets could spark a major diplomatic crisis.

The EP-3 incident occurred in the first year of the Bush administration when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a US reconnaissance plane. The US aircraft had to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island, and the Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, was killed in the crash. The Bush administration then had to negotiate for the release of the American crew members. Ultimately, they issued something resembling an apology to resolve the situation.

What startled US policymakers was their inability to establish communication — they tried calling Chinese counterparts, but nobody would answer. This wasn’t just bureaucratic delay. The Chinese military cannot operate independently without approval from political authorities in the Politburo Standing Committee, requiring internal deliberation before responding.

My theory is that China viewed this approach as successful. Going dark serves two purposes: it allows time for internal deliberation within their collective leadership model, and it works as an effective negotiating tactic. When China goes silent, it unnerves the Americans and provides leverage — China then controls when conversations resume and can set the terms.

This creates a fundamental mismatch in approaches. Many discuss achieving something like détente, and the Trump administration expressed interest in arms control talks, but China remains uninterested. They view such conversations as a trap, believing the Soviets’ participation in similar discussions contributed to their downfall.

Sergey Radchenko: The Soviet experience shows a different trajectory. After the major scare of 1962, they gradually moved toward arms control. One of the first steps was stopping atmospheric nuclear testing in August 1963 with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

This led to establishing the NPT regime — a remarkable achievement where superpowers agreed on nuclear nonproliferation despite their rivalry. In the early 1970s, this progressed to agreements like the ABM Treaty on ballistic missile defense.

Jordan Schneider: Well, let’s give Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan a few more years — then it really gets out of control, right?

Sergey Radchenko: Yeah, then we’re in a big mess. That’s right. That’s very sad. I was in Beijing, and I raised this issue with some of the Chinese experts. Their response was essentially that they simply cannot engage in this kind of discussion. On the other hand, they said we can talk about AI regulation.

AI Safety Dialogue

Jordan Schneider: Let’s turn to Kevin then, because in contrast to nukes, where everyone and their mother is going to have one by 2030, it’s not necessarily going to be the case in AI. At least today, there really are sort of two superpowers, though one can debate just how far behind China is relative to the US. Kevin, what’s your take on the idea that there’s going to be some sort of AI safety dialogue between the two countries?

Kevin Xu: I will say AI is the one thing that might throw that dynamic a little bit off in the US’s advantage. I was actually in China for nine days during the latter end of April through early May.

During these meetings with a small delegation of AI researchers and writers, all the Chinese labs complained about compute constraints — they can’t get enough compute.

The biggest culprit is US export controls. The second biggest culprit is the lack of domestic capacity to produce quality chips at a high enough yield. Even if Huawei can design the best chip, SMIC can’t manufacture them quickly enough with the quality needed to satisfy domestic demand. This doesn’t even address Chinese models or cloud providers potentially going abroad, which many would like to do if given the opportunity.

Against this backdrop, Anthropic recently launched their model in a way that scared every industry that cares even vaguely about cybersecurity. We’re hearing news about Dario Amodei briefing the largest banks in Europe, including central banks, about the power of AI.

This was the “Trump card” the US delegation brought to China to initiate what we might call a G2 AI safety dialogue, positioning the US from a place of strength in these conversations. The current consensus view of what this could produce long-term is relatively modest. This is an entirely different kind of technological threat compared to nuclear weapons.

In response to your mildly sarcastic point — yes, everybody will have AI in their computers. We already have AI in our phones, laptops, and at work, whether we like it or not. But not everybody has a mini nuclear reactor powering their house. The reverse is true with nuclear weapons.

There’s a larger non-military application to AI, but also a very legitimate military or national security dimension that makes this a more novel kind of dialogue between the G2 powers when it comes to technological containment or coordination.

The context of the US delegation going to China to discuss AI safety has much to do with non-state actors accessing advanced AI models. It’s less about the US saying, “You better not do this because we have the better model,” or China thinking, “You have the better model, we’re going to catch up, so you better not do anything crazy.”

This is where we’re heading, and it’s probably the most consequential factor that could shift the G2 dynamic in one side’s favor or the other, depending on where the models stand on any given day. This makes the dynamic much more fluid than traditional determinations of common denominators.

Jordan Schneider: If we’re stack-ranking what might break the stalemate for the rest of the Trump administration, we’ve got AI. We’ve got a Taiwan presidential election. What else, really? We’ve already done the trade war — I don’t think we’re going back to that. That’s kind of off the table.

Kevin Xu: The term “détente” may not be the best framework to describe the current moment. As Sergey pointed out, it’s more of a pause — a period where each side is buying time to reshore and strengthen themselves for whatever the future might hold.

We’re seeing clear examples of this strategy from the Chinese side. They’re refusing NVIDIA H200 chips from entering China, even though the US has granted enough licenses for them to be sold.

The Chinese side doesn’t want these chips because having more foreign technology come into their ecosystem — especially less advanced versions — would disrupt their reshoring playbook. They’re channeling every single lab in China to give all their purchase orders to Huawei, work with Huawei, co-design with Huawei, and ensure that supply chain is as robust as possible. Even if they suffer a lag of six months, nine months, or even a year, and even though every company would love to have the H200s, accepting them would dilute the revenue, attention, and mindpower needed to support domestic GPU suppliers as much as possible.

The big wildcard is what we’re doing on the US side to match this approach. That could change the dynamic significantly if we have real announcements — not just stock-pumping announcements from companies like Applied Materials or MP Materials. These are domestic rare earth suppliers and mines. If they could say, “Hey, we actually have enough going on now to support GM and Ford and all of our automakers without needing to rely on any foreign source of processed rare earth material in our supply chain,” that would change the dynamic quite a bit. But we’re typically not very focused on building our own capabilities right now.

Jordan Schneider: Let me share a Xi quote from March 2021: “Practice has repeatedly told us core technologies cannot be begged for, cannot be bought, cannot be bargained for. Only by holding core technologies firmly in our own hands can we fundamentally guarantee national economic security, defense security, and other aspects of national security.”

Sergey Radchenko: I think we can all subscribe to that, right? That’s what we’re all trying to do now.

Jon Czin: That’s great for our study session, Jordan. But I think this is really the key question. There are two critical issues here: What breaks the stalemate — either it falls apart, or somebody has a breakthrough — and who uses the time better in the meantime?

This is one of the things that causes me a lot of anxiety. I’m not persuaded that we’re using the time wisely or to the full extent. This is one of the interesting dynamics — if you talk to Chinese colleagues, they feel confident that they’re making good use of the time. You can see that reflected in the five-year plan and how they’re talking about it — the confidence they’ve been exuding since the fourth plenum last year. If you talk to people in the Trump universe, they also feel pretty good about the US position. Some of that is congenital to the Trump brand to have that bravura.

But it’s something that I’ve been really wondering about: Who’s making better use of the time? Yes, we’re having remarkable breakthroughs in the private sector on AI.

What I worry about is if you just talk about the particular issue like rare earth — I give the administration a lot of credit for the work they’re trying to do in the Pentagon in particular, and even the Pax Silica initiative. We have two real factors working against us just on that particular issue.

One is that we’re getting our act together belatedly, frankly. We’ve known about this issue since 2010, since they did it to the Japanese. Even the Japanese, as many people have pointed out, after 15 years of assiduously working on this, only reduced their dependency from something like 90% to 70%.

What’s been on my mind is that the Japanese have METI. They’re designed to do industrial policy. Even in the best case scenario, or even in the Biden administration, we are not really designed for this. This is hard. How are we going to do price floors and offtakes for something like rare earths, never mind the other supply chains that run through China? How much are we really devoting to figuring out some of these challenges?

The other issue is there’s other aspects to this competition too — things that people have pointed out already, the depletion of munitions with the war in Iran, the reallocation of resources from Indo-PACOM to Central Command that have been concomitant with this.

Even on the technology aspect of it, one of the things that I worry about — and that my colleague Kyle Chan points out too — is that I worry that we have AI myopia here in the United States and we’re so focused on this one technology. If you look at the five-year plan from China, they’ve got more of a portfolio approach. They are very much focused on AI, but there’s a whole suite of other technologies that they’re really putting a lot of emphasis on that I think are also quite important. Green energy, of course, has been very much in focus recently, but robotics, other aspects of this too.

It leaves me feeling unpersuaded as an American — or anxious — that if we do have this pause, maybe we’re not making as much of this time as we really could or should be.

One last thought — on what could break the stalemate or shake up the dynamic, the other element is just the mere fact of our midterm elections. As Beijing has thought about sequencing the diplomacy this year, this has been a crucial part of how they’ve tried to do the choreography.

It’s not like they think in terms of dynastic cycles — they’re just thinking in terms of the outlook calendar and recognize we’ve got an election coming up. They recognize that whatever they’re going to give the Trump administration in terms of concessions or wins, they’re going to get more bang for their buck if they give those to Trump during a state visit that’s very close to the midterm elections.

Jordan Schneider: They didn’t give him anything.

Jon Czin: They’re withholding it until later. They recognize that if it’s all about finding the minimum price point for mollifying Trump, you’ll get more mileage if you do it around the midterms. The really open question is how the policy and political dynamic in China shifts potentially after the midterms.

Jordan Schneider: I don’t know if this is a sell. We were talking about the Trump administration wanting to get some brownie points because they feel insecure. Are there voters out there who look at those videos? Are there swing voters — voters who might stay home in November — who see those types of videos and the quote-unquote “respect” we get from a Putin meeting in Alaska or a Xi meeting in Washington in September and think, “Yeah, this is the party I want to vote for”?

And on the economic stuff — okay, it’s one thing to make announcements. To actually reduce inflation, that has to flow through the economy, which isn’t just an October surprise type thing.

Jon Czin: That’s a really fair point. It’s not necessarily high political salience. It may have to do with how Trump wants to depict himself. At the very least, what he’s going to be loath to do is see one of his big international deals unravel right around the time of the midterms.

I thought this after the two leaders met in Bali and agreed to the supply chain truce. They’re looking at one year — it’s a one-year pause. Trump’s not going to want this to all unravel as he goes into the midterm election. They probably calculated that it gives them leverage to at least stabilize things or lock in the US side and prevent any competitive actions, at least through the midterms.

Kevin Xu: The Chinese side is much more willing to play that dynamic as well. Front-loading all the deals they’ve already said they’ll give to the Trump side right now is actually pretty dumb. If you’re that aware of the US political calendar, everybody knows nobody pays attention until after Labor Day when it comes to a presidential election, let alone a midterm election. That’s just how it always works.

A late September big announcement where Xi actually comes to the US and gives Trump a giant basket of gifts — whatever those purchases might be — is what the Trump side wants and what the Chinese side is willing to give. It would give Trump the best hand he could have for the second half of his second term so there’s actually more deal to be made. The moment the House and/or the Senate flips, a lot of the stuff that China may want to work with the US on that’s longer term or has a longer timeline becomes much more difficult.

All this investment stuff, where there could be joint ventures, actual booths on the ground, building certain facilities where Chinese companies or Chinese technology is involved — that could really flip on a dime, depending on who is part of the separation of powers getting to say. We just have to wait until then. I’m pretty sure the Iran war will end in some way, shape, or form before September. Let’s hope. Trump’s whole gimmick is that this will reduce gas prices overnight and inflation will come down.

I don’t think voters think about inflation from an analytical or academic point nearly as much as whether the gas pump is lower. If gas is cheaper, there’s no inflation, and then we move on to our daily lives. All that actually lines up quite well to almost this weird little — I call it G2 chemistry — where each side actually knows what the other side needs to keep each other in play, to keep working together in ways that we probably don’t give either side much credit for. We usually look at everything from a super competitive, confrontational, adversarial perspective in ways that dilute this interesting little understanding of realpolitik between Trump and Xi.

Jon Czin: Just to underscore that point, Kevin, when you think about it over the arc of the past year, it’s pretty remarkable that’s where we’re at now. Fourteen months after having a de facto embargo on China, where the administration comes in and thinks it’s clobbering time — and now this is where we end up, with this implicit gentleman’s agreement about scratching each other’s political itches for the moment. It’s striking to me. We’ll see how things play out with Iran, but I’ve had this thought that the Iran war is almost following a very similar narrative arc to what happened with China.

The administration comes in — literally in the case of Iran, guns blazing — they underestimate the other side, they realize how much resilience and appetite there is for pain on the other side, and then they end up looking for some kind of diplomatic denouement or off-ramp. There’s something essential there, both years that have defined the trajectory of each one of these contests.

A Book Recommendation

Jordan Schneider: I’ve got a book recommendation. Maybe we can end on that. I just finished Julia Ioffe’s The Motherland, which I found to be fascinating to pair with your book Sergey asbecause it tells the story of the Soviet Union through women.

The contrast between how the wives of various American presidents saw themselves and the wives of Soviet leaders — who were PhDs and had their own professional lives and really thought they wanted to mix it up on the world stage — was fascinating. At the same time, they had these status anxieties. They wanted to be perceived as prestigious and not these dowdy Russian babushkas.

You get that layer of history as well as Julia Ioffe’s personal arc, telling the story through four generations of her family and the social dynamics of what has led to this transformation. We’ve gone from the dream of the early days of the Soviet Union — where you have full and total equality and women are able to pursue exactly the same careers that men have — to Russia in the 2020s, where the ideal is to just marry a rich man and have him divorce you 10 years later so you’re kind of fine, I guess.

That whole loop has personal dimensions and policy dimensions. It’s a nice reminder that even though you have photos with the US and China where you have 15 men on either side, there are actually lots of women who are a part of these discussions and informing them, even if they aren’t literally the leaders of the two countries. Hopefully, we’ll get Julia on the podcast, but that was a fun book.

Sergey Radchenko: It’s a very masculine, toxic environment, considering the number of men in all of this. That’s something I suppose we should strive to do something about. Trump is not doing anything about it. Nor is Xi Jinping.

Economic Deterrence Without Autarky

The Cold War sparked an entire academic and policy discipline on nuclear deterrence and statecraft. It is time that the sphere of economic security received its fair share of attention. But we do not have to start entirely from scratch; there is much to learn from our “Cold War Warrior” predecessors. This essay suggests borrowing from the theory of “nuclear latency” — the notion not of having a bomb, but of having the capacity to build it in a coercive or crisis context — and applying it to vulnerable but non-critical elements of U.S. economic security.

The combination of rapidly emerging dual-use technologies like AI and quantum, the hyper-interdependence produced by globalisation, and U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry all mean that economic security is having a moment. However, as the lines between technology, economic and national security blur the likelihood of confused policymaking increases dramatically.1 The question for the United States then becomes not ‘should we prioritise economic security?’ but ‘how do we prioritise within economic security?’.

Prioritisation matters for two reasons. First, because economic security — even for the United States — is not free. Attempting to insure against every vulnerability produces familiar pathologies: blanket “re-shoring” agendas, misallocated capital, political capture, and opportunity costs2 in other areas. If the United States started treating every economic risk as an existential security threat — shielding industries from competition and innovation — it would undermine the very market dynamics that make the U.S. economy the strongest in the world.3

Second, because the most powerful economic security card that the United States has is not isolation but network dominance.4 It derives leverage from scale and openness — the conditions which produced interdependence in the first place. The strategic task is therefore to preserve the United States’ strategic gains from interdependence, while reducing the most coercible points of dependence — and, crucially, to do so efficiently.

In light of this, the United States’ current economic security policy repertoire is incomplete. Most U.S. economic security tools are either negative instruments — sanctions, tariffs, export controls — or vital but blunt supply-side interventions aimed at a narrow set of indispensable (‘Tier 1’) capabilities such as chip fabrication. The mixed historical record of economic deterrence should caution against overconfidence in coercive tools alone.5 Meanwhile, full-scale domestic re-shoring is fiscally unsustainable once it extends beyond a small number of genuinely existential sectors or capabilities (e.g., fabs). The missing gap is what to do about the wide middle: supply-chain bottlenecks that are strategically consequential, vulnerable to coercion, yet not important enough to justify full-scale CHIPS Act-scale reshoring.

This essay proposes a way to manage that middle category: an Economic Security Latency Fund, on the order of $20-30 billion, explicitly designed to build resilience and as a form of ‘deterrence by denial’. The organising idea comes from nuclear strategy. Japan and South Korea have debated “nuclear latency” — maintaining the industrial and institutional capacity to build a weapon quickly without actually doing so — because full armament is destabilising, but zero option value is risky when alliances and threats are uncertain.6 Applied to economic security, latency means preserving the ability to scale production rapidly in a crisis without trying to on-shore everything in peacetime.

The point is not autarky but time. Economic coercion works when it can impose politically salient pain faster than the target can adapt. Latency reduces that coercive leverage by shrinking time-to-substitution and scale-up bottlenecks, ensuring that the capacity to ramp-up takes months rather than years. By building latent capacity, the United States can build resilience in areas where it is vulnerable and not currently critical — but could become critical in a crisis scenario.

The rest of the essay does three things. First, it sets out a disciplined hierarchy for U.S. economic security: distinguishing Tier 1 capabilities that justify permanent capacity, Tier 3 areas where markets and diversification are sufficient, and Tier 2 bottlenecks where latent capacity is the efficient middle path. Second, it operationalises what “latency” means in practice: how to choose select target areas, what instruments actually buy rapid scale-up, and what credible “thresholds” look like: economic equivalents of red lines. Third, it stress-tests the approach through an illustrative scenario, showing how latency can build resilience and deter coercion against the United States.

The core wager is this: disciplined latency can deliver a higher deterrence-per-dollar ratio than either blanket reshoring or reliance on coercive tools alone, while preserving the very interdependence that makes the United States powerful in the first place

Proposal: An American Economic Security Latency Fund

Countries like Japan and South Korea have long debated nuclear “latency”: the ability to acquire nuclear weapons quickly without actually building them. Latency is a hedge against uncertainty. As well as capability-building, it offers deterrence through credible potential — the knowledge that, within months rather than years, a state could cross the nuclear threshold if it chose to.7

Full nuclear armament for such countries is costly and destabilising: it invites sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and potential arms races. But zero capability is also dangerous if allies waver or geopolitics worsens. Latency is the middle ground: a strategy for building the capacity to act — stockpiling materials, maintaining expertise, investing in civilian nuclear research — so that, if the world darkens, options do exist.

The American economic security toolkit needs an analogue to nuclear latency. The United States should establish an Economic Security Latency Fund — on the order of $20-30 billion — to maintain latent capacity in a bounded set of ‘Tier-2 Critical’ supply chains or capabilities. The fund would not aim to permanently replicate entire industries. Rather, its purpose would be threefold:

• Insurance: The fund would underwrite surge capacity in selected bottleneck capabilities where disruption would be costly but not existential, and where markets alone are unlikely to maintain redundant capacity. It would act as an insurance policy against long-duration coercion or repeated medium-sized shocks.

• Deterrence: Properly designed, the fund would enable deterrence by denial, rather than deterrence by punishment. The aim is not to threaten retaliation through sanctions or counter-coercion (although these tools will also be necessary as part of a wider U.S. arsenal), but to reduce an adversary’s expectation that weaponising a particular dependency will generate lasting leverage. Economic coercion works when the target lacks credible alternatives within the timeframe that matters politically. Latency shortens that window.

• Capability: Latent capacity is not dead capital. If structured well, the fund could generate present-day economic benefits: supporting R&D in critical but under-funded technologies, sustaining specialised skills and engineering expertise. Done right, it is therefore also an economic policy: a targeted bet on capabilities that have both security and productivity spillovers.

To make this work, the United States needs to have a hierarchy of prioritisation to understand where and what type of intervention is justifiable:

• Tier 1: Strategic Autonomy. These are capabilities whose loss would be existential or fundamentally compromise national power: advanced semiconductor fabrication, core defence platforms, key elements of the nuclear fuel cycle. They justify permanent domestic or closely allied control and large-scale, long-term investment, as seen in the CHIPS Act and related measures. Strategic autonomy does not mean full on-shoring but it does mean having significant capability and thereby large upfront investment.

• Tier 3: Market Resilience. These are goods and services where normal market mechanisms — diversified suppliers, inventories, substitution, redundancy — can provide adequate resilience, give or take some R&D tax credits here and there. Permanent subsidy or reshoring would be an inefficient use of scarce resources.

• Tier 2: Latent Capability. Between these poles sits the layer we are interested in: concentrated nodes within critical supply chains where disruption would be highly damaging; substitutes exist in principle but cannot be activated quickly and yet full on-shoring would be economically inefficient.

The Economic Security Latency Fund would operate strictly at this Tier-2 level. Its remit would be limited to a small number of bottleneck capabilities that meet three tests:

1. Low substitutability: few alternative suppliers, long time-lines, or alternatives that are geopolitically misaligned. Substitution would take years, not months.

2. High exposure: the United States imports far more than it exports, meaning limited domestic surge capacity — a replacement ratio or exports to imports well below 1.0.8

3. Strategic value: the good is a dual-use input or systematically important across multiple sectors. High dependence on garlic9 or ball-point pens does not justify latency investments; a severe lack of advanced packaging facilities might.

These criteria allow for a more disciplined approach to the latency fund: rather than asking if this is a “critical sector” (i.e. where payment machines that use AI end up getting caught in the net), policymakers can ask “is this a bottleneck where dependence is both high and hard to substitute, and where latent capacity would materially change the coercive calculus or level of resilience?”

Operationalisation: How The Latency Fund Would Work

A $20–30 billion Economic Security Latency Fund would, by design, be modest compared to the scale of Tier-1 programmes such as CHIPS, but large enough to matter in a defined set of Tier-2 domains. Rather than sprinkling money across every vulnerable supply chain, it would concentrate resources on perhaps five to ten bottleneck capabilities that clearly meet the Tier-2 criteria. For the purposes of this essay, I later provide one illustrative example. The operating would have to vary on a case-by-case basis, but should have some common features.

First, selection and metrics. Two quantitative indicators stand out for identifying potential areas.

• Dependence threshold: where more than 70 per cent of imports of a specific input come from a single source, vulnerability is high. Below that, market diversification provides meaningful resilience; above it, the risk of weaponisation rises sharply.10

• Replacement ratio: The second is the replacement ratio: the value of exports of a given good divided by imports. A ratio well below 1.0 signals that a country lacks the industrial base to replace lost imports quickly; a ratio closer to parity suggests some latent capacity already exists.

Superimposed on these metrics would also be a qualitative risk assessment across exposure, strategic importance, and substitutability — where a judgement has to be made as to whether this falls into the remit of the latency fund (i.e. Tier 2 priority) or Tier 1 or 3.

Second, instruments. Given that the fund’s job is to ensure enough capacity exists for preparedness and a rapid surge — rather than to outright build — a portfolio of tools would be needed. This might include contingent “latency contracts” that pay firms to maintain standby production lines, tooling, workforce capacity, and stockpiles — which would be scaled up on request within an agreed timeline. It could also include investment in modular or scalable facilities, R&D grants for industrial capacity where private returns are uncertain, investment in specialised talent pipelines, and fast-tracked regulation. Realistically, the tools will have to vary in a case-by-case instance.

Third, triggers and thresholds. These are necessary for both domestic and international reasons. Domestically, because tools like “latency contracts” would require pre-determined threshold lines. Internationally, because for economic security latency to have a desired deterrent effect, there would need to be clear conditions under which it is activated — although perhaps with some room for ‘strategic ambiguity’.

These thresholds might be framed in terms of duration (“if access to advanced packaging is cut for more than six months, we will activate domestic surge capacity”), concentration (“if import dependence on a single source exceeds 80% specified inputs, we will invest to reduce it”), or explicit coercive acts (“if we are subject to economic coercion in sector X, we will ramp up production within this timeframe”).

Fourth, if a U.S. latency fund were initially successful, allied cooperation might be considered further down the line. For example, in strategic areas like copper, where the U.S. only controls 5.5% of global reserves but the US, Australia, and Canada combined have more like 17%,1112 it may make sense to build international “latency pool” models: where allied countries with different specialisations and resources can each maintain partial surge capacity that becomes effective in a NATO Article 5 equivalent for economic security (though this is an entirely separate essay in itself).

Finally, there are obviously limitations and necessary further thinking. The first is mission-creep: for the latency fund to work it has to be targeted at between five and ten areas of capacity. Much more than this and it becomes spread so thin so as to become meaningless. Second, on the deterrence side, more serious thinking would need to be done on how transparent the United States should be: too opaque about where the U.S. is investing in latent capacity and the fund does not perform its deterrence function; too much openness and adversaries simply factor those latent capabilities into their calculations and find other gaps to squeeze.

Case Study: Submarine Cable Repair Capacity

Submarine cables carry almost all international data traffic, roughly 99% by most estimates, and underpin global finance, cloud computing, communications, and everyday internet use. The network itself is large and geographically dispersed, with more than 500 active cable systems worldwide.13 The United States sits at the centre of the network, and American firms own or co-own much of the world’s subsea infrastructure.14

Cables are damaged regularly by fishing activity, anchors, earthquakes, wear, and grey zone attacks. The system is built to reroute around single failures, but the real vulnerability is not the cables themselves so much as how long they take to fix. Fixing a deep-sea cable requires a specialised ship, trained crew, and often diplomatic clearance to operate in territorial waters. The global repair fleet is small and ageing. Industry analysis suggests that maintaining current service levels — even without a major geopolitical shock — will require significant additional vessels over the coming decade.15

In an Indo-Pacific conflict scenario, for example, cables serving Guam or linking the U.S. to Asian allies would be obvious pressure points. The current repair system is very much built for one-off breaks not sustained disruption.

In this context, the Latency Fund would focus on shortening repair timelines and building surge capacity in case of a conflict. It could co-finance additional repair vessels alongside industry, structured as surge capacity. It could fund stockpiles of spare cable and landing-station equipment at major U.S. hubs. And it would also invest in workforce pipelines for the specialised crews these ships require. This fits firmly into “market failure” territory, given that private operators generally build for commercial uptime and only recently have begun factoring in geopolitical externalities.

Not only does this act as insurance, it also strengthens the United States’ real-time capability: with more repair vessels and specialised crews the U.S. strengthens its hold over the global cable network. And this also changes incentives. The leverage gained from cutting cables lies mostly in delay. So if restoration is slow, disruption is an attractive option for an adversary. But if repair capacity is visible and actively invested in, then the payoff falls. In other words, the deterrent side is that latent capacity in cable repair makes it less likely that a surge will be needed in the first place.

This fits into the case for latency because it is not clear-cut, top priority “industrial strategy” — but nor is this an area that can be left solely to private actors. Private operators won’t finance idle repair capacity for low-probability shocks. Public policy can, and should.

Conclusion: Don’t build the bomb, have the capacity to

The United States is at risk of fighting the wrong economic security war. Endless sanctions, tariffs, and export controls dominate the toolkit on the offensive end; and heavy-handed, and often counterproductive,16 industrial strategies are creeping in at the defensive end. Both may experience a backlash. Indeed, the former already has.17 The reason why these tools dominate is that they are easy; not in the sense that they are cheap, but they are levers that are easy to pull, and often easier to sell politically. But that is also why they are often wrong. This proposal is less expensive, but it is harder: because it is more nuanced, requires more technical ability, flexibility, and does not make headlines.

The measure of economic power in the coming decade won’t just be how much a country produces, but how quickly it can replace what it loses access to. Speed, in this case, is sovereignty.

Sometimes the best move is not to build the bomb, but to be able to.

More from Guy:

Guy Ward Jackson

Tech | Industrial Strategy | Economic Security | Tony Blair Institute

And the movie poster:

Today, the second half of our conversation previewing the summit that just kicked off. With Mythos scrambling everyone’s priors on frontier capabilities, AI safety is suddenly back on the bilateral agenda. Julian Gewirtz (former NSC senior director for China) and Matt Sheehan (Carnegie) join to map how Beijing is processing the shift and what’s actually achievable in renewed US-China dialogue.

Check us out on YouTube or your favorite podcast app!

Good Job Alert: Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) is hiring senior generalists and grantmakers with a China background. Coefficient created CSET (who won ChinaTalk’s inaugural ‘think tank of the year’ award) and are set to fund more in the US-China AI space. Check out the job posting here and do consider applying.

The AI Safety Angle

Julian Gewirtz: Both sides have been signaling that AI will feature prominently in upcoming discussions. During the Biden administration, we pushed hard to get AI safety on the agenda when President Biden met with President Xi. Beijing initially gave us the cold shoulder, but gradually realized there was no major downside to including it on the agenda.

The Trump administration initially showed little concern about AI safety. JD Vance and other senior officials openly mocked AI safety as a construct, making US-China AI safety dialogue a non-starter — the United States didn’t even want it.

What’s changed recently in the Trump administration appears directly tied to the Anthropic Mythos moment. The realization that extraordinary and potentially dangerous AI capabilities aren’t theoretical conjectures for years down the line but exist in the real world right now has made the administration take this issue more seriously.

Both the Chinese and Americans are now backgrounding expectations that AI will come up in discussions, with potential AI safety-related deliverables. During the Biden administration, we pushed hard to get this topic on the leaders’ agenda. China’s initial response was essentially a cold shoulder — they weren’t interested in having the conversation. They felt it was happening in an environment of heating AI competition and were unhappy with export controls and other steps we were taking.

Whether we wore them down or won them over, the topic eventually came up between the leaders. Jake Sullivan also discussed it with Wang Yi. Beijing shifted its approach after realizing this was an area where the world was looking to the two most powerful countries to show leadership. They also recognized there was little downside from their perspective.

When the Trump administration came in, their approach was to dismiss AI safety entirely. You had JD Vance and other senior officials mocking AI safety, saying the administration would stop all “that nonsense” and focus solely on winning. But over the past month, since Anthropic began briefing on the Mythos capability, the administration has begun taking this more seriously. They’re realizing this isn’t conjecture about future risks but actual capabilities in the here and now that open the United States to profound vulnerabilities and dangers.

This creates an interesting and different starting point for renewed conversations with the Chinese about AI safety. One lesson from Mythos appears to be that for both the United States and China, advances in capability cannot be separated from increases in vulnerability. The more capable American models become, the more capable Chinese models become, the more risk, danger, and potential bad actor misuse emerges.

Some people in both countries have fantasized about reaching a point of such dominance and capability that safety issues would become less salient. But we’re learning that vulnerability and capability are fundamentally interlinked.

Matt Sheehan: That was a great rundown of it from the US side and then how the Chinese side looks in that engagement. During the same period of time, I’ve essentially been following the Chinese domestic conversations on this very closely. There’s been a pretty big evolution, partly in response to — largely in response to the development of the technology. But then also in response to different groups within China platforming these issues and then seeing them get some level of traction with leadership.

Maybe if we go back to at least pre-Mythos, because this is so recent, if you had to characterize how the Chinese government thinks about AI safety writ large, whether it’s misuse or control stuff, I’d say it has risen much higher on the agenda. They have essentially put it on the table as a topic that they need to think through, but they haven’t made up their mind on what they think of it.

You saw this has been cropping up in different policy documents. One place was in what they call the AI Safety and Governance Framework 2.0. It’s kind of these two organizations under the CAC, their roadmap for how are we thinking about AI risks? How are we thinking about mitigations, especially as it relates to technical standards?

They had a version of this in 2024 that was just super high level and very light on any, what we would call AI safety related topics. They updated it in 2025. You saw a bunch of changes between the two documents. In one of them, labor featured much more prominently and seriously in it.

Julian Gewirtz: Meaning people losing their jobs because of AI?

Matt Sheehan: People losing their jobs because of AI. In the 2024 version, it was some very handwaving of yes, it’ll restructure social relations and we should think about that. In the most recent one, I’ll miss the exact phrasing, but it said something along the lines of “This will lead to a devaluation of labor relative to capital and social disruptions related,” something like that.

Between these two documents, we saw labor rising a bunch and we saw safety in a few different forms, like misuse and also some of the control, loss of control language featured more highly. When I asked some people involved about this and what does this reflect or not reflect about the policy process over there? I specifically asked about these safety issues and it’s on the agenda, it’s something that we’re thinking about, but we don’t know what we think about it at this point in time. This is going back to September, September of last year.

Fast forward to now and obviously the biggest change has been Mythos. You also have people within the Chinese system that are essentially working to platform these issues. The area that I’m most focused on right now is the technical standards work. A couple months ago, they created an AI safety security working group on technical standards. It’s led by Zhou Bowen, who’s the head of Shanghai AI Lab. That’s one of the more safety-pilled organizations in China. We’re seeing, okay, below the line, underneath the surface, they’re starting to get their mind around these issues.

And Mythos is like the bomb that scrambles this equation. We don’t yet know how the party has actually taken Mythos on board. I’ve heard different things from different people who interact with different parts of the Chinese bureaucracy. Some downplay it, feeling like they’ve got it under control — it’s just a new cyber thing and we’ve been doing cyber things forever. Other people say they actually seem pretty shook about this and want to talk about it.

At least when this is getting tabled for this conversation, my read — not based on inside information — is that this is the US side pushing this as a topic for discussion, not necessarily the Chinese side. I have pretty low expectations for anything in the way of tangible deliverables from these discussions. The idea that we’re going to strike some type of grand bargain on AI where we both agree, “If you don’t do it, then I won’t do it” — we’re both going to be nice, we’ll have a hotline, and we’ll just call each other right away as soon as something goes wrong — I have very low expectations for that.

The effort should go into trying to establish some working level, more technical conversations, specifically on testing and evaluation for safety risks. This gets very tricky with the capabilities and threats dynamic. When you learn how to test a model for certain capabilities, that also might indirectly help you build those capabilities in advance. It gets very tricky, and people in the testing and evaluation world have somewhat different takes on this.

My takeaway from many of those conversations is that there is a path forward for sharing some relatively high-level information about how we test for these risks. There are a few reasons to be doing that. One is that currently, the Chinese frontier AI labs’ testing for frontier risks is nowhere near the level that it is in the US labs. It’s a funny inverse where the Chinese labs face tons of regulatory compliance obligations from their government, and therefore, they’re not tacking on all of this voluntary testing for frontier risks. The US labs, at least historically, have faced very low regulatory burden from the government, and therefore, they put a lot of energy into this type of voluntary testing.

If you take Chinese capabilities relatively seriously — even if we’re ahead and maybe going to get further ahead — their capabilities matter. And the type of testing that happens in China voluntarily within the Chinese system (not jointly testing, but the testing they do for their own national security reasons) really matters. We should try to do what we can to make that testing better, to bolster that part of their system.

Julian Gewirtz: Super interesting. When I hear you talk about this, I wonder what the version of this conversation that could happen at the leader level is, because you don’t have two leaders in this case who are going to be talking about that degree of specificity. We have to imagine, at some level, the conversation will essentially be, “AI matters, we both agree,” and maybe some other people figure out what to do about it.

Jordan Schneider: We were talking at lunch about the idea that even if you’re nine months behind, that means a Chinese lab will have a Mythos thing in nine months. Even taking away the US-China national security angle — NSA versus MSS — there are still criminals in China or around the world who might exploit this. Perhaps nine months from now, the rest of the world will have patched everything, and China will have the most vulnerabilities open to them to do ransomware on water treatment facilities or similar attacks.

The US government, or this administration was able to spend a year and a half dismissing it because it wasn’t really all that pressing. But everyone’s consensus view now is that — whether it’s six months, a year, or eighteen months — at some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be Chinese labs able to create extremely cheap, extremely potent cyberweapons from a domestically trained model. When things hit the fan in China from a domestic perspective, you have to think they’re going to start doing more testing than just checking if you’re saying anti-party stuff.

Julian Gewirtz: It’s fascinating to me because if you go back to the history of how China governed the internet giants, there’s a real similarity. Initially, it was, as long as you do censorship, you’re okay. No images of Winnie the Pooh, no mention of Tiananmen, and we’ll leave you alone.

But then they began to realize that even with that set of technologies, there were systemic risks. This is often shorthanded as the Jack Ma speech and the crackdown that followed on the Alipay IPO, but actually, it was a regulatory storm — a complete 360-degree crackdown on the sector to rein in financial, social, and political risks.

That hasn’t yet happened with the AI sector in China. It has largely been censorship and a few other things, partly because this is such an area of national competition. But that other shoe has to drop. I don’t see a way around it.

Jordan Schneider: What does the political response look like when we see crazy cyber hacks or actual real labor disruption?

Control, Harness, Govern

Matt Sheehan: Yeah, the comparison to the internet era is fascinating — the parallels are striking. So what’s China’s playbook here? It follows a pattern — control, harness, govern. Control means managing the speech implications, censorship, and political aspects of the technology first. Harness is the next phase — once they feel they have control, they focus on using the technology to diffuse and upgrade their economy. Govern represents the more sophisticated approach of addressing knock-on social effects beyond party control.

In the Internet era, control meant building the firewall over the long term. When I moved to China in 2010, there were about two years of relatively wild activity online. Then came the 2013 crackdown on the Big Vs where they implemented policies like making people legally liable if their Weibo posts were retweeted 500 times. This crackdown phase focused on controlling speech and information implications, spanning roughly 2012 to 2014.

For AI, this control phase ran from 2021 through 2023. They first worried about recommendation algorithms and their effect on people’s feeds, then deepfakes, and finally generative AI for similar reasons. They attacked these information problems first.

Once they felt comfortable with control, they moved to harness the technology. In the Internet era, this was the Internet Plus campaign, starting around 2014 or 2015. They launched the “1,000 entrepreneurs and 10,000 innovations” initiative — entrepreneurs and innovators everywhere. Having gotten the internet under control, they encouraged its expansion, leading to a huge explosion in mobile internet services spreading across the economy.

For AI, they’ve resuscitated the “plus” formulation with “AI+.” For those unfamiliar, AI+ means AI+ manufacturing, AI+ healthcare — the same pattern as Internet+ transportation. This represents the harnessing phase: politics controlled, economic diffusion good, or at least on the right path.

The government then asks: How do we deal with the knock-on effects? In the internet era, this meant the Cybersecurity Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, followed by anti-monopoly efforts and the broader tech crackdown.

We’re at the dawn of this phase with AI. They finalized regulation on anthropomorphic or human-like AI in April, addressing concerns about addiction, effects on minors, and psychosis related to AI addiction. It’s very focused on social impacts.

The question now is what comes next. Some will involve hard security and cyber issues, but there’ll also be a broader focus on labor impacts and other societal concerns.

Julian Gewirtz: We haven’t talked much about this, but there’s an important difference in how the Chinese Communist Party is governing the AI sector. One of the main ways they’re exercising control is by not allowing companies to obtain the compute they want from abroad.

We’ll see how this plays out when President Trump visits China, particularly if Jensen Huang accompanies him on the trip. There’s this fundamental tension between Chinese labs wanting to buy NVIDIA chips and Chinese regulators forbidding them from proceeding with those transactions because of geopolitical risks and leverage concerns. This is an interesting version of the governance paradigm, but from a side that we didn’t see the Chinese government worry about in the internet sector.

Some of the same dynamics may be true with investment from abroad. Obviously, if you think about the Manus acquisition debate — which you and I, Matt, have discussed many times before — that’s one where clearly the interests of a company and the government are at odds.

Matt Sheehan: I have a half-baked take I’m trying to bounce off people. You were talking about CBRN cyber criminal actors — non-state actors. This has been central to a lot of US discussions of AI safety. When people want to make these safety risks real, they’ll often refer to concerns about terrorists making bioweapons. I’m not dismissing that as unreal — it could be — but it’s something we go to very quickly in the US.

In China, they’ve been more skeptical of these risks for a while, for a variety of reasons. My half-baked take is that China doesn’t feel itself to be under siege from a world full of terrorists in the way that we do. In the United States, we have a self-conception — which is based in reality — that we are often the victim of terrorism. Everyone wants to get at us from abroad, and therefore, if these models are out there, we’ll be first in line to get CBRN attacked in one way or another from non-state actors.

In China, they say they’re worried about terrorism. Terrorists in their mind are domestic and are from a specific ethnic group in their conception of it. But they’re less worried about foreign non-state actors in the way that we are.

Jordan Schneider: The Falun Gong bioweapon — would you really put it past them? Yeah, I think it’s a bad take.

Julian Gewirtz: I think it’s a bad take, too, Matt. First, the Chinese Communist Party perceives itself as profoundly under siege and has a paranoid mentality that is absolutely central.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with Xinjiang. According to some narratives, the policy shift was initially triggered by concerns about foreign ideological infection and terrorist elements coming from abroad. What else do you see as problematic with this framing?

Julian Gewirtz: The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has the most catastrophic worst-case scenario planning mentality of any regime I can think of. Their relative lack of concern about chemical and biological weapons and AI stems more from assumptions about how AI differs from existing capabilities — and those assumptions may be changing — rather than from any lack of concern about external threats.

Over the past decade, I’ve seen the CCP become increasingly fixated on the idea that nefarious forces are out to get them.

Matt Sheehan: To clarify, when we talk about being under siege, it’s from non-state terrorist groups. The paranoia is intense, and the feeling of being under siege is real, but they’re usually talking about the United States of America. That’s fundamentally different.

Both governments should assume the other will use AI in every possible way to gain state-to-state advantages. But concern about non-state actors differs significantly between the two countries. Someone who focuses on Southeast Asia, the Golden Triangle, and the scam factories there might see this very differently.

With CBRN stuff, there’s a big distinction between state and non-state actors, and their paranoia focuses on the United States.

Julian Gewirtz: Here’s a comparative question — where does Japan fit into this framework? They’ve actually experienced a sarin gas attack. The United States has experienced horrifying terrorist attacks, but not specifically chemical or biological weapons attacks. Some societies have experienced these kinds of attacks firsthand.

I wonder whether Japan’s degree of anxiety about AI risk is heightened because of its experience, or not. If it maps similarly to other countries, then perhaps the alternative hypothesis — that concerns are mostly about AI capabilities rather than threat perception — is more accurate.

Jordan Schneider: I’d also say public discussion about organized crime or terrorism in China is heavily constrained. These conversations happen privately, but discussing them publicly on WeChat or Xiaohongshu is impossible. You can only discuss them in the context of announcements about arrests that have already been made.

Julian Gewirtz: As I think about it more, there’s no doubt that the AI safety community has talked extensively about chemical and biological weapons risks. But when I see what’s really driven actual concern about AI safety in broader society, it’s effects on kids, deepfakes, and similar issues. From a national security establishment perspective, there’s concern about use in warfare, and perhaps most fundamentally, this idea of out-of-control systems — a loss of human control.

I wonder whether the community that has held the candle for these risks, centered partly on CBRN risks, actually represents how most Americans think about AI risks. There is polling on this we could look up, but I doubt CBRN risks would be in the top three AI concerns for Americans.

Matt Sheehan: I totally agree that the average American, even the average policy world person, isn’t putting these risks top of mind. Within the community that’s been pushing the message that these systems are getting really dangerous really fast — not in a diffuse social impacts way, but in a safety way — that’s where these concerns are centered.

Jordan Schneider: It comes down to the binary of whether something is an existential risk or not. Cyberattacks aren’t existential risks. Labor disruption isn’t an existential risk. You don’t necessarily have those funders and people focused on existential risks clocking those sorts of issues as much. The whole existential risk framing hasn’t bled into the Chinese discussion nearly as much as it has at Berkeley and beyond.

For part 1:

We cover:

• What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit”

• Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney mission and the 1972 Nixon-Kissinger opening: summit optics, status games, and the choreography of power.

• Taiwan: arms sales, declaratory language, and Beijing’s long game on Taiwanese morale and politics.

• The good and bad case for China in the Iran conflict, and how Chinese officials may be reading America’s military commitments, political cohesion, and staying power.

• The US-China AI safety conversation after Mythos, China’s approach to frontier AI risks, and the control, harness, govern playbook for emerging technologies.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Seriously, listen! Way more people subscribe to this newsletter than listen to the podcast directly.

But Julian has a wonderfully sonorous voice. By just reading the transcript you will be missing out!

Leverage, Political Will, and Deals

Jordan: Let’s talk about leverage between the two countries and the two leaders. What’s the right way to think about this?

Julian Gewirtz: President Trump is going to China in just a few days. This question of leverage is at the center of everything for both sides.

Historically, we’ve thought that the United States has a lot of leverage over China, and we can exert that leverage and that also shapes the strategic dynamic between the two countries. But over the last year and a half, you have seen China exerting leverage to an unprecedented degree. They’ve used critical minerals, instituted a global export control regime, and employed other forms of leverage as well. That has had the effect of putting the United States on the back foot.

We spend a lot of time thinking about who has which choke points, what are the areas of leverage that could be used in the next stage of this standoff? That’s really setting the backdrop for this summit.

But I keep returning to the fact that one of the lessons of the past year and a half is that political will and staying power — those questions are as important as who has what choke points. You can have a choke point, but if you can’t use it, if you can’t find the political will to use it and to sustain it, then it’s not worth very much. We saw that with President Trump’s tariffs. And of course, we’re also potentially going to see it with his relaxation of some export controls on semiconductors.

I have gone back recently to one of the most famous passages from the collected works of Mao Zedong. I went back to Mao because he’s had such a shaping influence on Xi Jinping. The famous passage is the one in which he describes the atom bomb as a paper tiger. This is in an interview with a journalist. He not only calls it a paper tiger, but he then explains why. Of course, he acknowledges that it’s a very powerful weapon, but he says ultimately what determines the outcome of a war is not simply one or two weapons. It is the people, the political will, cohesion and staying power of the people. This idea of people’s war from Mao, which shapes his approach to the United States then, is also shaping Xi Jinping’s approach to the United States today.

Jordan Schneider: Is Mao right?

Julian Gewirtz: Mao is literally wrong. He’s wrong about the power of nuclear weapons. His dismissal is a posture that he strikes at a time when China is working intently to develop nuclear weapons, and of course, ultimately does. And Mao is very proud of that achievement. So this is a posture of a country in a relatively weaker position at that time.

But he is right in a broader sense, particularly at the metaphorical level. We’ve seen that in a sustained competition between two very powerful countries, questions of capability always have to be thought about alongside questions of the ability to actually deploy a particular asset or choke point.

One of the things I worry about most in the United States is our polarization and political tensions. We’ve seen a real challenge with either party mounting the kind of sustained long-term effort needed to mobilize aspects of our economy that would need to be deployed effectively over the long term against a quite formidable competitor in China.

Jordan Schneider: Given Trump’s current position, what’s the right way to think about what’s actually going to happen over the next few days?

Julian Gewirtz: The way I’ve been thinking about it is that this is a summit taking place during a stalemate. It’s a stalemate, not an end to a protracted competition. For each side, there are somewhat different objectives, but from Beijing’s perspective, this is a test of wills during a lull in a long and intense competition.

It’s a stalemate summit, but we shouldn’t be mistaken by the decrease in tensions to think that just because we’re in a period of de-escalation, at least from Beijing’s perspective, they’re not approaching this in a competitive mindset. They certainly are.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s stay on that stalemate summit concept. There have been plenty of stalemate summits that have made history during the Cold War and beyond. Is it remarkable that they’re taking the time to meet in the first place?

Julian Gewirtz: Both President Trump and President Xi understand that their leader-level diplomacy plays into the overall dynamic between the US and China. If they don’t meet, if they don’t put this dynamic of stalemate into practice through what comes out of their meetings, as we saw when they met in Busan last year, then things can go off the rails very easily.

President Xi wants this period of stability in the US-China relationship so that he can continue buying time, strengthening China’s capabilities. He’s also hoping to get some concessions from President Trump.

From President Trump’s perspective, he has a very complicated situation around the war against Iran, which has certainly not gone as planned, or perhaps not quite as planned. He also seems to want a period of stability in US-China ties.

We know that President Trump is already teeing up a message around this summit that it’s going to be a huge win. He said the same thing when he and Xi Jinping met in South Korea last year, as I mentioned. At a time when the international landscape is very low on good news for the United States, he’s clearly hoping to trumpet this meeting with Xi as a win.

Jordan Schneider: It’s weird. He’s not going to a meeting and saying, “The way the White House is trying to frame this is interesting.” On one hand, they’re setting low expectations — no deals, nothing’s actually going to happen. Asking CEOs to join five days before seems rushed.

Julian Gewirtz: I think the CEOs have been saving the date. There’s an interesting dynamic where we don’t know exactly who will be on the business delegation. We know that President Trump loves a business delegation. His trip to Saudi Arabia had a massive one last year.

Jordan Schneider: It’s just part of the traveling circus for him. It’s not a party unless you can snap your fingers and have Tim Cook or whoever “new Tim Cook” is show up.

Julian Gewirtz: The basic point I keep returning to is that President Trump has long viewed US-China rivalry as primarily an economic rivalry. Back in 2000, when he explored running for president on a third-party ticket, he was hammering the WTO. He was hammering China for being an unfair trading partner of the United States. These themes have always been there.

He’s always been less animated by the security concerns that, for many folks in Washington, are the core of the China challenge. He’s certainly less animated by human rights concerns that have been core to the US approach to China for a really long time.

When he goes to China, he’s going not simply as dealmaker-in-chief, as he likes to be called, but through this paradigm of “this is the world’s other largest economy.” They have over a billion people. They’ve got a ton of money to throw around. All the business leaders he talks with care a lot about either access to that market or competition from that market. For him, those are the four corners of the square.

Jordan Schneider: It’s funny — what would another president over the past 30 years do in the context of this trip, especially with the Dalai Lama being 92?

Julian Gewirtz: You don’t have to go too far to find that counterfactual. Just look at how the Biden admin approached these issues. Many of the changes in US policy toward China that we’ve seen over the past year and a half during this administration aren’t changes where there was a massive constituency pushing for bigger purchasing commitments. That’s always been there. Trump is going because he wants to approach the relationship this way himself, overriding the instincts of many of his advisors.

Jordan Schneider: Would Biden have gone if there wasn’t COVID?

Julian Gewirtz: It’s an interesting question. I was thinking about the last time President Trump went to China in 2017. That was a very different time in the US-China relationship, and it’s worth pausing to consider that context.

Many of the themes were very similar. President Trump wanted a good relationship with Xi Jinping. He brought a bunch of CEOs. He wanted a big set of purchasing commitments and other economic deal-making. This was before the real launch into escalation in the US-China trade war.

He was blown away by what he saw he still talks about it. He talks about the pageantry, how much he loved the grand reception that Xi Jinping gave him. He’s even talked about how all the soldiers who greeted him were exactly the same height, and you could send a billiard ball down their hats, which is exactly the kind of thing that my brain could never generate, but here we are.

That’s all the backdrop for this trip. It used to be a much more standard-issue thing for US presidents to go to China. One of the key things to remember is even in the Obama administration, the main reason that presidents went to China was because there would be a multilateral meeting a meeting of APEC, the G20, in China and that would anchor a president’s trip. That’s obviously not the case this time. It wasn’t the case in 2017. We know Trump is much less interested in multilateralism than his predecessors and wants that bilateral contact.

The Long History of Summit Theater

Jordan Schneider: Let’s do a tour of past delegations to China.

Julian Gewirtz: As I’ve been thinking about this summit and why it’s such a distinctive and interesting thing to have an American president go to China — why it’s different than an American president going to France or Mexico or any of the many countries that presidents visit — it’s partly because of this incredibly rich and fraught history of diplomacy with China by the United States and other outside powers.

As we think about the visuals that Xi Jinping wants to construct, what’s at stake for Xi Jinping as the host, and what’s at stake for the United States in the interactions that they’re going to have, I’ve been thinking back to a few moments in history. I’m a historian by training and have written a couple of books of history. It’s worth examining some of these historical precedents because they really directly inform what we’re going to see unfold next week.

The first defining early mission to China is George Macartney’s in 1793. He goes with a set of economic, trade, and diplomatic objectives. He goes to meet with the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. This is obviously after the United Kingdom has lost its American colonies, but of course, it still has a global empire.

The delegation has several central immediate problems, and it’s remarkable to me how these themes, in a very different, now obviously post-imperial context, extend. First, Macartney is asked to perform the ritual bow, the kowtow, to the emperor, and there is unbelievable negotiation and tension simply in the optics.

There are cartoons in the British press making fun of Lord Macartney’s willingness to be placed in a lower position. He’s not willing to perform the full bow, but he does certain other gestures.

These questions of status, visible status, and the performance of status, almost as a matter of both high politics and ordinary protocol, are at the center from the very beginning. We’re going to see that again with Xi Jinping and Trump — the question of who’s standing where when they shake hands, what are the visuals as they walk alongside each other.

Ironically, President Trump is perhaps as sensitive to this as any world leader in history. He’s thinking this way, too. That will be on display.

The second is famously the posture that the Qianlong Emperor takes — one of haughty and superior rejection of the British offers. There’s this famous passage where the Qianlong Emperor writes to George III — “Our celestial empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”

Now, Qianlong is posturing. Obviously, there are plenty of things that the British have at this point that China doesn’t, but that posture, that theme of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, not wanting to be dependent on, not wanting to draw in, and increasingly in this era, feeling that China can surpass the United States — Xi Jinping’s not going to say those words, of course. This was almost 250 years ago. But those themes are very much at play in a very interesting way.

There’s a great book on this by Henrietta Harrison called The Perils of Interpreting, about the interpreters who were charged with running between these guys and I will just end this particular historical vignette by saying one of the most interesting positions of anyone in the world today is the people who are going to interpret the conversations between President Trump and President Xi. Some of those conversations will happen in the big plenary room, but others will happen as they take a walk, or have a one-on-one dinner, or sit down for tea, etc. Those people, the interpreters, are going to be conveying a remarkably important set of messages that could pertain to the future of Taiwan, of US technology controls, of trade, of each political system. It’s one of these critical jobs in the context of a summit.

Jordan Schneider: First of all, the idea that visuals matter even before you had photos. The visual aspect is fascinating because politics has always been about optics and setting. It mattered even 250 years ago.

But those talks weren’t ultimately one-on-one leader conversations – they were more like at the assistant secretary level. So, let’s talk about Taiwan, with the give and take it entail. Why don’t you give us the context of what people are thinking about with Xi and Trump for this trip regarding Taiwan?

Julian Gewirtz: There’ve been a lot of questions about whether Xi Jinping is planning to use this trip and other upcoming diplomatic engagements this year — including potentially a reciprocal state visit to the United States — to press on the question of US support for Taiwan. This involves both declaratory aspects (the statements the United States makes about Taiwan’s political aspirations and independence) and material support.

The standard US formulation has been that the United States does not support Taiwan independence. This has been our position for many years. The Chinese formulation is to oppose independence — much stronger language. There have been plenty of media reports that this is something they’re pushing on now.

But it’s not just about declaratory language. It’s also about arms sales — the material support that the United States is obligated to provide Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act. We know that Beijing has been pressing the administration to curtail that support. They did move a significant arms sale at the end of last year.

One thing we know Xi Jinping is going to raise is his concerns about Taiwan and US support for Taiwan. Candidly, it’s anyone’s guess how President Trump is going to react to that. At various times, he has been more critical of Taiwan than any other president in a long time. There’s anxiety in strategic circles in many countries around the world about how this conversation could play out.

Jordan Schneider: Can we role-play this? If you’re the Chinese translator, you’ve been workshopping this. They must have gone through so many iterations of various approaches. If you’re at a table with ten people on one side and ten people on the other side, the amount you’ll be able to get out of Trump is probably what he’s already agreed to. Everyone on the flight over is rehearsing — here’s what we’re going to do, here’s what we’re not going to do. If I were in their shoes, the walks and one-on-one sessions would be the time to see if you can push them a little further and reframe the issue.

Julian Gewirtz: It’s worth saying what the goals are from Beijing’s perspective.

Their approach is gradual rather than dramatic. They’re unlikely to seek an overnight shift in how the United States approaches Taiwan, particularly given Congress’s strong feelings and decades-long leadership on Taiwan issues. Instead, they’re employing what we call “salami slicing” in the South China Sea — pushing incrementally to change the overall dynamic over time. That’s their goal.

But their audience, crucially, are the people of Taiwan. While some in the American foreign policy community argue that minor changes in language don’t matter much since US. If policy remains fundamentally unchanged, this perspective overlooks how differently these shifts are perceived in Taiwan. For people living there, whose futures depend on these intricacies, such changes carry enormous weight. China’s current efforts to influence Taiwan’s politics and demoralize its population are central to their overall strategy, especially with Taiwan’s presidential election coming in 2028. I hope those briefing the president understand this nuance, though I have my concerns.

The “Most Important Meeting Since 1972”

Jordan Schneider: Do you want to do some more history?

Julian Gewirtz: The defining image of US-China summitry remains Nixon and Kissinger going to China — Kissinger’s secret trips, then Nixon’s 1972 visit to meet with Mao and Zhou Enlai. This marked the beginning of the shift in America’s approach to China and the development of the engagement policy.

Those images of American leaders sitting in big stuffed chairs with Chinese leaders, discussing world order and shifting history’s tectonic plates in real time, continue to animate successive generations of policymakers. This includes both those from Kissinger’s lineage and his critics.

The Chinese understand that for Americans, dealing with China represents the terrain of grand strategy where the stakes are high. They know these historical images remain in American minds. But of course, Trump has been different from his predecessors — less interested in grand strategic conversations and more focused on deal-making.

This creates interesting questions — what does US-China diplomacy at the leader level look like when it’s driven by relentless transactionalism within a competitive framework? It will likely differ significantly from those iconic images of leaders sitting side by side in stuffed chairs that defined the Nixon-Kissinger era.

Jordan Schneider: The Nixon-Kissinger legacy really hangs over all of this. Everyone wants to be remembered in history for having shaped the world, right? What better way to do that than to make peace between the US and China?

This brings us back to the stalemate concept. Even if you really wanted to change things and were better briefed, more focused, and didn’t have a war in Iran and everything else going on — what’s your read on this? To what extent can these structural tensions be overcome fundamentally if you’re a president who really wants to bend things differently?

Julian Gewirtz: One way I think about that question goes back to something I mentioned earlier — the idea of a stalemate only makes sense in the context of an ongoing conflict or competition.

It’s important that we not conflate a period of decreased tensions with a fundamental shift in the strategic dynamic between the United States and China. China still sees all the same challenges emanating from the United States over the long term, even if they’re buying time and decreasing tensions in the short term.

Candidly, even in the United States, President Trump may have his areas of focus, but the structural dynamics of competition are continuing. China is continuing to engage with Iran, for instance. The US Treasury has sanctioned some new Chinese entities, and in response, China has deployed new legal instruments that essentially tell those entities not to comply with US sanctions. All of this is still happening during this period of stalemate.

It’s actually part of how Mao Zedong historically talked about what a stalemate is in the context of a conflict — fighting continues, but tensions are lessened.

Around the summit, I’ve noticed one line of commentary that’s really building it up. I read an op-ed this morning — I won’t name names — but somebody was saying this is going to be potentially the most important meeting since 1972. There’s a chance we see that kind of rhetoric coming out of the administration.

Jordan Schneider: Should that be the headline of this podcast?

Julian Gewirtz: Jordan, if it’s the headline…

That’s obviously boosterism, which I find highly unlikely. There’s a downside scenario where this summit becomes very important, as I was alluding to. On the upside scenario, I don’t really see it.

But there’s another line of argument that I find troubling — the idea that we should be intrinsically upset about being in a period of de-escalation. While I am concerned for reasons I’ll explain, it’s not as if the metric of competition is escalation. You don’t get paid by the escalation if you’re competing. That’s a silly way to think about it. Escalation is a tool and sometimes a consequence of other policies you have to take for your own interest.

What’s interesting now is that you could imagine a period of de-escalation being very much in the United States’ interest if we were using that time to shore up our strengths at home and abroad.

What concerns me most about this period of de-escalation is precisely that the United States under President Trump has been using this time to weaken those sources of strength. We’ve been engaged in this war in Iran that has alienated partners around the world, spent down a tremendous amount of our stocks, and made many countries see us as acting irresponsibly and illegally.

At home, if one of our core strengths is going to be our lead in AI, the administration last month had a spectacular blowup with Anthropic, the company that possesses the world’s best models right now. We’ve used this period of de-escalation not to build up our own strengths, but actually to undermine them further. This is the classic case of a win-win for China — China wins twice.

Jordan Schneider: On Anthropic, from a KPI perspective — if our KPIs are national power, global influence— I think even that one we can put as a blip. The fact that us two policy nerds sitting here are going to be over-indexing on the decisions that governments and capitals make...

Julian Gewirtz: I don’t disagree with you about that, but the other really important thing to remember is that if that over-indexing is true of us, the same over-indexing is also happening in Beijing among Chinese officials who watch the United States. The stories they’re telling themselves and briefing up their chain to the leadership may be similarly skewed.

Even if it’s true that this is just a blip and the US lead is more important than this infighting or these attacks on our sources of strength, one of the most revealing passages I’ve seen from Chinese leadership over the past year came at the end of last year. Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, wrote a long essay on national security in China.

To be clear, when Xi Jinping talks about national security, we often think of it as the military apparatus, but the state security apparatus is actually at the absolute heart of it. Chen Yixin gives this assessment of the United States — “Its democracy is mutating, its economy decaying, its society fracturing at an accelerated pace. Abroad, its credibility is rapidly going bankrupt. Its hegemony is crumbling, and its myth is collapsing.”

This is propagandistic rhetoric, no doubt. But I worry that this is quite similar to what he would say in his briefing to Xi Jinping, who is only getting information through these kinds of sources. We should take seriously the idea that multiple realities can exist at once, and that Beijing is seeing a version of reality that may be closer to some of the worries we have because it fits a triumphalist narrative that several senior people in China already hold.

It’s the kind of thing that makes this upcoming summit so important. When I was in the Biden administration, and we would prepare President Biden, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, or Secretary of State Tony Blinken for their meetings with the Chinese, one of the things we were always thinking about was that they were getting information from these interactions. They’re actually learning about the United States and how we see issues. We’re approaching this in an environment of very low to almost no trust.

Jordan Schneider: But these are data points.

Julian Gewirtz: They are data points. Even if they’re looking at them with a lot of suspicion, they’re still looking at them. They will certainly be approaching the meeting with President Trump that way.

For instance, I wonder what exactly they will make of some of the things we know he has said in past meetings with Chinese leadership — all kinds of things about his domestic political opponents. There were reports in John Bolton’s book that he talked about Xinjiang and gave Xi Jinping the go-ahead to build the camps. There’s a record of people who’ve been in those meetings with President Trump coming out with a lot of concern about what went down.

To my mind, that’s all data that China is taking in, that Xi Jinping is personally taking in. It’s why this meeting is so high stakes and so potentially dangerous.

Jordan Schneider: You mentioned Jake Sullivan — Alaska’s definitely one of the ways this could totally fall off the rails. I see two really crazy downside scenarios. One is the scenario you alluded to, where he just starts giving the house away because he’s in a good mood and they serve him the right cut of steak or whatever. The other is that he’s cranky, this war is pissing him off, he’s jet-lagged halfway across the world and just decides, “I’m sick of these guys, I’m gonna start a fight.” To be clear, that’s very low probability. But how are you thinking about the really surprising downside outcomes of this?

Julian Gewirtz: I worry more about the former scenario. I worry about a scenario in which Beijing is able to extract concessions.

Jordan Schneider: And look — it’s not his thing. He picks fights with Zelensky, right? In person, he’s never done an autocrat in-person fight before.

Julian Gewirtz: I’m not in the business of the psychoanalysis of Trump, but I do think it’s pretty clear that he sees some leaders as peers and has admiration for them, and then he sees some other leaders as beneath him and treats them terribly. Xi has clearly been in that first category.

Even just over the past 24 hours, he’s reiterated what he describes as their friendship, and he says it’s going to be an amazing meeting. He is very much in that mode, I think.

Two Briefings on Iran

We should talk about Iran a little bit because it is the key context here, and will be a key subject in the discussions. The reality, to my mind, is that for President Trump, the primary way in which the war in Iran will affect his approach to this trip to China is that he wants a win. It’s, at some level, simpler than the detailed machinations. President Trump wants a win. He wants numbers that he can trumpet, bringing home the bacon for Americans, and he wants to be able to say, “I’m on the world stage with the most serious leaders who exist, these tough guys, and they take me seriously.”

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, it’s so funny because for decades that was the inverse, right? If an American president meets with you, that means you’re doing something right, or you have that global gravitas. But now Trump is seeking that — he can’t get that from having a great G7, right?

Julian Gewirtz: Well, I would argue he absolutely could. He’s just clearly not.

One exercise I often do to pressure test my assumptions and think about how Beijing’s perspective on world events might differ from American views is to construct competing briefings. Imagine two officials — one who has to brief Xi that the war in Iran is good for China, and another who argues it’s bad for China. How would these briefings go?

The briefing to Xi Jinping that the US engagement in Iran is good for China would go something like this — “President Xi, China is better prepared than almost any country in the world to endure this conflict. While we would prefer it to end, the disruption brought on by these reckless actions is negative, and you have prepared China to endure what you’ve called ‘extreme circumstances’ and ‘bottom-line scenarios.’ We are better positioned than any other country to weather this storm.

“There have been significant benefits to our clean energy sector. The world is surging with purchases because they believe clean energy — the energy of the future from China — provides more stability for their economies than traditional energy sources. The world is also looking to China as a diplomatic source of stability and even as a mediator in this conflict. These are profound indicators of how the world sees the relative balance between the United States and China, viewing China as a responsible great power.”

“While there have been concerning disruptions to the Chinese economy, the whole world is experiencing these disruptions. They’re unlikely to erode China’s manufacturing position over the longer term.”

The briefing would continue — “The United States may be demonstrating military capabilities in abundance in the Middle East, but they’ve moved strategic assets out of Asia, including the THAAD system that China has complained about for years. They’re using enormous quantities of expensive munitions in this war that will take considerable time to restock — a reminder that their defense industrial base is much weakened, even if they remain an impressive military force.”

Finally, this hypothetical official would make a point about timing: “President Trump is coming in just a few days. If the end of the war appears tied to his trip to China — which he’s talking about very actively — it will provide China with an unexpected diplomatic windfall. It will appear that the forcing function for the United States was President Trump’s desire to meet with you, President Xi. Additionally, the fact that China just hosted Iranian diplomats in Beijing, with Wang Yi hosting them, will appear to be a facilitating factor as well.”

That’s the version of the good case for China.

Jordan Schneider: What’s the official argument that this is actually terrible for China?

Julian Gewirtz: This was harder to construct, but here are a few points. China needs a stable global economy to continue powering its economic rise and keep everybody moving in the same direction. This war has fundamentally disrupted the flow of global commerce. It has made inputs to Chinese industry more expensive, particularly petroleum-derived products, and caused global markets for China’s exports to pull back and tighten belts. This will also limit the overseas expansion of Chinese industry.

Second, this hypothetical official would have to acknowledge that China has not been able to protect its friends in Venezuela or Iran. Now — this is me interjecting — I don’t think those countries thought their relationships with China were mutual defense treaties. But we do have to acknowledge that it has shown the limitations of China as a partner.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, beyond the economic side, they’d have to acknowledge the impressive display of the US. military’s capabilities, including AI-enabled capabilities. We’ve actually seen the same Minister of State Security I mentioned earlier acknowledge this as the future of warfare. They are, like Ukraine, watching closely and taking notes. The untested PLA has to be feeling a bit of insecurity in relation to those capabilities. But when you compare the two cases side by side, the argument for this being good for China, net-net, despite some negatives, is pretty compelling.

Jordan Schneider: When Trump asked Xi for help to open the strait and pressure Iran — we’ve had decades of this in a North Korea context, which is maybe the closest analogy.

Julian Gewirtz: Though Xi Jinping has come out and said he wants the Strait reopened, the question is whether China is really prepared to do anything about it. Candidly, they have not been nearly as willing as the Trump administration hoped they would be. This is a reminder that while China wants stability in the global economy and wants the Strait open, they also don’t want to put themselves in a position of heightened risk, heightened exposure, or candidly even partnership with the United States to affect that outcome.

The leverage China has with Iran differs significantly from its relationship with North Korea. This nuclear issue represents the Iranian regime’s top priority, and Chinese influence — while perhaps marginally useful — operates within fundamentally different dynamics compared to the DPRK situation.

A preview for paid subscribers: why Anthropic's Mythos disclosure may have done more to put AI safety on the Trump-Xi agenda than two years of Biden-era diplomacy, what China's own AI governance roadmap looks like heading into its third phase, and where Matt and Julian disagree on how Beijing weighs CBRN risk.

Read more

We discuss…

• Why Project Freedom failed

• Whether this war is “bereft of strategic thought”

• Steelmanning Midnight Hammer and the cul-de-sac the administration walked into

• 70% of Iran’s missile force still standing, Saudi economic exposure, and Iran hitting AWS data centers

• F-15E losses, electronic warfare, and the lessons we’re not absorbing for the Pacific

• Why we’re not seeing offensive cyber against Iran and what that tells us

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

It Was a Love Tap

Jordan Schneider: This has been the murkiest week we’ve had in a while, right?

Bryan Clark: Absolutely. The White House has announced that the war is over as well as continuing in a new form. It was a “love tap,” it was a trifle. It’s a whole smorgasbord of military operations.

Justin: These shootings do not equate to a ceasefire being broken.

Bryan Clark: Exactly. Like if you went to tea at the Langham in London. So the latest — the leverage Iran has right now is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The US saw an opportunity to say, well, if we can erode that leverage, maybe we get a better position in negotiations. The gambit was an escort operation on the cheap.

Back in the 80s, in the Tanker War, the US Navy had to escort shipping through the Strait with dozens of warships interspersed among convoys, defending against missiles, small boat attacks, and mines. Shipping companies had to flag their ships under US flag and have US warships next to them as bodyguards. It was a large undertaking.

The administration didn’t want to pursue that level of effort this time. They tried to convince shipping companies to join a sort of convoy of convenience — a couple of US warships leading them out, commercial ships falling in like ducklings behind. If that worked and Iran didn’t attack, you’ve called their bluff.

Well, shipping companies didn’t find it credible. The level of protection wasn’t sufficient, and the US wasn’t willing to flag their ships. So they begged off. The only two ships that came out were two US-flagged Maersks that knew they’d be protected no matter what. The US took out some Iranian small boats and a pretty good number of cruise missiles and drones launched at the warships and commercial ships. Those threats were neutralized — but the rest of the 900 or so large ships in the Persian Gulf are still there.

One complicating factor: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia decided not to allow basing or overflight rights for US forces doing this defense operation, which really constrained the air power available. Without that air cover, without willingness to put Navy ships at risk in larger numbers, it just wasn’t credible. The US, to save face, said we’re going back to the negotiating table — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have asked us to. It was a nice way to walk it back without looking like you’re running home with your tail between your legs. But in a lot of ways, it was a failure.

Eric Robinson: 20,000 sailors are aboard those vessels. Bryan — about a month ago, there was robust commentary about how MBS was aggressively advocating for increased military action, that between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi there was this percolating assumption that if you’d breached the peace and gone to war, you might as well try to finish off the regime. What transpired in the past month that has led regional stakeholders to back off? Or was that original viciousness not particularly well-sourced?

Bryan Clark: Probably a combination. We met with MBS back when he was defense minister as part of the effort to sell multi-mission surface combatants. He seemed very savvy, very knowledgeable. I find it hard to believe he’d be so naive as to think the Iranian regime would fall just with sustained firepower from US and Israeli air forces. So I think it was probably not that well-sourced at the start. And then in the last month, we’ve just seen evidence that the Iranians aren’t going to fold.

Justin: I think this speaks to two things. One is that the preeminence of an air campaign alone was never going to be enough to capitulate Iran. And the coalition building necessary to even sustain those operations — we didn’t have those conversations already in place. Like, hey, if they try to close the Strait, this is what we’re going to do, this is the access we’re going to need from Saudi Arabia and UAE. And then as soon as Project Freedom gets launched, UAE gets hit. Iran is denying it was them. So there’s also the question of what else is going on in this area where maybe KSA is like, hey man, stuff’s getting wilder than we’re prepared for.

Bereft of Strategic Thought

Jack Shanahan: A couple of things. First of all, it’s become evident that all I have to do is come up with a new name and you get another 60 days. So we’re going to see a lot of different names used to get around the War Powers Act, which is crazy by itself.

But to a broader point — I’ll never forget being in a meeting in Secretary Mattis’s office, not long before he resigned. Wasn’t a meeting I had to be at, but I was in. Very small group, OSD policy was there, and he was clearly tense. Came back from the White House. The discussion was about Russia, and the OSD policy people were in a good mood saying, here’s what the administration wants to do.

He was terse. He picked up this paper they were talking about and said, “This paper is bereft of strategic thought.” Very classic Mattis. This operation is bereft of strategic thought. We don’t know what the end state is. They’ve tried to explain it 15 different times, but it’s a variation on a theme and nobody can understand. I feel bad for the people doing the targeting because they’re going to do what they were told to do. But if anybody’s trying to ask, what are we doing — the connection of ways and means against what strategic end state — I don’t have a good answer. Right now it appears to be the Strait of Hormuz is open, and I can’t get much beyond that. Maybe enrichment is under negotiation — how many years, with complete obliteration to, well, maybe 10 years.

Without that clarity in strategic end state, this is not going to end well. Sourcing is a little unclear, but UAE may have been attacked again by ballistic missiles and drones it successfully defended against. And Bryan, those US naval ships were attacked, successfully defended, but we’re one inch away from catastrophe if you successfully hit one of those ships. And it will not be hard to do because they still have plenty of fast boats, drones, and other capabilities.

If we end up killing American sailors on these ships, that is going to make a turn I don’t think we’re prepared for. The president used a phrase yesterday I’m trying not to read too much into — that there will be “a bright glow” coming from the country should Iran successfully attack one of our ships. That sounds to me like he’s suggesting nuclear weapons. That is not a path we should be walking very far down.

Eric Robinson: Didn’t the president come out and say he wanted to buy the HEU?

Jack Shanahan: I’ve heard a lot of different things. One is, it’s so far underground they’re never going to get it. Two, they’re going to give it to us. Three, well, maybe we can pay for it. The response from the Iranians has been clear: no, we’re not giving it up.

Tony Stark: Well, to be fair, if anyone knows the market rate for highly enriched uranium, it’s the Pakistanis. So we’ve got the right negotiators.

Bryan Clark: AQ Khan, exactly — he’s our negotiating partner. To Jack’s point, that’s the reason we didn’t do the full meal deal on the escort mission. It’s inevitable that one of these ships gets attacked if you put them in contact with Iranian forces long enough. And the US doesn’t want that visual. They’ve built up the expectation that this is a risk-free operation. There hasn’t been a strategic rationale that would justify having a lot more casualties. They’ve backed themselves into a corner where they can’t mount any operations that are higher risk.

I’ll note one other thing from Navy land. The passage US ships have been using, right next to Oman, is pretty narrow. They’ve identified that as an area free of mines — a Q route, as we call it. But it’s not wide enough for two-way traffic. So if you’re going to restore access to the Strait, it’s one-way traffic, single file, nowhere near 130 tankers per day. There’s some other mine-clearing operation that still has to happen even once we get to a negotiated settlement. That’ll take a couple weeks at least to verify the area is clear, and probably a couple more to clear what you find.

Justin: Bryan, sticking on that — during the Tanker War, that’s when the SEALs really leaned into VBSS, the visit, board, search, and seizure missions. What’s our strategy right now?

Bryan Clark: The Marines do those now. So one of the things Marine Expeditionary Units are doing out at sea is VBSS missions to support the US blockade. The Marines have gotten a lot of experience between Venezuela, Cuba, and now here. They view one of the ARGMEU missions as now being blockades and VBSS, which we’d always envisioned but they hadn’t really practiced.

Justin: When we talk about risk acceptance, is there an acknowledgement that that is a highly risky mission? I think back to even training in the Gulf — those two SEALs killed two years ago, the swim buddies, one fell off the boat trying to climb in and the other one went in after him. And that’s training. There’s also the question of, back to the Tanker War, the Vincennes shooting down the Iranian airliner. When all of our defenses are turned on, what prevents something like that from happening?

Jack Shanahan: What you’re not hearing is — and I know this is military talk that won’t resonate with the typical American — what is the acceptable risk to mission, risk to force? Those are concepts everybody in the military lives by. You could try to translate that at the administration level and say, this is so important, we’re going to accept a certain level of risk. You’re not setting the stage to accept some level of casualties. If you did it in a way the American people would buy into, that’s different. Right now, that risk discussion is the opposite — no, no, this is a cakewalk, piece of cake.

Eric Robinson: And it’s also grounded in almost anti-constitutionality. Civic risk management is Article 1, Section 8 — this is supposed to flow through Congress to the executive. There are numerous parts of a regular process that have been avoided or skipped.

Jordan Schneider: And this is how you get to that no-more-ammo conversation we’ve been having for the past month. Part of buying down potential casualties, potential hostages is using more long-range stuff, which is more fancy and expensive — so you don’t have to have planes flying over the country. That doesn’t mean no risk, that means more risk in 2027 and 2028 when you have less of this stuff for other theaters. By dialing this down, you end up sort of spending more.

Tony Stark: Yeah — using long-range exquisite munitions is to buy down risk to force. What they will not say is that creates more risk to mission, because you still need to be able to hold ground or hold blue ground, and to impose your will upon the enemy, which they haven’t been able to do. Now you’re inviting greater risk to force and mission in other theaters, which is really killing me. If we have to do another three to four months of this, as the leaked CIA report says, the amount of munitions we can burn in that time is another two to five years of magazine relays.

Eric Robinson: Hyperpowers have constraints.

Memorial Day Math

Jordan Schneider: Setting aside a broader economic turn — if this war lasts another few months and gas hits $5, $6, what are people going to be campaigning on in October and November? National security as a vibe in Washington has been on a pretty long bull run. Since 2018, a broad consensus around preparing to deter a big conventional war in East Asia. Having such a dramatic military adventure go poorly — if it ended tomorrow, this wouldn’t necessarily bake in. But if this drags on much longer and the inflation impact really starts to kick up, it’d be a scary time for me working in a Pacific-oriented defense tech, much less a prime.

Jack Shanahan: Part of this goes back to national-level messaging. If the case was made to the American people — look, there is going to be pain — I don’t want to make this a Jimmy Carter “feel the pain” message, but if that messaging was strong enough, you’d get some people to accept the short term. It’s open-ended right now. And when it’s open-ended, all people are hearing is one, gas prices, two, fertilizer, things they don’t even know about. The pinch is going to be felt in four, five, six more months. By then, the question on the election will not be a national security question — it’ll be economic. We’re in this purgatory right now. It’s neither war nor peace, and we don’t have a solution for it.

Jordan Schneider: I just think it’s unsellable, Jack. Iran getting a nuclear weapon is not something that the current body politic is willing to send thousands of people to die for and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on.

Tony Stark: The next trigger here is Memorial Day weekend, two weeks away. That is the first big test of whether people are willing to tolerate big gas prices. I think the answer is going to be no.

Eric Robinson: There is going to be a historic precedent of rally-to-the-flag, that people will take their countryside in times of challenge. The administration, through its muddled messaging about — it’s about nuclear weapons, it’s about respect, it’s about conventional capacity, it’s about just killing their leaders because it’s fun — has muddled that. And when you do not go to Congress and compel members of the House and Senate to put their careers on the line to affirmatively acknowledge that we’re going to war for this purpose, you lose the opportunity to create civic virtue around the expenditure you’re about to expect the country to bear.

Steelmanning Midnight Hammer

Jordan Schneider: I’ve gotten some critique from more right-leaning family members about how all we do is beat up on these guys. So let’s do a counterfactual. You’re sitting there, you really think Iran’s about to get a nuclear weapon. You know you can’t get Congress to vote for a real military operation. You also know that the American people will not tolerate 100 or 1,000 Americans dying. So what is the path that’s left to you? It’s a negotiation, but say you don’t believe in negotiation and you can’t trust them. So you’re left with this very uncomfortable, narrow path where you’re just trying stuff and seeing — because there aren’t necessarily good options. Got to bake in 10% — maybe I draw two aces on the river and if we kill everyone, things end up going swimmingly. I do feel for these guys at some level.

Eric Robinson: Jordan, I think Kamala Harris, if you’d given her the mission profile of Midnight Hammer — that the Israelis, by virtue of their intelligence services and special operations, had reduced Iranian air defenses to a negligible position, that they had good targeting data on the three principal sites, that you knew where the HEU was, that if you used a certain number of ordnance penetrators against these targets you could set back the Iranian capacity for 10 years — I think Kamala Harris would have been compelled to think about that seriously. The original military operation against the nuclear program fits within the traditional span of American national security decision-making. There are very serious Democrats that would have looked at that mission profile and said, let’s go.

Bryan Clark: Even after that operation — and people said maybe it only set it back a few months — you could just mount more of those strike operations. The air defense network in Iran was fairly degraded. With normal SEAD-type operations and whatever the Israelis had done, you could continue to degrade it over time. As long as you don’t take it to the level where the Iranians feel they have to escalate by closing the Strait — when we run these war games, the Iranians generally don’t take that action unless they’re backed into a corner because it puts them in the penalty box. So as long as you keep hitting them and degrading the capability without forcing them into that corner, you could have ended up degrading the nuclear program without getting to the cul-de-sac we find ourselves in today.

Jordan Schneider: So it’s really that temptation of the jackpot — we kill these guys and the whole house of cards falls down.

Jack Shanahan: Midnight Hammer is so defensible in so many different ways. Up to that point, you could have made — and reasonably did make — a case to the American people: we stopped them from getting a nuclear weapon. You could argue on the timelines, was it really a couple of weeks? No, it was not a couple of weeks. We all know it was not a couple of weeks. But it’s a reasonable one. From that point to today, the message has become so muddled we don’t know what we’re trying to achieve.

I watched an interview at FP Live yesterday with Ali Hashem, an Iranian reporter in the Middle East. He says this really does seem to have a reverse rally-around-the-flag for the Iranians. You’ve gone from mass protests in the cities to “why does the United States keep hitting us, and what are we going to do about it?”

Justin: Those are my two big hangups. To Bryan’s point, you could have just continued to do Midnight Hammers. If that’s where all the highly enriched uranium was, they go in to try to get it, you drop again on it. They go in to get it, you drop again on it. Captain America in the Avengers — I can do this all day. Every time you go back to touch it, I’m going to hit it again. You’re not getting a bomb, you need to come to the negotiating table. That’s the big-brother tactic I would have expected us to use. You could also have had a humanitarian argument — 30,000 protesters, they want regime change, they’re calling for it.

We didn’t do either of those things. We waited for the protests to be suppressed, waited for the killings, then started targeting and bombed a girls’ school, maybe multiple girls’ schools. Hit things of civilian importance that would be necessary for any new regime to come in and run the country. We didn’t do those things. We didn’t build coalitions. Then we started hitting random strikes outside of leadership within Iran. And then the ceasefire — and according to some intelligence reports and open-source reporting, something like 70% of the Iranian ballistic missile capability has potentially survived and been reconstituted.

70% Still Standing

Eric Robinson: That’s sourced to a CIA analysis that segments of went to the Hill. It’s supposed to be classified, but yeah — 70% of pre-war defensive capabilities still in check. After all that.

Jordan Schneider: What does that mean? They went from shooting like 200 missiles a day to two missiles a day, and by the end they were up to five or six. So 70% of what exactly?

Tony Stark: Without having seen the report — is that all missiles? Just long-range? The shoot-and-scoot type? Are we including Shaheds? If you said 70% of long-range effectors, that would make sense. That’s the “you can do this all day, lob warheads across the strait on their end.” Look at the targeting packages we went after first. First it was regime change. Less than a year later, regime change. Then we pivoted basically to infrastructure and kind of trying to do scud hunts, but not really. Given what the targeting priorities looked like, there’s maybe a world where the mobile targets were harder to hit.

Justin: And that gets to Bryan’s war games. It doesn’t take a lot to close the Strait. Even if it’s 70% of whatever the amorphous thing is, it only takes a couple of those shots for shipping companies to go, well, we’re not moving through the Strait today.

Jordan Schneider: It could be 95%. Right?

Eric Robinson: It is much less about damage control on an Arleigh Burke destroyer as it is about insurance carry rates and force majeure provisions in contracts that are tied regionally. Those are much more brittle devices than the engineering on an American destroyer. That is the core vulnerability — the financial component, which I don’t think the senior stakeholders in the Pentagon really thought through.

Jack Shanahan: And the economies of every country in the Middle East right now. I’m not trying to claim a causal connection between the Saudis pulling out of funding LIV Golf, but I actually think there’s something there.

Eric Robinson: The Saudis had a really robust strategy by virtue of their partnership with McKinsey — they were going to shift from hydrocarbons to mining to financial services to tourism. The mining project hasn’t taken off. Maaden, the state-owned enterprise, has dramatically pulled back ambitions. The megaprojects are pulling back. Even mundane residential efforts in and around Riyadh are slowing down. The Saudis worked under an extraordinarily robust set of assumptions, and those assumptions all broke based off this war.

Tony Stark: The problem with pivoting to tourism and finance is that it’s dependent upon missiles not raining down on your key industries.

Jack Shanahan: And this other one got headlines for a couple days and faded — hitting the AWS data centers. To me, that reinforces why in the world are we going to go Stargate $500 billion and build all this infrastructure in the Middle East? A very savvy move on Iran’s part — just enough to say, those data centers, yeah, we can hit those too. And by the way, if you’re thinking this whole economy is going to be based on the back of AI, we can hit that. Whether or not it did long-term damage is less the point than the fact that they demonstrated they can and will hit commercial targets they assume are being used for national security purposes.

Eric Robinson: They put data centers into the concept of critical infrastructure very aggressively. The United States has to adapt to a whole new series of targets. It’s not just like Ukrainian armed services hitting Russian oil infrastructure — there’s a much broader array of authentic target opportunity these armed actors can now put into their thought process. It was true innovation.

No Such Thing as an Air Campaign

Justin: Jack, you’ve been looking at this. What do you think the SEAD lessons learned are, given the F-35 getting hit, the A-10 getting shot down or hit, the F-15 getting hit — what are we learning or not learning from a SEAD and projection-of-military-power perspective?

Jack Shanahan: I’m absolutely shocked we’ve lost four F-15Es in a conflict I’d consider low-level. Three were by fratricide — by the Kuwaitis — so I put those in a different category. But when you only have 218, four is a pretty significant loss. Maybe the Air Force views it as, it gets us to the F-15X quicker than we expected, but that wasn’t really the intent.

The shoot-down and the near-absolute-tragic loss or capture of the crew really hit me — F-15E background, watched all that play out. Really disturbing how we got into the place where we’re getting hit by probably shoulder-fired or some infrared SAMs. As a broad comment, we’re very, very good at certain things, including SEAD. But this idea of — what do we really mean when we say air superiority, air supremacy? We have air superiority in localized areas, but we clearly do not have air supremacy over the entire country, because an airplane got shot down. You could say that was an aberration. I don’t accept aberrations. You either have air supremacy or you don’t.

We’ve suffered on the electronic warfare part for about 15 years. Thanks to counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, we didn’t invest. The service kind of gave up on it after the EF-111, put the eggs in the F-16 Wild Weasel basket. But what we’re seeing now, both in Iran and really in Ukraine and Russia — if we do not go all in on electronic warfare, electromagnetic spectrum operations, we’re in serious trouble in a fight in the Pacific. Very serious trouble. The DDIL — denied, disconnected, intermittent, limited bandwidth — environments, that’s not an assumption anymore. It’s going to be a fact of life.

There is no such thing — I had this drilled into me by former JFACCs, real JFACCs — there’s no such thing as an air campaign. There’s a joint campaign of which there is an air component. To think you’re going to win the war by air alone is delusional. And if we put people on the ground, it’s going to get ugly very quickly.

We’re fighting two different wars. We’re fighting a very conventional one — go destroy their Navy and Air Force. We talk about how well we’ve done that. The Iranians are saying, look, we’re not going to win against you with our Navy and Air Force anyway, have at it. We’ll go at you with our ballistic missiles, our Shaheds, these fast-boat attacks. Call it asymmetric, an economic war on their behalf, while we’re fighting a much more conventional military fight. In general, we’re doing very well on the kind of things we know how to do. But that shoot-down was a wake-up call. We were one inch away from absolute disaster — a bunch of people being killed or captured on TV, prisoners of war. We got lucky in my opinion. Very high-risk mission. The heroes in special ops, CSAR, Air Force — nobody else in the world could have pulled that off. But we shouldn’t be expecting everything to go right in the future in a different fight.

Justin: Do you think the shoot-downs are going to drive more impetus for uncrewed capabilities, or do you think there’s going to be a move to get pilots all out of the aircraft faster?

Jack Shanahan: It won’t be binary. There’s always going to be a place for the crewed platform. But this is one of the many reasons driving more and more toward unmanned. It’s a little bit shocking to me — doesn’t get talked about a whole lot — I think we’re up to like 30 MQ-9s shot down. That’s not a small number. They’re what, $30 million plus or minus on the page. So we’re talking a billion dollars of assets, plus the AWACS, plus the four Strike Eagles. Many billions of dollars of assets.

Eric Robinson: Plus, all the aircraft getting knocked down are recovered by Ministry of State Security and rebuilt. All those assets are now known to our opposition. Electromagnetic signature, visual, acoustic. The crown jewels of American special technology have been revealed in Venezuela, Iran, and elsewhere.

Jack Shanahan: Like the RQ-170 that got shot down years ago.

Two big things scream to me. One — to Justin’s point — yes, more investment, but a different kind of drone. Much cheaper, mass-produced. From one of your episodes, Jordan, with a person from Ukraine, I caught onto this idea: it’s no longer just-in-time logistics, it’s just-in-time disassembly and reassembly at the operational unit as they get thrown in. Because the technology has changed in the 48 hours since the thing was delivered to where they’re going to use it. I don’t think we’ve fully absorbed these lessons yet. We’re trying to pretend that all of them are or it’ll be a different fight in the Indo-Pacific.

But counter-drones is the bigger one. We’ve struggled on this. Where does it really reside, who’s got overall lead? The counter-drone piece is the ultimate wake-up call of seeing what Iran can do with just a couple of Shaheds here and there — really having big impact well beyond the tactical level. Some of those will be electronic warfare, some kinetic, some cyber at some point. But I don’t see crewed airplanes going away anytime soon. It’ll be a question of where in the fight you use them — stand off and work your way in as you reduce the air defense threat. Maybe it was a lucky shot, a golden BB. Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean you have air supremacy.

Quiet Cyber

Justin: Why do you think we’re not seeing more cyber usage offensively against Iran? Is it the nature of the internet in the country, or have they learned lessons from Stuxnet and made it harder?

Jack Shanahan: I think we’re not seeing it because we’re not going to see it. There’s probably more happening than we’d normally think. But all the claims of cyber offense have been countered by cyber defense. It’s the classic history of military technology — Newtonian third law for every action, equal and opposite counteraction. When we’ve hit them hard with cyber, they put defense in place. Maybe — speculation — they’re getting advice from Russia or China on bolstering cyber defenses.

What would we go after? Probably command-and-control networks. Take down their ability to command and control their military and national security. That’s probably happened. Once you start talking about electrical infrastructure, you get into a much more gray area.

There’s a lot to what we saw at the beginning of the Ukraine war with Russia. We all thought Russia was going to come in with state-of-the-art cyber and completely shut down Ukraine. That did not happen. Speculation is they didn’t want to reveal their best capabilities, or it just didn’t work the way they thought — you change one router box and your cyber attack is no longer good. So a combination of things: their defenses are probably better than 10 years ago, they’re probably getting help, and on our side, what are we trying to do and why.

What I remember from Brigadier General Tim Haugh, who was vice commander when I was down in San Antonio many years ago — the operation they put in place, cyber supporting the CENTCOM fight as a truly supporting element, not trying to go off and do things by itself. Let the national agencies do what they’re going to do, but figure out how to make this part of the overall campaign. One day it’s a cyber capability, the next day it’s something kinetic. CENTCOM, as the owner of the overall fight, gets to make those choices, as opposed to treating cyber as this special thing over there. The good news for me is both cyber and space have become normalized in a way I always hoped they would. It is being integrated into the overall campaign. At the national level — what are we doing? There’s something happening, but the good news is I’m not privy to it, because I’d be hauled away if I said anything.

Jordan Schneider: Thank you so much, Jack, for being a part of WarTalk. This is a pleasure.

Jack Shanahan: Thanks, all of you. You guys are legendary. Every time I read something with Jordan, I ask myself, when the hell do you sleep? ChinaTalk keeps me occupied for at least an hour and a half every day just reading this stuff. I commend you for doing it. But God, you put a dent in my day just trying to keep up.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Ken Liu argues that:

• Technology is the most human thing we do — humans have always externalized our minds into the world and then allowed those creations to reshape who we are.

• AI “slop” won’t stop humans from making art that matters, and the real distinction isn’t quality versus slop, but between desire-fulfilling machines and artists who draw from the collective unconscious.

• The deeper danger of AI isn’t machines replacing humans, but systems that train humans to behave like machines.

• Science fiction isn’t prophecy, but mythology — and ideologies are just mythology’s cheaper, hack cousins. Orwell, Shelley, Tolkien, and Le Guin endure not because they predicted the future, but because they gave us metaphors powerful enough to think with across generations.

• Large language models are intelligent, but can’t be wise. Drawing on Laozi and Zhuangzi, Ken explains why everything that truly matters lies beyond language.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Technology as Human Expression

Jordan Schneider: We’re living in the age of Claude Code, and I want to start with a passage you wrote. Why don’t you set it up and read this vision of future coding and writing?

Ken Liu: Let me start by saying what the book is actually about. All That We See or Seem is a techno-thriller in the sense that none of the technology mentioned is really speculative — it’s all either already here or very possible, just needing to be scaled up slightly.

Julia Z is a hacker, a hero in the mold of Clarice Starling or Jane Whitefield — someone with a very strong moral compass and a very dark past. She’s trying to escape that past, but events keep pulling her back in, and she realizes she cannot overcome external threats unless she confronts the demons within her. In this novel, she has specialized skills with AI and robotics and is tasked with finding an artist who has disappeared — an artist who works with AI to help large audiences dream together.

The passages I’m going to read are reflections on Julia in the Age of AI. Here’s the first, which is about what it’s like to be a programmer — something very close to my heart:

The hardest part had been the programming. Writing code without the help of Talos, or even a lowly codemonkey or datajinn, was not something Julia had much experience with. In the same way that few contemporary writers could compose even a five-hundred-word essay without the help of AI as research assistant, fact-checker, dictionary, thesaurus, grammarian, and, in extreme cases, amanuensis, very few contemporary programmers could create a functioning nontrivial application without the help of codedaemons, bug-genies, patchsprites, scriptpixies, and a whole fairyland of similar artificial intelligences.

Homo sapiens had always externalized their minds into the world, oozing books, drawings, plans, recordings, the same way honeybees made their minds visible in the form of wax comb and sweet honey, but the trend had never gone as far as now, when most of one’s knowledge consisted of knowing where to look things up and how to give an AI the best prompts, and more of one’s mind existed outside the skull, infused into fiscjinns and memoelves and egolets, spread among artificial assistants and helpers and aide-mémoire, imprinted in cogitrons and electrons and logons, than remained inside the squishy gray matter inside the skull.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s start with the idea of choosing a techno-thriller as a genre to explore something every white-collar worker is grappling with today.

Ken Liu: Genre labels are largely irrelevant to me. All of my fiction — whatever the marketing genre — is fundamentally technological. Whether it’s the Dandelion Dynasty, my short fiction, or the Julia Z series, they’re all stories about what it means for humans to express parts of themselves through technology.

If there’s something unique about humans compared to other species, it’s fundamentally our technological nature. This is important. A lot of things described as “sci-fi” aren’t really sci-fi at all — they have very little to do with science. They’re technological stories. “Techfi” is far more interesting to me. Technology and science are completely different disciplines, and the vast majority of so-called sci-fi is really techfi, because it’s really about what it means for humans to express themselves via their creations.

We are the only species who express who we are through the things we make. We imagine things that did not exist in the universe, then actually bring them into being — concretely substantiating our mental constructs in the world. And these technological manifestations, this stuff we ooze out, in turn changes who we are. We converse with, interact with, and co-evolve with our own creations. No other species does this.

One of the great philosophical debates in our tradition is whether humans are more human without technology or with it. This debate goes back to Plato, to Zhuangzi, to all the great philosophers. What is language? The entire skeptical interrogation of language itself is really this debate about human nature.

In the contemporary world, we often default to the position that technology is somehow external to who we are — something we should be wary of. To me, this is nonsensical. Human technology is a manifestation of human nature. It’s in fact the most human thing we make. You cannot understand human nature without understanding human technology — it’s literally a tangible substantiation of what is inside our minds. To understand what human nature is, we have to interrogate human technology and truly understand how we co-evolve with our own creations. That’s what the Julia Z series is really about.

Irene Zhang: You use the metaphor of the jinn to describe what the marketing world might call AI agents. That obviously comes from Arabic mythology and Islam. Why did you choose that metaphor, and how do you think about the metaphors we use to understand AI?

Ken Liu: The immediate answer is that I was interested in the word “cotton gin” — it’s short for “cotton engine,” which is just the way we play with language. Why not take that “gin” and turn it into a different kind of “jinn”?

If you look at how technology is expressed through language, it’s very mythological. Think about how we name our technology. Why did the U.S. decide to name its space programs after Greek and Roman gods? There’s a mythological component to the way technology is manifested because technology is not independent of who we are — technology is how we dream.

The reason technology is so expressive of human nature is that it’s a manifestation of our deepest desires and dreams. We’ve always used mythology to express and understand technology. Look at how technology companies talk about and market their creations — there’s always a mythological component. If I didn’t name them jinns, that would be weird. It has to be a mythological name, because that’s how these companies think.

Jordan Schneider: Is this time different? You made the argument to the negative, but in that passage, you’re saying that externalizing your brain to the extent your characters do — or we’re doing today — is something unique in human history.

Ken Liu: Externalizing the brain into our creations is not unique. Every child who has learned to read has experienced that moment of communing with mental patterns from creatures long ago. When you read Plato’s dialogues or Zhuangzi’s stories today, you’re communing with minds from thousands of years ago. That’s very strange if you actually think about it — you’re engaging in something no other creature can do. We’re communing with mental constructs from the past.

Consider what happens when you do arithmetic — long division, an integral, working out a tensor. You’re using pen and paper to externalize your brain. Your cognitive function is literally externalized on the paper. It’s a very strange thing. Your brain is out there, you’re interacting with it using your body, then getting it back. No other creature does this.

Is AI significantly different from that? I don’t think so. The best way to understand large language models is to go back and read the structuralists from the 1980s. Roland Barthes said that in a deeply literary society, burdened or blessed with millennia of writing and millions upon millions of authors, we are surrounded by words — by their minds. A modern writer, a “scriptor,” is not an author who creates out of nothing, but someone basically babbling in the presence of a complete corpus of past writings. You are just playing with words, reference upon reference, allusion to more reference. You’re acting as a channel, a conduit to this playful field of past writing as you babble more writings.

Barthes wrote this as a way of talking about the death of the author, but reading it now in the age of large language models, you realize that’s exactly what he was describing. The large language model is a substantiation of that imagined dictionary of all writings. It’s language coming to life. It’s you interrogating the entire corpus of what humans have written — this “pluribus,” this multi-mind, that you’re engaged with.

That’s my argument for how AI is not really different from how we’ve always dealt with technology.

Now, there are some interesting differences. For the first time in history, we’re confronted with the idea that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing.

If you examine older sci-fi literature, there’s a huge fundamental assumption that something intelligent will necessarily be conscious — that the more intelligent something is, the more it necessarily comes with intention, will, desire, and the sense of being something, of some mind behind the intelligent acts.

What we’re seeing now is that there’s no doubt these models are intelligent. A lot of the popular discourse — “it’s just a very powerful autocomplete” — is very silly. That description is technically true, but it means nothing. You might as well say humans are nothing more than compilations of statistical likelihoods. Yes, that’s technically true, but so what?

The real issue is this — if something can write essays, pass the bar exam, and get a perfect score on the SATs, to say it’s not intelligent is a nonsensical declaration. It’s clearly intelligent, but it’s not conscious. I don’t think many of us would argue that LLMs are conscious.

That is very strange. The fact that we can have intelligence completely divorced from consciousness, from will, from intention, from subjectivity — that is weird. We’re still coming to terms with it. We’re trying to understand why we value subjectivity so much, yet don’t seem to think intelligence by itself is all that valuable anymore. Many of us now seem to be leaning in that direction.

That’s honestly why a show like Pluribus on Apple TV is so interesting — it’s mythologically engaged with this particular question: what matters more, subjectivity or intelligence?

The Age of Slop

Jordan Schneider: One theme you pick up on is this idea that yes, there’s a future of AI slop that your world is swimming in, but there’s still something where the audience wants to meet up in person and have a connection to a particular human who lives and breathes and bleeds. It seems your contention is that there’s something about having a human behind it all that will remain fundamentally appealing, however good these models get.

Ken Liu: I want to start by saying I don’t necessarily have a specific argument one way or the other in the book. My fiction gets published and people attribute certain points of view to it — sometimes, readers attribute polar opposite views. That’s actually a sign I’ve succeeded, because I deliberately write fiction with very little messaging in the sense of propaganda. Fiction written as propaganda isn’t particularly interesting to me. Ayn Rand very famously writes propaganda that is very popular, but I don’t find that kind of fiction interesting. All of my fiction is aesthetic works that can deliberately be read to support multiple contentions, because that’s how reality is. You can take reality and interpret it to suit different messages.

That said, the contemporary anxiety over AI slop is understandable, but it has to be contextualized historically. We are already living in a world of slop — not AI-generated, but mass-produced slop.

Take your mind back to before the invention of photography. You might see maybe a few hundred images in your entire life, every single one produced by hand by a real human being. Church stained glass windows. Famous paintings, if you were rich enough to travel. A few pictures you made yourself if you learned to draw. Pictures drawn by friends. Prints in books made by someone who had to translate an image into a printing plate by hand. A few hundred of these things in your lifetime.

After photography and photographic reproduction techniques, we entered what Walter Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction. We’re surrounded by images — hundreds of thousands in a single day. The vast majority is slop — clip art, images made by graphics programs, and reproductions from public domain stuff with a few manipulations.

My point is that this hasn’t destroyed art. It hasn’t made humans unable to appreciate art. In the age of AI slop, what makes you think we’ll stop producing actual art? We’re already living in an age of slop, utterly surrounded by it, and yet the proliferation of slop has allowed us to become even more artistically interesting and create more interesting human art. I don’t see that being different in the future. We know how to deal with slop. The age of mechanical reproduction is here, and the age of AI slop will not be any different. I don’t see the moral panic over it.

Now, that’s not the same as saying it won’t lead to the loss of livelihoods. The age of mechanical reproduction caused the loss of livelihoods for many artists — specifically engravers, great artists who had to translate paintings and drawings into printing plates. Yes, they were displaced, and that was a difficult transition. We will face a difficult transition today too. But the idea that AI slop will destroy art is very flawed. That’s just not how historically any of this has ever worked.

What interests me more is what this technology can enable humans to do creatively. Historically, in every case where some technology displaced aspects of human craft, humans ultimately learned to practice craft with that technology.

Humans have practiced craft with the camera. When the camera was just “push a button and chemistry and physics make a picture,” that’s not interesting. But when humans learned to use the camera as an artistic tool — how to tell stories with it — that’s how we ended up with cinema, with TikTok, with YouTube, with the vast explosion in video art. None of which would have been possible without the camera.

Something similar has to happen with AI. Today’s AI is in the stage where you give it a prompt and it generates something. This is very non-crafty — there’s no craft to it. But it won’t stay like this. Over time, artists will figure out — what are the affordances we need to actually use these models in interesting ways? How do you precisely position the generator within latent space? How do you precisely delineate the chain of inferences and associations inside the model’s weights to generate what you want? How do you precisely manipulate this model the way you can dial in camera settings, set up poses, and frame a shot?

When all these affordances are given to an artist who wants to work with AI as a tool, then and only then will we see interesting art being generated by humans. That’s my contention.

Jordan Schneider: In a recent Substack post, you said you spent much of December and January playing video games. Behind you, I see a PSP and a Game Boy Advance. In the book, you explored one future of artistic creativity — AI-enabled dream weaving. Where do you see the future of video games with all of this?

Ken Liu: One of the most contentious uses is AI-generated assets in games. I personally think this will eventually be normalized. If you want to call AI-generated material slop, that’s what it is — but we’re surrounded by slop, surrounded by mechanical reproduction and cheap art. That’s just how it is. Eventually, this will probably happen to video games too, in terms of asset generation.

That doesn’t mean human-crafted material will lose its appeal. In the same way that humans, even in the age of mechanical reproduction, continue to be enthralled by the aura of the artist — much to perhaps Walter Benjamin’s disappointment — I don’t see that changing in the age of AI slop either. The human aura will still be very appealing to many of us.

At the same time, one of the great things about AI-generated art, like mechanical reproduction, is democratization and the ability to generate certain kinds of art that human artists would never make.

Here’s a very interesting pattern — humans find playing with AI to make art for themselves very interesting, but we almost never find sharing this stuff with other people interesting, and other people don’t find it interesting either. You generate something using AI and it’s kind of interesting to you, but not necessarily to anyone else. There’s an intense personalization effect here worth following up on.

AI is really good at fulfilling your desires in a way that human artists never will and never can. Take a crude example. You might crave a particular kind of fiction or film — an adaptation of your favorite novel starring your favorite actors. In reality, that will never happen. Humans will not do that for you. But you can use AI to create it. AI is a desire-fulfilling machine, but it’s only able to do that for you, and only you would find it interesting. It’s not the kind of thing human artists would ever do.

The analogy is that mechanical reproductions can fulfill a niche humans never could or would. For the vast majority of history, it wasn’t possible for most people to get a good portrait done. You had to be very rich or famous, otherwise you relied on a friend or family member who could draw. That’s why we have that picture of Jane Austen done by her sister — it’s not a very good picture, but it’s the only one we have. Once the camera came along, middle-class families could have pictures done cheaply. Now everybody can take a selfie. We’re awash in slop selfies.

That’s what technology can do — allow you to get things humans never would provide. You can’t get portrait artists to paint most of us, but you can easily use a camera. If you want a particular kind of story, you’re not going to get human artists to write it for you. But you can get a machine to do it. This highly personalized, self-involved fiction — when people speak about AI boyfriends and companions, that’s what they’re talking about. Fiction co-written with an AI for themselves alone. That’s exactly why these things are appealing.

But that doesn’t mean people who love this will stop appreciating fiction written by humans that’s not meant to fulfill desires. Artists are not there to fulfill your desires. Artists are there to fulfill their own dreams. They go into the collective unconscious and are seized by some image or vision they have to bring out. That’s why artists create.

There’s a complementary role for AI versus human artists. Human artists will do what they’ve always done: dream and bring forth interesting dreams from the collective unconscious. AI will fulfill your individual desires. The two are complementary — not the same kind of thing, but they can coexist.

Everything Not Said

Irene Zhang: On companionship and desires, I wanted to ask about Talos, Julia’s AI assistant. Julia lives in a world where personal AIs are common, but you don’t portray that as companionship in the book. People still fall in love and have friends and family. How did you make those decisions in crafting Talos and the personal AI landscape?

Ken Liu: Talos is actually very different from any other personal AI in the book, and the distinction is important. The personal AIs that everybody else uses are essentially subscription services — what all the companies are trying to make. You subscribe to their cloud AI, it’s personalized to you, but the data is all with them. That’s what people are concerned about in terms of privacy.

Talos is different. Talos is not a subscription AI from some large company. Talos is something Julia builds herself, running on her own local hardware, entirely controlled by herself. What Talos really is, in terms of how the book describes it, is an “egolet.”

What’s an egolet? It’s an AI representation of you. Let me tease this apart.

What I find deeply interesting about AI is that neural networks are essentially a camera for different things — not a camera for images, but a camera for decisions. For decision-making procedures, decision-making processes, for choices you’ve made in the past.

Take a concrete example — if a painter were to train an egolet (and companies are exploring this possibility), they would train a neural network not just on their finished paintings but on the entire process of creation. How do you decide to make this paint stroke and not that? How do you decide to cover up these strokes and not those? How do you decide to do this part first and that part last? The entire process of creating a painting or a book is where the interesting stuff is.

We’ve all had the experience where AI produces a painting “in the style of so-and-so,” and it looks superficially good until you examine it — there’s always a superficiality. Or there’s this popular application where you feed all the books by some author into a model and say, “Now you can talk to so-and-so.” You train an AI on all the dialogues and books by Plato and supposedly you can talk to Socrates about AI.

These are all terrible apps, and none of them ever feels convincing. People have done this to me — trained models on my interviews and asked me what I think. What I think is, “This is garbage. This sounds nothing like me.”

Here’s why — for everything I say, there are ten things I’ve decided not to say. If models are trained only on things I’ve published, the model will never know all the things I would never say. When you have models trained only on what has been said, they don’t know what has been decided to be not said. So they always generate garbage, saying things I never would have said.

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The issue is that for these models to be a good representation of the person, they need insight into all the things you’ve decided not to say — everything behind the scenes. Published works and finished paintings are like the part of the iceberg above the water. The vast majority is below. Steve Jobs once said something like — this is a paraphrase — for everything you say yes to, there have to be at least ten things you say no to. It’s the part you say no to that matters.

An egolet, in my conception, is an AI capable of actually capturing the part where you say no — all the parts you’ve denied.

How many of us are comfortable giving that information to Anthropic, to Google, to OpenAI? The idea that you would reveal the parts you’ve kept hidden from the public — who’s going to do that? Nobody.

That’s why personal assistants in that form will never amount to anything. Personal assistants trained only on what you’ve let out will never amount to anything. The only way to produce real egolets — small egos, small copies of yourself, something trained on who you truly are — is if you have total control over the model. Total control of the training, total control of the hardware, total control of the data. Total sovereignty.

That’s what Talos is. Talos is totally controlled by Julia. Because she has complete control over Talos, Talos is very different for her. She explains in the book that talking to Talos is like talking to a version of herself, or different versions of herself in different periods of her life. She’s able to examine herself. Talos is the fulfillment of that oldest of philosophical desires — “know thyself.” By having an AI trained on yourself in this deep sense, you can reflect on yourself. Julia can examine who she is via Talos — to leverage herself, work with herself, and critique herself. That’s what makes this sort of thing actually interesting.

The Real Danger of AI

Irene Zhang: Without spoiling it, quite a bit of the plot centers on something that actually exists — scam call centers and human trafficking rings in the Golden Triangle, primarily in the Thailand-Burma border regions. How did you become interested in that, and what makes it important to you?

Ken Liu: Let me address that by explaining what I think the real danger of AI-generated slop actually is. I disagree with a lot of mainstream commentary on what the issue with deepfakes really is.

A lot of commentary focuses on the idea that we’re going to be manipulated by bots from foreign actors. The natural outcome is better ways of distinguishing organic accounts from bot-operated ones. But if we get there, the next logical step for actors who wish to weaponize commentary is to have humans do it, not bots. In an age where machine-generated slop is a big problem, there will necessarily be a premium placed on human-generated content. The next logical step is actors who enslave human content creators for that purpose. This seems quite plausible, and I’m sure it’s already being done somewhere.

But the issue is not quite that simple. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the real problem of AI is. We often describe the problem as machines replacing humans, as though that’s the biggest issue. That is not the real danger. The real danger from AI is that humans will start treating other humans as machines. It’s the gradual mechanization and reduction of humans into components of a machine — that is the relentless pattern of modernity.

This has been going on forever. When the assembly line was invented, human workers were reduced to components of a massive production machine. Instead of exercising individual judgment and creativity, humans were put into positions where they exercise as little creativity as possible — repeating the same motions, specializing in doing the exact same thing over and over with as little variation as possible, becoming standardized components of a machine.

That production line model has persisted into the modern age. We constantly take away individual initiative and decision-making from workers. Call center employees are instructed to follow the script, not deviate, not exercise human empathy — to think of themselves as components of a machine, essentially language models. This is why call center workers are so easily replaced by AI: modernity has tried to reduce humans into robots so that real robots can take over from them very easily.

This is the real danger. Wherever humans retreat into an area of individual initiative and choice, the pressure of capitalism is again and again to reduce them to components of a machine, to appropriate their creativity, to standardize their initiative for purposes of money and control and power.

In the book, without spoiling it, a large part involves exactly this kind of enslavement of humans into an economy that puts a premium on individual human creation. In the age of mass mechanical reproduction, human-made custom bespoke art is given a premium. In a future where AI-generated slop is everywhere, human-created content will again be given premium value. Social media companies will figure out ways to show they have real engagement instead of bots. When you have an internet that’s 99% bots talking to bots, the way to convince humans to engage is to promise them real humans.

But once you’ve gone down that route of putting a premium on human content, people will inevitably figure out ways to again reduce humans to machines and enslave humans for that purpose. This is the pattern we see over and over again.

Mythology vs. Ideology

Jordan Schneider: These books — sci-fi in general — are not predictions. They’re an expression of where we are today. Why is the idea that these books are predictions so seductive, and why does it make no sense?

Ken Liu: There’s a tendency in literature and the arts to figure out how we justify ourselves. Fundamentally, writers write because they’re having fun. The fact that we’re being paid for it is a little weird, so we have to figure out why. A common reaction is to view sci-fi as particularly relevant because it somehow predicts the future or helps us think about what’s likely, or warns us from dystopias we might step into.

I don’t think this justification is plausible or even interesting, because sci-fi has a very bad track record of predicting anything. If sci-fi ever does predict anything, it’s more out of luck than anything else. The sci-fi we hold up as really good predictors or evergreen classics are such because they get some metaphor right that’s very potent, but the details are completely wrong.

Take 1984. It’s a very good book and still extremely relevant decades after it was written. But the surveillance society we live in today is very different from the one envisioned. Big Brother in 1984 is a state-imposed surveillance system. That’s not the surveillance system we have today. Even in contemporary totalitarian societies, surveillance is often not imposed in the way 1984 pictures it.

We live in a surveillance society that we crafted out of our own desire. It’s not a state-imposed system — it’s a system we constructed through voluntary consumer decisions over decades. We consistently gave up bits of privacy in exchange for convenience. Now we’re surrounded by devices constantly listening and watching, sending bits of what we’re saying back to the mothership. So much of our data is given to companies to train their devices, and these companies are happy to share it with governments. We are under a degree of surveillance Orwell would have found astonishing. And the vast majority of us are quite happy about it. We don’t think this is terrible. We’re fine with having our data constantly exposed.

Orwell did not get any of the details right. But the fundamental metaphor of Big Brother is extremely potent as a mythological concept. It has shaped how we think about surveillance, how we talk about it, and how we think about private desires and private thoughts versus being constantly on display.

That’s what sci-fi is actually good at. Sci-fi is not about prediction — science fiction writers have no more authority or knowledge about the future than anybody else. The future is very accidental. Every time science fiction writers speculate about the future, they can’t help but extrapolate from present trends. Science fiction stories are almost always about the present — present trends extrapolated. But the way the future evolves depends on so many unpredictable factors. The future we end up having is almost never the future we thought we would have. You can plan all you want, but the future you get will be nothing like what you planned. A thousand different teams will work on solving the same problem, and the team that ultimately succeeds won’t be the one many of us thought would succeed. The future is unpredictable in a very deep, fundamental sense.

But sci-fi writers do have something interesting and valuable to add in the mythological realm. Artists go into the collective unconscious, dream interesting visions, and bring them back. It’s these mythological visions that ultimately persist.

We don’t read Frankenstein anymore for its speculation on how you might create artificial life. We read it because the creature is a very potent metaphor for new technology. We cannot think about new technology without thinking about Frankenstein’s creature.

In fact, the LLM — this technology of the moment — is very much like the creature. If you go back and read Frankenstein, read the part about how the creature learns human language, learns human morality, learns human relationships, learns to desire — it’s eerily like the way LLMs are trained. And the questions being asked of the creature are very much like the questions Anthropic nowadays is asking about alignment — how do we end up with an AI aligned with our own interests? I find that deeply fascinating.

This is why old sci-fi remains relevant. Not because their predictions are particularly valuable, but because the metaphors they bring up, the mythological figures they invoke from the collective unconscious — they persist and help us dream about the present and the future, and think about how we want to use technology to express who we are.

Irene Zhang: While we’re discussing sci-fi writers as myth-makers, I can’t help but read this in the American context today. Palantir exists, and I’m sure Tolkien, when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, did not imagine his myth-making would become a potent symbol enabling technology as a political class aligned with certain ideologies and bound to the government. How do you think about that evolution in sci-fi’s relationship to politics in America today?

Ken Liu: I don’t think writers should be propagandists either way. The reason Tolkien is potent as a writer is that he tried his best not to be a propagandist. The fact that The Lord of the Rings can be read to support completely different political ideologies is a testament to his skill, not a failure. He might personally disagree with how Palantir is now invoked as a symbol, but that’s not a testament to his failure as a writer. He succeeded in creating very potent mythology. Good mythologies will always be appropriated by people of very different beliefs. Just watch how Christianity or Islam has been appropriated by very different ideologies to say completely opposite things.

I don’t think writers should feel responsible for how their mythology is used. The writer’s only job is to create interesting mythologies — mythologies true to the collective unconscious, to their journey into it, to the dreams they’re trying to bring forth. That is their only job.

They should help us escape in the deepest sense. The real world is filled with bad mythologies, bad allegories, and bad fantasies that are not true to human nature. One of the critiques of fantasy that Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin both pushed back against is that fantasy is escapist. This is obviously nonsense. As Le Guin said: “If we live in a prison, then escape is actually our moral duty.”

In the world of ideologies that we live in, ideologies are the bad cousins of mythologies. Ideologies are cheap, bad, hack versions of mythologies. The fact that people can believe in ideologies at all is a sad state of affairs. The idea that you believe money has actual meaning, the idea you believe that the Wall Street Journal has any kind of moral authority — that’s nonsense. If that’s the reality you’re living in, then it is your duty to escape.

That’s what fantasy does. Fantasy enacts our moral duty to escape from the bad hack mythology of ideologies by substituting them with real mythologies — mythologies that actually mean something. The fact that somebody can reduce Palantir to the service of a bad ideological agenda does not make the actual myth in The Lord of the Rings any less valuable. It’s up to the rest of us to recover the multitude of meanings from the mythology and reclaim the truth that fantasy is meant to tell.

Jordan Schneider: Ideology as hack mythology — nationalism, for instance. There are a lot of people all around the world who get into positions of power on the backs of those things.

Ken Liu: I entirely agree. One of the worst things that’s happened to politics — not just democratic politics, but politics everywhere — is that real mythologies are being hijacked by ideologues. Real mythology that is life-giving, potent, creative, and inspiring has been hijacked into serving very hacked, bad versions of the real mythologies. Nationalism is often one of them. Real, genuine, powerful collective identities have been hijacked by nationalistic sentiments into something horrific — in the same way that the beautiful vision of Christ has often been hijacked by organized religion into something much worse.

Daoism and Freedom

Jordan Schneider: Let’s take it to our beautiful vision of Laozi, who just kind of gets ignored — not really hijacked. Why did you take this one on?

Ken Liu: Laozi actually does often get hijacked, in ways that are pretty horrible. Daoism is one of those philosophies that often ends up twisted into serving something it’s not. People quote Laozi whenever they’ve been thwarted in their political ambitions, using him for comfort. Or they use Laozi to discourage resistance — to say all resistance is pointless and you should just go with the flow and do whatever the dominant trend is. These are utter misinterpretations, sometimes misunderstandings, sometimes deliberate twistings — in the same way Palantir is a deliberate twist on what Tolkien was trying to do.

Laozi is interesting to me because he casts a particularly strong shadow across East Asian philosophy in a way that’s rarely acknowledged. People often say Western culture is deeply individualistic while Sinitic culture is deeply collectivist. This is utter nonsense if you know anything about anything. Western culture has very strong communitarian and collectivist trends — arguably the entirety of Christianity is deeply oriented towards a collectivist vision of what human beings can do and be. You cannot deny that Christianity is a deep part of Western culture.

Similarly, you cannot deal with East Asian culture without addressing Daoism’s deep influence, especially through Zen Buddhism, which is basically a fusion of nativist Daoist philosophies with Buddhist ideas. Understanding the deeply individualistic and freedom-oriented nature of Daoism is extremely important to me.

One of the things I care about most in Daoism is its deep commitment to freedom as an ideal, in a way that’s rarely discussed. There is a deep wellspring of freedom — yearning for freedom, love for freedom, mythologizing of freedom — that is important to Daoism. We need to recover, rediscover, and reclaim these ideas. They’re important now, perhaps more than ever.

Jordan Schneider: Care to elaborate?

Ken Liu: One thing about Daoism that often gets ignored is this idea of freedom — freedom in a very deep sense. What does it mean to be one with the Dao, to follow the Dao? It actually means a kind of transcendence, particularly important in the modern age.

A lot of times we feel a lack of freedom not because of external constraints but because we fall into the trap of believing there are certain things we need or should do that are actually not things we need or should do at all.

Think about — those who are a little older — how important it was when you were a teenager to dress the right way, listen to the right music, express opinions your peers did. Looking back, all of that seems incredibly silly. Yet at the time, it seemed like the most important thing in the world. Those were constraints on your freedom, on your ability to be who you were. It’s only with hindsight and wisdom that you realize that.

The older you are, the less constrained you feel. The less you feel you have to keep toxic people in your life. The less you feel you have to play a role and be nice to people you don’t want to be nice to. The less you feel supposed to do things other people tell you to do.

The older you are, the closer you are to death, the freer you are. That’s paradoxical. We ought to think young people have the most freedom because they have the most choices, and old people the least because they have fewer choices. Yet psychologically, older people feel freer because they have less to give.

That’s one of those paradoxes about Daoism that’s important to think about. The way you are free is the degree to which you are not constrained. The more you feel free to live the way the universe wants us to live, the closer you are to the Dao.

That’s one of the insights I got reading the Dao De Jing in the aftermath of the pandemic. Until I started reading the text in depth and really reflecting on it, I hadn’t realized how much academic discussions of Daoism neglect how radical the philosophy really is. Daoism refuses to be tamed. It’s not one of those philosophies that can be easily reduced to larger frameworks of philosophical traditions. It’s incredibly skeptical, slippery, and self-deconstructing from the start.

But ultimately, Daoism’s highest ideal is freedom. In an age with so many constraints and impediments to freedom, that makes Daoism more relevant than ever.

Irene Zhang: There’s a natural follow-up: how would Daoism feel about surveillance and data collection as a constraint on freedom?

Ken Liu: I cannot imagine Laozi or Zhuangzi or any of the Daoist philosophers looking at the world we live in and viewing it as anything but the worst of the worst. We are literally surrounded by illusions and spend our time chasing after illusions.

Think about what you’re doing on social media. You’re getting your emotions riled up by words generated possibly by a bot or by someone paid to manipulate you. Your very anger, your very rage, is what these companies monetize. In the moment these companies claim to give you agentic AI, you have actually been turned into an agent of the companies themselves. The only reason agentic AI is being given to you — so you can give them your email and calendars and let the AI do things for you — is so you can give them more data they would otherwise never have access to. You are the agent being deployed to explore the world and give these AI companies more and more information.

We live in a world surrounded by illusions, pursuing illusions. We think we have wisdom when we have none. We are so obsessed with chasing illusions that we’ve utterly forgotten what the real pursuits are. I could say endless things about our politics and how we waste energy chasing illusions and fighting over illusions rather than going back to the few things that actually matter.

As Laozi put it, we are obsessed with our eyes and neglect our bellies. It is the belly that is the fundament, the belly that is the truth, the belly that allows us to feel the Dao and be with it. Our eyes are surrounded by illusions. We are constantly pulled away in this age of slop — not just AI-generated slop, but slop ideologies, hacked mythologies that lead us away from where we need to be.

I don’t think there’s a magical solution other than for individuals to go back and make the right choices. This is very difficult. For most of us, the folly of our youth is not realized until decades later. Maybe society as a whole has to go through this — a few years, hopefully not decades, of this kind of folly before we recover some measure of wisdom and realize how deeply we’ve gone down. Meanwhile, we can only do the best we can as individuals to make choices that allow us to focus on our bellies and not be deceived by our eyes.

The Inadequacy of Language

Jordan Schneider: Can you talk about how Laozi used language? Rereading it this year, I was struck by how different he feels from what ChatGPT and Claude give you.

Ken Liu: That’s a great point. As a premise, every single writer worth reading essentially invents his or her own language. I don’t think it makes sense to say Jane Austen wrote in some 18th-19th century English. No — Jane Austen wrote in her own language. She had to invent her own language to tell the story she wanted to tell. Same with Shakespeare. Same with Laozi.

Laozi took classical Chinese — a very interesting language in its grammatical structure and deep commitment to balanced structure in literary creations — and turned it into something unique. As a writer, he persisted in writing in a way that deconstructed binary opposition.

Binary opposition is a deep part of the human cognitive apparatus, a deep part of how we see the world. Something is either this or that, black or white. Laozi leaned into it. If you read him, he constantly writes things in a way that turns every word into its own opposite. He uses the same word to mean its exact opposite.

But the purpose isn’t to say everything’s just a big mush. He’s saying that in every binary opposition, there’s a third possibility — or innumerable third possibilities — that are neglected. Things are not either black or white, but other colors entirely. Things are not empty or filled, but potential, which is not the same as filled and not the same as empty.

Over and over, he makes statements that are “this or that,” “this and that,” “this is that.” He constantly uses the same verbal formulation to force you to see that language itself is inadequate to the expression of actual truth.

The way that can be stated is not the way. The path that can be laid out is not the path. This sounds like paradox or mystical nonsense until you apply it to your own experience.

A concrete example — as a writer, when I started out, I thought there would be some path to success. It took years and years of failing before I realized there is actually no path. There’s only the path left behind you after you’ve done what you’ve done, after you’ve lived. If you ask other people how they succeeded, they’ll tell you what happened to them — but that’s unique to them. You cannot apply it to yourself in any way that matters. You have to find your own path, your own flow through the universe, the path that will lead you to the sense of freedom you crave. Because writers, after all, crave freedom.

The path that can be stated, explained, and reduced to language is not the path that matters. This skepticism toward symbolic language runs deep throughout Daoism — the idea that whatever can be captured in words is not the actual thing itself. If you’re obsessed with words, you’re only obsessed with shadows of real wisdom. Language itself is the thing that’s left behind when real wisdom has moved on.

Zhuangzi has this beautiful parable — if you’re reading the words of sages, you are not truly engaged with the wisdom of sages, because the real wisdom has left. All you’re left with are the footprints of the mystical beast, the echo of the dragon’s sound, the husk of the real grain of wisdom. What you’re left with is the shell that will point you to the real thing. But to find the real thing, you have to look beyond language.

This skepticism of language exists throughout philosophical traditions. But to bring it back to your question, Jordan, this is exactly why large language models do not have wisdom. They may have intelligence, but they don’t have wisdom.

All that large language models can ever do is know the world to the extent they can know it through language. But everything that matters is beyond language. The truth about the universe is not capturable by language. Language is itself not adequate to capture reality. Language is a shadow cast by reality, a manifestation of human mental impressions left by reality. Reasoning from these traces and tracks, you’re always just reconstructing the beast, the dragon that left them behind. You’re not actually seeing the dragon itself.

Laozi urges you over and over again to seek the dragon itself, not merely contemplate its tracks and scales.

Jordan Schneider: So when’s the Zhuangzi translation coming out?

Ken Liu: Not working on one.

Jordan Schneider: Okay, maybe next time.

Irene Zhang: One last controversial question — why be a writer if words are about illusions?

Ken Liu: That’s actually a great question. Le Guin had a good answer — artists are about the truth, not facts. Artists go into the collective unconscious and retrieve the truth and try to present it to the world. But the truth is not something that can be captured by what we have.

Artists are people who try to paint what is essentially not paintable. Writers are artists who try to say with words what cannot be said in words — in the same way that Laozi tries to use words to tell you what the way is, even though he explicitly said the way itself cannot be captured by words. That’s how all of us have to deal with it.

Jordan Schneider: You write that Laozi wrote this way because he wanted to emphasize that language is ultimately a misleading guide — “We think that when something is nameable, it is real. But he writes, ’The name that can be spoken is not the name that endures.’ Conversely, we think what cannot be spoken about does not exist. But the most important knowledge is never reducible to words.”

So when we’re all living in our AI-generated virtual reality video games — brought to you by, hopefully not slaves living in the Golden Triangle — we should remember to pick up our Chinese philosophers every once in a while, as well as Ken’s new book, All That We See or Seem. Ken Liu, this was just the biggest treat in the world.