Day: July 21, 2026

The struggle between the US and China over who will lead in artificial intelligence is one of the defining competitions of our time. In the second part of our exclusive interview with a key player defining Washington’s policy on AI, Jacob Helberg, US undersecretary of state for economic affairs, discusses America’s efforts to rally its allies and cut dependence on China by securing alternative rare earth and critical mineral supply chains. By the time US President Donald Trump signed his military supply chain executive order on Monday, the need to…

The Solomon Islands, widely considered China’s closest security partner in the South Pacific, will soon sign a deal allowing the US Coast Guard to patrol its waters with local police aboard, Prime Minister Matthew Wale announced on a trip to Washington to strengthen bilateral ties. While the South Pacific nation has deepened its ties with China over the past few years, particularly following the signing of a secret security pact in 2022, Wale’s visit underscored efforts to strengthen maritime cooperation with the US. Wale, who took office in May pledging…

A Chinese researcher’s vision of serving spicy crawfish soup to astronauts on Mars became an unlikely symbol of Washington’s growing anxiety over China’s scientific ambitions at a US Senate hearing on Tuesday. Drew Endy, associate professor at Stanford University and director of bio-strategy and leadership at the Hoover Institution, said that last autumn he met a 20-year-old Chinese researcher from Shanghai at a scientific conference in Paris. Dressed in a large red crawfish costume, the young scientist described work on enzymes that could break down crawfish shells, allowing the material…

For years, Washington has fixated on the gap between US and Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) models as AI has increasingly taken centre stage in the strategic competition between the world’s two leading powers. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 established a clear early lead for the US, with the first batch of export controls on advanced semiconductor chips introduced in October that year, putting American tech ahead by three years or more, some experts estimated at the time. But years soon turned to months as China leaned into…

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Manila on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump signalled that Washington would confront Beijing over its alleged interference in the 2020 election but played down the prospect of retaliation. “We’re going to talk to them about it,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday, adding that the alleged interference “took place a long time ago” and that China might be “a little bit different today than it was then”. “They do things to us and we do things to…

Chinese researchers have called for more coordination among the country’s maritime authorities to counter an American strategy that has put pressure on Beijing across three critical waterways in the first island chain. By synchronising operations across flashpoints in the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, Washington’s “three seas linkage” strategy aimed to force Beijing into multi-front operations and strategic overextension, warned Yue Shengsong, an associate professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, in an article on Monday. The three waterways lie along the first island chain,…

Taiwan has cleared the way for overseas satellite internet providers such as Starlink to operate on the island – a move analysts said could strengthen military and civilian communications if conventional networks were disrupted in a conflict with mainland China. On Tuesday, the island’s legislature approved an amendment to the Telecommunications Management Act that would exempt satellite communications operators from foreign ownership caps and the requirement to have a Taiwanese chair. The exemptions – which are subject to security and public interest checks – are widely seen as removing the…