Problem

The BRICS summit concluded in New Delhi on Sunday, with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi having hosted the two-day gathering as chair. As with many meetings of the group of emerging economies, this edition brought together the leaders of China, India and Russia and featured plenty of anti-Western rhetoric. This was also Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s first visit to India for more than six years, in the latest example of Sino-Indian normalisation following a sustained period of tensions.

New Delhi’s normalisation with Beijing over the last year looks like more of a tactical de-escalation than a realignment. Nevertheless, India has over that time begun to agree more measures to provide greater access to Chinese investment in manufacturing and climate technology, both areas important for India’s development. This should act as a warning for Europeans. If India cannot source technology and capital from partners in Europe, it will seek to do so from China even while remaining suspicious of Beijing from a security point of view.

Solution

New Delhi continues to view Beijing as a threat and seeks deeper security and economic ties with Brussels, as well as with Washington, despite the difficulties President Donald Trump presents. Modi has thus worked to prevent the BRICS from tipping into a purely anti-Western vehicle, since this would run against India’s interests.

Europeans also see India as an increasingly vital partner, following the EU-India trade deal agreed earlier this year, as Europeans diversify geopolitically in the face of tense transatlantic relations. But India’s bilateral agreements with China, including on the sidelines of the BRICS meeting, show that the EU must not take the mutual benefits of closer ties for granted.

Ahead of Modi’s anticipated visit to Brussels later this year, the EU should accelerate its plans further to strengthen Europe-India ties. For instance, it should enhance the existing Trade and Technology Council to drive cooperation in areas like AI, while also moving forward cooperation on defence and security, and making faster progress on India’s plans to join the Horizon Europe funding programme for research and innovation.  

Context

The EU and India signed a landmark free-trade agreement in New Delhi in January, alongside a new security and defence partnership. Both sides aim to build on these with wider cooperation initiatives to encourage greater cooperation and investment in areas like semiconductors, AI and clean-tech supply chains.

India supported moves at the 2023 BRICS summit to agree on a major membership expansion. The group began as a much smaller coalition of just Brazil, Russia, India and China, and South Africa—hence “BRICS”—but has since grown to eleven members, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as a wider grouping of observer and partner countries that attend summits and align themselves loosely with the bloc’s agenda. The group is internally divided, and not just in terms of China and India. Both Iran and the UAE are members, for instance, despite longstanding regional tensions. This year’s summit produced a limited declaration including vague promises to enhance cooperation.

Source

New Chinese border control rules taking effect Tuesday could ban citizens from leaving the country if they engage in illegal activity that risks national or industrial security.

New Chinese border control rules taking effect Tuesday could ban citizens from leaving the country if they engage in illegal activity that risks national or industrial security.

The real threat to global stability and the well-being of citizens is not China’s strong economic performance but Washington’s colossal military spending, which drains the social sector and provokes global conflicts. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly campaigned against China’s trade surplus, including rallying 19 G20 members to disrupt China’s $1.2 trillion trade surplus […]

Earlier this year, an Iran-linked actor used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model to scrape and analyze data with the aim of helping target U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. A group in Yemen – very likely Iranian-backed Houthi militants – also used Claude to assist with work on guidance systems for ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

These are just some of the revelations about how adversaries and other malign actors have been using one of the premier pieces of AI software being developed in the United States that were contained in a new report Anthropic released late yesterday. The 154-page document also details instances where Claude was used directly and indirectly to support intelligence gathering and surveillance, cyberattacks, influence operations, and even worrisome biological research over the past eight months. In addition to Iran and Yemen, the human actors behind these activities were based in Russia, China, and a host of other countries.

Anthropic has shared details about what it calls the “misuse” of its models in the past, but describes the new report as its “most detailed” to date. The company has clearly been cataloging these case studies, and has assigned each one a control number. Though the entire contents of the report are cause for concern, the explicit attempt to use Claude to target American forces, as well as to develop new higher-end missiles and other military technology, are particular standouts and signs of what’s to come, as we will highlight below.

GTG-30005: Military reconnaissance

GTG-30005 is the case study dealing with the targeting of U.S. naval forces, and the summary is as follows:

“In another investigation, we identified and disrupted an Iran-nexus threat actor that used Claude to collect and analyze publicly accessible data to develop targeting recommendations against US naval forces in the region. The threat actor used Claude to compile targeting handbooks, through a Python pipeline the threat actor built with Claude’s assistance, to identify and track naval positions based on open-source information. The compiled material included a roster of US personnel scraped from captions on public military photographs; publicly accessible ship and aircraft transponder identifiers; commercial satellite-imagery query scripts; and an inventory of public websites that exposed US naval movements. The threat actor also directed Claude to compile vulnerability research on shipboard systems, cataloging known CVEs in maritime VSAT terminals, Cisco communications equipment, and industrial control products.”

“We banned the actor’s account, developed detections to reduce the risk of future misuse, and shared threat intelligence with government authorities to disrupt the threat.”

How exactly Anthropic defines the term “nexus” here is not immediately clear, and other entries in its new report also use “state-nexus” in addition to country-based variations. However, in this specific case, an addendum is added to the entry that explicitly says that the same account was separately tied to “domestic mass surveillance” software development work “for Iranian state systems,” clearly pointing to an actor directly linked to the regime in Tehran.

Whether or not any of the data collected and analysed here was directly used to subsequently carry out attacks on U.S. forces is unknown. However, there have been media reports just in recent weeks that Iran has been increasingly trying to strike American warships. Those same reports have raised questions about how the country has been prosecuting those operations given its limited capabilities and capacity to track maritime targets far from its shores. The possibility that Russia or China could be supplying targeting data has been put forward.

The use of AI technology by nation-state armed forces to develop target sets and engage them is already known to be growing globally. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been a pioneer in this regard, but the U.S. military, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and others are also known to be developing and fielding these capabilities.

U.S. military officials have also voiced increasing concern in recent years about the ability to track the movements and disposition of U.S. military assets and personnel using publicly available pictures and other data. There has been much talk, in turn, about how to balance transparency and operational security.

GTG-87001: Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell using Claude to develop guidance software

Anthropic’s new report details an instance where an individual in Yemen used Claude as part of missile guidance work, which is given the control number GTG-87001.

“We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.”

“The actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. For example, they used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, tuning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The actors managed several Claude instances at once, assigning each one a role, much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering team: the actors tasked one instance with writing the code, another with research, and a third with reviewing the code the first instance produced.”

“Our safeguards blocked many of their requests, but not all of them. The actors used a variety of tactics to evade our safeguards, including hiding their goals and the products the software was meant for, and they split their work across multiple sessions so no single session revealed their full intent.”

“These actors carried out a sustained effort to develop guided weapons, including using Claude to design guidance software. We do not have evidence the actors succeeded in fielding an operational device; but they did test-fire a guided rocket. This field test appears to have failed: within hours, the actors returned to Claude to work out why it failed.”

“We identified this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected weapons development. We banned accounts associated with the actors and shared threat information with public- and private-sector partners to mitigate risks posed by the actors. Nevertheless, we have evidence that the actors had already built an offline simulation toolkit that does not rely on Claude or other engineering computing environments such as MATLAB.”

As mentioned earlier, the report does not name the Houthis, but that group has historically been based primarily in the northern end of Yemen. It is also the only entity in the country known to have active missile development programs, which are conducted with critical support from Iran.

Whether this particular work directly resulted in any new capabilities is unknown. Anthropic notes that there looked to be at least one failed test launch before the accounts were banned, which would have occurred sometime after the beginning of this year, based on the stated cutoff dates for the report. By the end of 2025, the Houthis had already amassed a wide array of very real ballistic missiles, including types with at least claimed ranges of 2,000 kilometers (approximately 1,242 miles). The group also has a variety of cruise missiles and one-way attack drones that it has employed operationally.

Still, being able to leverage Claude could only have helped any domestic missile development efforts in Yemen, which might help reduce dependency on Iran, at least to a degree. Furthermore, developing functional hypersonic glide vehicles capable of prolonged stable flight has historically been notoriously difficult, even for entities with extensive relevant knowledge bases on an organizational level.

GTG-17001: Disrupting a China-based operation using Claude to draft a fire control specification and acquisition documents for undersea warfare

Use of Claude in foreign military endeavours goes beyond the Middle East, as evidenced by case study GTG-17001. This involved a Chinese actor conducting work related to a naval counter-torpedo defense system.

“We identified a China-based threat actor who used Claude to advance three parallel tracks of work on an anti-torpedo weapons system:”

• “First, the actor used Claude to draft a Chinese-language specification for an anti-torpedo fire control system (the core logic that aims and times an anti-torpedo weapon’s response). The document was written to win approval from a Chinese defense manufacturer, which would move the work on to technical certification and operational testing.”
• “Second, the actor used Claude to produce a Chinese-language technical proposal of more than 200 pages, accompanied by an executive briefing deck.”
• “Third, the actor used Claude to benchmark their own system against specific US anti-torpedo and anti-submarine programs based on publicly accessible information. They then generated a Chinese-language briefing on US Navy systems derived from open-source reporting.”

“The actor presented themselves as an original equipment manufacturer in the US defense sector. We assess the actor was associated with a Chinese defense industry manufacturer aiming to produce a weapons specification and acquisition proposal for the People’s Liberation Army Navy.”

“The actor used Claude to write the acquisition proposal, refining it over many drafts. After each draft, the actor instructed Claude to role-play a hostile expert reviewer to critique the proposal, then used that feedback to sharpen the next version. In parallel, the actor used Claude to build pieces of the anti-torpedo weapons system’s fire control software and a test matrix to validate them.”

“The operational lift the actor achieved was a function of using Claude to automate complex technical outputs. The actor leveraged the model to compress the development timelines for the certification registry, compliance documentation, and automated fire control logic. The actor also accelerated the traditional human review cycle by having Claude critique the acquisition proposal across multiple rounds of review while role-playing a persona.”

“We uncovered this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected weapons development. We cannot attribute the activity to a specific entity or actor. But we have banned the account for violating our Supported Regions Policy and our Usage Policy, which prohibits weapons design and development, and incorporated our investigative findings into our safeguards to mitigate the risk of future misuse.”

Anthropic’s report does not name the U.S. programs leveraged here, but does note the information in question was publicly available. Anti-torpedo systems for surface warships and submarines have been an area of significant interest for the U.S. Navy for years now. Those developments have also produced compact torpedo designs for use in other applications.

The PLAN’s interest in these same kinds of capabilities is not at all surprising. Underwater threats and countermeasures to them, broadly speaking, would play a central and vital role in any future conflict between the United States and China across the broad expanses of the Pacific.

GTG-27005: Disrupting a Russia-based operation using Claude to engineer an autonomous military drone swarm

Another case study, GTG-27005, details the use of Claude by Russian actors working on drone swarming technology.

“We identified likely freelance Russia-based threat actors who set out to build a full-stack autonomous first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drone swarm. The actors used Claude Code to write and test the code and save it directly into the actors’ own project files. In addition to Claude Code, the actors used a software-in-the-loop simulation stack and a rented graphics processing host for model training. They called the operation ‘DronDoc’ or ‘Serafim.'”

“The actors used Claude to build the core software system, including the drones’ shared swarm memory and fault-tolerant coordination logic (FTCL); an onboard small language model to govern attack, observe, and return-to-base behaviors; a terminal guidance software system to steer drones to their target (using the onboard camera) and issue the call to detonate; a control-link geolocation module to find opposing drone operators; a passive acoustic detection layer; and low-level logic for the drones’ programmable chips. The actors designed the platform for autonomous lethal engagement; the onboard model could select targets (including a ‘person’ target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop. The actors’ activity—including flashing the low-level firmware to live development boards, provisioning single-board computers, and wiring up a simulation environment over a mesh network—confirmed that they were using real hardware-in-loop testing within their sessions.”

Many were surprised yesterday by the news that a Russian fiber-optic FPV drone flew into Kramatorsk and attacked a car.

But there is nothing surprising here. The war of 2025 is already very different from the war of 2024.
From LBZ to Kram — 20 kilometers. Enemy FPVs can fly even… pic.twitter.com/hTfhJFPcxZ

— Richard Woodruff (@frontlinekit) October 6, 2025

“The actors trained a computer vision classifier on scraped Ukrainian combat footage, splitting the target classes into “enemy” and “friendly,” and allow-listing Russian systems. They also repeatedly used a fixed coordinate in Donetsk Oblast as the demonstration strike point, with front-line cities and corridors in Ukraine as the mission geography.”

“The actors created their accounts between late 2025 and early 2026 and started the operation in mid-May 2026. The actors circumvented our geographic access controls by routing traffic through commercial virtual private servers.”

“We assess the actors were a small, specialized freelance team doing a mix of civilian and military work, not a Russian state entity. We identified nine accounts associated with this group; eight were used only for ordinary freelance work, not weapons-related software development. Based on our investigation, we assess the actors had ties to a regional university with a federal research center associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences. The actors claimed to have received funding from Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, National Technology Initiative, and Ministry of Defence, though we cannot verify those claims. We identified this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected weapons development, we banned accounts associated with the actors, and have incorporated our investigative findings into safeguards to reduce the risk of future misuse.”

Anthropic’s report included a table, reproduced below, detailing different types of drones and other capabilities that were fed into the model as part of this work.

Also, while Anthropic said it could not confirm any direct ties in this instance to the Russian government, the work described here is fully in line with capabilities that have already been demonstrated to varying degrees in Ukraine in the past few years. TWZ has been very closely tracking developments on both sides of the conflict when it comes to new automated targeting and swarming capabilities for shorter- and longer-ranged kamikaze drones. In 2024, we also published a detailed feature outlining a coming revolution in drone warfare, signs of which were already emerging then, thanks to AI and the ever-lowering barrier to entry for leveraging that technology.

GTG-17002: Disrupting a China-based operation using Claude to build targeting software for electronic warfare and air defense suppression

The last case study in the Conventional Weapons section of Anthropic’s new report, GTG-17002, covers electronic warfare-related work by a Chinese actor, with a particular focus on potential air defense targets in Taiwan.

“We identified a China-based actor who used Claude’s chat, coding, and agentic work tools to design, build, and iterate on a Chinese-language suite of about 16 modules for electronic warfare, using the electromagnetic spectrum to detect, jam, or deceive an opponent’s radar and communications, and for suppressing an opponent’s air defenses.”

“The actor used Claude to build the software system, from the underlying logic to the user interface, and iterated through 12 versions. This included implementing and optimizing the system’s radar detection and jamming physics, generating a vulnerability analysis module, and drafting Chinese-language targeting instructions. The software suite the actor built analyzed an opponent’s radars, surface-to-air missile sites, command posts, and communications nodes, then computed their detection coverage, assessed the effectiveness of jamming, ranked targets by value and vulnerability, including which to suppress first, and determined how best to assign jammer sorties to targets across multi-day campaigns. The suite also ranked which of an opponent’s assets to suppress first, and modeled specific engagement envelopes, including those of Patriot and THAAD-class [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] systems.”

“Mid-project, we observed the actor change the simulation’s default scenario to 12 targets in Taiwan. The targets included a command bunker in Taiwan, an early warning radar site, Patriot and Tien Kung [surface-to-air missile] batteries, major air bases, and a regional combatant command headquarters.”

“The actor also ran a self-hosted model on an internal network alongside Claude and connected the software suite to this model through a tool-use integration.”

“Based on our investigation, we assess the actor is a China-based defense and military-industrial researcher. Account-level metadata and content flagged by our safeguards indicated the actor was linked to PRC research institutions, including the PLA Academy of Military Sciences. We detected this activity as part of our internal investigations into suspected weapons development, we banned accounts linked to the actor, and have incorporated our investigative findings into our safeguards to reduce the risk of future misuse.”

An accompanying table, seen below, mentions several specific types of U.S.-made air defense radars, as well as the Link-16 datalink network, as having come up in the course of this work. Electronic warfare variants of the Chinese Y-8 and Y-9 aircraft, as well as the J-16D electronic warfare jet, and what appears to be a reference to the Golden Eagle drone helicopter, are also mentioned.

The suppression of enemy air defenses is an essential part of any modern air campaign, whether conducted independently or as a part of a larger operation. This would be no less critical in any military intervention against Taiwan from the mainland, or any other larger-scale conflict the PLA might find itself in.

Guardrails and ethics

Beyond the details in any of the specific case studies, Anthropic’s new report underscores growing broader concerns about guardrails for the use of AI and general ethics surrounding the technology. As noted in the instances above, Anthropic has also implemented various safeguards to try to block access to Claude from certain regions and/or to prevent the model from conducting certain types of work. At the same time, what the company has now shared makes clear that those protections can still be circumvented to a significant degree, at least for now.

For its part, Anthropic has been publicly supportive of transparency laws and regulation, at least within the United States. The company also notably made tweaks to certain Claude models earlier this year to address U.S. government cybersecurity concerns.

Starting in December 2025, Anthropic has also been very publicly embroiled in a dispute with the Pentagon over the potential use of Claude to support mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapon systems. This subsequently led to the company being designated a supply chain risk, and limitations being imposed on the use of that model within the U.S. military and elsewhere across the U.S. government. Anthropic is continuing to fight that action in court. However, just yesterday, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said the U.S. military had scaled back the use of Anthropic’s products in support of classified work by 90 percent.

Anthropic is still a designated Supply Chain Risk at @DeptofWar and for the Defense Industrial Base. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

— Under Secretary of War Emil Michael (@USWREMichael) September 3, 2026

The concerns about ‘misuse’ outlined in Anthropic’s new report apply, in general terms, to publicly accessible models being developed by other companies, too. There have already been publicly disclosed instances of AI agents themselves engaging in hacking and other malign behavior in order to complete assigned tasks, raising additional questions about security and public safety, not to mention ethics.

TWZ has noted in the past that America’s adversaries are likely to be less worried about ethics, in general, when it comes to AI. Anthropic’s new report also shows there are few bounds to what state-aligned or even non-state actors might seek to use this technology for, including the development of potential weapons of mass destruction.

At the same time, AI models like Claude are not going away, and developments continue to advance at an ever-quickening pace, opening the door to further proliferation. Developments are rapidly intermingling globally, with companies in China notably leveraging models created in the U.S. to further their own work, which is then released publicly. The technology will increasingly become more integrated and critical to most aspects of military operations and weapons development, alongside its commercial and civilian applications. It is just as much a superweapon as anything else, and the country with the more capable models, and the willingness to deploy them, will have a major edge in future conflicts.

With all this in mind, it seems very plausible, if not probable, that the case studies described in Anthropic’s new report are just the tip of an approaching iceberg that will need a concerted effort to tackle.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Adversaries Using Claude AI To Target Americans And Develop Missiles Is A Sign Of What’s To Come appeared first on TWZ.

The strategic choice facing India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other large developing economies does not just boil down to choosing between BRICS and the West. These countries continue to follow a multi-vector policy, aiming to simultaneously reap the benefits of cooperation with BRICS, the G7, the EU, and regional institutions. However, it is important […]

Around 1590 BCE — more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born — a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasn’t a local crop, and it didn’t belong to any plant known elsewhere […]

Hacia el año 1590 a.C., más de ochocientos años antes de que Roma existiera siquiera como aldea y con Tutankamón todavía sin nacer, un puñado de personas en el sureste de Polonia empezó a comer un cereal que no era suyo. No procedía de los campos que sus vecinos llevaban generaciones cultivando ni de ninguna […]

In 2019, workers doing routine ecological restoration at a quarry in China’s Yunnan province hit something under the soil: bones and stone tools. Nobody realized at the time that this unassuming hole — known as Bianfu Cave, “bat cave,” after its former residents — would turn out to hold the largest collection of Denisovan remains […]

En 2019, un grupo de operarios que trabajaba en la restauración ecológica de una cantera en la provincia china de Yunnan tropezó con huesos y herramientas de piedra enterrados bajo la tierra. Nadie sospechaba entonces que aquel agujero, conocido como Cueva Bianfu (literalmente, «cueva de los murciélagos», por los animales que la habitaban), acabaría convirtiéndose […]

The EU welcomes Cambodia’s decision to join the Multi-party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) for WTO members, contributing to efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system. 

With Cambodia’s participation, the MPIA now covers 62 World Trade Organization (WTO) members and 60.4% of world trade.  

The MPIA brings together participants from all continents and at different levels of development, united by a shared commitment to upholding the rules-based trading system. 

The MPIA preserves the right to appeal in trade disputes among participating WTO members, at a time when the WTO’s Appellate Body remains non-functioning. It helps ensure that disputes can continue to be resolved in an orderly and binding manner, avoiding appeals 'into the void'. 

“I welcome Cambodia to the MPIA. The arrangement plays an important role in upholding the rules-based trading system. Each new participant helps reinforce the predictability, stability and credibility of global trade rules. I encourage other WTO members to join the MPIA,” said EU Trade and Economic Security Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. 

Background 

The MPIA was established in 2020 and has proven its effectiveness in many WTO disputes.  

Under the MPIA, appeals are heard by arbitrators randomly selected from a pool of 10 standing appeal arbitrators set up by the participating WTO members. These arbitrators are persons of recognised authority, with demonstrated expertise in law, international trade and WTO agreements.  

The MPIA is open to all WTO members as a practical tool for appeal arbitration, pending the restoration of a reformed and fully functioning WTO dispute settlement system. 

As of 1 June 2025, the MPIA has an updated pool of appeal arbitrators to ensure that appeals continue to be heard by independent arbitrators of the highest calibre. 

At the WTO Ministerial Conference that took place earlier this year, MPIA ministers stressed the importance of the MPIA for the security and predictability of the multilateral trading system.  

The current MPIA participants are Australia, Barbados, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the European Union (and its Member States), Guatemala, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, Macao (China), Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Vietnam.

More information

MC14: Supporting the rules-based multilateral trading system: the role of the MPIA

For much of the 20th century, the US represented not just a place on the map. It was also a point in time. When Western Europeans looked at images of America after the second world war—depictions of Hollywood’s glamour, American cars and newfangled labour-saving devices—they thought they were looking into the future.

The American Dream had an especially irresistible draw for Eastern Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, and for tens of millions of Chinese during the opening and reform era that began after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. China’s great economic reinvention was inspired, in part, by Deng Xiaoping’s awe at American modernity, which he witnessed firsthand during an official visit in 1979.

But fast-forward to 2026, and the positions have been reversed. For most people in most countries, the future can now be seen in China. Just as Hollywood once showed the world what modern life looked like, China is showing African, Latin American and even American young people what an economy built on green energy, mobile payments and other services, and advanced robotics looks like. For Cobus van Staden of the China-Global South Project, the West is “increasingly being framed as backward-looking [and] associated with the past”, a phenomenon presumably accelerated by Trumpism, with its rejection of renewable energy, diversity and its social conservatism.

In the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences

In many parts of the West, disillusionment has given rise to Chinamaxxing on social media, with American and European influencers performatively embracing Chinese mannerisms and aesthetics. And in the global south, young people aren’t just imitating Chinese practices like drinking hot water or trying out tai chi. They are watching as China reshapes their daily experiences.

This signals a genuine historical rupture. For generations, most countries defined themselves in relation to the West. Some sought (or were convinced) to emulate Western development models like the Washington Consensus, and many were keen to acquire Western technology and aid, or simply to get the West’s approval. Other countries did push back against the West’s influence and attack Western hypocrisy, but their counter-models were themselves defined by opposition to the West.

Either way, West-centrism was the prism through which geopolitics was conducted and interpreted. When countries in the Sahel invited Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries to help them deal with insurgencies, it was seen as a reaction against France and its traditional role in the region. When Angola invited Sinopec to exploit its oil fields, it was seen as a snub to Portugal and Britain. And then there are the many challenges to US hegemony in the Middle East, Latin America and South-East Asia. Around the world, memories of bloody Western interventions or financial crises still linger.

Yet younger generations around the world are not even pro- or anti-Western so much as they are post-Western. For them, China, not the US, is at the centre of their conceptual universe and envisaged future.

What happened? One of the big differences between countries in the global south and the global north is their demographic profile. In the US and Europe, the median age is 40–50, compared to 19 in Nigeria, and 29 in South Africa, India and Lebanon. That means some 70% of Nigerians aren’t even old enough to have registered the 2003 US invasion of Iraq or the 2008 global financial crisis. As Cobus points out, young West Africans “never knew anything more than the US as we know it now”. The era of Donald Trump encompasses their entire political memory, and they presumably are not very impressed.

This shift in perceptions is not just an African story, of course. In Vietnam, which has long had a fraught relationship with China, young people are becoming less reflexively Sinophobic than their elders. Chelsea Nguyen, a researcher at the London School of Economics, credits the covid-19 pandemic for catalysing this change. The West’s perceived mishandling of the pandemic undermined its status as a model worthy of emulation. Many Vietnamese turned to exploring their own history and that of their Asian neighbours, including China. As in much of Africa, growing exposure to China’s rapid technological progress and Chinese consumer goods transformed the country’s global brand.

Meanwhile, Loubna El Amine, a China scholar at King’s College London, notes that in regions riven by instability—such as the Middle East, where the US itself is a big part of the problem— “a lot of the attraction of China is its absence rather than presence”. The latest Arab Opinion Index bears this out, showing that 77% of respondents view US policies as a threat to the region’s security and stability, compared with just 25% for China—and that was well before Trump launched his catastrophic war against Iran. And, of course, China carries none of the colonial baggage that complicates European interventions (or even peacebuilding efforts) in the region.

Still, China has been known to be aggressive in pursuing its economic agenda in the developing world, whether through predatory loans, acquiring critical national infrastructure or deliberately exporting its domestic overcapacity. Such behaviour ruffles feathers as much in Thailand, Mexico and Nigeria as it does in the US and Europe. Moreover, young people’s widespread distrust of their governments can easily bleed into unhappiness with China when political leaders are seen to be giving it undue privileges.

Since the pivot to China as an exemplar of modernity is in many ways pragmatic and non-ideological, its hold on the popular imagination is still tenuous. Lots of leaders in the West want to compete with China for “soft power”. But the key is not to counter Chinese “propaganda” or improve Western PR. The winners in the battle for hearts and minds will be those who offer real solutions to people’s problems and create more opportunities for prosperity than are currently available.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate on August 18th 2026

Source

Un equipo de arqueólogos y antropólogos ha documentado el que podría ser el primer caso arqueológico de amputación nasal punitiva en la historia de China. Los restos de una mujer, datados entre 1298 y 1404 d.C., fueron encontrados en el cementerio de Sanzhiyuan, en la ciudad de Sanmenxia (provincia de Henan), con claros signos de […]

Chinese legal texts have described nasal amputation as a criminal punishment since the Bronze Age. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty even carved the concept into a single character: a knife next to a nose. For all that documentation, though, no archaeologist had ever found a skeleton that showed it happening — until now. […]

Two of the most prominent belligerents of World War II ended up clashing despite having initially fought on the same side, and it wasn’t until 1951, six years after the end of the conflict, that they signed an unusual peace. One of them was Italy, obviously, where the government that succeeded Mussolini signed an armistice […]

Dos de los beligerantes más destacados de la Segunda Guerra Mundial terminaron enfrentándose pese a haber militado en el mismo bando inicialmente y no fue hasta 1951, seis años después del fin de la contienda, que firmaron una insólita paz. Uno de ellos era Italia, obviamente, donde el gobierno que sucedió a Mussolini firmó un […]

Der russische Außenminister Lawrow hat auf dem Östlichen Wirtschaftsforum eine Grundsatzrede über die Positionen der russischen Außenpolitik und über Russlands Antwort auf die aktuellen Eskalationsschritte der Bundesregierung gehalten. Ich übersetze hier die Zusammenfassung der Rede, die die TASS veröffentlicht hat. Beginn der Übersetzung: Lawrows Erklärungen: Die Antwort auf Berlins Vorgehen und Selenskys Drohungen Der russische […]

Chris Mathers, a former RCMP officer who runs a private crime and risk consulting firm, said it's common practice for Chinese state security to try to recruit people online.

The conscripts are part of the first group recruited under Denmark's expanded military service program.

The post Denmark deploys conscripts to Greenland, fueling fresh Arctic tensions appeared first on BOL News.

Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has used the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek and a wide-ranging interview with China’s Xinhua news agency to set out a closely connected vision of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy — combining deeper economic and technological cooperation with China with a broader commitment to multilateralism, Eurasian connectivity and reform of global institutions.

Speaking as leaders gathered in Bishkek for the 26th meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and its SCO Plus format, Tokayev presented Kazakhstan as both a committed regional partner and an increasingly active “middle power” seeking to bridge geopolitical divisions.

His summit remarks were reinforced by an exclusive written interview with Xinhua, published on 1 September, in which the Kazakh leader described relations with China as being at an “unprecedentedly high level” and said Astana intended to continue strengthening what the two countries describe as an “eternal comprehensive strategic partnership”.

Taken together, the two interventions offer a clear picture of Kazakhstan’s current diplomatic strategy: maintain close relations with its major neighbours, promote trade routes linking Asia with Europe, embrace technological cooperation and at the same time argue for international relations based on dialogue rather than confrontation.

China partnership moves beyond traditional trade

In his Xinhua interview, Tokayev stressed that Kazakhstan-China relations now extend well beyond traditional energy and commodity ties.

Cooperation encompasses trade, investment, transport, industrial production, agriculture, digitalisation, healthcare, science, education and culture, he said. China is now Kazakhstan’s largest foreign trading partner, while transport and logistics have assumed an increasingly strategic role.

That emphasis is particularly significant for Europe.

Kazakhstan occupies a central geographical position between China and European markets, and Tokayev argued that the country was working with China to transform that location into a modern Eurasian transport and logistics network.

He specifically highlighted the Belt and Road Initiative, new railway construction, dry ports, logistics terminals and modernisation of border infrastructure.

Central to this strategy is the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, commonly known as the Middle Corridor, which links China with Europe through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and onward towards European markets.

Tokayev described making the route more competitive as a shared priority, pointing to “smart customs”, digital documentation, interconnected information systems and automated border procedures as necessary elements in reducing transit times.

That message closely reflected his position at the SCO summit, where Kazakhstan again offered to help develop transport initiatives throughout the organisation and called attention to the potential integration of the Belt and Road Initiative, Middle Corridor, North-South Corridor and routes connecting Central and South Asia.

For the European Union, which has increasingly sought alternative and resilient connections with Central Asia and China, the development of the Middle Corridor gives Kazakhstan an importance that extends considerably beyond the size of its domestic economy.

Artificial intelligence becomes a new pillar

Tokayev also placed technology and artificial intelligence near the centre of the emerging Kazakhstan-China relationship.

China's position in AI, robotics, digital technology, new energy and advanced manufacturing complements Kazakhstan's own ambition to accelerate its digital transformation, he argued.

Kazakhstan has declared 2026 its Year of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, and Tokayev referred to meetings with leading Chinese technology companies during his recent participation in the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

He said there was mutual interest in projects involving the digital economy, intelligent manufacturing, e-commerce, research and skills development.

The subject moved seamlessly from the bilateral interview into Tokayev's multilateral message in Bishkek.

Addressing the SCO Plus meeting, he warned that global stability increasingly depends upon the responsible development of artificial intelligence and called for universal rules capable of encouraging innovation while preventing uncontrolled use and narrowing the digital divide.

Kazakhstan is also establishing an Asia-Pacific digital solutions centre in Almaty under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, which Tokayev said should help developing countries gain access to technological expertise.

In his Xinhua interview he went further, arguing that AI should ultimately serve humanity as a whole and that countries should have equitable access to technology, knowledge and computing resources. Kazakhstan was among the founding participants this year in a new international AI cooperation initiative launched in Shanghai.

The ‘Shanghai spirit’ as an alternative to bloc politics

Underlying both the interview and Tokayev's summit speech was a wider political argument.

The Kazakh president portrayed the SCO not simply as an economic or security grouping but as a potential model for cooperation between states with different political systems and interests.

In Bishkek, he said the organisation's principles of equality and consensus had become a “gold standard” for multilateral cooperation. He proposed that core SCO principles should ultimately be reflected in a UN General Assembly resolution linked to the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace.

The formulation is consistent with Kazakhstan's long-standing attempt to avoid being drawn exclusively into competing geopolitical camps.

Tokayev reiterated that Kazakhstan would maintain what he described as a balanced, constructive and peaceful foreign policy, while arguing that the international order should move away from the “cult of force and confrontation” towards collective responsibility and long-term cooperation.

In his interview with Xinhua, he similarly said Kazakhstan and China shared support for the central role of the United Nations, international law, mediation, multilateralism and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

A stronger voice for middle powers

One of the more significant elements of Tokayev's Bishkek intervention was his argument that responsible middle powers should have greater influence within global governance.

With tensions between major powers putting pressure on existing international institutions, Tokayev suggested countries such as Kazakhstan could facilitate dialogue between competing centres of power and help develop collective solutions.

“Kazakhstan is ready to actively contribute to this process,” he told the summit.

At the same time, he resisted suggestions that shortcomings within the United Nations justified weakening the organisation.

Despite criticism of the UN, Tokayev said there was no viable alternative to it. Kazakhstan's position, he argued, was that the UN should remain at the centre of the international system and that its Charter should continue to provide the universal foundation of international law.

The President called for closer interaction between the UN and regional organisations such as the SCO, stronger preventive diplomacy and greater emphasis on peaceful settlement of disputes.

Water security joins the global agenda

Tokayev also used the summit to promote another issue of growing importance to Central Asia: water.

Climate pressures, population growth and competing demands on shared water resources make the issue increasingly important to Kazakhstan and neighbouring states.

Tokayev proposed creating an International Water Organisation under UN auspices, arguing that although numerous UN bodies deal with water, no universal intergovernmental organisation currently has a comprehensive mandate.

He also proposed an SCO Water Problems Analysis Centre as a regional complement to such a global organisation.

The proposal fits into Kazakhstan's broader effort to move environmental and resource-security questions higher up the international agenda.

A Eurasian crossroads

Perhaps the strongest thread connecting Tokayev's interview with his SCO appearance is Kazakhstan's determination to turn geography into diplomatic and economic influence.

Astana is simultaneously strengthening its relationship with Beijing, maintaining important relationships with Russia and other neighbours, developing transport corridors towards Europe, expanding cooperation with Western partners and presenting itself as an advocate of multilateral diplomacy.

Tokayev's description of relations with China therefore carries a wider meaning.

He quoted a Kazakh proverb in the Xinhua interview: “Those travelling the same road share a common destiny.”

Yet the message emerging from Bishkek suggests Kazakhstan sees that road not as one running exclusively eastwards towards China, but as part of a much larger network connecting East and West.

As competition between the world's major powers becomes more pronounced, Kazakhstan is attempting to position itself at the centre of those connections — geographically through trade and transport corridors, technologically through digital cooperation, and diplomatically through its advocacy of multilateralism.

For Europe, that makes developments in Kazakhstan-China relations increasingly relevant. The more successfully Kazakhstan develops the Middle Corridor and other east-west transport links, the more the country becomes not simply a Central Asian partner but a strategic gateway connecting European and Asian economies.

And that, ultimately, appears to be the common theme running through Tokayev's words both to Xinhua and to the leaders assembled at the SCO summit: Kazakhstan believes its future influence will come not from choosing between competing blocs, but from connecting them.