Into the Gulf

Recently: Why is the Arctic so important? Mia Bennett’s & Klaus Dodds’s new book, Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic.

Today: For weeks, Trump threatened to strike Iran if it killed protesters. It killed thousands. Now he’s demanding a nuclear deal—and isn’t mentioning the protests.

+ For members: Who’s got the best AI? Selina Xu on America’s intelligence explosion—and China’s “dark factories.”

& New music from Makthaverskan ...

‘A massive Armada’

For weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened military action against Iran over its crackdown on nationwide protests. He drew a red line: If Iran “violently kills” demonstrators or executes them en masse, he would strike. Iran’s security forces crushed the protests—activists say more than 6,300 people died—but the mass executions didn’t come. Trump said Iran gave its assurances. On Wednesday, with a carrier strike group in Middle Eastern waters, the American president issued a different ultimatum. “Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal—NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS,” he wrote—warning that the next attack would be “far worse” than the June strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. He didn’t mention the protesters.

But what may be even more notable in the circumstances: He moved from a specific threat to an open-ended one—and didn’t explain why. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified on Wednesday that Iran is “probably weaker than it has ever been.” The Iranian rial hit a record low on Thursday. The economic collapse that drove Iranians into the streets hasn’t eased. And yet Washington hasn’t actually asked for negotiations. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said there’s been no contact from the U.S. Last June, when Trump struck Iranian nuclear sites, it followed months of failed back-channel talks. This time, he’s skipped straight to the ultimatum—and the ultimatum has no threshold. His red line on protests was specific: mass executions. Here, it’s just, “Time is running out.”

Meanwhile

• Brussels crosses a Rubicon. European Union foreign ministers designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization on Thursday—a historic move that puts the IRGC on par with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. France, which blocked the designation for years over fears for French detainees, dropped its objections after the protest crackdown. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called it “a decisive step.” The bloc also sanctioned 15 Iranian officials, including Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni.
• Body cameras and warrants. In the U.S., Senate Democrats blocked a US$1.2 trillion spending package on Thursday, refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security without reforms that include body cams on agents and judicial warrants for arrests. The 45-55 vote came five days after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis intensive-care nurse and U.S. citizen—the second such death in Minnesota this month. Negotiations continue on separating DHS from the remaining five bills. Funding expires at midnight on Friday.
• The parade to Beijing. The U.K.’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer met China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday. Without naming the United States, Xi warned that major powers must follow international law “or the world will regress into a jungle.” Starmer is the first British leader to visit Beijing in eight years—and the fourth Western leader this month, following Canada’s Mark Carney, Ireland’s Micheál Martin, and Finland’s Petteri Orpo.
• Beijing’s long arm. China executed eleven members of the Ming family crime syndicate on Thursday for running scam operations in Burma worth more than US$1 billion and killing fourteen Chinese citizens. The group operated compounds in Burma’s border regions where workers—many trafficked—conducted online fraud targeting victims worldwide. The Ming family was one of northern Burma’s “four families,” crime syndicates with ties to militias tied to the ruling military junta.
• The fall continues. A South Korean court sentenced former first lady Kim Keon Hee to twenty months in prison on Wednesday for accepting bribes from the Unification Church. The court acquitted her of stock-manipulation charges. Kim’s husband, the ousted President Yoon Suk Yeol, awaits a verdict next month on rebellion charges stemming from his brief martial-law declaration in December 2024—charges that could carry life imprisonment or possibly the death penalty.

For members

The jagged frontier

Who’s got the best AI? Selina Xu on America’s intelligence explosion—and China’s “dark factories.”

Last year, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced the creation of the Stargate Project, he called it "the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history." The group behind Stargate—OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and the United Arab Emirates’ government-owned investment firm MGX—has pledged some US$500 billion. How much they’ll actually invest may still be unclear, but a pledge like that already means ambition and scale.

According to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025, corporate AI investment soared to $252.3 billion in 2024, with private investment surging by 44.5 percent.

Last summer, the White House released a report entitled “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan”—the race being “to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence.” Which is to say, the stakes couldn’t be higher: “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.”

And there’s tough competition. A year ago, China’s DeepSeek shocked American markets when it released a chatbot that matched American models at a fraction of their cost.

So who’s winning this race now?

Selina Xu is a writer and researcher based in New York, focusing on China and emerging technologies. Xu says the question assumes something: that the two countries are trying to do the same thing with AI. And largely, they’re not.

There is some overlap—DeepSeek’s chatbot competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and other leading chatbots—but mainly, the Chinese government isn’t trying to push the frontiers of intelligence. It’s trying to integrate AI throughout the economy to boost productivity. The Chinese economy has struggled in recent years—not least its real estate market—so Beijing is looking for new growth drivers, and it’s betting on AI. Already, the Chinese are building factories that can run without workers.

Meanwhile, American companies have bet big on having the best AI software. The idea is that once the program gets good enough, it’ll reach a stage where it can improve itself, leading to massive intelligence gains—and ultimately, massive financial gains for whichever company and country controls it …

New music

‘Louie’

Over to Sweden for another track from a record Gothenburg’s post-punk Makthaverskan is releasing in April 2026. It’s still a long wait, but it’s also still great to hear new music from the band as they drift into a dream-pop sound—though with a certain feral tone returning in Maja Milner’s voice as the song crescendos.