ChinaTalk

The blockade is squeezing Iran. So why does it keep being easier to press the war button?

WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.

Why the strikes continue when the blockade is doing the real work, and what running the war off two carriers costs the Navy.

Combatant commanders pitching the president their own wars, and whether Cuba is next.

The myth that a more lethal military would have won in Afghanistan.

The Joint Staff J-5’s firing, and what it says about a Pentagon that’s stopped planning.

Plus: join the Navy, see the world (mostly the Iranian coast), and letting AI pick the next war.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:20 Iran and the midterms

00:10:20 Is Cuba next?

00:24:37 Jensen, spies, and the J-5 firing

00:42:07 The Afghanistan myth
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In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead.

Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data at Accenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University of Maryland, where his counterinsurgency research showed that some of the most influential quantitative studies got the answer exactly backwards.

We discuss…

Why “inaction is in and of itself risky” — and how government risk-aversion compounds against less-cautious competitors

The “gun-armor race” in classified AI environments, where defense costs grow exponentially against linear offense

Entity resolution and predictive modeling for BIS export-control enforcement, and unwrapping the PLA’s shell-company maze

DOE’s Genesis Mission and Accenture Federal’s “backbone for scientific research”

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.
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ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world.

But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent?

To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire.

Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms.

We discuss…

Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all

How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers

Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes

A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring

US vs. China corruption

Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds
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Ukraine and Russia have rebuilt their armies around drones, deception, and long-range strike. What should the U.S. military take from it?

Michael Kofman joins WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark.

We discuss:

How much leverage the U.S. still has over the war, and why Europe can't replace America's role in NATO.

Why buying drones means nothing without drone platoons and companies to fight with them.

Why no one owns the night anymore, and why the U.S. military has no culture of decoys.

What counts as a lesson from Ukraine, and discussions on wet-gap crossings

Plus: getting rich as a military analyst, and how to tell real maneuver from sparkling mobility.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 U.S. leverage in Ukraine

00:30:02 Who will fight with the drones?

00:47:05 You don't own the night

01:04:32 Wet gap crossings

01:08:56 What to tell Congress
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Nick Brown is a co-founder of the Center for Technology and Statecraft (CTS), a new think tank spun out of IFP, that looks at long-term technology challenges and opportunities facing the US. Nick was a physics major, spent a while as a software engineer in and around government, and had an arc as an aspiring concert violinist. But we’re here to talk about what is in pole position for my paper of the year: his master class on what would happen if the US cut off DUV exports to China: DUV Immersion Lithography: The Foundation of US AI Compute Advantage. Co-hosting is ChinaTalk’s Aqib Zakaria.We discuss:

The case for banning DUV exports to China: Why lithography is the hardest part of the semiconductor manufacturing stack for China to replicate/indigenize and the strongest point of leverage the US and its allies have over China’s future AI compute.

The cannonball-sized hole in US export controls: China imported roughly 90 immersion lithography systems a year in 2024–25, nearly two-thirds of ASML’s immersion exports. If imports continue at this rate, China could approach or even reach parity with the US in AI chipmaking within a decade.

What the MATCH Act would do: How Congress could close this gap by restricting DUV immersion exports and servicing, and whether the US can get its allies on board.

Will Beijing retaliate? Why a gradual, long-term restriction may be less likely to provoke another rare-earths crisis

Buying time for AGI: How cutting off DUV imports could preserve America’s AI compute advantage into the 2030s, giving the US more time to navigate the technological, geopolitical, and societal implications of increasingly powerful AI.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:07:11 EUV vs. DUV

00:21:55 What the MATCH Act does

00:41:24 Would Beijing retaliate?

00:58:59 Japan, the Netherlands, and the light-source option
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