WORLD ROUNDUPHow Ukraine Has Turned the Tide | The Pentagon's AI Edge Is Being Distilled Away | Cuba Isn’t a National Security Threat. Here’s Why., and more

The Pentagon’s AI Edge Is Being Distilled Away  (Sebastian Elbaum, War on the Rocks)
The U.S. has spent billions building frontier AI models. Chinese labs have spent just thousands learning from them.

How Ukraine Has Turned the Tide  (Seth Stodder, Foreign Policy)
Resilience, technology, and European support have put Russia on the back foot.

How to Counter China’s Fishing Fleet in the Western Hemisphere  (Rob Pierce, National Interest)
The US Coast Guard should work with South American partners to end China’s illegal and environmentally harmful fishing practices.

Cuba Isn’t a National Security Threat. Here’s Why.  (Matthew Reisener, National Interest)
The risks of a Cuban regime-change operation far exceed the potential benefits.

Why Congress and Senior Officials Must Deny Trump a ‘Nuclear Escape’ in Iran  (Paul Slovic, Rose McDermott, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The most frightening possibility in the ongoing Iran war is not simply that the United States could deepen its involvement. It is that a US president whose own decisions helped create the crisis could come to see nuclear escalation as the clearest path out of humiliation, stalemate, and existential loss.
That risk should not be dismissed as fanciful.

What Is ‘Strategic Autonomy’ – and Why Is Everyone Suddenly Reaching for It?  (Andrew Latham, The Conversation)
Strategic autonomy is having a moment.
European leaders are invoking it to justify a historic defense buildup; India’s foreign ministry has made it the organizing principle of a policy that buys Russian oil while courting American investment; and Canada is treating it as a “core objective.”
The phrase is everywhere in international relations circles, but the explanation is almost nowhere. So what does strategic autonomy actually mean? And why are analysts reaching for it now?

China’s Global ‘Concierge Services’ to Strengthen Fellow Authoritarians  (Christopher Walker, Just Security)
The wars in Ukraine and Iran have laid bare a stark reality: some of the world’s most autocratic regimes are bound together by a far-reaching international mutual support structure. This loose but potent network operates not only across these conflicts, but well beyond them.

Is Time on China’s Side? Beijing’s Taiwan Calculus and the Balance of Power  (Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Amanda Hsiao, and Ryan Evans, War on the Rocks)
Are we facing a strategic window of opportunity for Beijing to make a move on Taiwan because of a distracted United States?

Forged in a Knife Fight: China’s Brutal Domestic AI Competition  (David Lin, War on the Rocks)
While Washington is still reading Beijing’s AI 2017 plan, the firms that survived China’s domestic knife fight are now shaping the foundation layer of global AI development.