ChinaTalk

Five months into the Iran campaign, the US has two carrier strike groups parked in the Arabian Sea, a blockade that may take months to bite, and a daisy chain of tankers stretching thousands of miles because there is no longer any fuel or food to buy inside the Gulf. Now the Houthis have entered the chat and declared their own blockade of the Bab el-Mandeb.

Just the OG crew with Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer, Justin Mc a former special operations officer who works on defense technology, and Tony Stark.

We discuss…

What Trump is doing in Iran, why the Navy is short-cycling ships out of maintenance and what happened the last time the fleet ran this hot, from McCain and Fitzgerald to the Truman’s two collisions in one deployment

Why a ground campaign in Iran is a fantasy, from the Marsh Arabs to the Alborz range to the Baluch salt flats, and what Shia militias in Iraq would do to the logistics tail

The nuclear-powered cargo ship renaissance and why circumnavigating Africa at 30 knots suddenly pencils out

Whether Congress should get an AI kill switch, why DHS is the wrong home for it, and what happens when the boy who cried wolf is finally right

Ukraine’s civ-mil drama

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The whole ChinaTalk gang gets together to discuss a big week in China AI with the release of Kimi K3 and Xi talking open source and safety at WAIC. We also discuss our latest article exploring the three potential scenarios for Chinese governance when they really get their Mythos moment (you can read here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/chinas-mythos-moment-366).

song:
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What do actual historians think about the Thucydides Trap? Does our 'low T' discourse all just come back to the movie 300? How the did ancient Greeks fight and why does Homer still keep us coming back 2700 years later?

To discuss we have on the excellent Roel Konijnendijk, professor at Oxford and author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History.

Tony Stark and Justin McIntosh join.

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Claude Mythos scrambled American AI policy, leaving us with what Dean Ball calls a de facto involuntary licensing regime from the administration that promised us the opposite. Zhipu's cofounder says China will have a Mythos-class model before the end of the year; IAPS says February 2027. Either way, Beijing is about to face down the same question, but unlike Washington, it already has a form to fill out.

Guests: Kevin Xu of Interconnected. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

We discuss…

Why China's answer to Mythos will look like Glasswing — but started by the state, not a lab, with government ministries and central SOEs first in line

Whether the CAC's content-testing regime can absorb cyber, and why a Chinese lab dropping a frontier model without a heads-up would be "very bold and self-destructive behavior"

The mixed signals on open source — a Reuters report on MOFCOM and NDRC weighing export controls on model weights, versus Minimax and Zhipu founders publicly doubling down, with Xi's WAIC speech as the tiebreaker

Whether open weights even matter when running a frontier model adversarially requires a datacenter, and the case that lighting the dark park makes it safer

What the US and China can actually agree on — non-state actors, eval methodology sharing, and why labor displacement lessons don't travel

Companion-app regulation flowing from Sacramento and Albany to Beijing, the AI policy brain drain into the labs, and whether Sam Altman's five percent is American state capitalism or just a Trump thing

song: https://suno.com/s/xZE1pIKrVBtCfTBO
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Beijing just announced a persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, the administration is calling arms sales a "bargaining chip," and the NDS doesn't mention Taiwan at all. Is deterrence in the Strait quietly coming apart?

Randy Schriver is Chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (the successor to Project 2049), current chair of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the first Trump administration.

We discuss…

China's new persistent Coast Guard patrol east of Taiwan, and how lawfare, fishermen rescues, and radio queries make sovereignty claims physically manifest,

Why treating arms sales as a "bargaining chip" puts the US out of compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act,

Whether Seoul and Tokyo go nuclear as hedging accelerates — and what the axis of autocracy means for a Korea contingency,

How many Chinese mothers will sacrifice their only legal child for a Xi Jinping vanity project — and why America stopped doing information warfare,

Blockade vs. invasion, Hellscape, and why the US should exercise a Keelung–Yonaguni corridor with Japan,

The own-goal management of US-India relations, plus Randy's reading list for new Indo-Pacific hands.

song link: https://suno.com/s/aRUtODqWdnqhKG3l
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