Azeem Azhar

It's a great initiative.

I'm super happy it started.

We will, of course, talk about AI today, but you are best known for China talk.

And there is so much going on between the US and China.

And I just want to make sense of it.

And hopefully you'll be able to help us do that.

It seemed to me that

We're watching the US and China do more than traditional trade wars.

And we've moved from a phase where the US was trying to contain China, perhaps into something more, a decoupling.

And what I want to argue that that decoupling is actually more interesting and perhaps more dangerous than things we've seen in the past.

It's not so much separation, but the emergence of these two parallel tech universes, but they remain deeply entangled.

And the rub of all of this is that the tools we use to manage it, export controls, tariffs, sanctions, well, they're 200 years old.

We're dealing with a 21st century problem, a 21st century economy, and a 21st century technology.

So are those traditional containment tools helping or harming?

Or was I overstating the case in the first place?

That's where my daughter has just flown off to this today, in fact, to a school trip to Taiwan for 10 days.

And we've seen that a little bit with these new rare earth tariffs or controls rather that were announced a couple of weeks ago where it's the heavy rare earths that you can find in missile control systems that have fallen under this new control.

But the lighter rare earths that live in things that the Chinese export, like wind turbines, don't fall into that control.

There's some pragmatism that's going on.

But I guess the thing that I thought felt like it might look different is a sense that