But watch him with Jensen Huang, as I did recently, and you will observe an unusual dynamic. The Nvidia chief executive acts not just as Macron’s peer, but even, in brief glimpses, his superior. When the two men were on stage together at a tech conference in Paris, there was a telling moment almost lost in an animated conversation. Huang, wearing his usual leather jacket and t-shirt pairing, talked over the President.

It was as if Huang were a statesman of slightly senior rank, an idea that seems less illusory with every year of Nvidia dominance. Arthur Mensch, the 31-year-old chief executive of Europe’s leading frontier AI company, Mistral, sat on the fringe of the conversation. Quiet, well-dressed, and intermittently talked up by Macron, he gave a stronger impression than Huang of being the President’s junior.

Huang’s assuredness is justified. Macron is keenly aware of the predictions that advanced AI will usher in a period of wealth creation unlike any the modern world has seen. He is also aware that with creations of wealth come redistributions of power. The French believe that if they are to be on the right side of these developments, they will need homegrown companies such as Mistral to compete with giants like OpenAI. And if Mistral is to compete, then it will need the Élysée to secure the physical hardware on which the company’s computation will take place and its data transferred.

It is Nvidia, of course, which sells that hardware: the silicon chips at the heart of this revolution. Imagine that, at the dawn of the fossil fuel era, there was a single company that was central to the piping and other infrastructure required to transfer oil, gas and coal and to burn them. Sure, Google and Amazon have their own serviceable chips; other companies are trying to develop their own. But Nvidia occupies a dominant position.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the California-based company has the second-highest market cap of any company in the world. And it is no wonder that Macron has championed Mensch and has helped broker a deal between Nvidia and parties including Mistral. As Macron said: “This is our fight for sovereignty, for strategic autonomy, which is to say: we want to keep that.”

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The deal will ensure that Mistral is one of the beneficiaries of Nvidia’s Blackwell platform: the new generation of microchips on which high-level computation can take place. This will allow Mistral to handle the duties that will be increasingly outsourced to it by the French state: bureaucratic, logistical, even military. Blackwell will also be the training ground for forthcoming iterations of Mistral’s large language models. Sure, the Élysée could contract an American company — OpenAI has begun hawking its services to entire countries — but that would risk France’s independence. Such a deal could ultimately be the equivalent of filling a civil service with foreign nationals who could be recalled without warning.

Even using ChatGPT puts French consumers downstream of decisions made by American developers. It was American developers, famously, who were responsible for the Gemini model that gave the impression that Vikings and Nazis alike were black. That kind of overbearing cultural engineering, though accidental and swiftly retracted, is a poor fit for a country that has a heavy-handed cultural programme of its own. Take the Académie Française, whose role of language custodianship — did I say “role” again? I meant rôle — has no equivalent in the Anglophone world.

Sovereign AI, then, makes philosophical and pragmatic sense for a country that retains a defiant sense of selfhood. And as the data fed to AIs becomes increasingly voluminous and intimate, even as the AIs are given more comprehensive decision-making power in realms from utilities to the military, the task of implementing sovereign AI becomes ever-more urgent.

But is it really sovereign? There is an obvious irony in buying one’s sovereignty from an American company. Neither Macron nor Huang nor Mensch acknowledged that on stage. But the facts are plain: Donald Trump could, with a single executive order, prevent Nvidia from exporting chips even to Western allies such as Britain, France and South Korea. The world’s most powerful chips, those used within Nvidia equipment, are the product of near-superhuman manufacturing whose complexity and intricacy are unsurpassed beyond Taiwanese shores. Blackwell models include 208 billion transistors, each of which is smaller than a viral particle and etched by lasers with nanometre-scale precision. This is some of the most technically demanding engineering on the planet.

Very few countries, even with sustained national effort, could emulate the performance of those GPUs with an in-house substitute. So far, only China comes close. And the US and China are the only two countries that can already claim to be anywhere near AI sovereignty, developing both hardware and software either on their own shores or via domestically headquartered companies such as Nvidia. True AI sovereignty, for almost every other country, is therefore something approaching a mirage — at least within the current technological paradigm.

The same is true, though, of almost any given technology. Prosperity depends on trade; trade depends on interdependence. The pipework of AI, so to speak, happens to be accessible only via an unusually small number of vendors. But the impracticability of perfect sovereign AI does not mean that Macron and his peers should not strive for it. There are relatively few vendors of oil and gas, and total energy independence is very difficult, but it is still worth aiming for. Partial dependence is much more desirable than total dependence.

There remains the uncomfortable question of what will become of the countries that fail to secure any meaningful kind of AI sovereignty. They are likely to outsource some amount of decision-making to foreign tech companies, and this decision-making will be inflected by someone else’s values. The decision-making would be based on data that might be held in foreign servers. One can imagine President Donald Trump Jr, a couple of election cycles hence, demanding access to a third-world country’s cobalt mines, threatening to turn off this country’s access to its own data. More subtly, a leading power might use other levers: limiting, for instance, a rival’s speed of access to the latest AI models. No less significantly for such a country, its selfhood will inevitably be eroded if it is governed by algorithmic values that are not quite its own. As Nathan Beniach, an investor and the author of the “State of AI” report, tells me: “For countries that opt out of building strategic AI infrastructure, the risk isn’t immediate subjugation but progressive loss of agency, what I’ve called a form of AI colonialism. These nations will increasingly find their economies, healthcare systems, security apparatus, and political discourse shaped by foreign models they neither control nor fully understand.”

The classical nation-state model, says Benaich, will struggle to adapt to these conditions. What emerges from the “sovereign AI” sales pitch, he suggests, is “a kind of neo-mercantilist compute empire, whereby Nvidia occupies the position of upstream monopolist, extracting rents across multiple national industrial strategies”.

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Along the way, Huang, who is already worth $93 billion, will become even wealthier. Nvidia, whose stock price jumped on the day of the Paris event, is on course to become even more dominant than it is already; Apple and Microsoft will have to innovate rapidly in order to keep up. Anyone fearing an eternal monopoly, though, should note the rapid outmoding of the Google search engine, once seen as unassailable, by today’s youthful cadre of large language models. It is conceivable that, even without the advantage of Chinese IP theft, someone will make cheaper versions of Nvidia hardware.

And so the scramble for digital sovereignty begins. Last week, the British government called for “high-ambition researchers” to come up with uses for its new supercomputer, combining AI with robotics, biosciences, materials discovery and national security. Meanwhile, the President of South Korea has announced a $735-billion investment plan that will keep the country’s AI South Korean, and has been harvesting leading tech executives to steward the project.

Richer and more assertive countries, such as France, will retain some level of independence, even if intelligence, power and wealth begin to concentrate more intensely than they do already. Britain has catching-up to do; having allowed Google, as it was then, to buy DeepMind, we have no home-grown frontier AI company to rival Mistral.

If the doomers are correct, the ongoing concentration of intelligence and power is freighted with danger. The big fish will get bigger, the small fish will get smaller, and Starmer and Macron have a limited amount of time in which to find their countries’ place in this precipitous new hierarchy.

In this remark, Sullivan displayed far more lucidity regarding AI than did other members of the Democratic establishment. (Take Kamala Harris’ bewildering characterization of bias and misinformation as “existential” threats.) Their successors in the White House, though, see AI as central to their plans for American dominance. Last week, the Trump administration slapped strict export controls on Nvidia’s H20 chip. And on Monday, the president’s science and technology policy chief, Michael Kratsios, told an audience of technologists that AI would be central to the new “Golden Age of America”. 

It is easy enough to say that a new technology will power prosperity. The reality, though, is that AI is more challenging a topic for the White House than Kratsios let on. There were some clues in JD Vance’s speech on artificial intelligence in Paris in February. It was his first major policy address as vice president, and it revealed an understanding of AI that befits him as a former tech investor. 

But it was also a careful political balancing act. Vance promised that the Trump administration’s AI policy would, simultaneously, be highly deregulatory, cripple American adversaries, and “center American workers”. These wide-ranging undertakings hint at the underlying reality of Vance’s speech: that the Trump administration’s emerging AI policy is being shaped by distinct factions with different priorities and worldviews.

As AI capabilities improve, the ideological divisions have only sharpened. Silicon Valley accelerationists push for unfettered development while invoking Chinese competition as a shield against regulation. Meanwhile, the populist elements of Trump’s base remain deeply skeptical of coastal elites building “machine gods” that could displace American workers. 

These contradictions explain Vance’s rhetorical tightrope: promising deregulation to please potential big tech donors, while assuring workers that they will have “a seat at the table” in a future that may not require their labor. It is what you would expect from an administration being pulled in three directions.

The strongest pull comes from the “accelerationists”. This is a group that includes venture capitalists, such as Marc Andreessen, and their venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and tech giants interested in AI like Meta and Nvidia. 

They spend hundreds of millions in lobbying and political spending. After pharmaceuticals, tech giants are DC’s largest lobbyists. They have one lobbyist for every two Congress members, spending a record $61.5 million in reported federal lobbying in 2024, not including unreported think tank donations and direct political fundraising. It is commonly recognized in Silicon Valley that when a senator visits, the first dinner stop they make is a fundraiser hosted by Marc Andreessen or David Sacks, now the White House’s AI and crypto czar. 

The group has said again and again that technological advancement should not be hampered by over-regulation or a fear of hypothetical future risks. It is a group that has been scarred by the crippling environmental regulation of the late 20th century — particularly for nuclear power, where environmentalist groups made similarly “existential” arguments about nuclear safety. Accelerationists liken such thinking to that of the Effective Altruists, who have long called for caution in the development of AI, and whose lobbying influenced the Biden administration.

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Much of Andreessen’s writing about AI is an implicit rebuke to Effective Altruism. In his manifesto “Why AI Will Save The World”, he positions AI as “quite possibly the most important — and best — thing our civilization has ever created”. He rejects concerns about AI killing humanity (calling this a “category error”, since AI is “math — code — computers”); ruining society through harmful outputs (dismissing objections as “thought police”); eliminating jobs (Andreessen counters this with economic theories on productivity growth); or causing inequality (arguing technology democratization benefits everyone).

As we get closer to powerful AI systems beyond “math — code — computers”, and public and political concerns grow, the accelerationist faction will likely double down on their framing of regulations as capitulation to China. They will reframe the debate around American dominance. Ted Cruz summed things up on his podcast: “If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese.” 

Soon enough, national security risks will become clear. These will include AI-assisted bioweapon development, or clear evidence that systems are misaligned with the intent of their operators. At this point, the accelerationists will call for guardrails, but only those of the superficial kind. 

In that event, the accelerationists might sound like they are in line with the China hawks, but will quietly continue business as usual. Meta continues to open-source its latest models, despite reports of their use by China’s military. Nvidia has lobbied against, and blatantly violated, export controls. These companies’ political capital comes not only from their willingness to spend money on lobbying, but from their availability as “experts”. Much policymaking is based on available “expertise”, which often means corporate lobbyists.

The accelerationists, then, now have the most power over the White House’s AI policy. But they might understand the least about what’s coming.

The national security hawks have a clearer view of the future. This is a group whose origins can be traced, at least in part, to the first Trump administration. In 2019, the president presciently signed the first ever executive order on AI, recognizing “the paramount importance of American AI leadership to the economic and national security of the United States”. 

This view persisted among select members of the Biden administration, including Sullivan and Ben Buchanan. Sullivan and Buchanan have been succeeded in the White House by a faction that includes traditional Republican “China Hawks” such as the new National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, who view AI as the defining front in a new cold war. The faction has allies in AI lab leaders, like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have publicly advocated for the US to maintain leadership in the development of AI, even if it involves means such as export controls.

To the national security hawks, it is an undeniable fact that China must not achieve superintelligence first. There are two distinct ways to ensure victory: Accelerate America or Obstruct China.

The choice of approach depends on the perceived risks of AI beyond the China competition. It’s no good beating Beijing if, by winning, the US loses control of advanced systems. The greater the perceived existential risk from advanced AI itself, the more inclined officials become toward obstruction over acceleration.

The “Accelerate America” hawks believe that the US must be ahead in AI development at all costs. As such, President Trump’s recent executive order calls for “American Dominance” in AI. At minimum, this means streamlining permitting, removing regulatory barriers, and avoiding hindrances to American progress. And, encouraged by the recent tariffs, reshoring efforts are gaining momentum: Nvidia announced on Monday that it will manufacture its latest Blackwell AI chips in the US, as part of a broader $500 billion investment in the next four years. Hindrances to accelerationists include things like creator copyright enforcement. Accelerate America hawks view any government interference that slows American labs as ultimately benefiting Chinese competitors, who operate without such constraints.

Moving further along the spectrum, mid-level hawkish interventions would see the military and government industries not merely adopting advanced AI systems, but actively co-developing them. The most aggressively hawkish iteration of the Trump administration would designate AGI as a national priority, overseeing a “Manhattan Project” for superintelligent AI, and giving unprecedented access to resources. One such resource would be the NSA’s reams of high quality data.

This policy would entail large government involvement, which could trigger a nation-state arms race. China, we can imagine, would perceive American government-led AI development as an existential threat requiring matching countermeasures. Another problem with the plan is that it would transfer development authority away from technical experts and toward bureaucrats and military planners. As a result, it would decrease the competence of those overseeing the potential intelligence explosion.

The other group of hawks, the “Chinese Obstruction” camp, focuses less on winning and more on ensuring that China loses. If empowered, this faction would enact rigorous national security evaluations of AI systems, the idea being to build up state capacity and defensive expertise within AI. (This is the current mandate of the US AI Safety Institute.) The obstructionists could extend to federally-backed intervention. This strategy would recognize that open-sourcing AI significantly benefits China, which has strong technical talent but weaker computational resources. With this in mind, note Sam Altman’s recent announcement that OpenAI will open-source one of its leading models. He is trying to get the beating of DeepSeek, a Chinese rival, perhaps to the detriment of national security.

By keeping model weights private, as well as restricting knowledge of training methodologies, America might be able to maintain its lead. This strategy rests on information asymmetry. As such, it might include export controls on both hardware and knowledge. There could be criminal penalties for sharing restricted AI information with Chinese entities, and policymakers could classify certain AI techniques as controlled defense technologies. There are already signs of this attitude. Senator Tom Cotton recently proposed barring citizens from foreign adversaries like China from working in the national laboratories.

The obstructionist hawks borrow from nuclear deterrence theory. As a result, they understand that the creation of transparent thresholds for AI development (such as the size of a training run), and the imposition of consequences for those who violate those thresholds, might make the development of superintelligence less economically and politically attractive. (That was the argument of a well-circulated paper whose three authors included a former Google CEO and an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI company). Under such a strategy, the US would publicly commit to specific countermeasures triggered by Chinese advancement toward superintelligence. These countermeasures could range from economic sanctions to targeted cyber operations against research infrastructure to more aggressive interventions.

Finally, the most extreme obstructionist approach recognizes that the AI arms race itself might be destabilizing, regardless of who wins. This strategy would involve America voluntarily restraining its own superintelligence development in exchange for verifiable international agreements — perhaps the “Deal of the Century” (or Anthropocene) for President Trump. It would require sophisticated verification mechanisms, potentially including international inspection regimes similar to nuclear non-proliferation treaties. The fundamental premise is that the prospect of Chinese superintelligence is so troubling that America should sacrifice its own in order to avoid it.

The populist Right is the third major faction likely to influence the administration’s approach to AI. This is a group that is dormant in formal policy circles but vocal in the cultural landscape that elected Trump.

Take the comments made by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Joe Rogan regarding superintelligence and the Trump administration’s official policies. Carlson has characterized AI as a “threat to human civilization”. On his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Carlson went further, declaring: “If it’s bad for people we should strangle it in its crib. Why not just blow up the data centers?” Steve Bannon predicts “artificial superintelligence that is far more intelligent, far more creative, far more powerful than human beings”. Joe Rogan doesn’t think we are ready for it.

This faction splits into two sociologically distinct but overlapping groups. The religious traditionalists — Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals — fundamentally reject Silicon Valley’s quest to create “machine gods”. To them, this represents not merely technological hubris but potential heresy. They question whether humans should attempt to construct intelligences exceeding our own capabilities — a modern Tower of Babel disconnected from Biblical values.

The second group — workers traumatized by globalization and the ramifications of the NAFTA trade deal — seeks a better vision for automation than the previous waves, which devastated manufacturing communities. Trump’s base won’t tolerate another generation of workers discarded by technological change. Groups like American Compass represent their interests, demanding AI deployment that strengthens rather than displaces the middle class. Even so, we’ll only see these effects later: AI will affect cognitive work before it affects physical work. As a recent analysis puts it, AI will first come for “films, finance and programming” — not exactly blue-collar labor. 

These two factions find common ground in the New Right’s broader opposition to war and global entanglements. If superintelligence development continues unchecked, the populists will fear a Cold War with China, potentially triggering a Taiwan invasion and disrupting peaceful American life — precisely the scenario Trump promised to avoid.

From a sociological perspective, they see AI’s development as being driven by young, well-paid, liberal Californian engineers racing to build machine gods — while risking both American lives and livelihoods. And after witnessing existing technology’s destruction of family values and youth culture, they fear that AI will do further damage, constraining freedoms while concentrating power in government and tech firms.

As we get more powerful AI systems, the populist Right is likely to become more comfortable with government intervention to protect their lives and livelihoods. The populists will push for law and order policies — “AI agents must follow the law” — while advocating for populist measures to limit automation’s impact. Such measures might include requirements of human oversight; taxation of computational activity; and pro-union regulations.

Most importantly, this group embraces America First principles — rejecting both unnecessary military escalation with China and trade policies that sacrifice American workers. And they offer a third path beyond hawkish-libertarian binary that dominates Washington. 

For the time being, it appears that the Effective Altruists are an afterthought and that the accelerationists and the more aggressive hawks together have the upper hand. Shortly after Michael Kratsios was confirmed as the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, President Trump urged him to “blaze a trail to the next frontiers of science” and make America an “unrivaled” global leader in emerging technologies. Kratios’ speech this week expressed an almost identical spirit.

But the arrival of powerful AI will fracture both domestic and international politics. It is a fundamentally destabilizing technology — socially, economically, and geopolitically. Increasingly realistic chatbots will support, and then substitute, human friendships and relationships. Autonomous AI agents will replace cognitive labor, then robots will take care of the rest. And the development of this technology might herald the beginning of a new geopolitical Cold War with China — where a Taiwan invasion becomes ever more enticing, data centers become strategic missile targets, and cyberweapons make it onto the escalation ladder. 

It is rarely prudent to second-guess Trump. Elon Musk, for a few weeks the “first buddy”, appears now to be on his way out of the White House. Musk, having said on a recent podcast that AI has a “10-20% chance of killing everyone”, might have been one of the more moderating influences on the president, if only with regard to AI.

Where things go from here, therefore, is anyone’s guess. But despite the prospective exit of Musk, Trump is uniquely placed to achieve what others thought impossible: meaningful coordination domestically and internationally. In short, he has an opportunity to strike the “Deal of the Century” with China. His foreign policy successes — the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, historic summit with Kim Jong Un, pressuring European allies to pay up for defense — show his deftness in using US leverage for American, and global, interests.

In this spirit, he could avoid war, or worse, by adopting the containment strategy of the obstructionist hawks; protecting his white-collar-voting base; and making a deal with China that mimics nuclear arms deals. The more aggressive hawks might object to it, but it’s worth remembering how quickly Trump has normalized, at least among Republicans, the idea of pragmatic engagement with Russia. Norms are out, negotiations are in, and with AI moving at lightning speed, it is negotiations that are the appropriate course of action.

Britain, by contrast, has no comparable strategy. Its absence of long-term vision has made it an easy target for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), whose strategic ambitions unfold over decades. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sale of Imagination Technologies, a crown jewel of British innovation whose semiconductor designs are powering the next technological era. Since its acquisition by a Chinese state-linked firm in 2017, Imagination’s Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and AI accelerator technology have been absorbed into China’s AI ecosystem, driving the very breakthroughs that now challenge Western dominance.

This was no ordinary corporate acquisition, but a reckless surrender of future-defining technology to a geopolitical competitor — a decision emblematic of Britain’s strategic myopia.

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For years, Apple was Imagination’s largest and most lucrative client. But that all changed in April 2017, when Apple announced it would no longer use Imagination’s technology, triggering a collapse in the firm’s valuation — from £2 billion to just £550 million. Within months, Canyon Bridge, a Delaware-based private equity firm heavily funded by China Reform Holdings — a Chinese state-owned enterprise under direct CCP oversight — moved in to acquire it. China Reform was, theoretically, positioned to exert influence over Canyon Bridge and, by extension, Imagination. Despite this warning sign, the UK Government approved the acquisition, reassured by promises that China Reform would remain a passive investor. This was a terrible miscalculation — and one that betrayed a naivety about how China’s centralised state apparatus executes strategy.

Illusions of China Reform’s “passivity” crumbled in 2020, when it attempted to install four of its own directors onto Imagination’s board. The move ignited a fierce backlash within the company and alarmed Government officials. Under mounting public scrutiny, Global Counsel — a “strategic advisory” firm founded by Lord Mandelson, now British Ambassador to the United States — was hired by Canyon Bridge to “reassure UK stakeholders” about Imagination’s operations.

Just months before this attempted coup, Mandelson, a former UK cabinet minister and then-president of the publicly funded Great Britain China Centre, traveled to China with his aide to discuss “cooperation opportunities” with China Reform’s senior leadership. By his own account, the visit was a success, deepening ties between China Reform and Global Counsel — an advisory firm that soon after (it claims coincidentally) was enlisted to manage the fallout of Imagination’s crisis. Mandelson denies involvement in the Imagination case. The optics, however, are disturbing: corporate — and, perhaps, political — influence diluted scrutiny of a state-linked transaction with lasting implications for Britain’s national security and technological future.

Though Whitehall ultimately blocked the board takeover, Britain had already lost control over Imagination. Company CEO Ron Black was sacked after citing concerns over Chinese government interference, while other senior executives resigned. Testimony uncovered by UK-China Transparency revealed that in 2020 and 2021, Imagination’s intellectual property and key assets were quietly funneled to Chinese GPU companies through “unusual and undisclosed knowledge-sharing agreements”. Two of the recipients, Moore Threads and Biren Technology, were sanctioned by the US in 2023 for their ties to China’s military-industrial complex. In this way, a key British technological asset was effectively dismantled, its innovations repurposed to advance the ambitions of the CCP. The British Government had either gravely underestimated the strategic intent of Chinese leaders — or it had simply been outmaneuvered.

This was just another step in the CCP’s broader strategy. In 2014, Beijing released plans to position China’s semiconductor ecosystem as a global leader by 2030, backed by a $150 billion National Integrated Circuit Fund to advance cutting-edge research and cultivate “national champions”. A year later, Made in China 2025 introduced the bold target of producing 70% of semiconductors domestically by 2025. These policies were reinforced in 2016 by the Innovation-driven Development Strategy, which funneled unprecedented governmental resources into research, talent cultivation, and infrastructure for China’s high-tech industrial ecosystem.

By 2017, Beijing’s semiconductor ambitions were already well-advanced — and raising alarm among Britain’s allies. It was becoming clear that China was executing a disciplined whole-of-state strategy to “leapfrog” key stages of semiconductor development, leveraging state funding and systematically extracting technology from foreign companies through acquisitions, joint ventures, and knowledge-transfer agreements. State-linked entities, including China Reform, played a key role in absorbing critical expertise into the country’s domestic ecosystem — securing intellectual property through licensing deals, embedding Chinese engineers into overseas R&D teams, and orchestrating takeovers of foreign semiconductor firms, including Imagination.

Shortly before Imagination Technologies’ sale, the US moved decisively to block Canyon Bridge from acquiring an American semiconductor firm, citing national security risks tied to Beijing’s industrial policy and the need to protect such critical technology. Britain, however, failed to shield Imagination, appearing blind to Washington’s caution. Not only did it ignore the emerging centrality of semiconductors in great power competition, but it overlooked the patterns of logic behind the CCP’s moves.

The CCP’s industrial, technological, and geopolitical goals are all situated within an ideational framework: Xi Jinping’s China Dream. This vision drives the CCP’s pursuit of strategic aims, guiding China’s transformation into a prosperous, technologically sovereign, and globally dominant superpower by 2050. Central to Xi’s Dream is the principle of technological “self-reliance”, aimed at reducing dependence on foreign technology, securing supply chain control, and establishing leadership in critical sectors, including semiconductors. With ideological clarity and strategic patience, China is steadily realizing decades-long ambitions for national rejuvenation, exploiting the disarray and short-termist thinking of less cohesive nations.

The failure to shield Imagination is not an anomaly, but a symptom of Britain’s deeper strategic paralysis. The January 2025 Commons debate which followed Rachel Reeves’s visit to Beijing provided a glimpse into Britain’s ongoing dysfunction. It was a performance which, if I were a Chinese strategist tasked with formulating UK policy, I would watch gleefully with my colleagues as we sipped Maotai and munched peanuts. The backdrop of the debate was Labour’s decision to resume economic dialogue with Beijing prior to publishing its promised and long-delayed China audit — a critical step in assessing the range of risks, opportunities and priorities in this complex relationship. Amid Reeves’s incomprehensible celebration of having secured £600 million “of tangible benefit for British businesses” (a figure akin to pennies found down the back of Beijing’s sofa), the debate descended into jeering and partisan mud-slinging, devoid of both cross-party solidarity and a sense of Britain’s long-term national interest.

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The fragmentation exposed during the debate reflects an underlying malaise: Britain has yet to establish a coherent hierarchy of values to guide its China policy. Parliament is fractured along ideological, strategic, and even regional lines, and Government departments engaging with China are split too. The Department for Business and Trade prioritizes economic ties, while GCHQ and MI5 warn of escalating security threats and the Foreign Office grapples to balance diplomacy with the defense of human rights and rule of law. Such ideological incoherence leads to siloed decision-making and mixed messaging. Whitehall’s fragmentation is further exacerbated by private interests which, in the absence of a clear overarching framework, can sway policy in directions that undermine Britain’s national security. The role of Mandelson’s lobbying firm in the Imagination fiasco illustrates how unreconciled agendas — whether between departments or state and private actors — breed strategic incoherence. China’s geopolitical rise is too important for Britain to proceed divided.

Should economic growth outweigh national security considerations? Can Britain credibly champion universal principles such as human rights and the rule of law while deepening ties with a regime which views them as existential threats to its own survival? Such questions are exceedingly complex and remain unanswered, as the Government has yet to articulate a clear vision for its relationship with Beijing — nor how its China policy will fit within Britain’s broader ambitions in the decades to come.

Keir Starmer is reportedly planning a trip to Beijing later this year, which would make him the first UK prime minister to visit in more than seven years. He has promised a “consistent, durable, respectful” relationship with China. Yet consistency and durability will be impossible in the absence of a unified, supra-partisan national strategy.

Without a long-term vision, the UK will continue to forfeit tools of power and credibility needed to remain influential in the 21st century. The case of Imagination Technologies illustrates the stakes: Britain is ill-prepared to confront a competitor that not only commands vast scale and resources, but which also thinks and plans in decades. In a world increasingly shaped by China’s ambitions, Britain must conjure a unified vision — or else risk continued erosion of its technological advantage and credibility as a global power.