Chrystia Freeland discussed dealing with the United States at a talk on Monday.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Pyongyang in June 2024, his first visit to North Korea in nearly a quarter century, the optics were striking. Russian flags and portraits of Putin adorned the capital, where he was treated to an elaborate welcome ceremony with a military honor guard and groups of balloon-toting children. But this was to be expected; such pageantry is a hallmark of North Korean politics. Less anticipated was the substance of Putin’s subsequent meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership the two men signed that day formalized a relationship that had been quietly taking shape since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: a military alliance between two nuclear-armed pariah states. By October 2024, around 11,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to Russia, primarily in the Kursk region along Ukraine’s northeastern border, to support Russian combat operations. By late April 2025, South Korean intelligence assessments put Pyongyang’s troop presence at around 15,000, and at least half that number remain deployed.
The partnership has made a significant difference in Russia’s war effort. North Korea’s conventional military is often written off as small and underdeveloped, but the country has become a key supplier of artillery ammunition, select missiles, and manpower to Russia. In February 2025, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief publicly claimed that North Korea was providing about half the ammunition Russia was using at the front. Based on Ukrainian military intelligence estimates from November 2025, North Korea has supplied Russian forces with around 6.5 million artillery rounds since 2023 and with sophisticated long-range self-propelled artillery systems and multiple launch rocket systems since late 2024.
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Russia, China, and the Growing North Korea Threat
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Benjamin Yoel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Previously, he was a Predoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute and a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago's Center on Democracy.
Benjamin studies democratic backsliding, nonviolent resistance, international pressure, opposition politics, and public opinion. His main research agenda focuses on the nexus of foreign pressure and opposition to democratic backsliding. Other work focuses on the broader causes and consequences of democratic backsliding as well as making different types of data more accessible to researchers and practitioners alike. His academic work has been published in Nature: Scientific Data, The International Journal of Public Opinion Research, International Affairs, and American Politics Research.
In addition to his academic research, Benjamin has consulted on projects related to democratic backsliding that have been supported by the US Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Michigan State University and a B.A. and M.A. in Government from Reichman University.
How do portrayals of foreign nations as threats shape public opinion on foreign policy and domestic racial attitudes? This study examines how portrayals of China as a threat influence Americans’ support for U.S. policy toward China and attitudes toward Asian Americans. A content analysis of CNN and Fox News transcripts from 2010 to 2020 shows that both outlets increasingly portrayed China as a threat, although Fox News more often emphasized threats to the United States, whereas CNN focused more on threats affecting other countries, international institutions, and populations. A national survey and a preregistered survey experiment further demonstrate that exposure to China threat narratives, regardless of whether the threat targets the United States or another country, increases support for hawkish U.S. foreign policy and heightens anti-Asian resentment, especially among Republicans. These findings show how portrayals of foreign threats shape public opinion and spill over into racial attitudes at home.
Media Influence on U.S.-China Policy and Anti-Asian Sentiment
The global demand for “AI sovereignty” is increasingly shaping AI policy and safety discussions. What was once a niche concern has become a widely shared priority, with more countries seeking control over how AI is built, deployed, and governed within their borders. This memo synthesizes key insights on the drivers of AI sovereignty, how countries are operationalizing it in practice, and the implications for U.S. diffusion strategy and managing global risks.
Three premises frame the analysis. First, emerging economies and middle powers are becoming crucial partners, consumers, and suppliers in the global AI ecosystem. Second, U.S. leadership in frontier AI creates a narrow—and likely diminishing—window to shape how this technology diffuses. Third, understanding what countries actually want from AI is critical to designing a sustainable U.S. diffusion strategy and navigating shared risks.
These insights draw on ongoing research from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and Stanford's Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG), and were further developed at a workshop, “AI Sovereignty, Diffusion, and Risk: Strategy in a Contested Landscape,” convened by CEIP and GTG on June 17, 2026 with experts from civil society, industry, and academia.
While the term “AI sovereignty” is ambiguous, it has become an increasingly influential part of international AI discussions. Sovereignty goals seem less about achieving true technological autarky (widely seen as unfeasible), and more about a desire to secure national interests (economic, security, cultural) within a tech landscape dominated by the U.S. and China. In this way, AI sovereignty might be practically understood better as “AI agency:” a country's ability to execute choices in line with national interests. In search of this agency, countries will likely pursue a strategy that combines assured access arrangements for foreign AI models and hardware with efforts to diversify and build domestic capacity (indigenous or modified foreign open-source) if such access is disrupted. These domestic capacity efforts tend to focus on cheaper, multilingual, and multimodal models contextually attuned to underserved markets.
Sovereignty can serve as a source of resilience, and, increasingly, may serve as a deterrent against being cut off from frontier AI capabilities. To achieve this deterrent effect, countries are likely to seek sources of leverage along the AI value chain. These may include:
These sources of leverage, however, could be a depreciating asset, as a nation may only be able to threaten or use its leverage once before providers diversify away from it.
Discussions of AI sovereignty in many middle powers and emerging economies are primarily driven by concerns over dependency, extractivism, market concentration, and geopolitical subordination. Cross-border, large-scale AI risks like cyberattacks, biosecurity, or rogue AI agents have not been central to these debates to date, as they are often perceived as remote or lower priority than immediate economic and political concerns and assured access to AI technology.
Recent events, such as the U.S. government blocking Anthropic's Fable model access, have reinforced this focus on dependency. While the incident highlighted the potential for dangerous capabilities, the primary international reaction has been concerned with the U.S. wielding a “kill switch” over model deployment, reinforcing fears of unilateral control and strengthening the case for AI sovereignty.
This dynamic could shift as AI capabilities diffuse. The widespread availability of powerful models capable of causing significant cross-border harm, such as cybersecurity failures in critical infrastructure, may force a re-evaluation. In such a scenario, the salience of shared safety and security could rise, potentially aligning national interests more closely with global risk mitigation efforts.
A clear trend of sovereign-related AI projects and announcements is underway globally, especially in the EU, Indo-Pacific, and Gulf States. These initiatives range from building national compute clusters and developing domestic models to pursuing legal arrangements to ensure data localization and provide assured access to foreign AI models.
However, a significant gap often exists between high-level ambitions and the operational capacity to implement them, as many efforts lack clear funding and technical expertise.
The viability of these national ambitions may hinge on a critical, and often unresolved, distinction: identifying which use cases can use “good enough” AI, relying on less advanced models and infrastructure, versus those that require access to the frontier.
A fundamental tension exists between two potential AI futures: one where a handful of frontier labs create a runaway capability gap, and another where open-source models remain competitive and useful for most purposes.
In a world where frontier models pull away, a U.S.-led stack could become central to the global economy and international security, giving the U.S. unprecedented insight and international leverage.
In contrast, in a world where open-source and fast follower models remain competitive, the strategic calculus shifts, potentially lowering the stakes of frontier competition for many countries and enabling more diversified technology ecosystems.
The concept of an organized “third stack” as an alternative to U.S. and Chinese ecosystems built on open-source models and diverse hardware is a potential pathway for middle powers seeking to avoid dependency. This alternative is only viable if a coalition of middle powers align on standards for procuring and deploying AI to pool their collective purchasing power; the European Union’s regulatory and tech sovereignty efforts are informed by this logic. However, multi-state organization around a third stack faces significant collective action problems, and any effort to create an independent stack could be viewed as a challenge to U.S. national security, incentivizing Washington to pursue bilateral engagements that thwart an emergent alternative.
Even if many countries' economic, development, and security goals can be achieved through “good enough” AI, countries may want access to high-end capabilities for specific purposes. This could give the United States an opportunity to offer assured access to frontier AI in exchange for safety and security commitments.
However, an assured access framework faces major challenges:
Many believe the U.S. government currently lacks the capacity and planning to execute a complex global AI diffusion strategy. The U.S. government’s existing toolkit for promoting the U.S. tech stack, including bodies like the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and EXIM Bank, is difficult to deploy effectively. The government's most effective role may be to de-risk investment and lend credibility in geopolitically critical areas where a natural market does not exist.
In the absence of a robust government strategy, market forces are the primary driver. The quality of U.S. technology creates a natural pull, but this may be counteracted by U.S. policy unpredictability.
In this vacuum, non-governmental actors are stepping in. Philanthropic organizations are brokering agreements between U.S. AI labs and Global Majority countries for specific use cases. However, it remains unclear if these ad-hoc efforts can scale into a coherent ecosystem that benefits U.S. interests.
This analysis surfaces several unresolved questions that warrant further research and debate. Priorities for future inquiry include:
Washington’s alliances are under immense strain. Many allies and partners are subject to increased threats from great-power adversaries, and they are coming to doubt whether they can rely on the United States. The response to these pressures is to rearm. Like the United States itself, U.S. partners across Asia, Europe, and elsewhere are building up their defense industrial and technological bases to improve their ability to project power, deter enemies, and prevail in a protracted conflict.
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As we celebrate our achievements today, I want to take a moment to thank the people who made this journey possible. To our families, spouses, and supporters who stood beside us through the highs and the lows — thank you. To the MIP program team, as well as the mentors across campus who guided us throughout our time here — thank you. To the staffers who served us food, took out the trash, and cleaned off the whiteboards — none of this would have been possible without you. And finally, to this cohort: I am so thankful for the support that we gave one another every single day. I appreciate it all more than words can say.
Fellas, we have come a long way. And while I could talk about our journey for hours, I'll spare you — and instead organize my remarks in a way that's very familiar to us all: problem identification, solutions development, and implementation. That’s right guys, I’m leaning all the way in, welcome to our final, final session of Policy Change Studio.
First up: problem identification. From the moment I walked into MIP bootcamp and looked around at this illustrious cohort, it was not hard to identify many problems. For starters — how could I possibly compete with Howie, Elena, Kylie, and Funmibi, all of whom somehow managed to look incredible no matter the weekday. Or how I would ever tell apart the two Chris's — both serving in the Army, both starting families, and both completely inseparable from one another.
And I'm sure many of you had your own questions. Nik was wondering what it would look like to lead the Stanford soccer team while managing his graduate studies. RJ, faced with Stanford’s strict housing policy, was trying to figure out how he could possibly live without his two wiener dogs by his side. Malou, ambitious as ever, had already begun her first Gordian Knot Innovation scholar and was wondering how quickly she would adapt to Stanford's research environment. And Jen was quietly waiting to see how long it would take for someone to realize her husband was attending our rival school, UC Berkeley.
For some of us, the challenge was navigating a career transition. for others, it was getting back into the rhythm of school — and let's just say Chonira's Economics course did not make that learning curve a gentle one.
I had some of these questions too and many others. And as I looked around at my amazing set of classmates, one key question came to mind : who did I want to be during this chapter of my life?
As our first quarter kicked into full steam, we began developing solutions quickly.
Our solution to surviving Chonira's rigorous Economics homework was to build our own little supply chain in the basement of Green Library, where finishing a problem would move you to the next table until you made it through the assignment. Conversely, we learned that to survive Alain’s class… ask Gaby. RJ discovered he could substitute the company of his wiener dogs with his cohort, and became the regular host of our after-class lunches at Arbuckle. That's really where we started to bond.
We all started to laugh more, with Funmbi's infectious laugh becoming something of a soundtrack to our class experience. We took trips to Sausalito and Napa Valley. We celebrated each other's wins, especially in athletics — whether it was Ella's incredible mountain biking treks or Yukiko finishing a 10K all the way in Japan. My title as the baby of the cohort was quickly overtaken by actual babies — Chris's — followed by Christian's, and now we have one more MIP baby on the way. We made time for each other, whether it be Ran's occasional tea gatherings, Humzah’s SF professional happy hour, or Santiago who made it his mission to include us all in the various traditions at the GSB.
Of course, it wasn't all laughs, things did get intense. McFaul dinners were always entertaining — partly for the great food, and partly because you knew the spiciest part of our political conversations would soon appear on McFaul's Substack. A heated race for International Policy Student Association President ended in a military coup, resulting in a dictatorship that lasted until approximately April 2026 — when Haolie's manifesto was finally taken down from the MIP common space. And I'm fairly certain Shin-Haeng and Elena are still debating who received the shiniest wedding ring by the end of the program.
But through all of it we grew together, and the passion and full presence of my cohort gave me an answer to my own question about who I needed to be here.
It was through Kylie, a phenomenal writer who spent her days challenging the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, who also found her outlet by merging her love of filmmaking with nuclear activism. It was Tennyson, who balanced helping to educate he next generation of political science students with scriptwriting and dramatic arts. It was Malou — learning two languages, and serving as an awarded resident advisor — who still found time to take salsa classes, which, for the record, she did not need. It was Shin-Haeng, the diplomat who could tell you everything about everyone in this cohort, who almost never missed a class unless it was to slip out for golf lessons.
It was Sophia, who by guiding her capstone team through Ukraine, letting the resilience and spirit of her people speak for itself all while exploring local municipal bond financing. It was Amit, whose studies in economics gave us a lifeline in our first quarter, also showing no mercy to his classmates on the pickleball court. And it was Humzah — a natural convener— hosting events that bridged our program with the School of Business, a task that made sense for him because that man could sell you on anything.
Through these examples and many others, people brought their full selves to the table. And what that taught me was that no matter who I wanted to become or where I wanted to go, I didn't have to lose myself in the process. It inspired me to think differently, to take the less obvious path, to lean into the unfamiliar.
And now, as we approach the end of our program, we can see how far that openness has taken us.
In classic Stanford fashion, the curious and endearing Cosima channeled her love of geopolitics and public service into founding a startup. Luke is now a Second Lieutenant — a remarkable achievement that is only slightly overshadowed by completing the Bay to Breakers 12K two years in a row. We have colleagues who have published research, attended conferences, and made a real impact, and folks like Funmibi who can do all of that and still find the time to immediately post it on social media.
And last but not least, our community has only grown — from dual-degree students like Ashraf whose summer highlight included working with investment bankers, to the meet-cutes and the marriages of Humzah, Khalifa, Shin-Haeng, and Elena, whose partners have become honorary members of our graduating class.
And so, we arrive at the final phase: implementation.
These two years have not been all sunshine and rainbows. Uncertainties around visa situations continue to affect some of us even as we walk across this stage. Sudden policy changes left contracts unfulfilled, causing real disruption to our plans and our lives. And across the world, things have not been much smoother. We have been confronted with war, genocide, even geoeconomic fragmentation.
For many of us, this may not have been the world we expected to step back into. But if there is something I want to leave with our cohort — and I promise it is the most earnest piece of advice I can offer — it's this: keep doing what you're doing.
Don’t let the weight of the world we are entering stop you from showing up as your full self. The work you do may sometimes feel thankless — but each of you are planting seeds. And the most powerful thing about this cohort is that none of the seeds we plant look the same. From the diplomat on her way to an unforeseen country in Latin America, the political activist trying out tech startup scene, and even to the Special Forces Officer who is already road-tripping to his next posting — these turns from the expected path are not distractions from your impact, they are your impact. They are what makes your contribution to this world yours and no one else's.
So, despite how uncertain things may feel, I want to ask each of you to hold onto what made you, you. Continue to bring your unique lens to every room you enter. Think differently. Ask the uncomfortable question. Take the less-traveled path. And continue to shine — not because the world will always reward you for it, but because that light is yours to give.
As I conclude my capstone presentation, I want to take a moment to thank my family and friends for supporting me every step of the way. To my mother, who sat by my side after long days of work to help teach me how to multiply, thank you for your patience and your love. To my father, who after long days as a mechanic still made sure to dress me in my Sunday best every week— thank you for your dedication and your sacrifice. To my grandmother, whose stories of Cuba first sparked my curiosity about the world beyond my own — thank you for planting that seed.
And to this cohort — for every laugh shared, every piece of advice given, every memory made — thank you.
Please join me in congratulating the Stanford MIP graduating class of 2026.
Tyler Smith encouraged his fellow graduates from the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy to approach their futures in true Stanford style: by identifying problems, developing solutions, and implementing a course of action forward.
A new front has opened in the U.S.-China competition in artificial intelligence: open-weight, local AI models. Until recently, the most capable AI models were too big and too costly to run anywhere but in giant data centers packed with expensive, specialized chips. But now these systems are rapidly migrating from the cloud to consumer hardware—including laptops and mobile devices—where they can answer questions, write code, and take actions on a user’s behalf without sending data to a remote server. Thanks to technological advances in both AI models and chips, the so-called open-weight AI models that increasingly underpin most local AI deployments are smarter and smaller than their predecessors and can be freely downloaded from the Internet, modified, and deployed without a centralized provider.
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At a moment marked by war, regional fragmentation, and mounting uncertainty across the Middle East, the Program on Arab Reform and Development (ARD) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a wide-ranging conversation between historian and Middle East scholar Joel Beinin and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Senior Research Scholar and ARD Associate Director.
The discussion explored how the region’s current crises fit within longer historical trajectories, and what they may signal for the future of political order, state power, and social movements in the Arab world.
Throughout the conversation, Beinin situated contemporary wars and political ruptures within broader histories of authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and the erosion of regional political cohesion. The discussion ranged from the legacies of the post-9/11 era to the fragmentation of the Arab regional order, the failures of democratization, and the global rise of the far right.
Here are five major takeaways from the discussion:
One of the central themes of the discussion was that today’s regional turmoil differs fundamentally from earlier periods of instability. Beinin argued that while the Arab world has long experienced cycles of war, authoritarianism, and external intervention, the current period is distinctive because the very idea of a coherent “Arab world” has weakened dramatically.
As Beinin put it, “A quarter of a century ago, you could still talk about the Arab world with a certain sense of unity… and today, increasingly, it doesn’t.” He stressed that this fragmentation is not merely geopolitical but also political and ideological. Regional powers now pursue sharply divergent agendas, while many traditional centers of Arab political and cultural influence have declined.
Egypt occupied a central place in this analysis. Beinin argued that Egypt, historically viewed as a political and cultural anchor of the Arab world, can no longer plausibly play a regional leadership role. He described the Egyptian regime as deeply constrained by debt crises, Gulf dependency, and intensifying authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) increasingly shape regional politics, albeit without the broader political legitimacy or cultural influence once associated with Cairo.
The result, according to Beinin, is a region characterized less by shared political trajectories than by fragmentation, competing alignments, and increasingly localized struggles for survival and authority.
Early in the conversation, Sallam read aloud a passage from President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, warning that the United States “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” Sallam then revealed that the quotation was not from President Donald Trump, but from Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
The exchange set up one of the discussion’s recurring themes: the persistence of interventionist frameworks in American political discourse on the Middle East.
Beinin argued that much of contemporary U.S. rhetoric surrounding Iran reproduces assumptions and narratives that shaped the run-up to the Iraq War. “None of it was true when they said it about Iraq,” he remarked, “and none of it is true when they’re saying it about Iran.”
More broadly, he suggested that the post-9/11 political climate fundamentally reshaped how the United States discussed the region. Reflecting on the years after the September 11 attacks, Beinin described g a political atmosphere in which attempts to contextualize regional dynamics were frequently dismissed as apologetics for extremism.
The conversation repeatedly returned to the dangers of reducing regional politics to moral binaries or civilizational narratives. Instead, Beinin emphasized the importance of historically grounded analysis attentive to state interests, political economy, and international power relations.
Another major takeaway concerned the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 and the broader trajectory of authoritarianism in the region.
Beinin argued that states such as Egypt and Tunisia have emerged from the post-uprising period with harsher and more consolidated forms of authoritarian rule than existed prior to 2011. “Any kind of political, civil, even to some degree cultural resistance has been stamped out,” he said, citing the expansion of surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.
Yet the discussion also rejected the simplistic notion that the Arab uprisings were meaningless failures. Beinin pointed to later protest waves in Sudan and Algeria during 2019–2020 as evidence that activists and civil movements had absorbed important lessons from the earlier uprisings.
In Sudan in particular, he argued, protest movements understood that “the army is not on the side of the people,” reflecting a deeper awareness of how military institutions could derail revolutionary transitions. At the same time, Beinin stressed that regional interventions by Gulf powers played a major role in undermining these movements. He described how competing regional actors backed rival military factions, contributing to fragmentation and ultimately overwhelming civilian political forces.
The broader implication was that authoritarian resilience in the Arab world cannot be understood solely through domestic dynamics. Regional rivalries, external funding networks, and transnational counterrevolutionary alliances all play a central role in shaping political outcomes.
While much of the conversation focused specifically on the Arab world, Beinin consistently situated regional developments within broader international trends.
He argued that the current moment reflects not only regional disarray but also the rise of increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian political currents globally. Beinin pointed to “a hard lurch to the right” in multiple countries, including Israel, India, and parts of Europe.
This international dimension, he suggested, has profound implications for the Middle East. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian politics globally has helped normalize more extreme forms of militarism, ethnonationalism, and state violence. It has also weakened many of the international norms and institutions that once constrained state behavior, however imperfectly.
The discussion of Israel occupied a particularly important place here. Beinin linked Israel’s rightward shift to broader transformations in global politics. At several points, the conversation underscored how the wars in Gaza and Lebanon cannot be understood in isolation from these wider ideological and geopolitical currents.
Rather than treating the Middle East as uniquely unstable or exceptional, Beinin repeatedly encouraged the audience to see the region as deeply connected to broader crises of democracy, inequality, nationalism, and authoritarianism unfolding globally.
Perhaps the most important theme running through the conversation was methodological rather than purely political: the insistence on historical perspective in moments of crisis.
At the outset of the event, Sallam emphasized that the purpose of the discussion was “not to chase after the headlines,” but rather to “take the long view” and place contemporary developments “in conversation with scholarly research and debates.”
Throughout the conversation, Beinin repeatedly cautioned against analyses driven solely by immediate events, media cycles, or simplistic geopolitical narratives. Instead, he urged audiences to understand contemporary wars and political transformations as products of longer histories involving colonial legacies, state formation, authoritarian restructuring, social movements, and international intervention.
The discussion ultimately offered no easy optimism about the region’s future. Yet it also rejected fatalistic portrayals of the Arab world as uniquely doomed to instability. Instead, the conversation highlighted the importance of historical memory, critical scholarship, and political analysis capable of connecting contemporary crises to deeper structural processes.
A full recording of the conversation can be viewed below:
In a discussion convened by the Program on Arab Reform and Development, Stanford scholars situate regional upheaval within longer trajectories of imperial intervention, authoritarian rule, and global political shifts.
