ChinaTalk

Joining me for WarTalk’s post-midterms edition are regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Special Forces veteran Justin McIntosh, and former House staffer Tony Stark.

We discuss…

Why Iran holds the cards now — a blockade too slow for the White House’s clock, half the deployed Navy pinned down, and Tehran’s likely asks, from reparations to a strait toll.

The war Congress won’t pay for — why no NDAA or appropriations bill moves while the shooting continues, and the one-line rider that could end it.

Hegseth’s impeachment math — articles due Monday, how many Senate Republicans might break, and the 1876 Secretary of War who raced to resign minutes before the House vote.

Defense tech after the wave — why a big Democratic majority may be kinder to the topline, the coming scrutiny of politically connected contracts, and Starshield’s governance problem.

Who does the oversight — Tony’s new guide to being a good staffer, and why the Pentagon keeps 23-year-old aides in the dark.

The WarTalk Book Club debuts — Harold Coyle’s Team Yankee as a case study for company commanders, why mil-fic makes me uneasy, and proof that officers have never read.

Plus, I had Claude rebuild the original Team Yankee board game. Play a friend or the AI here (https://claude.ai/artifact/7LyRbALwL11FnqZWsqC9Rp). Next book: Tonio Andrade’s The Gunpowder Age.

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You can read a translation into English of this interview here: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-make-fun-of-chinese-ai

Xianyu (咸鱼), the writer behind 葬AI — “Funeral AI” — produces some of the best satire out there about China’s AI industry. ChinaTalk Substack readers may remember his essay “Open Models Are the United Front of AI”.In this conversation, Irene and Xianyu talk (in Chinese) about:

Why AI writing isn’t funny;

How Xianyu made a website for ordinary people to rank video model by meme-ability;

Why Five Year Plans are a kind of benchmark;

And why there’s so much Chinglish in AI.

We also disagree about where the hype is worse: China or America.
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The blockade is squeezing Iran. So why does it keep being easier to press the war button?

WarTalk regulars Jordan Schneider, Justin McIntosh, Bryan Clark, and Tony Stark.

Why the strikes continue when the blockade is doing the real work, and what running the war off two carriers costs the Navy.

Combatant commanders pitching the president their own wars, and whether Cuba is next.

The myth that a more lethal military would have won in Afghanistan.

The Joint Staff J-5’s firing, and what it says about a Pentagon that’s stopped planning.

Plus: join the Navy, see the world (mostly the Iranian coast), and letting AI pick the next war.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:20 Iran and the midterms

00:10:20 Is Cuba next?

00:24:37 Jensen, spies, and the J-5 firing

00:42:07 The Afghanistan myth
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In the new era of global competition, being at the forefront of Super Intelligence innovation equals geopolitical power. To maintain leadership and establish the next world order, the U.S. is moving to cement its lead.

Barnett Koven is a Managing Director of AI and Data at Accenture Federal Services. He came to Accenture Federal Services after stints in industry and a faculty job at the University of Maryland, where his counterinsurgency research showed that some of the most influential quantitative studies got the answer exactly backwards.

We discuss…

Why “inaction is in and of itself risky” — and how government risk-aversion compounds against less-cautious competitors

The “gun-armor race” in classified AI environments, where defense costs grow exponentially against linear offense

Entity resolution and predictive modeling for BIS export-control enforcement, and unwrapping the PLA’s shell-company maze

DOE’s Genesis Mission and Accenture Federal’s “backbone for scientific research”

Thank you to Accenture Federal Services for bringing us this episode.
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ChinaTalk spends a lot of time on the leading lights of the Chinese economy... the MiniMaxes, ByteDances, Unitrees, and BYDs of the world.

But what about the rest of the system, the part growing at zero to two percent?

To talk about what's broken, not just what works, we talk with Meg Rithmire.

Meg is the James E. Robison Professor at Harvard Business School and author of Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia. With UC San Diego's Peter Cowhey, she recently wrote "The Cost of Keeping China Out" for Foreign Affairs, which argues that Washington should let some Chinese firms build in America... on strict terms.

We discuss…

Mafia firms: how Anbang, HNA, and Wanda raised money on stock exchanges, tunneled it into subsidiaries by the thousands, and bought the Waldorf Astoria without making anything at all

How China's zombie firms moved out of real estate and into industrial policy, why households put up with it when "the rest of the world seems awful," and what Japan teaches about living well with bad macro numbers

Why the Chinese Communist Party is more nervous about controlling its own champions than Western media assumes

A reverse Tesla: Meg's case for letting BYD and CATL build in the US with localized supply chains, split hardware and software, and continuous monitoring

US vs. China corruption

Plus: the Indonesian tycoon hiding behind the building on Meg's book cover, whether AI can do David Barboza's paper-trail reporting in five seconds
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