davel

Paywall bypass: https://archive.today/NytYP

As the leaders of the United States and China met in Beijing on Thursday, Xi Jinping had a much older rivalry on his mind.

The Chinese president invoked a warning from the Classical world, when the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta went to war, saying that the United States and China should beware the “Thucydides Trap” in their own relations.

Mr. Xi cited the concept, popularized in recent decades, as he warned that Beijing and Washington could enter an “extremely dangerous place” if President Trump sought to impede China as it asserted itself over Taiwan.

The trap referred to by Mr. Xi was named for Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general, whose account of the Second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) is considered one of the first written military histories.

In it, Thucydides argued that the war between Athens and Sparta was driven by the threat posed to an established power by one gaining strength. “The rise of Athens frightened Sparta and forced them into war,” wrote Thucydides. (The precise translation is contested among classicists).

For some scholars, the war — and the explanation offered for it in that ancient passage — presaged nearly every major conflict to follow. The international relations theorist Graham Allison dubbed it the “Thucydides Trap” in the early 2010s.

“The idea is that when an established, great power is met with a rising power, conflict between the two is certainly likely if not inevitable,” said Daniel Sutton, a classicist at the University of Cambridge who studies Thucydides, on Thursday.

In Mr. Xi’s version of the analogy, an emboldened China is the Athens to an American Sparta.

To demonstrate his theory, Professor Allison identified 16 times in history that a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. According to his tally, which is subjective, 12 of the 16 rivalries ended in a conflict.

The UN chemical weapons watchdog has been ordered to pay moral and legal compensation to one of its former investigators who was censured and smeared by the organization for challenging its fabricated claim that the Syrian government carried out a chemical attack against its own civilians in Douma in April 2018.

On 1 May, former Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigator Brendan Whelan announced that an independent arbitration body, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), had ruled in his favor and ordered the OPCW to pay damages and legal costs.

Beyond vindicating Whelan, the arbitration case highlights the OPCW leadership's effort to manipulate its own report to maintain the false narrative that the former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was behind a series of chemical attacks during the 14-year US and Israeli-backed dirty war that sought to topple his government and install an Al-Qaeda-linked militant leader in his place.

This month-old instance has three communities. One is for testing and the other two are anti-trans.

The UN Security Council on Tuesday failed to adopt a Bahrain-led measure aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with China and Russia blocking a watered-down version of a resolution that initially authorized the use of force.

Bahrain's Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani said the resolution was intended as "a step toward a permanent solution that will ensure navigational freedom in the Strait of Hormuz."

“Failing to adopt this resolution sends the wrong signal to the world,” Zayani said.

There were 11 votes in favor, including Bahrain and permanent members the United States, France and the United Kingdom, with abstentions from Colombia and Pakistan. Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Panama and Somalia also voted to pass the resolution.

The vote came hours before President Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to reopen the strait or endure strikes on its civilian infrastructure. He warned in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning, “A whole civilization will die tonight," if no deal is reached.

In remarks following the vote, US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz accused Moscow and China of backing “a regime that seeks to intimidate the Gulf into submission.”

They’re basically minimum-viable products that by design can be used to violate the law in California when the Act goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

A flashback to 24 years ago.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Your_War_On
• https://web.archive.org/web/20251201002916/http://www.mnftiu.cc/category/gywo/war81/

Paywall bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20251019175231/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/business/media/epoch-times-pentagon-press-rules.html

BoingBoing on Wednesday: Mainstream media quit Pentagon rather than sign pledge

Update: By end of day, a few more signed up; this post originally identified only one, OANN. The new Pentagon press corps appears to be The Federalist, the Epoch Times, OANN, a Turkish newspaper and a blogger from Korea.

Aside from Alphabet’s own forays into AI, they’re also selling pickaxes to most other AI prospectors.

It’s a story deSouza likes to tell in numbers. In a conversation with this editor, he notes several times that nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all GenAI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate.

Asked what percentage of Google Cloud’s revenue comes from AI companies, he offers instead that “AI is resetting the cloud market, and Google Cloud is leading the way, especially with startups.”

The strategy extends beyond simple customer acquisition. Google offers AI startups $350,000 in cloud credits, access to its technical teams, and go-to-market support through its marketplace. Google Cloud also provides what deSouza describes as a “no compromise” AI stack — from chips to models to applications — with an “open ethos” that gives customers choice at every layer.

The approach reflects both opportunity and necessity. In a market where companies can go “from being a startup to being a multibillion-dollar company in a very short period of time,” as deSouza puts it, capturing future unicorns before they mature could prove more valuable than fighting over today’s giants.

“Companies love the fact that they can get access to our AI stack, they can get access to our teams to understand where our technologies are going,” deSouza says during our interview. “They also love that they’re getting access to enterprise-grade Google class infrastructure.”

Google’s infrastructure play got even more ambitious recently, with reporting revealing the company’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to expand its custom AI chip business. According to The Information, Google has struck deals to place its tensor processing units (TPUs) in other cloud providers’ data centers for the first time, including an agreement with London-based Fluidstack that includes up to $3.2 billion in financial backing for a New York facility.

Competing directly with AI companies while simultaneously providing them infrastructure requires … finesse. Google Cloud provides TPU chips to OpenAI and hosts Anthropic’s Claude model through its Vertex AI platform, even as its own Gemini models compete head-to-head with both. (Google Cloud’s parent company, Alphabet, also owns a 14% stake in Anthropic, per New York Times court documents obtained earlier this year, though when asked directly about Google’s financial relationship with Anthropic, deSouza calls the relationship a “multi-layered partnership,” then quickly redirects me to Google Cloud’s model marketplace, noting that customers can access various foundation models.)