Thursday, December 18, 2025

Today, Matt Pottinger and Ben Buchanan warn that the Trump administration is giving China the reins in the AI race by approving the export of more advanced NVIDIA chips. Apple in China author Patrick McGee appears on the latest episode of China Considered. And Eugene Volokh explores if the Canadian publisher of the Franklin the Turtle series can sue the US government for using Franklin’s likeness in a series of online memes.

Confronting and Competing with China

Trump Is Doubling Down on AI Chip Policy

Writing in The New York Times, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Matt Pottinger and Ben Buchanan, former White House Special Advisor for AI, argue that the Trump administration’s recent decision to allow NVIDIA to sell its leading-edge H20 and H200 GPU chips to China will allow the Chinese Communist Party to catch up its domestic semiconductor industry to the dominant market position of the United States and Taiwan. As with so many other technologies, Pottinger and Buchanan argue the Chinese will import the chips until such time as they can make their own, and then leverage their enormous industrial capacity to outproduce us. “US National Security and technological dominance shouldn’t ever have a price — let alone such a low one,” Pottinger and Buchanan write. Read more here. [subscription required]

How iPhones Built a Superpower, with Patrick McGee

On the latest episode of China Considered, Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy speaks with Patrick McGee, Financial Times technology journalist and author of Apple in China, about how Apple’s deep involvement in growing China’s technological manufacturing base inadvertently helped it morph into the industrial powerhouse it is today. In the book, McGee traces Apple's journey from near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s to becoming deeply dependent on Chinese manufacturing, explaining how Apple didn't just outsource production but actively trained Chinese factories and transferred sophisticated manufacturing knowledge that later benefited homegrown competitors like Huawei and Xiaomi. Watch their conversation here.

Revitalizing American Institutions

Can Franklin the Turtle Sue in the Court of Federal Claims for a Reasonable Licensing Fee?

On his blog, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh asks whether the mounting use of Franklin the Turtle in online memes by US officials and federal government social media accounts opens them up to liability for copyright infringement. The Canadian publisher of the lovable children’s book series featuring the turtle has condemned the character’s use in the memes, which make light of the ongoing US military campaign against drug traffickers in the Caribbean and domestic immigration enforcement operations. But Volokh says the actual damages incurred by this use are perhaps no more than $750. “Whatever one might think of the ethics or taste of what the government is doing here, it appears to be essentially authorized under American law, but with the requirement of modest compensation,” Volokh writes. Read more here.

Determining America’s Role in the World

South Asian States Seek Cooperation—Without India

In Foreign Policy, Senior Fellow Šumit Ganguly writes about the new effort by Pakistan, China, and Bangladesh to form a new regional organization that leaves out India. He writes that China and Pakistan, through their aggression toward India and military cooperation, are now India’s “two principal adversaries.” And India’s relations with Bangladesh have cooled considerably since India gave refuge to ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina last year. Ganguly says India needs to come up with new ways to maintain its influence among its smaller neighbors, and counter growing diplomatic and military ties forming between those states and China. Read more here. [subscription required]

Revitalizing History

Hoover Acquires Family Papers of Yang Yongtai, an Influential Bureaucrat in Chiang Kai-shek’s Regime

The Hoover Library & Archives has obtained the family papers of Yang Yongtai, a leading politician of the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party of China who was assassinated in 1936. Yang was a key figure in the KMT’s campaigns against Chinese communists between 1932 and 1936. He was killed October 25, 1936, after returning home from lunch at the US Consulate in Hubei Province. His collected works were donated by his grandson, Henry Hung Fong. Read more here.