Lansing Today

Beneath the daily churn of AI headlines about data centers, job losses, and safety fears lies a quieter but consequential contest: the race between the United States and China for AI supremacy. It rarely dominates public conversation, but the stakes are enormous. Unlike nuclear weapons, AI-powered cyberwarfare offers no mutually assured destruction — a country with a decisive AI edge could potentially hack into rival financial systems or critical infrastructure with impunity, since the victim's less capable models couldn't mount an equivalent defense or counterattack. That asymmetry alone could reshape global power balances in ways nuclear deterrence never allowed. Recent months have fueled anxiety that China is closing the gap, with Chinese models like Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 posting results that rival American systems on certain benchmarks — including one cybersecurity test where GLM-5.3 briefly edged out Anthropic's celebrated Mythos model. But the comparison is misleading. Mythos itself was months old by the time it was compared, and Anthropic has confirmed it possesses more advanced internal models it hasn't yet released, partly due to safety concerns that Chinese labs don't share. The bigger picture: America still leads decisively in models, computing power, and revenue. But that lead isn't guaranteed to last, and paradoxically, cooperation on AI safety — something both nations have reason to want — may only become possible if the U.S. maintains a clear advantage. Squandering that edge, including through policies that drive away Chinese AI talent, could carry consequences far beyond the tech industry.

A recent Harvard Harris poll revealed something striking: among all the political figures Americans were asked to rate, three of the least popular—Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Benjamin Netanyahu—shared one common thread. Each has become entangled in the increasingly toxic overlap between Middle Eastern politics and American domestic life. As the country marks 25 years since 9/11, that attack's legacy looms larger than ever—not just in foreign wars, but in how Middle Eastern conflicts now shape U.S. elections, media narratives, and even synagogue shootings. From Trump's costly and unpopular war with Iran to the escalating Israel-Palestine debate reshaping Democratic primaries, the region's fault lines are increasingly America's own. Groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC are pouring resources into races nationwide, transforming candidates into proxies for overseas conflicts rather than champions of American priorities like inflation, healthcare, or democracy itself. This piece argues for a fundamental rethink: genuine U.S. disengagement from the Middle East, made newly feasible by economic shifts that have rendered the region's oil far less critical to American prosperity than it was in the 1970s. With America now a net oil exporter and its economy dramatically less sensitive to price shocks, the old rationale for deep entanglement no longer holds. The case is clear—it's time to stop importing the Middle East's conflicts into American politics, and start focusing on the issues that actually affect American lives.