Foreign Policy Blogs

Several international and European human rights organizations along with hundreds of social media activists took part in a huge social media campaign in front of the European Parliament in an attempt to raise awareness regarding the human rights situation in Sudan and the use of chemical weapons against civilians following the report of France 24 ,the French channel together with a euronews report that showed members of EUB network which demonstrates the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the Sudanese Armed forces.

The media campaign in Europe comes as a continuous action to support the work of several human rights organizations which called upon the EU and international community to tell the Sudanese Armed forces to stop the use of chemical weapons and to call for ceasefire and peace as well as bring humanitarian aid to a suffering population.

It is also an action to inform young people in Europe and beyond about this forgotten crisis which caused the death of more than 150,000 people, the famine of more than 25 million people and the displacement of more than 14 million people.

Andy Vermaut, journalist and human rights defender, regretted that “Egypt, our neighbor across the sands, has aligned itself with the Sudanese Armed Forces, offering support that sustains the cycle of violence—support driven by borders and waters shared, yet prolonging the very chaos that drives refugees to their doors, over two million strong, fleeing homes turned to ash.”

According to Vermaut, “Iran extends its reach, arming the army with drones and weapons that tear through communities—exporting turmoil to a land already scarred by division, where ambition overshadows aid. Turkey and Qatar, too, lend their hands—through arms, through influence—turning Sudan’s internal strife into a theater of international ambition, where the powerful play games and the powerless pay the price; where alliances meant for stability instead fuel the fires of destruction.”

Vermaut continued, “And then there are the weapons that haunt our collective conscience: reports of chemical agents, chlorine gas deployed by the Sudanese army against its own people—choking the air of hope in places like Khartoum, violating every principle of human decency, echoing the horrors of wars we vowed never to repeat.”

Sadaf Daneshizadeh, representative of “Prosperous Iran”, joined this campaign by highlighting that “The Sudanese conflict must be analyzed not only as an internal crisis, but also within the broader context of regional dynamics. Several external actors, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, appear to be playing an indirect but significant role, notably through military cooperation and the transfer of capabilities, such as drone systems. These interactions, even when presented as strictly bilateral or defensive, contribute to the prolongation of hostilities and the worsening of the humanitarian situation.”

Manel Msalmi, women’s rights advocate and human rights advisor at Milton Friedman Institute, mentioned the report of France 24 and stressed the fact that “We all share a joint duty to uphold the rights and dignity of every individual, regardless of their location. We must not choose silence in the face of inaction; rather, we should raise our voices and ensure that the plight of the Sudanese people is acknowledged. To advocate for and support the Sudanese population, it is crucial to stay updated on the circumstances. This report aims to draw the world’s attention on the swiftly changing situation, underline the dangers of a further decline, and stress the immediate actions that are necessary to avoid further escalation.”

All the participants called for an immediate action, a ceasefire and a peace plan which guarantees access to humanitarian aid, food and shelter and put an end to the huge displacement crisis.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the joint press conference of the European Digital Sovereignty Summit, Berlin, November 18, 2025. (picture alliance / Andreas Gora)

In November 2025, the European Union crossed a decisive threshold in its effort to safeguard its digital backbone from strategic vulnerabilities linked to Chinese technology. On November 10, Vice-President Henna Virkkunen introduced a legally binding proposal requiring all EU member states to phase out Huawei and ZTE equipment from their 5G and future telecommunications networks. This marked a sharp departure from the EU’s 2020 ‘5G Toolbox,’ which relied on non-binding recommendations and lacked enforcement mechanisms. The new plan—complete with financial penalties for non-compliance—makes clear that Beijing’s expanding technological influence, and Huawei’s entrenched position in particular, has become the central threat to the Union’s digital sovereignty.

Only a week after the phase-out announcement, EU leaders convened in Berlin for the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty on November 18. There, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron jointly emphasized that Europe must rapidly strengthen its strategic autonomy if it hopes to remain competitive in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and semiconductors. Although the summit’s official agenda avoided explicitly naming China, Europe’s accelerating policy shift—including the renewed push to remove Huawei from its networks—made the underlying target difficult to miss. The subtext became even clearer when placed alongside Merz’s remarks at a business conference days earlier, where he outlined Germany’s new course: “We have decided within the government that wherever possible, we will replace components, for example, in the 5G network, with components that we produce ourselves,” he said, before adding, “and we will not allow any components from China in the 6G network.”

Europe’s consolidating consensus on a Huawei phase-out now sits alongside the EU AI Act of 2024 and the Cyber Resilience Act of the same year—two frameworks that impose strict cybersecurity and data-protection requirements designed to privilege trusted vendors over high-risk Chinese suppliers.

Unified Export Controls and Sanctions Might Accelerate Transatlantic AI Governance Convergence

The United States’ AI full-stack strategy, outlined in the July 2025 AI Action Plan, seeks to secure American advantage across the full technological chain—from semiconductor chips and high-performance computing to foundational models, data governance, and downstream applications. It blends restrictive measures and incentives: export controls, licensing rules, and standards-setting diplomacy operate as “sticks” to slow China’s access to frontier systems, while subsidies, joint research initiatives, and preferential integration into U.S.-led supply chains serve as “carrots” to draw allies into a shared technological ecosystem. Yet despite the strategy’s breadth, transatlantic coordination remains thin, lacking the institutional depth needed to support a truly integrated approach.

Europe’s recent moves, when viewed through the logic of the U.S. strategy’s sticks and carrots, provide new momentum for narrowing this gap. If Washington can translate this moment into practical institutional mechanisms, the full-stack strategy could serve as a strategic scaffold—offering political reassurance, regulatory leverage, and innovation resources that help Europe consolidate its trusted telecommunications infrastructure while advancing its broader digital sovereignty. In such a coordinated transatlantic framework, the United States and Europe together reinforce the foundations of a shared ‘free world’ technological space, reducing the free world’s dependence on Chinese digital and hardware ecosystems.

This convergence, however, remains fragile. Major EU regulatory projects, including the 2024 AI Act, must still reconcile competing demands from domestic constituencies and both European and American technology firms. The bloc’s struggle over the Huawei question illustrates these tensions vividly. Years of friction between security hawks and economic pragmatists meant that, after the 2020 ‘5G Toolbox,’ only 10–13 member states implemented meaningful restrictions. Germany hesitated largely because Huawei offered a 20–30 percent cost advantage over Nokia and Ericsson, compounded by significant sunk investments in its already‑deployed infrastructure—factors that made a rapid, full ban economically burdensome. Spain faced similar incentives: Telefónica had renewed a Huawei 5G core contract through 2030 and relied heavily on Huawei’s lower‑cost equipment and existing deployments, making an abrupt shift technically and financially challenging. Even so, by July 2025 Madrid committed to phasing out Huawei equipment in Spain and Germany to comply with tightening EU‑level security requirements, while maintaining Huawei systems in Brazil, where no such restrictions applied. Ultimately, Germany and France converged on a stabilizing middle path. Berlin sought to reconcile economic pragmatism with mounting security imperatives by offering subsidies to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, and Telefónica to complete equipment swaps by 2027. Paris—more hawkish from the outset—reinforced this trajectory by consistently framing Chinese vendors as fundamental sovereignty risks, helping steer the broader EU toward a more unified and security‑driven position.

These internal pressures help explain the endogenous nature of broader transatlantic divergences—differences that analysts at the Atlantic Council characterize as structural, rooted in the EU’s more precautionary regulatory philosophy, its deeper emphasis on market fairness, and its persistent drive for ‘strategic autonomy,’ especially in digital governance.Yet despite unresolved frictions, convergence is strong where both sides perceive systemic risk—data security, supply-chain resilience, and preventing the militarization of AI and quantum technologies by authoritarian states. The real task is, thus, to translate these shared anxieties into structured cooperation before divergences harden.

Coordinated export controls and sanctions offer a particularly strong pathway for accelerating transatlantic AI governance convergence. These instruments cut to the core of what makes uncoordinated national responses inadequate in an era defined by overproduction, supply-chain dominance, and state-supported technological scaling by Chinese-linked firms. For individual states, unilateral measures against China’s rapid advances are insufficient. But the United States and Europe possess complementary strengths—American technological leadership, European regulatory capacity, and the combined market power of the transatlantic economy—that can turn coordination into the linchpin of a coherent strategy. When synchronized, such controls help bridge differences in high-risk AI safety practices, fortify supply chains, and close loopholes that currently undermine enforcement.

Building this coordination requires elevating emerging-technology policy into a top-tier transatlantic channel—most naturally through a strengthened Trade and Technology Council (TTC). Within such an upgraded framework, Washington and Brussels could operationalize a common approach to high-risk technologies by jointly defining safety expectations for advanced AI systems, aligning listings and sanctions on sensitive Chinese-linked firms, tightening oversight of technology and data flows, coordinating early on outbound investment, and cooperating to disrupt diversion networks operating through Russia and other intermediaries. As analysts at the Atlantic Council note, these mechanisms offer more than technical alignment: they create the institutional fabric that allows the United States and Europe to manage systemic technological risks together rather than in parallel.

A fully developed TTC of this kind would also serve as the platform for narrowing existing regulatory gaps. The United States, for instance, could work with the European Commission (EC) to build an ‘AI-governance bridge’ that provides companies with predictable operational expectations across jurisdictions even when the laws are not identical. Synchronizing sanctions and export restrictions with the Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) would tighten enforcement and limit opportunities for evasion. Simultaneously, deeper collaboration with the Directorate-General for Trade (DG TRADE) would help Europe construct a more coherent export-control regime that complements the protective goals embedded in Washington’s AI Action Plan. Reciprocal notification requirements and shared-risk taxonomies for outbound investment would round out this architecture, laying the foundation for a future transatlantic screening system capable of managing strategic leakage at its source. Such alignment would extend the reach of transatlantic AI export controls and sanctions beyond bilateral borders, establishing global standards that shape technology flows worldwide through tiered licensing and extraterritorial enforcement mechanisms.

Rising International Multi-Layer Governance Threats from China to Transatlantic AI Governance

LGU+’s Huawei-linked IoT lab exposes how corporate dependencies can strengthen China’s leverage over allied digital systems.

Recent developments in Northeast Asia illustrate why transatlantic coordination on AI governance and high-risk technology controls must extend far beyond national capitals. In 2020, the U.S. State Department publicly warned LGU+ that continued reliance on Huawei equipment could expose the operator to serious reputational, legal, and security risks—part of Washington’s broader push to discourage high-risk vendors within allied 5G ecosystems. Five years later, during a 2025 parliamentary oversight hearing, LGU+ was again criticized for still operating Huawei-supplied 5G equipment, underscoring how entrenched procurement decisions can harden into long-term structural dependencies even after security concerns become explicit.

In September 2025, Mayor Kang Ki-jung’s Gwangju delegation visited Huawei’s 1.6 km² Shanghai Research Campus, revealing how municipal engagement can strengthen China’s strategic leverage.

Municipal dynamics reveal a similar vulnerability. Last September, Gwangju conducted an official visit to Huawei’s 1.6 km² Shanghai research campus as part of its effort to benchmark smart-city and AI-hub strategies. Though framed as a technical mission, the visit created an opening for Beijing to cultivate influence over subnational officials whose infrastructure preferences increasingly shape the region’s technological trajectory. Such episodes highlight how Chinese firms strategically leverage local development incentives to embed themselves in urban infrastructure planning—well beyond the oversight reach of national authorities.

These cases illuminate a broader strategic tension: while the free world benefits from maintaining limited, cooperative grey zones that allow behavioral observation of Chinese technological conduct, these same spaces create opportunities for Beijing to conduct its own counter-conditioning. The challenge is therefore not simply to preserve channels for observation, but to define the permissible boundaries of these grey zones and discipline the risks associated with them. Without clearer parameters, cooperation intended to generate insight can gradually drift toward structural dependence.

Taken together, these developments are not merely warning signs; they constitute a new frontier of strategic challenge for the transatlantic community. They underscore an underappreciated reality: high-risk technology penetration increasingly occurs through governance layers that traditional export-control systems were never designed to monitor. Ensuring technological security now requires policy mechanisms that span the full chain of decision-making—from national ministries to regional telecom operators to municipal administrations—each capable of introducing vulnerabilities that adversarial firms can exploit. Strengthening vendor‑risk standards, aligning licensing rules, and coordinating penalties across jurisdictions have thus become essential to prevent subnational gaps from crystallizing into strategic footholds for authoritarian influence.

Conclusion: Cultivating Carrots to Advance Transatlantic AI Coordination

Yet institutional alignment alone cannot build a durable front. Sustained cooperation depends on credible economic incentives that make participation strategically and commercially viable for allies. The next phase of transatlantic technological strategy must therefore pair regulatory ambition with material commitments that reduce the political and economic friction of compliance. If Washington couples its institutional efforts with meaningful economic commitments—co‑funded infrastructure, joint R&D programs, and clear assurances that export controls will not become instruments of unilateral commercial gain—its AI full‑stack strategy could evolve from a national blueprint into the backbone of a transatlantic technological alliance.

Such an alliance would not only strengthen the free world’s ability to resist Chinese technological influence but would also offer a coherent model for global technology governance—one grounded in transparency, high‑standard safety, shared economic opportunity, and a rules‑based order capable of shaping the next generation of advanced technologies. In this sense, transatlantic coordination is no longer a desirable accessory to national strategies; it is the essential foundation for securing the free world technological frontier in the decade ahead.

 

Colombian Air Force Kfir fighter jets fly in formation during the military parade to commemorate Colombia’s Independence Day in Bogota on July 20, 2024. (Alejandro Martinez/AFP)

There has been a lot of discussions on US plans in addressing security issues with Venezuela, as US forces take to targeting boats related to cartels attempting to bring narcotics into the United States. While the likelihood of a full assault on Venezuela would mirror the recent strikes on Iran as opposed to a strategy of regime change like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the success in assaulting the most well equipped nation in Latin America comes with significant risks to US forces.

Venezuela has been the benefactor of past procurements of weapons systems from the United States. In the pre-Chavez era, Venezuela was tasked with protecting not only itself, but American and foreign owned oil production assets. This close relationship between the US and Venezuela enabled the former ally to purchase early F-16 jets and rely on the overall protection of US assets in the region. With the start of the Chavez regime, Venezuela moved to a policy of expropriation, the cutting of ties with the West, and massive purchases of Russian military equipment, specifically the SU-30 fighter platform. With Venezuela’s border nations flying older Kfir jets and Mirage IIIE/5s, the SU-30s gave Venezuela a massive advantage in air superiority, now having the most capable fighter jets in the Americas after the United States.

While air defence over Venezuela would start with their SU-30 radars and longer range missiles intercepting incoming threats, Venezuela also obtained a layered air defence network from Russia and radars from China. Venezuela has not just one of the most capable air defence networks in Latin America, but worldwide. Chinese radars are some of the more modern variants available for territorial defence, systems which are now operational in Venezuela. To target longer range threats from the air and evasive missile threats, the export version of the S-300VM is operational in Venezuela. The S-300VM is the export tracked version of Russia’s S-300 missile system, and is one of the most capable systems in the world. To support the S-300VMs, Venezuela also uses the modern BUK-M2 for medium to long range air defence, a system that matches anything operational in the War in Ukraine in 2025. An assault on Venezuela may require more advanced techniques than even the recent strikes on Iran, as their systems are more modern than some of those that were operating in Iran before the strikes.

Being well known for many decades, and becoming more popularized in the movie Top Gun: Maverick, Venezuela operates the SA-3 air defense missile system. While not used as they would operate in real life in the movie, the SA-3 when used en masse would cause a lot of chaos in the air for any non-stealth aircraft conducting an assault on Venezuela. While the F-35s and F-22s would be a solution to avoiding the SA-3’s modernised radars in Venezuela, it would have made for a less exciting movie. A a mark of excellence, of good training by the SA-3 radar operators, and mistakes by the pilot and his support structures, an SA-3 was able to shoot down a F-117 stealth bomber over Serbia in the 1999. Even in chess, the Pawn sometimes is lucky enough to kill a King.

While the common theme when speaking about a US assault on Venezuela does not consider the mission to have great risks overall, mistakes could lead to US pilots being shot down. With multiple scenarios of defeating both S-300 systems and BUK-M2s having taken place in Ukraine, US forces likely have a good base of knowledge on how to defeat these systems in real world combat scenarios. Venezuela is quite a large country, and the very limited number of S-300VMs is not adequate to defend the entire territory. Lacking a sufficient number of BUK-M2s is also a problem and the SA-3 systems can be carefully avoided or defeated via cruise missile strikes on their radar hubs and launchers themselves. In reality, those missiles would have been taken out by overwhelming waves of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes in order to save Tom Cruise an Miles Teller a lot of grief, and in real life, all of the S-300VMs, BUK-M2s and SA-3s would be hit early with the Chinese made radars seeing the strikes coming in and being subject to them directly. If US bravado on Venezuela turns to conflict, waves of missiles would be what strikes Venezuela first and perhaps last, with no pilots being put at risk in the initial assault. The loss of US lives in combat with Venezuela would sour the public on any coercive actions, but the bluff might be worth the reward in the view of the current US Administration.

At first glance, the comparison seems almost absurd. Mongolia, a vast country with enormous mineral wealth, stretching between two geopolitical giants, versus Belize, a small Central American state with limited territory, modest population and no strategic depth. By classical logic, Mongolia should be the stronger actor in economic sovereignty. Yet recent analytical measurements reveal a far more counterintuitive reality: Belize today demonstrates a higher level of practical economic sovereignty than Mongolia.   As an expert of the International Burke Institute and an active participant in projects aimed at strengthening national sovereignty, I encounter such paradoxes with increasing frequency. They reveal one of the central truths of the modern world: economic sovereignty is no longer a function of size, territory, or raw resources. It is a function of control, diversification, resilience and institutional discipline.   Mongolia is rich in coal, copper, gold and rare earth elements. Its underground wealth is undeniable. Yet much of its economic model remains structurally dependent on a narrow export base and on external demand, primarily from a single dominant market. This creates a classic dependency trap. When prices fluctuate or geopolitical pressure intensifies, Mongolia’s fiscal stability, currency strength and social balance become immediately vulnerable to external forces it does not control.   Belize, by contrast, lacks large-scale mineral reserves and does not command major industrial capacity. But over the past two decades it has built something far more decisive for modern sovereignty: a diversified economic structure that reduces exposure to single-source dependency. Tourism, financial services, agriculture, logistics and digital services form a balanced ecosystem. None of these sectors dominates absolutely, yet together they form a resilient economic architecture.   Economic sovereignty is not measured by how much a country exports, but by how freely it can decide under pressure. A state that earns billions from raw materials but cannot influence pricing, transportation routes or investment conditions is not fully sovereign in economic terms. It is economically active, but strategically constrained. This is where Mongolia’s vulnerability becomes evident. Its resources generate revenue, but not full control.   Belize’s advantage lies not in volume, but in flexibility. Its economy is small, but adaptive. External shocks do not collapse the entire system at once. Currency policy, fiscal regulation and sectoral balance provide room for maneuver. In moments of global turbulence, this flexibility becomes a strategic asset far more valuable than sheer scale.   At the International Burke Institute, where we are finalizing the comprehensive Sovereignty Index to be presented this December for all UN member states, economic sovereignty is assessed not by GDP alone, but by a deeper set of indicators. These include dependency ratios, trade concentration, fiscal autonomy, financial system resilience and the state’s capacity to absorb shocks without losing strategic autonomy. It is within this multidimensional framework that Belize unexpectedly outperforms Mongolia.   As someone directly engaged in both the analytical and practical dimensions of this work, I see a pattern repeating across regions. States that rely heavily on a narrow economic corridor — one commodity, one route, one partner — accumulate invisible vulnerabilities. Their economies may look strong in growth charts, but their sovereignty erodes silently through structural exposure. When disruption comes, decision-making becomes reactive rather than sovereign.   Belize followed a different logic. Instead of maximizing output from a single dominant resource, it invested in balancing multiple smaller sectors. This did not produce spectacular growth headlines. But it produced something far more durable: economic independence in critical moments. Sovereignty is not tested in times of prosperity. It is tested when options disappear.   Mongolia now faces the classic dilemma of many resource-rich states: how to convert natural wealth into strategic autonomy rather than long-term dependence. The answer lies not in extracting more, but in restructuring more. Without diversification, even the richest subsoil becomes a fragile foundation for sovereignty.   The Belize–Mongolia contrast illustrates a broader truth about the modern global system. Size no longer guarantees strength. Wealth no longer guarantees independence. What matters is the architecture of control. Who sets the terms of trade? Who controls capital flows? Who absorbs the first удар during a crisis?   In December, when the full Sovereignty Index is released, many governments will confront similar surprises. Some large states will discover hidden fragility. Some small ones will discover unexpected strength. And many will face an uncomfortable realization: economic sovereignty today is built not by scale, but by structure.   Belize did not become stronger than Mongolia by growing bigger. It became stronger by becoming smarter in how it organizes dependency and control. And in the modern world, that difference defines who truly holds economic sovereignty — and who merely appears to.