Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

For the First Time, Both Canada and Mexico View China More Favorably Than the United States

pew

• A new Pew Research Center survey finds that Canadians, for the first time in nearly two decades of polling, now view China more favorably than the U.S. — Mexicans have held this view before, but only during Trump's presidencies.
• In both countries, more people express confidence in Xi Jinping than in Trump, and majorities say the U.S. does not respect their countries' interests or contribute to global stability.
• The shift is sharpest in Mexico, where the share saying the U.S. contributes to peace and stability has fallen from 50% in 2023 to just 28% today, and where Mexicans now more often call China a reliable partner than the U.S.

The iPhone May Have Done More to Reduce Birth Rates Than Any Policy in American History

promarket

• New research uses a natural experiment — AT&T's exclusive iPhone distribution from 2007 to 2011, which gave some counties smartphone access and others almost none — to show that iPhone access caused a 4.5–8% drop in teen birth rates and explains as much as half of the entire U.S. fertility decline in that period.
• The effect appears to work by crowding out the unstructured in-person time in which relationships — and unintended pregnancies — form, rather than by changing anyone's conscious preferences about children.
• The finding implies that government pro-natalist policies like cash transfers and childcare subsidies may be targeting the wrong bottleneck: the real constraint isn't the cost of raising children but whether people are forming relationships in the first place.

The best AI you can run on your own hardware is Chinese, and the West has no real answer yet

atlantic_council

• The most capable AI models you can download and run on your own servers — keeping your data private and under your control — are increasingly Chinese, with labs like Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot consistently topping the rankings for open-weight models.
• This matters because organizations are increasingly choosing locally-run AI to avoid handing their data and learning signals to cloud providers, but existing Western policy responses (app bans, chip export controls) don't apply to model files already downloaded onto servers in Frankfurt or Dallas.
• The deeper problem: even leading Western open-weight models are partly trained on Chinese AI, creating a dependency chain that Western governments have neither measured nor governed — and China is actively promoting its open models to developing countries as a geopolitical strategy.

In the News

After EV Tax Credits Expired, Americans Are Buying Hybrids Instead of Battery-Electric Cars

eia

• When federal EV tax credits expired in September 2025, battery-electric vehicle sales fell sharply — from a record 12% of new car sales right before expiration to just 6% in early 2026.
• Hybrid vehicles, which weren't eligible for those tax credits and don't plug into the grid, picked up the slack, hitting a record 16% market share — suggesting buyers still want fuel efficiency, just not full electrification.
• The shift matters for energy planning: hybrids keep Americans buying gasoline and don't add to electricity demand, which changes the outlook for both oil consumption and grid investment.

Analysis

Syria's New Parliament Is Less a Check on Power Than a Tool for Building It

atlantic_council

• Syria convened its first post-Assad parliament in July, but the body was designed for loyalty, not independence: President al-Sharaa directly appointed a third of its members, political parties were banned, and it lacks the power to remove ministers or override vetoes without a supermajority.
• The parliament's real value is largely technical — clearing an 800-bill backlog of Assad-era laws and rewriting a legal code built for repression, which matters enormously for investors and reconstruction but won't make headlines.
• The bigger risk is representational: minority communities make up 35-40% of Syria's population but only 14% of the chamber, and even Sunnis in al-Sharaa's own base are complaining their communities were shut out, raising doubts about whether the parliament can build the trust it needs to legitimize the new order.

Also Worth a Look

• Banning Chinese Open-Source AI Would Hurt American Startups More Than China (atlantic_council)
• Trump's new science strategy has bold ideas — but the budget cuts underneath could gut American research (atlantic_council)
• Bird Droppings Built American Empire — and the Fertilizer Crisis Shows History Is Repeating Itself (the_conversation)
• Al-Qaeda and ISIS Are Both Using AI, But for Very Different Reasons (the_conversation)
• The US-Saudi nuclear deal could give Riyadh a path to the bomb — unless Washington writes in real safeguards (the_conversation)
• U.S. Cuts Triggered the Largest Single-Year Drop in Global HIV Funding Since the AIDS Response Began (kff)
• The New Russia Sanctions Bill Has Teeth — But China and India Make It Complicated (atlantic_council)