Guermantes Lailari On Taiwan: The Cross-Strait ‘Status Quo’ Myth

China exploits the mythical “status quo” to undermine regional stability. Crucially, the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) never actually mentions this concept. Instead, Sections 2(b) and 3 establish explicit, legally binding US obligations to provide defensive weapons and maintain the capacity to resist any force or coercion that threatens regional peace or Taiwan’s security, society and economy. Framing these mandates as a vague “status quo” creates a conceptual trap. It paralyzes defenders by mislabeling Taiwan’s self-defense as a provocation, allowing Beijing to slowly strangle the island through gray-zone warfare. To fulfill the TRA, Washington and Taipei must replace passive ambiguity with

Silicon, not software, will decide the AI race

Did the artificial intelligence (AI) boom begin when it did simply as a result of scientific breakthroughs? At first glance, it would seem so. The transformer architecture — the foundation of today’s large language models — was introduced in 2017. By 2020, researchers had established the basic logic of scaling: More computation and data produce predictably better models. Then, in late 2022, the public launch of ChatGPT revealed the mass-market appeal of the technologies, setting off a global race for AI leadership. However, scientific advances alone do not trigger investment booms. Rather, AI delivered a market-wide shock to the semiconductor

By Antonin Bergeaud and Robin Rivaton