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A Made In Canada label is shown in Brampton, Canada, on February 3, 2025. Sweeping tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump on many Canadian products, including dairy, force many Canadians to check labels for Canadian-made or produced products as a response to potential higher grocery costs. (Photo by Mike Campbell/NurPhoto)NO USE FRANCE
Tariffs were postponed. For a day. Now they’re back. For now.
After a short break, President Donald Trumpannounced Thursday that tariffs for Canada and Mexico are back on for March 4, along with an additional 10% tariff for China. That’s the plan as of right now, but things could change, as we’ve seen in recent days. On Wednesday, Donald Trump postponed across-the-board 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico until April 2. That pause came shortly after Trump said the tariffs were, in fact, going ahead on March 4 – and after he paused them for 30 days last month. The White House also said steel and aluminum tariffs are still planned for March 12, as well as retaliatory tariffs in early April. Is that clear ... as mud?
The on-again-off-again tariffs are driving politicians in Canada and industry on both sides of the US-Canada border mad. The market hates uncertainty, and Trump’s tariff plans and contradictory statements are leaving policymakers and the business community wondering what exactly he has planned for the long term.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did offer some clarity on Trump’s tariff goals, saying that Canada and Mexico might be able to avoid duties if they can convince the administration they’ve done “an excellent job” on border security, but it’s anyone’s guess whether a) that’s true and b) what qualifies as an “excellent job.” Besides, any clarity ought to be taken with a grain of salt, given that Trump has also suggested tariffs are a means to balance US trade deficits, to force Canada to spend more on defense, to crush the country economically — and to bring it further under US control as the 51st state.Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown, seen here at the White House in Washington, in 2023.
China cooks up trouble in the South Pacific
The Cook Islands’ recent entry into a strategic partnership with China has spawned protests in front of Parliament, angered long-time ally New Zealand, and this week, nearly toppled the islands’ government.
On Wednesday, Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown survived a 13-9 no-confidence vote. Opposition legislators were angry that Brown did the deal with Beijing in secret, jeopardizing the country’s long-standing relationship with Wellington, which New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peterssaid will now have to be “reset.” Brown’s partnership with China also follows an unsuccessful pitch last December to create a Cooks passport and citizenship, which also did not sit well with both Kiwis and islanders.
What is the Cooks’ connection with NZ? The Cooks became partially independent in 1965, but its 15,000 residents receive NZ citizenship and passports and use the NZ dollar. New Zealand has also committed over US$57 million in aid since 2022 and supports both foreign affairs and defense.
What did China offer? Beijing pledged a five-year “action plan,” including $4 million for education, the economy, infrastructure, fisheries, disaster management, and, most controversially, seabed mining for nodules rich in nickel and cobalt.
China’s larger agenda The Cooks are just the latest South Pacific nation to sign a deal with Beijing. Kiribati has signed a series of development agreements in recent years, even hosting Chinese police stations, as have the Solomon Islands. China has also persuaded both countries, as well as nearby Nauru, to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the mainland.Security cameras representing surveillance.
OpenAI digs up a Chinese surveillance tool
On Friday, OpenAI announced that it had uncovered a Chinese AI surveillance tool. The tool, which OpenAI called Peer Review, was developed to gather real-time data on anti-Chinese posts on social media.
The program wasn’t built on OpenAI software, but rather on Meta’s open-source Llama model; but OpenAI discovered it because the developers used the company’s tools to “debug” code, which tripped its sensors.
OpenAI also found another project, nicknamed Sponsored Discontent, that used OpenAI tech to generate English-language social media posts that criticized Chinese dissidents. This group was also translating its messages into Spanish and distributing them across social media platforms targeting people in Latin America with messages critical of the United States. Lastly, OpenAI’s research team said it found a Cambodian “pig butchering” operation, a type of romance scam targeting vulnerable men and getting them to invest significant amounts of money in various schemes.
With the federal government instituting cuts on AI safety, law enforcement, and national security efforts, the onus for discovering such AI scams and operations will increasingly fall to private companies like OpenAI to self-regulate but also self-report what it finds.
A Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy Harbin Z-9 helicopter sits on CNS Yulin during a display of warships ahead of an exhibition at Changi Naval Base in Singapore on May 18, 2015.
China’s “dangerous” helicopter maneuver escalates tensions with US and Philippines
A Chinese naval helicopter flew nearly 10 feet from a Philippine patrol plane on Tuesday over a contested reef in the South China Sea, escalating tensions with Manila and Washington in the airspace over international waterways Beijing claims as its own.
The move, which the US condemned as a “dangerous maneuver,” comes months after a series of seaborne attacks in which Chinese coast guard vessels rammed Philippine ships.
Both Beijing and Manila claim the Scarborough Shoal – known in China as Huangyan Island and in the Philippines as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc – located less than 150 miles off the west coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon. But China has controlled the waters around the unpopulated reef since 2012. In recent months, the Philippines and the US have sought to assert Manila’s sovereignty by flying air patrols over the shoal.
In a tense 30-minute standoff on Tuesday, a gray People’s Liberation Army naval Harbin Z-9 chopper hovered just over the wing of a Philippine C-208 light utility plane after Beijing said the Philippines “illegally invaded the airspace” over the shoal. Washington rebuked the move against its ally, whose 74-year mutual defense treaty both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to reinforce over the past year.
“We condemn the dangerous maneuvers by a PLA Navy helicopter that endangered pilots and passengers on a Philippine air mission,” MaryKay Carlson, the US ambassador to Manila, wrote in a post on X. “We call on China to refrain from coercive actions and settle its disputes peacefully in accordance with international law.”
Flashback to a heated summer: Last June, Chinese coast guards wielding knives and axes rammed their ship into a Filipino vessel, injuring eight sailors and severing the thumb of one. The attack was intended to halt a resupply mission to a Philippine outpost in the Sierra Madre, a rusting World War II vessel run aground years ago on the shoal to mark Manila’s claim. China accused the Philippines of secretly hauling equipment to reinforce the decaying ship among food and water supplies for Philippine marines stationed on the outpost.
The bottom line: “While scary, this is more a continuation of near-boiling point tensions, where neither Beijing nor Manila wants the dispute to spill over into outright conflict,” said Jeremy Chan, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group. But Tuesday’s incident, he added, is “increasing the risk for both China and the Philippines that there could be some kind of aerial collision between the two countries.”
The growing cyber threat: Ransomware, China, and state-sponsored attacks
"Ransomware attacks surged 252% last year—hospitals, schools, and local governments are paying the price," said Brad Smith, Microsoft vice chair and president, during a Global Stage discussion at the 2025 Munich Security Conference.
Smith highlighted the evolving cybersecurity threats in 2025. While defenses have improved, China’s recent Salt Typhoon attack exposed vulnerabilities in US telecom networks, and ransomware has exploded—with over half of payments flowing to Russia and Iran. Smith warns that some of these attacks are state-sponsored or state-tolerated, calling for greater international collaboration to counter them.
Watch the full conversation here: Is the Europe-US rift leaving us all vulnerable?
This conversation is presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft from the 2025 Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical conversations on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.
In this photo illustration, a DeepSeek logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with a South Korea Flag in the background.
South Korea halts downloads of DeepSeek
South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission, the data privacy authority in the country, said the app “lacked transparency about third-party data transfers and potentially collected excessive personal information.” It’s unclear whether the third party in question is the Chinese government.
The government said the ban will only be lifted after DeepSeek adheres to the country’s privacy and security laws, which are considered among the world’s most stringent. While DeepSeek’s R1 model has quickly become one of the foremost large language models, it’s the first such one to hail from China — and thus, privacy advocates and global regulators have criticized its privacy policy, which states that the company will share data with China. “We store the information we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China,” the policy says. The Chinese Foreign Ministry urged South Korea not to “politicize” trade issues and said Chinese companies comply with local laws where they operate.
Italy already banned DeepSeek nationwide over privacy concerns, while Taiwan and Australia each banned the app on government devices. In the United States, there’s no federal prohibition on government devices, but legislation was introduced earlier this month to do just that. Meanwhile, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia have all banned DeepSeek on state-owned devices.
Software is difficult to ban — especially since virtual private networks can mask one’s location — but countries concerned by Chinese access to their citizens’ data are trying their best.
Taiwan's flag with a semiconductor.
Has US opened the door to Taiwanese independence?
The US State Department last week scrubbed a statement from its website that said it doesn’t support Taiwan’s independence, sparking fury in China, which called on the United States to reinstate the message. Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lungappreciated the removal.
This is the second time in three years that the US agency has removed this message from its website. The Biden administration cut it in May 2022 but restored it a few weeks later under pressure from China.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said that the United States maintains its official “one China” policy, which specifies that the US only has formal ties with China and doesn’t take any position on Taiwanese independence.
The reality is a little more ambiguous, almost by definition. The United States maintains unofficial diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and the pair have built a close trading relationship. In 2022, then-US President Joe Biden went a step further, pledging to defend the island nation if the Chinese invaded.
US-China relations have been simmering in recent years, across both Democratic and Republican administrations. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly warned of threats from China, calling the Asian juggernaut “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever faced."
The Trump administration’s relationship with Taiwan isn’t perfect, either. US President Donald Trumpcomplained last week that the nation, which produces more than 90% of the world’s semiconductors, has taken the industry away from the United States. In an apparent effort to appease the new US leader, Taiwan said it would increase its investment in the United States, while also spending more on defense.
What the website change means for the United States’ position on Taiwan’s sovereignty remains unclear. Rubio has said that the US won’t support Taiwanese independence, though this removal appears to put the United States a step closer in that direction.
“It’s not unthinkable,” says Eurasia Group’s Jeremy Chan, “that Trump’s team may be withholding a statement of not supporting ‘Taiwanese independence’ to build leverage for future negotiations with Beijing.”