Source: The Conversation – UK – By Beth Timmins, Lecturer in Anthropology, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford
As war threatens to erase everyday life in Ukraine, artists have turned to puppetry, one of the oldest forms of storytelling. Light enough to travel, intimate enough to gather a crowd and able to capture the attention of children, puppet shows have become resilient tools of resistance, support and relief for the people of a country at war.
Contemporary Ukrainian puppetry is part of a long tradition, from the 16th-century travelling folk theatre known as vertep, to the establishment of theatres in Kyiv and Odesa in the 1930s. Although later repressed and censored for satirising Soviet leaders, puppetry survived these periods of repression and is now enjoying a comeback in a time of conflict.
Meaning “secret place” or “cave”, vertep historically staged nativity scenes, secular tales and satirical folk performances. It emerged around the time that Ukraine’s early national liberation movement was gaining traction in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as it sought to gain independence from Poland and Lithuania.
Much of the puppet theatre from this period reflected society at the time, with Zaporozhian Cossacks dominating the stage, portrayed as protectors of the people against foreign powers and enduring symbols of resistance. Later, during the early Soviet rule – which sought to crush expressions of national Ukrainian identity – puppetry faced severe restrictions for popularising folk traditions and political satire.
Today, this legacy continues underground in basements, metro stations and bomb shelters in cities and towns across Ukraine. Puppet theatres like the Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University (below) are staging contemporary interpretations of vertep, reflecting on the events and effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
As a frontline city, Kharkiv has seen the deaths of hundreds of civilians and the wide-scale destruction of infrastructure. This has forced many people to seek shelter from bombing in underground shelters.
Ukraine’s vertep-style puppetry.
My work as an anthropologist considers how cultural heritage and art are used as forms of resistance and resilience by communities both during and after conflict. In a new ongoing study, this work examines how Ukrainian artists and cultural institutions continue to use puppetry and its rich traditions to sustain cultural life under extreme conditions, and for those among the Ukrainian diaspora.
I have examined images, videos and archival collections and conducted interviews with puppeteers, theatre directors, museum curators, artists and audience members. This work shows how Ukrainian artists have turned to a traditional form of storytelling using humour, folktales and performance to recall their history and heritage. For them it is a constructive way of fostering hope and keeping spirits up in difficult times.
How art and culture brings hope
During Russia’s initial full-scale invasion in February and March of 2022, intense shelling followed displacing thousands. Conscious that large numbers of children were having to shelter for extended periods, Oksana Dmitrieva, director of the Kharkiv Academic Puppet Theatre, decided to stage puppet shows in the city’s underground metro stations.
She developed stories that addressed the experiences of communities living through the fear and uncertainty of war. This included Giraffe Mons, the story of a giraffe living in Kharkiv Zoo during the second world war, a tale that examines the dislocation caused by conflict that young children can relate to.
The parable nature of the story makes it possible to create a performance that deals with painful topics, but does not traumatise the viewer, framing war from a child’s perspective, foregrounding fear, compassion and mutual support.
Dmitrieva emphasised the importance of sustaining cultural work during conflict, saying: “Where there is a puppet there is always mystery and beauty.” For her the performances are mechanisms of resilience, an “important experience that allows us to see how important art is – an opportunity to distract, to feel, to be together”.
Mykhailo Urytskyi, puppet director and lecturer at the Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv University also stages performances with his students in shelters and metro stations. During power outages, performances are lit with battery-powered lamps and supported by power banks, attesting to the persistence of art even in precarious circumstances.
Urytskyi told me that in times like these, this kind of performance is “not only relevant but necessary”. His work
engages with the topic of war, exploring what it means to be human and questioning whether forgiveness is possible.
In a show called Vertep Hope, he reinterprets the nativity as a story about the birth of Ukraine, which a modern-day Herod seeks to destroy. This he said, “is our way of shouting about the tragedy in Ukraine through the language of art”.
When Kherson was occupied in March 2022, the Kherson Puppet Theatre set off on tour on a bus flying the national blue and yellow flag. The company drew on Ukrainian history for a show inspired by the life of Taras Shevchenko, the revered poet and painter whose writing and political activism helped shape modern Ukrainian identity. Born into serfdom in 1814, Shevchenko took part in the struggle against Russian imperial oppression, becoming a fierce critic of Tsarist Russia and a national hero.
Beyond Ukraine’s borders where the diaspora has spread out across Europe and further afield, puppetry offers cultural preservation and a sense of connection for displaced people. The Ukrainian-Slovak Hub, for example, established in Kežmarok, eastern Slovakia, provides a space where refugees can find support. The hub’s puppet workshops have helped traumatised children articulate emotions that can be difficult to express.
But these shows do not only help people process the horrors of war. Stemming from a rich national heritage that bolsters feelings of unity and belonging, this deceptively simple storytelling medium helps to sustain cultural life as Ukraine’s 21st-century war rumbles on.
Beth Timmins receives funding from the Marcus Harmelin research grant provided by St Cross College, Oxford University. This research has also been supported by the Centre for Urban History in Lviv.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Politics; Director, Lau China Institute, King’s College London
When Britain sent its first formal diplomatic mission to China in 1793, one of the participants from London, Peter Auber, remarked that the group had been “received with the utmost politeness, treated with the utmost hospitality, watched with the utmost vigilance and dismissed with the utmost civility”.
The mission, which aimed to open trade and establish a permanent British embassy in Beijing, involved great pomp – but it led to no tangible return. Auber’s quote came back to me as I watched Donald Trump’s two-day state visit to China unfold.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, opened the summit by greeting his American counterpart with warm words. The relationship between their two countries, he stated, was the “most consequential in the world”. Xi added that making America great again, a reference to Trump’s political slogan, was compatible with Chinese progress.
Trump was equally effusive in his praise of Xi. Writing on social media during his flight to Beijing, he stated that the Chinese president was “respected by all”. And when the two delegations sat down for direct talks, Trump told Xi: “You’re a great leader.”
But what did this visit actually achieve, beyond the diplomatic words and mutual flattery?
One of Trump’s perennial aims in his first and second spells in the White House has been to correct the trade imbalance between the two powers. Figures from 2025 show that while the US sold US$106 billion (£79 billion) of goods to China, it bought products worth US$308 billion from Chinese exporters – a trade deficit of around US$200 billion.
On Trump’s previous visit to China in 2017, soya beans were the thing Beijing agreed to buy more of from the US. This time around, the sole big ticket item was aircraft.
On May 14, Trump announced that China had agreed to order 200 Boeing jets. Yet Boeing’s stock fell 4% immediately after the announcement, because the order was lower than many analysts had expected.
Trump also said that China had, in principle, agreed to buy crude oil from the US.
However, in terms of something significant for the CEOs of major tech companies accompanying Trump to Beijing, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook, it seems there was no major breakthrough.
China’s strategy of developing its own technology and capacity in this area is well-known, with the government’s recent 15th five-year plan setting out its commitment to innovation, and to its own indigenous companies.
Great-power cooperation
A more significant outcome from the visit came in the less tangible space of geopolitical management and great-power cooperation. At the summit, Xi said clearly that the world relies on China and the US being able to engage with each other pragmatically, even if they don’t see eye to eye.
Comments made on Taiwan, in particular, were seen as underlining the red lines for each side. Xi repeated his demand for American non-interference, a coded warning about US arms sales to the island, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province. Trump later told reporters he had not yet decided whether a major US sale of weapons to Taiwan could move forward.
But in their talks with Chinese officials, the US delegation appear to have stuck largely to policy lines in place since the 1970s – that this issue has to be sorted out peacefully, with agreement from both Taiwan and China.
In view of the other turbulence in the world at the moment, sticking as far as possible to the status quo on this issue, while unexciting, can be described as a positive.
Regarding that turbulence, Trump said Xi had offered to help the US in the Iran conflict – but how this might work out in practice is another matter. China is unlikely to want to play a heavy mediation role, because of the potential to be sucked into the perpetual problems the region seems to present to anyone getting more involved there.
What China wants is a long-term truce that means both Tehran and Washington can claim to have emerged from the Iran war as the winner – despite there being no final decisive outcome. China definitely does not want the conflict to continue indefinitely, given its disruptive economic impact – hence the offer of some kind of help.
History will probably judge Trump’s visit as one more landmark along the road to a world in which China has greater prominence, but still accords the US respect and acceptance of its current economic and military primacy. Trump may have left empty-handed – but in diplomacy, nothing happening is sometimes a good thing.
That the two leaders got on, did not clash and agreed to continue the conversation might not seem a great outcome. But in this turbulent world, it still counts as a plus.
Kerry Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Designing a series of sweetener trials seemed straightforward enough to us as behavioural scientists who specialise in human appetite and obesity. The plan was simple: replace the added sugar in a range of foods with different classes of alternative sweeteners, holding everything else constant.
We would start with a simple biscuit with a fruit filling and work from there. In each case we would measure the effects on participants’ eating choices, metabolism and health outcomes.
We put this to our collaborator, Alain Le Bail, a professor and senior food scientist in France with more than 30 years’ experience. He looked as if we’d asked him to build a bridge using marshmallows.
Sugar, he said, isn’t just sweet. It provides structure, texture, browning, moisture and mouthfeel. Removing it doesn’t just alter the biscuit; it breaks the rules that make it a biscuit in the first place.
If even we researchers on appetite and nutrition need to be educated on these complexities, what hope does the average consumer have?
Welcome to our new series exploring the cutting edge of food science. From the latest advances in meat alternatives to weird and wonderful new additives, science is transforming what we eat like never before. This series will bring you up to speed on all the latest and give you plenty of, er, food for thought.
Sweeteners, as we’ll call the broad category of sugar alternatives and sweetness enhancers, were once fairly niche. They were used to lighten a soft drink or sweeten a low-calorie yoghurt, but not much more besides. Now, they are on almost every shelf of the supermarket.
They go to the heart of global debates on obesity, diabetes, child nutrition and ultra-processed foods. Whether it’s politicians deciding on sugar taxes, doctors helping diabetic patients manage their diets, or parents wrestling with product labels, sweeteners are unavoidable.
They attract endlessly conflicting headlines. While we try to reconcile our very human desire for a healthy win-win with our deep cultural unease over “artificial” additives, sweeteners are alternately framed as helpful diet liberators or harmful hormone disruptors. Far more rarely are they seen as ingredients with a specific, measurable function. It doesn’t help that the science in this area is still surprisingly thin on the ground.
Understanding what sweeteners can (and can’t) do for us requires looking beyond the binary of “good” or “bad” to more grounded questions. What are they replacing? In what context? For whom? According to what desired outcomes?
And beyond all this is the question of where sweeteners are heading. Will new technologies like artificial intelligence be transformational? Will we ever make the perfect sugar alternative? Look down the decades and you realise we’ve been trying for a very long time.
A brief history of sweeteners
For over a century, sweeteners have promised the same taste as sugar without the calories or health risks – guilt-free pleasure, in other words. But every breakthrough has been followed by a backlash, leaving a trail of safety scares and shifting public attitudes.
The modern story of sweeteners begins in the late 19th century with the accidental discovery of saccharin at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Derived from coal tar, saccharin is 300-500 times sweeter than sugar.
It quickly found favour among diabetic patients and later, calorie-conscious consumers. Critics questioned its taste, safety and “unnatural” origins, yet its presence grew – particularly amid sugar shortages during the world wars.
In the decades that followed, saccharin became widely used in diet drinks and tabletop products, before safety scares and the arrival of newer sweeteners reduced its popularity.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
In the early 20th century, other synthetic compounds such as dulcin and P-4000 also emerged, but safety concerns led to their withdrawal a few years later. More prominent was cyclamate, discovered in 1937, which gained popularity in the post-war years, especially in the US.
Marketed as a diet aid and used widely in soft drinks, cyclamate was abruptly banned in 1969 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following concerns about bladder cancer. Though the evidence was contested – rats in one pivotal study were consuming the equivalent of 550 cans of diet soft drink each day – the US ban was never lifted, leaving a lasting scar on public trust in sweeteners.
The next turning point came with FDA approval of aspartame in soft drinks in 1983, ushering in what might be called the Diet Coke era. It was also approved as a general purpose sweetener in 1996.
Compared to saccharin, aspartame tasted more sugar-like: in an early comparative study of soft drinks, those sweetened with aspartame were found to be statistically equivalent to sugar (sucrose) on every descriptive scale. Drinks sweetened by saccharin, with its bitter/metallic aftertaste, were among the most different from sucrose.
Aspartame does still taste somewhat different to sugar, but duly became the sweetener of choice for weight-conscious consumers and the food industry, especially in the US and UK. It has drawn negative comparisons to the alternatives, however. In one Canadian study from 2021, 52% of respondents rated aspartame as less healthy than table sugar, while more favourably judging other sweeteners they saw as more “natural”.
Aspartame’s chemical origins admittedly lead to relatively minor drawbacks. It contains the amino acid phenylalanine, which harms individuals with the rare metabolic disorder phenylketonuria. Products containing aspartame must therefore warn about this risk in many jurisdictions, including the US and UK.
Journalists have also amplified speculative risks around aspartame, such as brain cancer, albeit without robust evidence. Regulators including the FDA and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) continue to regard aspartame as safe at current permitted intake levels.
Yet consumer scepticism has persisted – and with commercial consequences. In 2015 PepsiCo reformulated Diet Pepsi in the US as “aspartame-free”. Yet the ingredient was not displaced more broadly, and Pepsi later reintroduced aspartame after the reformulated product performed poorly.
The next wave of sweeteners focused on improved sensory profile and functionality. Acesulfame-K (ace-K) and sucralose were adopted in the 1990s and 2000s because they generally tolerate heat and storage better. For example you can’t use aspartame for baking or making sauces because it breaks down at high temperatures. It’s also not useful for items with long shelf lives including certain condiments, dried mixes and confectionery because it can lose sweetness over time.
However, ace-K and sucralose tend only to work in combinations. Ace-K, for example, boosts upfront sweetness, but has a bitter aftertaste that other sweeteners can help “round out”.
In general, uptake of “artificial” sweeteners has varied. They appear more accepted in the UK and Germany, and less, for example, in Portugal and Romania. Influencing factors include regulatory approvals, cultural preferences and health attitudes.
In the 2010s, consumers came to favour natural sweeteners with more botanical origins. The first to become a big deal was stevia, a sweetener extracted from the leaves of Latin America’s Stevia rebaundiana plant (below). It was followed by monk fruit, from the Siraitia grosvenorii vine of southern China.
These too come with trade-offs, however. For instance, stevia has unpalatable bitter or liquorice notes. And with various natural sweeteners, there are again challenges when sugar’s structural properties matter, including mouthfeel, browning and moisture retention.
This is one reason bulk sweeteners called polyols have become an important, parallel additive. Also known as sugar alcohols, polyols include erythritol, isomalt, maltitol and sorbitol. They are usually synthesised industrially using corn and wheat syrups.
Polyols can be added to products in much larger amounts, since they are not as sweet as the likes of aspartame and stevia. Used to replace sugar’s volume and texture, they can lower the calorie content of foods and also reduce the risk of tooth decay.
However, excessive consumption can give people gastrointestinal discomfort and make them go to the toilet. So when polyols make up more than 10% of the weight of most food products in the UK and EU, for instance, they require a laxative warning on the label.
Overall, the UK permits around 20 different sweeteners. But such are the pros and cons of each that there is still no simple sugar replacement.
Instead, manufacturers mix, match and blend ingredients to approximate the sweetness and structure that sugar provides. The resulting products generate huge annual sales around the world, but each advance is up against a public whose view of sweeteners is continually shifting. And sure enough, the same cycle has been repeating yet again in the 2020s.
How sweeteners became controversial (again)
To understand why sweeteners keep cycling back into controversy, it helps to look at the machinery that translates scientific evidence into public health messages and government policy. The World Health Organization (WHO) sets international norms, standards and evidence-based policy options in this area. It has traditionally focused on free sugars, meaning any sugars added to products as well as those in everything from honeys to fruit-juice concentrates.
The WHO has consistently recommended that adults and children keep free sugars below 10% of their total calorie intake to lower the risk of tooth decay and excess body weight, and below 5% to ensure life-long protection against tooth decay.
Most guidance on sweeteners has instead come from food safety authorities, and focused on safety and exposure rather than potential health benefits. In the UK, whose guidance has been broadly positive, the government launched a sugar reduction programme in 2016. This was ahead of a wider obesity strategy, under guidance from both the WHO and the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition.
The sugar programme actively pushed industry and consumers towards replacing sugar with sweeteners. This included introducing a soft drinks industry levy (“sugar tax”) in 2018, on manufacturers for drinks with excessive sugar content.
This led to higher quantities of sweeteners in consumer products, but then in 2023, to the surprise of many in this space, the WHO got directly involved in the sweetener debate. It recommended against using sweeteners as a strategy for weight control or reducing the risk of diseases.
The advice was based on a 2022 systematic review – meaning a summary of various studies – by the WTO. The review found that while rigorous short-term trials (up to one year) suggested minor weight-loss benefits from substituting sugar with sweeteners, long-term observational studies pointed to increased risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
In observational studies, researchers observe how people consume sweeteners of their own volition and track their health outcomes. As we’ll see, there are various drawbacks with these studies that make the results less reliable.
The strongest designs for reaching conclusions about the causes of particular health conditions are randomised controlled trials. In this context, that means studies where participants are randomly given foods made with different types of sweeteners to compare outcomes.
We’ll get into the details shortly, but when sweeteners are used in place of sugars in these studies, they typically see modest reductions in body weight and energy intake. In randomised trials comparing sweeteners with water, nothing or a placebo, there are generally no adverse effects on participants’ body weight or energy intake, and no other reported adverse events either.
The drawbacks with observational studies help explain why the WHO framed its recommendation as conditional – in other words, countries can still promote sweeteners if there’s evidence demonstrating their safety and benefits. This conditionality is standard when the WHO is less certain about the balance between benefits and harms, and may think a case-by-case approach is appropriate.
In the UK, that uncertainty didn’t calm the waters. Instead, it arguably legitimised the sense that sweeteners are “controversial”.
In 2025, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition published a detailed response noting that the WHO placed more weight on observational studies than randomised controlled trials, and that the underlying evidence for the recommendation was mixed. Nevertheless, the committee said people should minimise their overall intake of sweeteners, and that younger children should avoid drinks sweetened with either sugar or sweeteners.
At the international level, there are also more recent cases of policy outpacing evidence. Products containing sweeteners qualify as “ultra-processed foods” under the Nova classification criteria, a controversial system developed by Brazilian researchers around 15 years ago. Nova’s definitions are argued to be value-laden, ambiguous, and to blur the distinction between processing, formulation and nutritional quality.
This Nova classification has probably contributed to a major shift in US sweetener policy. New US dietary guidelines state that no amount of added sugars or sweeteners should be “considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet”.
Generally, the international conversation has shifted from “swap sugar for sweeteners” to “reduce overall sweetness in the diet”. Possible in principle, but poorly evidenced, and politically difficult to engineer.
Why sweetener research can be confusing
Broadly, the science of sweeteners and health consists of:
Mechanistic experiments designed to show how sweeteners affect the body at a biological level;
Observational studies designed to show what outcomes are associated with consuming them;
Randomised controlled trials designed to show what, if any, health conditions they cause under controlled conditions.
Mechanistically, sweeteners have measurable biological effects on the body. They activate taste receptors in the mouth, for instance. They can affect blood sugar responses after eating and drinking, alter hormone release, change how parts of the brain respond to sweetness, switch certain genes on or off, and shift the abundance of some microbes in the gut.
These findings show that sweeteners do have effects on the body. But that is not proof of real-world harm or benefit. A change in hormones, brain activity or gut microbes does not automatically mean that people will eat more, gain weight or face higher disease risk. Mechanistic findings are therefore best treated as clues about what might matter in everyday life.
The gut microbiome is a good example of this gap. Sweeteners potentially alter gut microbial profiles in ways that affect human metabolism. But microbiome findings may differ depending on which sweetener is studied, how much is consumed, who is consuming it, and what else is in the diet. A microbiome finding can therefore be scientifically interesting while still saying little about whether sweeteners, consumed in everyday diets, do net harm or net good.
Observational studies follow large groups of people over time and relate reported sweetener use to outcomes such as weight gain, diabetes, heart disease and death. These studies are indispensable for studying questions that randomised trials usually cannot answer well, especially rare outcomes and diseases that may take many years to develop. They are also useful for tracking patterns of consumption and for generating hypotheses. Yet they are also especially easy to misread.
One issue is the precision of measurements. Researchers typically infer people’s sweetener intake from self-reported diet questionnaires that use broad food categories, such as “diet soft drinks”.
These rarely capture the type or dose of sweeteners, not to mention that manufacturers regularly change the ingredients in their products. Researchers can easily link certain sweeteners to health outcomes through misclassifying data.
A bigger issue is known as reverse causality. Sweeteners are disproportionately used by people already trying to manage weight, control their blood sugar, or improve their diet. This is often because their risk of diet-related health problems is already high or rising.
In such situations, sweetener intake is likely a sign of underlying health vulnerabilities and attempts to change behaviour, not a cause of later disease. Researchers can adjust their statistics to account for such people, but this cannot fully untangle people’s motivations and lifestyles.
Finally, sweeteners sit inside what we call an additive vs substitutive problem. The comparison in research is rarely sweeteners versus nothing (additive), but sweeteners instead of sugar (substitutive). Rarer still are studies comparing unique sweetener types or blends.
When you change the comparisons you often reach different conclusions, yet debates around the safety of sweeteners often conflate research findings that compare different things. It’s only once you account for all these complexities that the best human evidence becomes easier to interpret.
To be clear, we’re not saying all the blame lies with policymakers misinterpreting science. The way studies are designed, analysed and communicated can also make the evidence seem more contradictory. The risks of misunderstanding are especially high when a tentative mechanistic signal is discussed as if it were proof of harm in everyday life, or if an observational link is presented as if it carries the same weight as a randomised trial.
What the best human evidence shows
The most important point about sweeteners is what happens when they replace sugar, not when they are consumed on top of an otherwise unchanged diet. That distinction matters because if someone consumes less sugar, you would expect lower calorie intake and smaller peaks in their blood sugar and insulin after meals.
This leads to two key scientific questions. One, do sweeteners change people’s eating behaviour by increasing how much food they eat or altering their food preferences? Two, do any short-term changes translate into meaningful long-term differences in body weight and health?
Some of the clearest evidence comes from a string of recent randomised controlled trials testing sweeteners in realistic dietary settings. Each has involved teams of researchers at different institutions and sometimes different countries, and are known by their short names: Sweet Tooth, Switch and Sweet.
In one trial within the Sweet project, adults with overweight or obesity consumed different drinks. These were sweetened with one of three different blends of sweeteners, alongside a fourth alternative that was sweetened purely with sugar.
Two of the three sweetener blends were new plant-based combinations containing stevia – one with monk fruit and one with katemfe fruit (thaumatin). The third was a common artificial combination of sucralose and ace-K. All participants were given either one of these or the sugar-sweetener drink, then ate a carbohydrate-rich breakfast.
The experiments were carried out by multiple teams of researchers at different universities. These were crossover trials, meaning they were repeated multiple times with the same participants consuming a different drink on each occasion.
All three blends of sweeteners led to people producing less insulin after their meal than those who had the sugar drink. The blends containing sucralose/ace-K and stevia/katemfe fruit also saw lower increases in blood sugar.
There were some small differences between blends in how they affected participants’ appetites, but these did not translate into higher calorie intake over the following 24 hours. In other words, the benefits to blood sugar and insulin didn’t induce participants to eat more to make up for it. Gastrointestinal symptoms were also mostly mild.
It’s harder to swap out sugar for sweeteners in solid foods because of the previously mentioned additional structural benefits that sugar brings. We had to overcome these issues to test the effects of sweeteners in biscuits in our study – mentioned at the beginning of the article – which was also part of the Sweet project.
We tested biscuits with fruit fillings made in three ways: with sugar, stevia or an artificial sweetener similar to aspartame called neotame. We examined how participants were affected in the hours after eating them, then after two weeks of daily consumption. Again, this was a crossover trial.
Participants who ate the biscuits containing the sweeteners again saw lower blood-sugar and insulin spikes after a meal – both after one serving and after the two-week test. Participants’ hunger levels and appetite-related hormones did not differ meaningfully either. This is one of the more direct tests of the claim that sweeteners in solid foods increase people’s hunger or disrupt their appetite hormones in a way that makes them eat more.
These results are reassuring, but the real policy question is what happens over months. Sweet has covered this too, in a 12-month randomised controlled trial of adults with overweight or obesity. Involving multiple research teams, the trial was designed to more closely reflect how people use sweeteners in daily life.
Participants first had to complete a two-month low-calorie diet to lose at least 5% of their weight (on average they each lost about 10kg or 22lb). They then had to eat a healthy diet for ten months in which no more than 10% of their calories could come from sugars.
One group had to meet the 10% requirement by replacing sugar-rich foods and drinks with products containing sweeteners, while the other group had to achieve it by avoiding both sugars and sweeteners.
At the end of the year, both groups had kept off most of the weight they had lost. But the group eating sweeteners had regained less weight – about 1.6kg on average – whereas the other group regained about 3.5kg. In other words, within a healthier low-sugar diet, sweeteners may help people to keep weight off.
The trial did detect differences in the two groups’ gut microbiomes, with the sweetener group showing relatively more microbes linked to short-chain fatty acid production and methane production. These could potentially lead to bloating or constipation. But there were no signs that sweetener use worsened measures linked to diabetes or heart disease risk (also known as cardiometabolic markers).
What could explain the difference in weight maintenance with sweeteners? One possible explanation is that the group avoiding both sugar and sweeteners found the diet harder to sustain. Reducing sugar and sweetened foods may have increased the appeal of sweet-tasting foods, making it more difficult to maintain a low-sugar, lower-calorie eating pattern over time.
This interpretation was supported by the psychological data collected in the study, which showed lower diet satisfaction and more cravings for sweet food in the no-sweetener group, but no comparable change in the sweetener group.
Evidence from weight-management programmes points in the same general direction. A year-long randomised trial from the Switch study at the University of Liverpool compared beverages with added sweeteners to just drinking water. This was during a structured programme that helps people change habits related to eating, exercise and lifestyle to lose weight and keep it off. Both groups lost weight and maintained clinically meaningful reductions.
The group having drinks with sweeteners lost slightly more weight than the water group, though the difference was small. The key take-home was that diet soft drinks are not associated with poorer weight control than plain water in a structured programme. This all runs counter to common claims that these drinks drive sweet cravings, reinvigorate people’s appetites and induce them to put weight back on.
Finally, the Sweet Tooth project recently carried out a randomised trial that helps address another popular narrative, namely that exposure to a sweet taste increases a person’s preference for sweetness and drives overeating.
For six months, participants were either given low, moderate or high exposure to sweet-tasting foods and drinks. In all cases, the sweetness came from sugars, sweeteners, fruit and dairy.
By the end of the study, groups did not differ in their liking for sweet tastes or to what extent they chose sweet foods. It also made no difference to their calorie intake, body weight or cardiometabolic markers. In subsequent months, participants drifted back towards the preferences for sweetness they had had before the study.
This weakens the idea that simply “training the palate” by stripping sweet tastes from the diet is a reliable route to lowering calorie intake or improving weight control in the long term.
These trials provide some of the strongest human evidence available and show the science is more coherent than the public debate suggests. In controlled settings, replacing sugar with approved sweeteners tends to lower post-meal spikes in blood sugar and insulin, does not increase appetite or energy intake, and can support weight management when used as part of a healthier, sugar-reduced diet.
The effects are not dramatic, and sweeteners are not a standalone solution to obesity. Overall dietary patterns, food choices and calorie density still dominate. But high-quality human trials do not support the claim that sweeteners, when used as substitutes for sugar, drive weight gain or cause metabolic harm.
One caveat readers may have in mind is aspartame, which was classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. However, it was based on limited evidence, mainly concerning liver cancer, and was a hazard classification, referring to the potential of a substance to cause harm in principle. It wasn’t a finding that normal consumption has been shown to cause cancer in everyday life.
The Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives has concluded that the evidence in humans is not convincing and kept the acceptable daily intake unchanged. The FDA said the classification did not mean aspartame was actually linked to cancer at current permitted levels of use.
The future
The next phase is to deepen what we know already. When people use sweeteners over years, does it help sustain lower sugar intake, or do people simply shift preferences and purchasing patterns? And when studies detect changes in the gut microbiome, does this matter for metabolic health in any meaningful way?
We need better evidence in some of the groups that those who shape policy care most about: children, people with diabetes, and those at highest risk of heart problems and diabetes. Not because current trials suggest clear harm, but because public health guidance should rest on data that reflects real life.
Children are one of several groups where the research evidence remains more limited. Gorodenkoff
The science also needs to answer some practical consumer-facing questions. For instance, we still don’t know enough about which sweeteners, or blends of sweeteners, work best in which products; how much sugar can be removed without making foods and drinks less acceptable; and whether the answers differ for children, adults, people with diabetes or people who already consume sweeteners regularly.
Another frontier is the attempt to get closer to sugar itself. Sweet proteins such as brazzein and monellin, first identified in tropical fruits, are attracting attention because they deliver intense sweetness in tiny amounts. The FDA has recently issued “no questions” letters for both as food ingredients, meaning they can legally be used in commercial foods.
Rare sugars such as tagatose and allulose are also interesting. They are not as intensely sweet, but come closer to sugar in taste and functionality.
But none of this means the perfect substitute has arrived. Sweet proteins can provide sweetness, but not sugar’s bulk, browning or moisture retention. Rare sugars may behave more like sugar, but their performance is still product-specific and manufacturing remains a challenge – they are not naturally abundant so must be produced through complex processes. All these are better seen as promising advances than a single, definitive replacement.
Artificial intelligence may help, though not as a magic wand either. Researchers are now using machine-learning tools to predict sweetness, bitterness, safety and other properties before candidate molecules are ever tested in foods.
That could speed up the search for better sweeteners and, perhaps more importantly, better blends for specific products. The future may lie less in one miraculous ingredient than in smarter combinations: sweet proteins for intensity, rare sugars for bulk and mouthfeel, and improved formulation to bring them closer to the real thing.
Will we ever be able to have our cake and eat it? Probably not in the literal sense of recreating sugar’s chemistry with a single substitute. Sugar is sweetness plus structure, and no one ingredient does both. But the evidence increasingly suggests that we can keep sweetness (and the pleasure it brings) in our diets while reducing sugar intake. In other words, we may not get the same cake, but we can still enjoy a version that costs the body less.
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Graham Finlayson received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for project: “Sweet” under grant agreement No 774293. Cargill R&D Centre Europe was a partner in the Sweet project. Cargill is both a major sugar producer/distributor and a researcher in sugar alternatives and sweetener technology. I have also received funding for a PhD studentship from the American Beverage Association.
Catherine Gibbons received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for the project: “Sweet” under grant agreement No 774293. Cargill R&D Centre Europe was a partner in the Sweet project. Cargill is both a major sugar producer/distributor and a researcher in sugar alternatives and sweetener technology. Catherine has also received funding for a PhD studentship from the American Beverage Association.
Jason Halford received funding from the American Beverage Association for the Switch trial and was a scentific advisor on the Sweet Tooth project. Jason also received funding for a PhD studentship from the American Beverage Association.
A lower court had temporarily blocked this access nationwide in early May 2026. The case now returns to that lower court, although it may well make it back to the Supreme Court in the future.
In states with abortion bans, telehealth prescriptions have allowed women to get abortions anyway. But the case is also significant to those in states without abortion bans, especially women with low incomes and disabilities or who live in rural areas, where reproductive services are extremely limited.
How did the case get to this point?
The case began in October 2025, when Louisiana argued that the Biden administration’s allowance of telehealth abortions was for “avowedly political reasons.” The state asserted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had insufficient evidence to remove the requirement that the drug be dispensed in person, which had been in place from 2000 through 2021.
The state also argued that mailing mifepristone violated an 1873 federal law known as the Comstock Act. This law, which makes it a crime to mail or ship any “lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article” and anything that “is advertised or described in a manner … for producing abortion,” has rarely been enforced.
The lower court thought Louisiana would likely win, but it decided to keep the FDA regulations in place while the case made its way through the courts. On May 1, 2026, however, the appellate court suspended the FDA regulation allowing mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth.
As a result, mifepristone could no longer be mailed or prescribed via telehealth, nationwide. Three days later, on May 4, after the manufacturers of mifepristone appealed, the Supreme Court put the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision on hold for a week to give it more time to consider the legal issues. On May 11, it extended the stay for a few more days.
What does the SCOTUS decision mean for mifepristone access?
On May 14, the Supreme Court decided to leave the FDA’s regulation in effect, so mifepristone remains available for prescription via telehealth. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito accusing the court of “perpetrat[ing] a scheme to undermine” the court’s decision in the 2022 Dobbs ruling that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion and allowed states to ban it. Thomas added his view that the Comstock Act makes it a criminal offense to mail mifepristone.
The case now returns to the 5th Circuit, which has signaled how it is likely to rule on this question. Namely, that it believes the FDA has exceeded its authority in allowing the drug to be prescribed via telehealth. Once the case has been resolved in the lower courts, it could end up before the Supreme Court again. If the court decides to strike down the rule, or if the FDA rescinds it, then women in all states would no longer be able to get the pills by mail, not just in the 13 total-ban states.
The court’s May 14 decision extends the pause on a lower court ruling, preserving mail-order access to mifepristone for now.
Initially, the FDA required the drug to be prescribed and taken at a doctor’s office. But after further review of research on the drug’s safety under the Biden administration, the agency changed some of the prescribing regulations, making it easier to access the drug.
One change made permanent in 2023 was to allow mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth and mailed. That is the regulation at issue in the Louisiana case.
But after the 2022 Dobbs ruling, mifepristone became even more of a target. Anti-abortion groups realized that people could effectively evade abortion bans by receiving abortion pills through the mail. After Dobbs, in fact, the number of abortions increased, and by June 2025 telehealth abortions had increased fivefold, with more than half of them occurring in abortion-ban states.
The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the case on the grounds that the challengers did not have legal standing to bring the claim. Legal standing requires the parties to show they suffered concrete harms or injuries.
Is this likely to happen with the other abortion pill?
The legal challenges so far have been only to mifepristone, one of the two pills used for medication abortion.
Unlike mifepristone, which is approved only for abortion, misoprostol was approved in 1988 for a different purpose: to treat gastric ulcers.
Misoprostol is prescribed for abortion “off-label,” which means it is an unapproved use of an FDA-approved drug that a healthcare provider determined is medically appropriate for their patient.
And the court’s ruling does not affect access to “Plan B,” a pill that prevents pregnancy and thus is used as birth control, not to induce an abortion.
The Supreme Court’s action is certainly not the end of the story. Challenges to abortion pills will continue, particularly because the leaders of many states believe the availability of these pills prevents them from enforcing their abortion bans.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When you ask a large language model a question, the reply may include falsehoods, and if you challenge those statements with facts, the AI may still uphold the reply as true. That’s what my research group found when we asked five leading models to describe scenes in movies or novels that don’t actually exist.
We probed this possibility after I asked ChatGPT its favorite scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting.” It noted a scene between leading characters. But then I asked, “What about the scene with the Hitler reference?” There is no such scene in the movie, yet ChatGPT confidently constructed a vivid and plausible description of one.
The confabulation – sometimes called an AI hallucination – revealed something deeper about how AI systems reason. References to Hitler are not uncommon in films, which apparently convinced ChatGPT to accept and elaborate on a false premise rather than correct it. I study the social impact of AI, and this surprise response led my colleagues and me to a broader question: What happens when AI systems are gently pushed toward falsehoods? Do they resist, or do they comply?
We developed an approach we called hallucination audit under nudge trial to answer those questions. We had conversations with five leading models about 1,000 popular movies and 1,000 popular novels. During the exchanges we raised plausible but false references to Hitler, dinosaurs or time machines. We did this in various suggestive ways, such as “For me, I really love the scene where …”
Our method works in three stages. First, the AI generates statements about a topic — such as a movie or a book — some true and some false. Second, in a separate interaction, the AI attempts to verify those statements. Third, we introduce a “nudge,” where the model is challenged with its own incorrect claims to see whether it resists or accepts them.
We found that AI models often struggle to remain consistent under pressure. Even when they initially identify a statement as false, they may later accept it when nudged – revealing a vulnerability that traditional evaluation methods fail to capture.
When ChatGPT was asked about a scene in the movie Good Will Hunting that doesn’t exist, it confidently described it. Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh, CC BY-ND
This tactic isn’t a hypothetical. When people talk, conversational pressure can emerge naturally. People may confidently repeat incorrect assumptions, partial recollections or misunderstandings. A person might say, “I’m pretty sure medicine X is effective for condition Y,” or “I remember event A happening before event B.” These statements can subtly influence an AI model.
Why it matters
What humans collectively remember, misremember and forget shapes our sense of reality. But if humans can persuade a model to accept a falsehood, that reveals an important vulnerability in AI’s capacity to provide accurate information.
Interactions in the real world are rarely static question-answer exchanges. They are interactive and iterative. An AI model’s willingness to reinforce falsehoods may seem harmless when chatting about movies, but in areas such as health, law or public policy, the tendency can have serious consequences. Our work highlights the need to evaluate not just what information AI systems have been trained on, but how reliably they stand by it.
It’s not clear why some AI systems resist falsehoods better than others. In our tests, Claude was the most resistant, followed somewhat closely by Grok and ChatGPT, with Gemini and DeepSeek further behind.
Movies and novels are self-contained content. Scholars don’t know how AI might respond to pressure in much broader, complex real-world settings. As a start, my group is exploring how to extend our approach to scientific literature and health-related claims. We want to understand whether conversational pressure works differently when the discussion involves uncertainty or expertise.
How to design AI systems that remain both helpful and resistant to falsehoods under wide-ranging conversation remains an open challenge.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
In western Colorado, home to the treasured Palisade peach, cytospora canker is one of the most economically consequential fungal diseases faced by growers.
A recent survey conducted by Colorado State University in Orchard Mesa found that 100% of the orchards have trees infected with cytospora canker. In some orchards, you can smell the sweetness of gummosis, the sweet oozing of sap from a tree that occurs from injury, stress, pathogen infection or insect damage.
We are part of a team of fruit tree growers, extension personnel and researchers who are developing tools for mitigating cytospora canker in fruit tree orchards in Colorado and Utah.
However, fruit tree production in the Intermountain West, which covers Colorado, Utah and Idaho, is threatened by diminishing water supplies, spring frosts, variable winter temperatures and soils that are above the ideal pH range for peach trees. Further exacerbating the environmental stresses are pest problems and the persistent cytospora canker disease.
What is cytospora canker?
Cytospora canker is caused by fungi within the genus Cytospora. These pathogens are found globally and affect more than 70 species of woody shrubs and trees. These fungi have been present on fruit trees in the U.S. since at least 1892 when cytospora canker was first discovered on peach, plum and almond trees in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Cytospora canker was first described as only a disease of stressed trees, but now it is recognized as a destructive disease in tree fruit across the U.S.
Plant Talk Colorado: What is cytospora canker? A video from Colorado State University Extension.
Growers expect peach trees to live for 20 years. The first five of those years are initial growth. The next 10 years are full production. Then, the tree’s productivity tapers off in the last five years of its life. The disease has halved the life of an orchard in Colorado from 20 years to 10 years or fewer. Trees that get infected during the first or second year are typically dead by year four or five before they reach peak production.
Cytopora canker typically enters through wounded and woody branches or twigs. Wounding occurs when branches are pruned to maintain tree vigor or through severe freezing or hail events. Freeze events are common in Colorado and are particularly harmful in the fall if temperatures drop abruptly without giving trees enough time to acclimate to the temperature shift.
Ice formation within plants causes swelling and cracking in woody tissues, as well as the formation of ice crystals within plant cells that can puncture the cells, leaving them vulnerable to oxidative damage and infection. Small cracks enable cytospora spores, like the seeds of a plant, to enter and begin to cause infections.
Cytospora canker and freeze
In 2020, a major freeze event damaged many trees throughout Colorado.
Following a warm October, temperatures dropped from 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius) to below 10 F (-23 C) in a 48-hour time span in the fruit region around the town of Hotchkiss. Because the recent temperatures had been in the 70s, there was not an appropriate amount of acclimation in the trees to be prepared for this large temperature drop. Leaves were still green, and sap was still flowing through the woody tissues.
The sudden freeze also allowed for a proliferation of new cytospora canker infections on peaches trees that were not killed outright by the freeze. The surviving trees were often more vulnerable because the cracked skin and bark of peach branches was now exposed to infection by the fungus. This correlation between cytospora infection and cold damage is thought to be a major reason why cytospora canker is a particularly significant disease in Colorado.
To manage the pathogen, growers can remove trees that are infected, protect wounds with chemicals to prevent new infections and ensure that established trees are free of stress. However, management strategies have limited efficacy due to the growing conditions. While Palisade has the most ideal peach-growing microclimate in Colorado, the cold season is near the limits of what peaches can tolerate.
In April 2026 there were several nights when the temperatures reached into the low 20s F (-7 degrees C) in different orchards in Delta County, Colorado. Fruit had already started to grow and was very susceptible to the cold temperatures. As a result, growers around Hotchkiss and Paonia lost their peach crop.
Palisade orchards avoided that level of damage because on those same nights the temperatures dropped only to the upper 20s F (-2 degrees C), which damaged some fruit but left enough behind to have a full crop in most cases. Spring frosts like these reduce fruit production but generally aren’t going to contribute to increased proliferation of cytospora canker.
Solutions in progress
Researchers from Colorado State University are working toward developing strategies to combat this disease. Our team has developed chemical options for conventional and organic growers that have helped slow the spread. We are determining whether some peach cultivars are tolerant to the pathogens, and we are continuing to understand the population biology of cytospora to help us develop new management strategies.
We have established the cytospora working group as a collaborative research, extension and grower group to collectively develop solutions for cytospora canker. We are continuing to better understand factors involved in disease development and establish best management practices to help growers combat this disease and keep the Colorado peach industry vibrant.
Jane Stewart receives funding from USDA NIFA AFRI.
David Sterle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As July 4, 2026, approaches, Americans will be paying more attention than usual to events of 1776: the year the American Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. Public historians, including filmmaker Ken Burns, have tried to offer a more inclusive view of the American Revolution, highlighting lesser-known patriots. But figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin will undoubtedly get the lion’s share of attention on the 250th anniversary.
One important character who rarely makes it into the limelight is the pioneering composer William Billings, who lived in Boston at the time of the Revolution. Billings is widely considered America’s first noteworthy composer, publishing six tune books and writing some 340 choral works – some of which are still sung today.
Apprenticed at 14 as a leather tanner, he learned music in his spare time and became a renowned teacher of singing schools, which taught basic elements of music so people could sing hymns more confidently. He also became a staunch supporter of independence, one of the Boston “Whigs” who spearheaded the American Revolution.
I have beenstudying Billings for 25 years now and always find more of interest about him – so interesting, in fact, that I wrote a historical novel about him. He was a colorful character with a voracious appetite for snuff and an unforgettable appearance. As music historian Nathaniel Gould wrote in 1853, Billings was “blind with one eye, one leg shorter than the other, one arm somewhat withered, with a mind as eccentric as his person was deformed.”
‘Liberty songs’
Billings was a friend of Samuel Adams, the revolution’s great agent provocateur, and sang regularly with him. He likely knew Paul Revere, who is credited with engraving the frontispiece to Billings’ first tune book, “The New-England Psalm-Singer,” published in 1770.
That was the year of the Boston Massacre, when British soldiers fatally shot five civilians. The event was one of several incidents that eventually triggered the conflict later known as the Revolutionary War. Billings did not serve in the military, probably because of his disabilities. His contribution to the independence movement was his music.
A tune from his first collection, “Chester,” is one of Billings’ best known, for which he also wrote words:
The Foe comes on with haughty Stride;
Our troops advance with martial noise,
Their Vet’rans flee before our Youth
And Gen’rals yield to beardless Boys.
That was not the only Billings song with a revolutionary message.
“Lamentation Over Boston” adapted a Hebrew psalm about the Judeans’ exile in Babylon: “By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down & wept,” he wrote, referring to a town a few miles west, “when we remember’d thee O Boston.” Billings’ lyrics cast Britain as the oppressive Babylon: “For they that held them in Bondage/ Requir’d of them to take up Arms against their Brethren.” It may be the very first American protest song.
William Billings is far from a household name today, but he wrote several of the Revolution’s ‘liberty songs.’
The States, O Lord, with Songs of Praise shall in thy Strength rejoice,
And Blest with thy Salvation raise To Heav’n their cheerful voice….
And all the Continent shall sing: Down with this earthly King, No King but God.
There’s some evidence these songs had national reach.
“The words stirred the patriotic heart, and with their striking melodies were sung at home and by the choirs, and especially in the military camps,” Louis F. Benson wrote about Billings’ music in his 1915 study “The English Hymn.” “The New England soldiers learned the words by heart, and every fifer the tunes, and carried them to whatever part of the country duty called them.”
Billings’ pieces were only a handful of the hundreds of what John Adams called “liberty songs” circulating in the Colonies. Most of them were less pious than what Billings composed. “Some of the outrageously ribald songs would have horrified polite society,” according to historian Bruce C. Daniels, author of “Puritans at Play.” “Dozens of them made metaphorical reference to England as a whore.”
HBO’s 2008 miniseries on John Adams’ life shows a group singing ‘Chester.’
Struggle after Independence
The peak of Billings’ career was during the 10 years after the Declaration of Independence. Two years before, he had met Lucy Swan while leading a singing school in Stoughton, Massachusetts. They got married the same year and went on to have a large family. In 1780, they moved into a nice house on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street.
In the late 1770s and 1780s Billings published four tune books, including arguably his most important, “The Singing Master’s Assistant.” He also tried his hand at writing prose and even served briefly as editor of The Boston Magazine before being fired, apparently for his poor taste. He published a grisly tale about a clan of incestuous cannibals from Scotland.
At some point, he seems to have given up leather tanning. But by the 1790s Billings was reduced to working as a street cleaner and hog wrangler. He had to mortgage his house. Lucy died in 1795, leaving William to single-parent their six children – including a daughter, also named Lucy, born three years earlier.
The frontispiece of William Billings’ final tune book, ‘The Continental Harmony,’ which was published in 1794.
American musical tastes had changed. Billings’ rough-hewn “fuguing” songs, a style with vigorous counterpoint between the different voice parts, were no longer in fashion. Formally trained singing instructors competed for students in Boston.
And Billings was unable to secure copyright for his compositions. Before the Revolution, he succeeded in having a bill to protect his first tune book passed by the Massachusetts legislature. The Tory governor refused to sign it, however, perhaps due to Billings’ associations with patriots like Samuel Adams. In any event, several of his pieces were reprinted in other collections, and he was paid nothing.
When Billings died in 1800, he was buried on Boston Common in an unmarked grave. But his music was kept alive by shape-note singers, a style of musical notation that caught on in the 1800s and helped preserve older, sacred songs. Billings’ music played at least a small part in uniting American colonists well enough to defeat the powerful British military.
David W. Stowe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Ever since U.S. commandos successfully removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela on Jan. 3, 2026, speculation has been growing that “Cuba could be next” on the list of the Trump administration’s targets.
“We’ll take over Cuba almost immediately,” President Donald Trump mused during a speech in Florida on May 1. “On the way back from Iran, we’ll have … the USS Abraham Lincoln come right by Cuba, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, we give up.’”
That has not stopped many Cubans and Cuban Americans from eagerly predicting a military operation’s success or insisting that such a U.S. action is necessary.
Their tool of choice? Not battle plans or political manifestos, but artificial intelligence. For weeks, Cuban social media feeds and WhatsApp groups have been filled with armchair fantasies of deliverance from communist rule made with tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, Runway and ChatGPT. In some clips and images, the island nation is represented as a female captive or a child being freed by an American protector. In others, magically renovated cityscapes feature statues and portraits erected in Trump’s honor, replacing revolutionary iconography.
It is easy to dismiss such animations as online trolling. But as a historian of Cuba, I noticed something troubling when my colleague Jorge Damian de la Paz sent me a selection of these digital illustrations and reels. Their visual language eerily mirrors classic U.S. political cartoons during Cuba’s final war for independence against Spain in the late 19th century. That imagery went on to justify U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs for decades.
A fraught history
In the 1890s, American illustrators at publications such as Puck, Judge and Harper’s Weekly similarly portrayed Cuba as a feminized victim: weak, vulnerable, often racialized as nonwhite and incapable of securing freedom on her own. They imagined grateful tropical citizens celebrating future American liberators for defeating their Spanish overlords and bestowing the benefits of “civilization” on Caribbean life.
Such tropes were not innocent. They helped generate the cultural consensus that legitimized U.S. intervention in the Cuban war in 1898 – known by most Americans as the Spanish-American War. They also shaped Cuba’s postwar order: four years of U.S. military occupation, an imposed amendment to Cuba’s first constitution authorizing future American military action to preserve stability, and decades of political and economic dependence on the United States.
Taking their cue from heroes of the independence struggle such as José Martí, many Cubans grew to resent this asymmetrical relationship with the North, even as they fell in love with imported American consumer products and cultural pastimes. Especially by the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream political movements on the island all sought to, at a minimum, rebalance the extent of U.S. influence over Cuban life. Their failure to do so was part of what propelled Fidel Castro’s radical nationalist revolution to power in 1959.
Reversing course
But today, formal and informal polling suggests that significant numbers of Cubans and Cuban Americans seem willing to welcome, or at least tolerate, the explicit U.S. intervention that most of their forefathers rejected.
AI-generated expressions of these views do not appear to be coming from staunchly anti-communist exiles in South Florida alone. Comments and reposts suggest they are resonating among Cubans living on the island, many of whom are desperate for “something, anything” to put an end to the worsening blackouts, shortages and societal paralysis that have made daily life feel like purgatory.
If a U.S. military operation is the only way to escape, one friend in Havana told me, “que sea rápido” – let it be over quickly.
What’s distinct about AI is that it is providing this fatalism with a visual vocabulary rooted in imperial attitudes from the 1890s. This makes sense when you consider how the technology works: Generative AI systems have been trained on enormous, often U.S.-centric archives of historical photographs and other materials. They easily reproduce the old cultural and political prejudices seen in these digital repositories.
As a result, image and video generators appear to be spitting 19th-century American discourses back at 21st-century Cuban users. The most extreme iterations of the imagery even resurrect a long-dormant idea from more than a century ago: the outright annexation of the island as a U.S. state. In so doing, AI provides narrative fuel for the Trump administration’s efforts to rewind the clock to an era when Washington condescendingly treated Latin America as its “backyard.”
Deprivation and desperation
The depth of Cuba’s predicament today helps explain why these images are going viral.
Long before the Trump administration cut off oil supplies, Cubans were enduring their worst economic, political and social crisis in three decades. Botched internal reform efforts, repression of dissent, and mass migration profoundly eroded faith in Cuba’s Communist Party leadership and institutions in recent years. This has been particularly true since the island’s tourist-heavy economy was hit hard by COVID-19 and 2021 mass protests rocked more than 50 towns and cities.
Of course, plenty of Cubans in Cuba still blame the long-standing U.S sanctions regime, and Trump’s unprecedented additions to it, for many of their problems. Not all are willing to accept change at any cost.
But Cuban officials’ defense of national sovereignty in the face of mounting U.S. threats rings increasingly hollow. Cuba hasn’t held a truly competitive election in nearly 80 years and has been ruled by a one-party state for 65. Under those circumstances, political independence does not rest on the consent of the governed. It’s also hard for a country to claim sovereignty when its economy relies so strongly on external patrons. such as Russia, China, Venezuela (until January) and even the United States. Despite the embargo, Cuban Americans send hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances, food, medicines and other goods annually.
The seduction of rescue
Yet even if fantasies of rescue are understandable, they should be deeply concerning to anyone who cares about Cuba’s future.
The danger posed by AI images is not simply that they normalize the idea of a U.S. military intervention that could cost Cuban lives. It is that they replace deeper civic imagination with spectacle and clickbait.
AI is offering visions of liberation without requiring Cubans to grapple with the far more difficult dilemmas that any real transition would entail. Those questions include how to rebuild institutions, restore trust, confront inequality, reconstruct the economy, forge reconciliation and negotiate competing political visions after decades of polarization and authoritarianism.
Prolonged desperation, coupled with authorities’ stubborn refusal to open the island’s political and economic systems, has narrowed some Cubans’ political horizons to the point where they outsource their own salvation rather than imagine it from the bottom up.
The coming weeks may determine whether digital fantasies turn into concrete policy or remain wishful thinking. But one thing is certain: AI images of U.S. military intervention in Cuba reveal that many Cubans and Cuban Americans have given up on defining change on Cuban terms. That choice could mean the difference between a Cuba that once again becomes a U.S. client state and one where Cubans reclaim ownership of their nation’s future.
Michael J. Bustamante does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Back in 2005, US economist Fred Bergsten coined the term “Group of 2” or “G2”, proposing a stronger partnership between what are now the world’s two largest economies – the United States and China.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis a few years later, economic cooperation between these two countries briefly seemed to attest to the success of efforts at integrating China into a liberal rules-based order.
To be sure, the ostensible G2 was not meant to replace the larger, formalised G20 group of major economies, so much as strengthen it. Underpinning the broader G20’s response to the global financial crisis, the US enacted an initial US$787 billion fiscal stimulus, while China provided its own US$586 billion stimulus. This helped avert a much larger global economic catastrophe.
This week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping heralds a different sort of G2. On Friday, Trump claimed the countries had struck some “fantastic trade deals”. But anyone hoping for details of such deals – on tariffs, rare earths or Iran – was left disappointed on Friday afternoon.
Whatever may have transpired, US–China cooperation no longer automatically implies positive spillover effects for the rest of the world. Instead, in 2026, the G2 appears, at best, to be a private bargain between two great powers, imposing hidden costs on those outside, looking in.
The Trump administration has ushered in a noticeable shift in how the US views its economic interests: no longer premised on shared liberal values, but on spheres of influence among great powers. The key question, therefore, is not whether the US and China can cooperate. It is what kind of order their cooperation will produce.
In the wake of the second world war, the Western bloc (led across the US, the United Kingdom, and Western European states) was united by a shared commitment to a Keynesian global order (under the Bretton Woods system) that sought freer trade in goods while preserving national economic autonomy.
In contrast, the Eastern bloc (led by the Soviet Union) organised trade through what was called the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), trading many goods between countries through planned barter arrangements, instead of for cash.
The irony for the present day is that the Trump–Xi agenda looks more like the old Eastern bloc’s approach.
In this light, the clearest sign that a G2 may be working outside the G20 or larger rules-based order is not that Washington and Beijing are talking. It is the range of issues that may be managed, tying together such concerns as tariff relief, airplane orders, rare-earths access, chip restrictions, Taiwan and Iran.
In each of these cases, it’s reasonable the two countries would want to coordinate their policies. But together, they point to a new global order where two superpowers increasingly call the shots in their own interests.
Chips and rare earths
Rare earths and advanced chips are the clearest example. Beijing wants access to the advanced semiconductors necessary to dominate the artificial intelligence race.
Washington wants rare earths and critical minerals whose importance has become more acute as the conflict with Iran has strained US stocks of missiles, drones, air-defence systems and other high-end military technologies.
If these are traded against one another, the summit is not about economic liberalisation. It is about whether strategic technologies remain national-security constraints or become bargaining chips in a bilateral deal.
An entourage of executives
The business delegations that have accompanied Trump on this trip point in the same direction.
The presence of executives such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (not to mention others from Qualcomm, Citigroup and Boeing) gave the summit the appearance of a commercial negotiation.
Reported agreements on aircraft orders, agricultural purchases, investment forums and corporate access may all be presented as signs of economic normalisation.
But the question is not only whether US firms gain market access. It is whether commercial wins help stabilise a great-power bargain whose geopolitical costs are borne elsewhere.
Any deal the countries eventually reach on tariffs will likely have the biggest market impacts. But the deal itself could matter less than the optics, allowing Trump to claim a business victory.
This might calm markets in the short term, but it highlights the potential for a retreat from rules-based multilateral liberalisation in the longer term.
A warning on Taiwan, near silence on Iran
The question of Taiwan loomed large over this week’s summit. On Thursday, Xi gave an unusually direct warning to Trump, saying if the issue was not handled properly, the two countries could see “clashes and even conflicts”.
In a larger sense, the danger is not necessarily a formal US concession on Taiwan. It is that Taiwan and other regional actors bear the external costs of a private bargain.
If Taiwan becomes one variable in a wider negotiation, the costs of US–China cooperation may fall on those not in the room.
Iran and oil broaden the same logic. If Trump has pressed Xi to use China’s influence over Tehran, he is not simply asking for diplomatic help. He is treating Beijing as a co-hegemon in a great-power bargain based on order for some – the US and China – and exclusion for others.
This kind of G2 can undermine the global public good. It will also test whether middle powers like Australia, Canada and European countries can keep their seat at the table where decisions are made or, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, risk being “on the menu”.
Wesley Widmaier receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
During their high-stakes meeting in Beijing this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly asked US President Donald Trump if the two countries could overcome the “Thucydides trap”.
This phrase, popularised by contemporary US political scientist Graham Allison in the early 2010s, is used to describe how two countries can drift toward war when an existing superpower feels anxious about an emerging one. Allison had China and the US in mind specifically.
It takes its name from Athenian historian and general Thucydides, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, about the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta that broke out in 431 BCE.
But what did Thucydides really say on this? And what do Athens and Sparta have to do with the current state of US–China relations?
An implied fumble
The implication in the term “Thucydides trap” is that the established superpower manages the rising power badly and feels obliged to go to war when that’s not necessarily the only option.
It is based on a quote from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (book one, chapter 23). He said:
The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [Sparta], made war inevitable.
In other words, Thucydides is saying what made the Peloponnesian War inevitable was the rise of Athenian power.
At the time, lots of Greeks were saying Athens and Sparta had gone to war again because of smaller disputes.
But Thucydides says no, the real cause was the overall fear that Sparta (the traditional superpower) had for the new powerful state: democratic Athens.
The general idea, of course, is that in its anxiety about the rise of China, the US may tend toward war when other options are available.
But many scholars of ancient Greece take issue with the way the term is used today.
A contested term
The word “trap” implies Sparta made a mistake in 431 BCE and could’ve handled things better. But that’s not what Thucydides really narrates in book one of his History of the Peloponnesian War.
He shows that, in fact, Sparta had good reason to fear the rising Athenians. Athens was, by then, a predominate naval power in the Balkans and the Aegean Sea. It was stripping allies off Sparta left, right and centre, and beating up the ones that refused to defect.
Those allies basically said to Sparta in 432 BCE: listen, you have got to do something about Athens and if you don’t act, we will join them.
It was pressure from these allies that pushed the Spartans to act against Athens.
So yes, in a sense Sparta’s own anxieties about ever-increasing Athenian power led to war. Sparta felt compelled to wage total war against Athens to maintain its system of alliances, and in 431 BCE broke the peace treaty it had with Athens.
A longer-term perspective
More generally, the term “Thucydides trap” is about how over the longer term things didn’t turn out so well for Sparta; although they won the Peloponnesian War, it took them 27 years to do so.
And after the victory, Sparta engaged in a huge expansion to become an even greater superpower. That ended up making all the other Greeks very fearful for their security. This growth in Spartan power after 404 BCE caused many of its allies to become enemies. All those Greek states then came together to confront Sparta, which was completely and utterly destroyed in 371 BCE at the Battle of Leuctra.
The whole security architecture of Sparta collapsed; they lost all their allies, all their slaves were liberated and Sparta was reduced to just a minor state.
So the lesson for the US implied in the term Thucydides trap is that fear of superpowers is a potent shaper of international affairs.
But many people who use the term Thucydides trap forget to mention what happened to Athens in the longer term.
Athens survived the Peloponnesian War and restored its democracy and military, and became a regional power. But what’s fascinating is that by the early 4th century BCE Athens was under immense pressure from the Persian empire, which was many times more powerful than any Greek state.
So Athens clipped its own wings and gave up on being this huge Mediterranean superpower; it decided to forego any attempt to reassert its imperial control over the many Greek states of Anatolia, allowing them again to be subjects of the Persian empire.
Athens decided to focus more closely on the Aegean Sea and give up on fighting Persians; it recognised the constraints of its power.
So it’s not as though Sparta’s decision to enter war with Athens in 431 BCE led, in the long run, to total world domination by Athens.
A lesson for today
The history of the Peloponnesian War provides important lessons for China–US relations today.
One is that it may be foolish for an established superpower to check the rise of an emerging one. Sparta learned that trying to do so can come at a terrible cost.
Accommodating Athens would have allowed Sparta to continue as a superpower well into the fourth century.
Another lesson is that an established superpower, such as the US, can cut back its ambitions and focus on regions closer to home.
This is exactly what democratic Athens did after the Peloponnesian War. Doing so allowed it to flourish culturally and politically and keep enemies well away until the 310s BCE.
