TL;DR: The idea of the "permanent underclass" applied to the middle powers of the world -- frontier model training not only accelerates its own progress, but also tends to eat up all the supply-inflexible resources it relies on, (high power GPUs, HBM, etc) meaning that countries outside of the US and China may be (effectively) permanently locked out of the frontier.
I've been doing some research on this on my own, sending my agents to pull foreign-language sources from Japan, Korea, EU countries -- the mood over there, if the translations are to be believed, seems to mirror these predictions. People are anxious. Reuters has quoted Japanese officials as fearing ending up as an "AI colony". There's real impetus to close the gap, but short of some unprecedented alliance of all/most of the middle powers into some international AI lab, I'm not sure how any one country will make it to the frontier.