There is something quietly remarkable about Africa’s digital situation. Mobile technologies generated $220 billion in economic value across the continent in 2024—nearly 8 percent of Africa’s entire GDP, according to the GSMA’s Mobile Economy Africa 2025 report. And yet 960 million people, almost two-thirds of the population, remain offline not because networks do not reach them but because getting online is simply unaffordable. In the continent’s poorest households, a basic internet-enabled handset (entry-level as well as smart feature phones) costs the equivalent of an entire month’s income. In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile broadband penetration sits at 27 percent, compared to 75 percent in Arab states and 88 percent across the Asia-Pacific region. The scale of investment required is vast. A 2023 IMF study estimates that connecting all of the world’s unconnected populations would cost some $418 billion — and the heaviest burden, relative to national income, falls on Sub-Saharan Africa, where the additional spending needed reaches 4.49 percent of regional GDP, the largest share of any world region.

The scale of this digital exclusion matters beyond economics. Access to the internet in the twenty-first century is the infrastructure through which education, financial services, health information, market access, and political participation increasingly flow. A population that is two-thirds offline is excluded from the systems through which modern economic and civic life is now organized. That exclusion has compounding effects: it reproduces educational gaps, limits economic diversification, constrains government capacity to deliver services efficiently, and reduces the ability of citizens and institutions to engage with the global economy on their own terms.

That funding gap explains almost everything that follows. When a continent needs this level of infrastructure investment and cannot generate it domestically, it becomes dependent on whoever is willing to provide it. For the past decade, that entity has primarily been China. This is not a story about technology being superior or inferior, but rather one about how different models of digital development operate in practice, what they offer, what they require, and what they ultimately produce for African states and citizens navigating a rapidly changing technological landscape.

The Digital Silk Road: A New Model of Technological Engagement

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013, was initially focused on developing physical infrastructure—ports, highways, railways, and energy pipelines—to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe. Less visible but increasingly consequential was the parallel development of what became known as the Digital Silk Road (DSR)—an initiative extending Belt and Road logic into the technological domain.

The DSR is not a single program but a strategic orientation implemented through Chinese state banks, technology companies, diplomatic frameworks, and bilateral agreements. It supports Chinese firms in building telecommunications networks, data centers, submarine and terrestrial cables, cloud computing platforms, artificial intelligence systems, mobile payment infrastructure, smart city technologies, and related digital services in partner countries. It operates through the triennial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summits, BRI forums, concessional loan agreements, and memoranda of understanding negotiated at the highest diplomatic levels. 

FOCAC, established in 2000, is the principal multilateral platform coordinating China’s political and economic engagement with the continent, convening ministerial and heads-of-state summits every three years that alternate between China and an African host. Its membership now spans 53 African states and the African Union Commission.

As of August 2024, 52 African countries and the African Union (AU) had signed BRI agreements with China, and the latter’s enterprises have signed engineering contracts in Africa totaling more than $700 billion over the past decade. The Johns Hopkins China-Africa Research Initiative documented 1,141 Chinese loan commitments to African governments worth $153 billion between 2000 and 2019, with the technology sector’s share growing consistently since. In just the first half of 2025, Chinese technology sector engagement in Africa grew by $9.9 billion compared to the same period the previous year.

What makes the DSR analytically significant is that it represents something genuinely new in Africa’s experience of external technological engagement. Unlike previous models—colonial-era infrastructure built to serve extraction, or post-independence Western development aid conditioned on specific political and economic arrangements—Chinese digital engagement does not explicitly attach governance conditionality. It operates through commercial and diplomatic relationships that treat African governments as sovereign partners making their own development choices. This has made it attractive across the continent’s diverse political landscapes, from democratic governments to more centralized systems, without requiring ideological alignment.

At the same time, all infrastructure embeds particular logics about how systems are organized, who maintains them, how they evolve, and what dependencies they create. Understanding what the DSR carries with it, in terms of technical standards, operational relationships, and long-term implications, is important not as a basis for judgment but as a basis for informed policy. African states are better served by clarity about what different partnerships involve than by accepting any model uncritically—Chinese, Western, or otherwise.

How Chinese Technology Became Africa’s Infrastructure

The story of how Chinese companies became the dominant providers of Africa’s digital infrastructure is instructive because it reveals the concrete mechanisms through which technological models spread, and what it actually takes to compete for a continent’s digital future.

Huawei, founded in 1987 and headquartered in Shenzhen, is a privately held Chinese firm that has grown into the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, supplying network infrastructure alongside its well-known consumer smartphone business. Today, it has built approximately 70 percent of Africa’s 4G network infrastructure, displacing Sweden’s Ericsson  as the continent’s leading telecoms supplier over the course of the 2010s. In Nigeria, Africa’s largest telecoms market, Huawei and ZTE together supply around 90 percent of network infrastructure. ZTE, established in 1985 and also based in Shenzhen, is a partially state-owned Chinese telecommunications-equipment maker and one of Huawei’s principal domestic peers in supplying network hardware across African markets. Huawei has become the leading provider across the Middle East and North Africa, having systematically outcompeted European incumbents that had operated in the region for decades. In South Africa in 2022, the country’s three largest carriers—Vodacom, MTN, and the partly state-owned Telkom—selected Huawei to lead their 5G rollouts, even as some European governments were revising their own relationships with the company. The decision reflected a straightforward assessment of what was available, affordable, and operationally proven.

The financial architecture underpinning this expansion has been a decisive factor. Chinese state banks, such as primarily the China Development Bank and China Export-Import Bank, provided financing to Huawei’s African customers through concessional loans at below-market rates, extended repayment periods, and bundled equipment-and-service packages. The Johns Hopkins SAIS-CARI database identified more than seventy such loan-backed Huawei contracts in Africa between 2000 and 2019. For many African governments and operators, the choice was not between equally available alternatives — it was between Chinese financing and a connectivity gap that could not otherwise be closed.

But financing alone does not explain the full picture. Chinese companies have also demonstrated a capacity to understand and adapt to African market conditions that distinguishes their approach from previous models of external technological engagement. The clearest example is Transsion, the Chinese mobile phone company that captured approximately 60 percent of Africa’s handset market. Transsion did not succeed by exporting a product designed for global flagship markets. It succeeded by engineering specifically for African realities: longer battery life for areas with unreliable electricity, camera technology calibrated for darker skin tones, price points accessible to low-income rural buyers, and distribution networks that reached well beyond major cities. This is a form of market attention and product adaptation that African consumers had not previously received from external technology providers at scale.

The DSR has also delivered genuine infrastructure that African economies needed and could not have built alone within any realistic timeframe. At least 38 African countries have worked with Chinese companies to develop fiber-optic networks, data centers, or advanced technological capacity. These are not negligible contributions. In a continent where the digital gap has real consequences for development, education, and economic participation, the construction of functioning infrastructure has tangible value for millions of people who now have connectivity they did not previously have.

The picture is not without complexity, however. Once networks are built around a particular provider’s equipment and standards, transitions to different systems involve significant technical and financial costs. African states that have built their digital infrastructure through these partnerships have created long-term operational relationships with Chinese providers that shape future choices. This is not unique to Chinese infrastructure—any large-scale infrastructure investment creates dependencies—but it is part of the reality that African policymakers are navigating as digital systems expand.

The AI Layer: Intelligence Follows Infrastructure

If the first phase of China’s Digital Silk Road in Africa was about physical infrastructure—cables, towers, data centers, and backbone networks—its second and now accelerating phase is about machine intelligence. The data centers constructed by Chinese companies across the continent now serve as the foundational layer for an expanding ecosystem of AI services, cloud computing, and machine learning applications.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company whose open-source models attracted global attention in early 2025, is being adopted in Africa at rates two to four times higher than in any other global region, according to Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute. The reasons are structural. DeepSeek’s models cost substantially less to deploy than alternatives from American providers, making them proportionally more accessible in markets where computational costs are a genuine constraint. They also run naturally on the Chinese-built data center infrastructure already distributed across the continent. Infrastructure and intelligence are reinforcing each other; the physical layer creates conditions favorable to Chinese AI services, and the adoption of those services deepens engagement with the infrastructure layer.

Since the mid-2010s, AI has been explicitly embedded in China’s digital engagement in Africa as a strategic priority. Chinese firms have built data centers across sub-Saharan and North Africa that serve as backbones for both commercial and government systems. In July 2024, China signed digital and AI cooperation agreements with 26 African countries through the FOCAC framework, institutionalizing partnerships that had previously been managed on an ad hoc bilateral basis. Researchers at Peking University’s Institute of New Structural Economics have described Africa as functioning as a primary international demonstration environment for Chinese digital systems, where their scalability and adaptability are being shown at continental scale.

The implications for African states are worth examining from multiple angles. On one side, access to AI capabilities that would otherwise be financially out of reach creates genuine opportunities in sectors including healthcare, agriculture, financial services, and education. The economic potential is significant: credible projections suggest AI could add $2.9 trillion to Africa’s economy by 2030. Chinese AI models that are accessible and affordable represent a real pathway toward those gains for economies that cannot afford the premium pricing of the most advanced Western alternatives.

On the other hand, the AI models available through Chinese platforms reflect the priorities and design choices of their creators. The data generated by African users of Chinese AI systems flows through those systems and contributes to their development. Government services built on Chinese cloud infrastructure create operational dependencies that have implications for institutional autonomy. These are considerations that African policymakers, technologists, and civil societies are beginning to examine, not as reasons to reject engagement, but as dimensions of it that require deliberate attention.

Africa currently represents only 2.5 percent of the global AI market, and the continent is not yet in a position to set the terms of global AI development. But it is nevertheless in a position to make choices about which systems it deploys, on what contractual basis, and with what requirements for local capacity development. These are choices that will accumulate over time into something that either moves toward or away from genuine technological agency.

Two Models, One Continent, and the Question of African Agency

Stepping back from the specific mechanics of Chinese digital engagement, a broader pattern becomes visible. Africa has, across different historical periods, been the site on which externally designed technological and development models have been deployed. These models were built around the priorities, capabilities, and interests of their originators, with African needs addressed to the extent that they aligned with those priorities.

The Western model of technological engagement with Africa has its own history in this regard. Western technology companies and governments, for much of the past two decades, treated Africa as a secondary market, significant for extractive industries, but not a serious arena for the technology investment that was reshaping the global economy. The connectivity gap widened during this period not because the resources to close it did not exist globally, but because Africa was not where the resources were being directed. When the strategic significance of who was building Africa’s digital infrastructure became apparent, the response was initially more focused on articulating concerns about alternatives than on presenting competitive ones.

Chinese engagement has followed a different logic, one characterized by systematic investment, market adaptation, and state-backed financing at a scale that no previous external actor had committed to African digital development. The results are visible: infrastructure that exists and functions, handsets that work for African users, AI tools that are financially accessible. These are real gains. Neither model, however, was designed with African technological sovereignty as its organizing principle. 

The question of who controls the innovation, who sets the standards, who owns the data, and who benefits most durably from the digital economy being built on the continent remains open. Training programs that produce technicians capable of operating imported systems are valuable, but they are different from educational and research investments that produce engineers and innovators capable of developing systems from the ground up. Technology transfer that enables use is different from technology transfer that enables independent development.

The optimal model for Africa is not a version of either the Western or Chinese approach. It is one built by African institutions, researchers, engineers, and policymakers around African developmental priorities. It is one that engages with international technology partnerships selectively, extracts maximum benefit from them, and directs that benefit toward building indigenous capacity for innovation, research, and technological self-determination. Both current models can contribute inputs toward that goal. Neither is a substitute for it.

Navigating the Digital Silk Road: Toward Strategic Engagement

African states are not passive recipients of externally designed digital futures. They are governments making real choices, under real constraints, about how to close a connectivity gap that has concrete consequences for their populations. The challenge is to make those choices with the greatest possible strategic clarity — understanding what different partnerships offer, what they require, and how to structure them to serve long-term development interests rather than simply immediate infrastructure needs.

Beyond infrastructure, there is a generational dimension that receives insufficient attention in most analyses of this subject. The engineers being trained today on Chinese systems, the university students whose technical formation is being partially shaped by Chinese company partnerships, and the government officials building experience with Chinese platforms are the people who will be making Africa’s technology policy decisions in ten and twenty years. The accumulated experience, institutional familiarity, and network relationships built through Chinese digital engagement will shape African policy cultures in ways that outlast any individual contract or infrastructure project. This is not a reason for alarm, but it is a reason for deliberate investment in building parallel technical expertise—rooted in African research institutions, African universities, and African policy frameworks—so that the next generation of decision-makers inherits genuine options rather than path dependencies.

Several African institutions have begun moving in this direction. The AU’s 2022 Data Policy Framework establishes continental principles asserting regulatory sovereignty over data flows, including those managed by foreign technology providers. Ongoing negotiations over the AU’s Protocol on Digital Trade represent an opportunity to institutionalize those principles into binding continental frameworks before digital dependencies deepen further. These processes deserve significantly more political attention and technical investment than they currently receive.

The current multipolar international environment creates genuine options. The competition between Chinese, American, and European technology powers gives African states leverage that they can deploy deliberately to extract better terms from all partners. The question is not which external model to align with, but how to use multiple competing models to advance African interests, which include requiring genuine technology transfer in contracts, investing in domestic technical education, building regulatory capacity, and participating actively in international AI governance processes where African voices are currently underrepresented.

Türkiye’s example is instructive in this regard. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently unveiled a new national AI action plan at the Türkiye Artificial Intelligence Summit in Istanbul, built around four pillars: awareness, use, production, and governance. Crucially, Erdoğan framed digital sovereignty not as a technological ambition but as a political one arguing that national power in the twenty-first century cannot be separated from control over data, AI infrastructure, and cyber resilience. Turkey is neither aligning with the Chinese model nor simply adopting Western frameworks; it is building its own national strategy from the ground up. This is precisely the kind of approach that African states, individually and collectively through the African Union, need to develop; not choosing between competing external models, but defining the terms of their own digital future.

There is also a dimension of this story that concerns the continent’s relationship to knowledge production. The AI systems being deployed across Africa—whether Chinese, American, or from other sources—are trained primarily on data that does not reflect African languages, cultural contexts, agricultural conditions, healthcare realities, or governance systems at anything close to adequate representation. The practical consequence is AI tools that work less well for African users than for those in the environments where the training data was concentrated. Addressing this gap requires African investment in data collection, annotation, and AI development that reflects African realities: this would have to be a long-term project that neither current external model is structured to deliver because it requires African institutions to take the lead.

The multipolar character of the current international order also means that the terms of digital engagement are more negotiable than they have been at any previous moment in Africa’s postcolonial history. During the Cold War, technological partnerships came with explicit ideological conditions. In the immediate post-Cold War era, they came with structural adjustment requirements and governance conditionality attached to Western development institutions. Today, the existence of genuinely competing powers seeking African partnerships for their own strategic reasons creates space for African governments to negotiate more actively, to set conditions, to play partners against each other, and to use the leverage that comes from being a continent that multiple powerful actors want to engage with. This leverage is not unlimited, and it has not always been used effectively. But it exists, and it is growing as the strategic significance of Africa’s digital market and data environment becomes clearer to all external actors involved.

The question of digital standards deserves particular attention in this context. The technical standards that govern telecommunications networks, data formats, AI systems, and digital platforms are not neutral specifications but rather governance choices that determine interoperability, security, innovation pathways, and long-term technological independence. African states that adopt Chinese technical standards across critical infrastructure become more integrated into Chinese technology ecosystems; those that adopt Western standards become more integrated into Western ones. A deliberate continental approach to standards—one developed through African institutions like the AU and articulated in negotiations with all external partners—would give African states greater ability to shape their own technological trajectory rather than inheriting the trajectory of whichever external partner arrived first and built the deepest infrastructure.

Africa’s connectivity needs are urgent and real. The infrastructure being built through Chinese partnerships, and whatever partnerships follow, serves those needs. But infrastructure is a means, not an end. The end itself is a digitally capable continent whose populations have access not only to the internet but to the knowledge, tools, and institutional capacity to shape their own technological future. The Digital Silk Road is one part of the path toward that future—a significant and consequential part, but not the destination itself.

This is equally true in the domain of AI governance, where the international conversation is still in early stages. The frameworks being developed now about data rights, algorithmic accountability, AI safety, and the governance of autonomous systems will shape how AI develops globally for decades. Africa has a direct interest in how these frameworks are designed: AI systems that perform poorly on African languages and contexts, that embed assumptions about governance and social organization derived from other settings, or that concentrate economic benefits in the hands of external platform owners rather than African users represent real costs to African development. 

Active participation in international AI governance—in UN processes, in multilateral standards bodies, in bilateral negotiations with technology partners—is not a luxury that can wait until Africa has resolved its immediate connectivity challenges. It is an urgent priority, because the governance frameworks being set now will be much harder to revise once they are entrenched.

In 1966, as the United States was slowly becoming entrenched in Vietnam, Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, wrote a book titled “The Arrogance of Power”. His critique of U.S. foreign policy focused on how American economic and military strength could prove a pitfall if equated with moral superiority. This “might makes right” ethos lends itself to Manifest Destiny, the belief that a superpower has a global mission—and therefore the obligation—to start and end wars, to regime change governments that do not conform to its microcosmic view of global affairs, and effectively police the world against threats. In the 1960s, the latter was the perceived expansion of communism.

Today, Fulbright’s warnings about U.S. missteps in changing global dynamics are as fresh as ever. The U.S.-Israel war on Iran, carried out by the strongest military in the world in alliance with the strongest military in the Middle East and North Africa region, has revealed in a practical demonstration not only what Fulbright meant but also underscored the limits of American power.

A New Dawn…of Failed Policy

A new reality is dawning on the Middle East—one in which months of back-and-forth negotiations, involving regional allies and mediators, toward a comprehensive peace agreement between Iran and the United States falter as so-called ceasefires unravel. It is poignant to mention here that it took 20 months of negotiations between the administration of former President Barack Obama and the Iranians to reach the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Tehran’s nuclear program in 2015, which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231. U.S. President Donald Trump rubbished that deal during his first presidency; now, most political pundits expect that any such future deal with Iran could take years.

If the nexus conflict involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. were to be approached in isolation, there could be room for cautious optimism of a lasting agreement; Iran’s nuclear program has been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy intervention in the region since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, the latest military conflict over the vital Strait of Hormuz comes on the heels of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that ushered a cascade of events which is still unfolding to the present day. In just two years, the region has undergone tectonic shock from the Israeli war on Gaza and then Lebanon; the 12 days war in June 2025 in which American bombers targeted three Iranian nuclear sites; and Operation “Epic Fury”, the current conflict launched by Israel and the United States on February 28, 2026. The trajectory of these events is not promising, and only adds to the environment of apprehension and uncertainty toward the future, especially with an erratic and unpredictable U.S. president. This uncertain environment will become the new normal in the region for the foreseeable future.

The Temptation of Low-Hanging Fruit

In the past 18 months, the United States has been pursuing a foreign policy built on what it perceives to be low-risk, high-stakes action. This began with Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 through surgical strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities. Since this operation lasted for only 12 days, Trump was able to declare a major victory in line with his election campaign promises not to get involved in any new endless war. This was then quickly followed with what the White House perceived as the successful apprehension of the then-President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro and his wife in another surgical raid in January 2026. 

Both operations (Iran in June 2025 and Venezuela in January 2026) were politically rewarding for the Trump administration. They also brought into focus Fulbright’s thesis of arrogance of power. Washington was flexing its muscles as it demonstrated American military and technological superiority to the rest of the world. It was also a show of force to remind rising powers, particularly China, that the U.S. could cut economic lifelines. China had relied on both Iran and Venezuela for much of its energy imports; Beijing was heavily invested in both countries. Yet, Trump’s successes in both theaters would soon prove to be his own trap. Both operations offered enough incentives for the current American administration to look for additional low hanging fruits to add to its victory roster. 

By Israeli intelligence estimations, Iran’s military losses in June 2025—coupled with Israel’s punishing defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the ouster of former Tehran ally Bashar Al Assad in Syria—seemed to indicate that the ruling clergy in Tehran were on the verge of collapse. The powerful popular demonstrations at the beginning of 2026 in many Iranian cities, with Tehran first and foremost, simply reinforced the perception in some circles of the Iranian regime’s vulnerability. The much-vaunted intelligence analysis at the time claimed that all that was needed to ensure the Iranian regime’s downfall was an additional push from the outside. This push, the intelligence held, would come in the form of decapitation of the regime’s religious, political and military leadership—much in line with Israel’s precision strikes against Hezbollah’s leadership (namely, neutralizing its leader Hassan Nasrallah in the previous year) to bring about the desired regime change in Tehran.

That was not only wishful thinking, but a gross miscalculation and a strategic blunder, to say the least. First off, while Hezbollah was weakened by Nasrallah’s death, it was far from losing influence in Lebanon; this is evident now as Israel continues to attack the country’s south under the pretext of neutralizing the group’s threat. But Iran is not Hezbollah. It has for decades fought war after war and prepared for the eventuality of a direct confrontation with the U.S. and Israel. Not only has the Iranian regime proved to be more resilient than originally thought, but it has also added new strength to its position by demonstrating its ability to control the strait of Hormuz and close it at will. The U.S. fleet, and airpower, based in neighboring countries, has been unable to prevent the closure of this vital global economic lifeline through which nearly a quarter of global energy supplies are transported.

Ignoring Local Power 

The arrogance of power which led to this war proved it is limited in its ability to produce the desired results. But rather than take a step back and reflect on the local and regional factors—such as the failure of anticipating the closure of the Strait—Trump hunkered down and pushed through with his vision for the Gulf. Fulbright anticipated this hubris: “When a nation is very powerful but lacking self-confidence, it is likely to behave in a manner dangerous to itself and to others. Feeling the need to prove what is obvious to everyone else, it begins to confuse great power with unlimited power… It can admit of no error; it must win every argument, no matter how trivial.”

This has proven to be Trump’s Pandora’s Box. In recent days, regional allies like Jordan, Bahrain and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries are bearing the brunt of Iranian retaliatory attacks against U.S. strikes on dual-use Iranian infrastructure. With the collapse of the June 2026 Islamabad Memorandum for a ceasefire, Trump has threatened and indeed carried out attacks against vital bridges, power grids, and other transportation networks. This has only invited further attacks against countries in the region which have already incurred significant infrastructure and financial losses.

Though it is true that Iran has been humbled militarily and economically, it yet retains considerable political and strategic clout. It is true that Iran lost at least its first and maybe its second tier of leadership with the assassinations of its late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then Ali Larijani, the secretary of the national security council, and the de facto second in command early in the war. However, the regime was able to rapidly replace them and maintained the chain of command and structure of the Islamic state. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), considered the backbone of the Islamic Republic, is now more emboldened and radicalized and almost in total control of decision-making at the higher echelons of the Iranian leadership, at least for now and the medium term according to most specialists on Iran. 

Following several consecutive days of high-stakes tit-for-tat military operations, both Iran and the United States appear locked in a cycle of escalation with a resolution nowhere in sight. In Iran, a more hardline and emboldened leadership style has emerged which does not bode well for the future stability of the Gulf, as demonstrated by their willingness to close the strait of Hormuz at will and whenever they deem it necessary to signal their displeasure of a certain action or position adopted by their adversaries in the region. 

Benefitting from War

In the meantime, there are benefits to the escalation in the Gulf. Israel, which had for decades tried to convince previous American presidents to do what Trump has finally agreed to do against Iran, is the primary beneficiary of this war. So much so, that it is now a growing hegemonic power which does not shy from flexing its military muscles. Consider its recent history of interactions in the region: First and foremost is its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza expanding its control to nearly 70% of the enclave, coupled with its expansion of settlements in the West Bank in congruence with new levels of Israel settler violence against the civilian population living there. Israel’s politicians have become increasingly emboldened—on national networks, ultra-right wing cabinet members openly call for the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, alarming even their staunchest allies in the West.

By the same token, Israel is following through with an expansionist policy in Syria by seizing and enlarging a so-called buffer zone; escalating with Hezbollah in Lebanon by crossing some red lines in decapitating its leadership and bombing the Al Dahya southern district of Beirut and currently occupying parts of South Lebanon. Israel’s reach had no bounds even extending to Doha, Qatar—once considered a somewhat friendly state to Israel; on September 9, 2025, it carried out a decapitation strike against a Hamas delegation the Qataris were hosting as members of a mediation effort with the Israelis.

And, as if this weren’t enough, some of its far right hawks are chattering about the need to deal with Türkiye (which they have configured as the next threat) after finishing the job in Iran. It is this kind of arrogance of power which Fulbright warned about sixty years ago. While his focus at the time was on the American involvement in Vietnam, it very much resonates today as a testament to the hubris with which powerful states believe that military success equals omnipotence. As a senior statesman, Fulbright was well-versed to argue that this hubris can only lead to a disastrous sense of exceptionalism. True to his words, Israel believes that its unique historical mission or existential stakes put it above and beyond the norms and standards governing other nations. Israel, does not hesitate to use its new flexed military power when it deems it necessary, with or without American consent, knowing that their relationship with the United States can withstand any momentary disagreements.This new Israeli projection of power has alarmed many regional actors including Türkiye, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who have to rethink their strategic position and recalibrate their future regional and international relationships, including with the United States.

Caught in the Crossfire

Since the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran, American bases in the region—which were supposed to act as deterrents against Iranian influence and protect the energy-rich Gulf States—have come under significant retaliatory attacks with a force and speed that caught Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE by surprise. Each U.S. or Israeli attack against Iran only invited Iranian wrath on the countries which are hosting American military facilities. The devastation was not just confined to these bases, but also civilian infrastructure such as airports, water desalination centers, oil refineries and liquified natural gas (LNG) production lines, just to mention a few. Thus, the appearance of stability and certainty—on which were built plans for turning the Arab Gulf countries to international hubs for aviation, tourism, and a safe haven location for finance and business in a turbulent region—was shattered and went up in smoke. Contrary to conventional Western wisdom necessitating the need for American military presence, the war now highlighted the Gulf States’ vulnerabilities. Suddenly, with American policy misfiring in the region, these Arab Gulf States are forced to grapple with a diminished confidence in the future.

The above mentioned events have only added to the anxiety many states feel in the region. Not only has American power—and along with it its ability to project its own influence—receded but the Arab Gulf States must now live with a new regime in Iran, one which doesn’t appear to necessarily adhere to the risk aversion policy practised under the previous leadership of Ayatollah Khamenei. In recent months, a more radicalized and confident Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seems to be at the helm for now at least, forcing these states to live with an Iranian threat at their doorstep. 

It is no surprise, then, that the Arabs find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They are alarmed by both Israel and Iran, each for different reasons; with regional momentum indicating that there is considerable erosion of trust in American power and reliability, the Arab Gulf states and especially Saudi Arabia are left with no other options than to start hedging against this uncertain future regardless of the chances (or lack thereof) of a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington. 

Forging New Alliances

Realizing that regional instability harms global economic vitality and in particular its own trade growth in the Middle East, China mediated an agreement in March 2023 to normalize relations between Riyadh and Tehran. For reasons that we will not go into for the purpose of this essay, the promising agreement was short-lived. In recent weeks, however, a new accord or initiative between the two countries has been floated, with some media reports speculating that a new regional understanding might be in the offing. However, given the history of relations between the two powerful Gulf states, this, too, might also prove to be vulnerable and short lived. 

In the meantime, in September 2025, Saudi Arabia signed a new Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement with nuclear power Pakistan: Islamabad immediately stationed 8,000 soldiers in Saudi Arabia. But a more potent hedge might be a move toward a regional alignment with both Türkiye and Egypt. The current increasing thaw in the relationship between Ankara and Cairo, which started about a year ago and culminated in joint military maneuvers of their armed forces, has surely not gone unnoticed in Tel Aviv. Both Egypt and Türkiye possess formidable militaries, equipped with advanced fighter jets, tank battalions and several hundred thousand of military personnel, according to a global defence review.

These actions have fueled speculations about a new security regime with new rising middle powers projected to compensate for the vacuum resulting from the recession in American power. The media is rife with talk of an emerging bloc between Türkiye, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. 

As a middle power, with a long-standing tradition of diplomacy, mediation, and peace-making, Egypt has already deployed some of its forces in the UAE and other Arab Gulf countries.

But the country which will benefit mostly from this new changing strategic environment is Türkiye, with its own ambitions to become the hegemonic power of the region, raising the potential for a clash of interests and escalating tensions with Israel on spheres of influence, which may have already started in Syria and could potentially spill beyond the Levant.

To be sure, it is a tense time. Gone are the promising days when Saudi Arabia’s military, political and economic relations with the United States amounted to a comprehensive strategic partnership. Not since the famous Yalta meetings between U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and  Saudi King Abdel Azziz Al Saud in 1945—in which the former pledged American security in exchange for the Kingdom’s oil—has this strategic relationship come under such strain. And when one relationship suffers, another has the potential to strengthen.

In December 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia bringing with him his country’s growing thirst for oil as an emerging power. As a super customer, China inked several deals worth billions of dollars during and after this visit. More alarming was China’s request to pay part of its Saudi oil imports with its Yuan currency, a point not missed by Washington.

The media landscape has changed significantly over the past decade. While governments retain powerful advantages through institutional authority, media infrastructure, and legal control, social media influencers are rapidly amplifying and even challenging official narratives through distributed, engagement-driven communication. And now, with the emergence of AI agents, fully autonomous synthetic actors can generate, tailor, and disseminate persuasive narratives at a massive scale while obscuring attribution. 

These ecosystems increasingly reinforce one another, creating new forms of propaganda, synthetic consensus, and policy influence that outpace traditional mechanisms of verification and accountability, threatening global security and democracy.

The onus then becomes on how to preserve a democratic marketplace of ideas beyond mere counter-speech. This essay argues that the media landscape now demands transparency around narrative origins, renewed institutional credibility, and regulatory frameworks for AI-generated content so that truthful speech can still be identified, heard, and trusted. 

The Persistence of State Control

While the internet has democratized the production and distribution of content, governments retain formidable advantages in controlling narratives during times of war (and beyond). They control the military apparatus itself, determining what information is released, when, and to whom. During active conflicts, states can restrict journalists’ access to battlefield zones, control telecommunications infrastructure, and deploy legal mechanisms to suppress or discredit competing narratives.

In this vein, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers a contemporary case study. The Russian government invested heavily in state media outlets like RT (formerly Russia Today) and TASS (formerly Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), as well as coordinated disinformation campaigns across social media platforms. The government tightly controls information flows domestically, making alternative narratives difficult to access within Russia. 

Beyond overt sponsorship, the state’s narrative advantage persists in other and more subtle ways: A government’s official statements carry legitimacy. When a state’s defense ministry issues a statement, citizens, policymakers, and international observers often grant it consideration precisely because it emanates from an authoritative and official source. This institutional credibility—however fragile it may have become—remains a form of narrative power that others cannot easily replicate. 

For example, in August 2025 President Donald Trump stated that the United States is the only country that uses mail-in voting. In reality, 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting. It has been argued that this claim is part of Trump’s attempt to diminish public trust in the integrity of mail-in voting to cast doubts over state and national elections that are trending against him. While nearly a decade of false statements have eroded his credibility in some sectors of the American public, his statements still have real-world consequences. Such claims of election fraud,for example, led to the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, after Trump lost the national election to Joe Biden.

State media also retains power in regions where citizens have limited access to diverse information sources, or where government control over telecommunications infrastructure is comprehensive. In authoritarian contexts, state narratives can dominate. However, in more open societies with robust media pluralism and internet access, state monopolies on the story of war have become virtually impossible to maintain.

The Rise of Influencers

The second ecosystem consists of individuals with substantial social media followings. This category encompasses journalists and freelancers operating independently of traditional institutional structures, qualified experts and analysts with large audiences, activists with political commitments, and influencers and content creators seeking engagement and monetization.

Individuals possess capabilities that states do not. They can respond with remarkable speed to breaking events, giving them the ability to hijack a narrative before official responses have had a chance to materialize. This distributed, real-time narrative has altered the information environment in ways that challenge state gatekeeping. Individuals are also remarkably heterogeneous and globally distributed, making this ecosystem both more resilient (no single point of failure can silence the conversation) but also more vulnerable to manipulation (bad actors can amplify falsehoods at scale).

As compared to freelance journalists and bona fide experts, influencers and content creators typically operate according to different incentive structures than state media. State media aims (at least ostensibly) to represent the official position of government. Influencers, by contrast, are often motivated by engagement metrics, creating perverse dynamics; speed, sensationalism, and outrage drive engagement far more effectively than careful, nuanced analysis. The algorithmic structures of social media platforms amplify this tendency further, promoting content that generates engagement regardless of accuracy. The growing presence of influencers have challenged the control of state media, but now both are facing a new player: AI. 

The Looming Frontier of Autonomous AI Systems

A third ecosystem is quickly emerging in the form of autonomous AI systems (also known as “AI agents”), capable of generating, customizing, and distributing content at unprecedented scale and speed. Unlike states bound by institutional friction and bureaucracies, or influencers constrained by human limitations, AI agents can simultaneously generate thousands of coherent narratives, each tailored to different audiences and platforms, working at machine speed rather than human speed. This introduces both an amplification of existing vulnerabilities and an entirely new set of risks.

During a crisis, AI agents can flood information ecosystems with coordinated or competing narratives faster than fact-checkers and moderators can respond. More troublingly, they introduce the possibility of synthetic plurality—many apparently independent voices, all ultimately controlled by a single operator. A state intelligence service or a single influencer could deploy AI agents to generate thousands of seemingly authentic accounts with unique writing styles, biographies, and posting histories. The appearance of grassroots consensus could be entirely fabricated. 

AI agents are also vulnerable to external poisoning. In 2026, curious to see if they could implant false information into an AI system, medical researchers uploaded two fake studies describing Bixonimania, a non-existent eye condition, to an academic preprint server. Within weeks, major AI systems began to describe Bixonimania as if it were a real disease. This experiment exposed a startling vulnerability: AI systems will eagerly ingest and regurgitate false information uploaded to the open internet.

The Interaction Effects

The three ecosystems—state actors, influencers, and AI agents—do not operate in silos. They interact in complex ways, creating dynamics that could not be produced in isolation.

States have already started to amplify their narratives through influencers. Russia, for example, has been documented funding and directing social media influencers across multiple platforms to amplify state messaging while maintaining plausible deniability about state involvement. There is also evidence that bot networks (a simpler version of fully autonomous AI agents) have also been deployed by Russia to manipulate the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

This interaction is not unidirectional. In December 2025, for example, the right-wing YouTube influencer Nick Shirley posted a video with unsubstantiated claims alleging fraud at Somali-run childcare centers in Minnesota. State officials said that investigations had found no evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited. But the U.S. government’s response was sudden and dramatic: The Trump administration dispatched 3,000 federal officers to Minnesota. 

The escalation that followed was severe. Operation Metro Surge involved the detention of U.S. citizens and the arrest of over 3,700 people. Federal agents killed two civilian protestors during the operation, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The influence on policy was also dramatic. After the video was released, the Trump administration announced a funding freeze to five Democratic-run states, pausing nearly $10 billion in funding for families in need and child services.

AI agents represent the logical next step—and perhaps, battleground— in this landscape. A state could deploy AI agents to generate narratives that appear to originate from independent influencers or grassroots movements, without the coordination costs or attribution risks of recruiting actual humans. Russia, China, and the United States have already begun experimenting with AI-generated content in information warfare, including AI-enabled propaganda, social-media manipulation, and synthetic media tactics designed to amplify state narratives and influence foreign audiences. 

A troubling example of state deployment of synthetic media came in late January 2026, when the White House posted an AI-altered image of civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem originally posted a photograph of Armstrong’s arrest showing her with a neutral expression, but roughly 30 minutes later, the White House posted an AI-manipulated version appearing to show Armstrong distressed with tears running down her face, captioned calling her “a far-left agitator” (Figure 1).

The consequence of these interaction effects is an escalating cycle as states invest in more sophisticated AI systems to outpace competing narratives. Influencers develop strategies to amplify their own voices against the backdrop of widespread synthetic content. Platforms struggle to detect and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior while not suppressing legitimate speech. 

Underlying all of this is a corrosive problem; as the distinction between authentic and synthetic becomes blurred, citizens and policymakers lose confidence in their ability to verify any claim about the information they consume. In this environment, narrative power accrues not to those with the best information or the clearest argument, but to those who can most effectively navigate the interplay between state authority, influencer credibility, and AI-generated plausibility. The winner is not necessarily the most truthful actor, but the most sophisticated operator of all three ecosystems.

A Path Forward

The story of global conflict and events should not be controlled by any single actor, but neither can we permit the information environment to descend into unmanageable chaos. The challenge then is how to preserve the benefits of a pluralistic, distributed information ecosystem while maintaining sufficient integrity that allows citizens, journalists, and policymakers to distinguish truth from falsehood, and fact from propaganda. This requires action on multiple fronts, each targeting a different layer of the problem.

First, we need radical transparency about the origins and funding of narratives. When a state funds an influencer or deploys an AI agent to amplify a particular message, the public must be able to trace that relationship. This means mandatory disclosure of funding sources for content creators, algorithmic transparency from social media platforms to allow researchers to identify coordinated inauthentic behavior, and international agreements that require states to label content they have generated or funded. These are not perfect solutions—bad actors will find ways to obscure their involvement. But they do raise the cost of covert narrative warfare and create at least the possibility of attribution and accountability. Without attribution, we cannot hold anyone responsible for falsehoods that cause real harm.

Second, we need to rebuild institutional credibility around information verification. The influencer ecosystem thrives partly because institutional media has lost authority; citizens no longer automatically trust official sources. But the solution is not to abandon institutions in favor of viral narratives. Rather, we need media organizations—both public and private—that are genuinely independent, well-funded, and insulated from political pressure. We need fact-checking organizations with real resources and international reach. We need academic institutions conducting rigorous research on misinformation and coordinated inauthentic behavior. And we need to protect journalists and researchers from legal harassment and physical threats when they report on uncomfortable truths.

Third, we need regulatory frameworks that apply to AI-generated content specifically. Deepfakes, synthetic media, and AI-generated text should be labeled as such at the point of creation and distribution. Platforms should be required to maintain records of which content is synthetic and make those records available to journalists and researchers. Governments should establish clear legal standards for the deployment of AI agents in information warfare, and violations should carry serious consequences. This is technically difficult and politically contentious, but the alternative is allowing bad actors to flood information ecosystems with low-quality, undetectable synthetic content.

The Marketplace of Ideas

Louis Brandeis, a prominent 20th century lawyer and leading figure in the antitrust movement, argued that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. This principle has animated liberal approaches to free expression for a century: The answer to propaganda is counter-propaganda, the answer to misinformation is correction, the answer to a lie is the truth told more loudly and more convincingly.

The Brandeis doctrine, however, assumes that in a marketplace of ideas, truth has inherent advantages, and that falsehoods, exposed to scrutiny and contradiction, will eventually lose ground. This assumption may have held some force in an earlier media environment, where distribution was costly and speech-making required resources and reputation. But it collapses in an environment where states, influencers, and AI agents can generate deceptive and manipulative speech at unlimited scale, where attribution is obscured, and where the distinction between authentic and fabricated narratives has become nearly impossible to discern.

The remedy for synthetic speech is not simply more speech. If an AI agent floods an information ecosystem with plausible-sounding narratives, each tailored to exploit existing polarizations and cognitive biases, the antidote is not a counter-narrative that reaches fewer people and faces algorithmic suppression. 

Brandeis was right that enforced silence is not the answer. But he was working in a world where speech had friction, where speakers were identifiable, and where truth had at least a fighting chance in open competition. We no longer live in that world. 

The challenge ahead is to preserve the Brandeis principle—that open debate and competing narratives are essential to democracy—while acknowledging that this principle only functions when the participants in that debate operate in good faith, when their claims can be verified, and when the audience has reason to trust the sources it is consuming. The solution is not to silence bad speech, but to restore the conditions under which truthful speech can be heard and believed.

The Gulf is undergoing one of the most consequential strategic transformations since the establishment of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1981. What was once viewed primarily as a relatively cohesive bloc shaped by common security anxieties, energy interests, and close political coordination is gradually evolving into a more plural and competitive regional system. 

While the U.S.-Israel war on Iran has had a significant impact on the GCC, its present transformation does not signify the collapse of cooperation among the Arab Gulf states. Nor does it suggest the emergence of open hostility among the region’s principal powers. Rather, it reflects the maturation of national ambitions, the diversification of strategic priorities, and the growing confidence of Gulf states in pursuing autonomous regional and international policies. 

The History of the GCC

The founding of the GCC—by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman in direct response to the upheaval of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War the following year—was a moment when six monarchies with broadly similar political systems judged that collective security and economic coordination offered better protection than acting alone.

Since then, the GCC has faced significant internal challenges, the largest of which was a 2017 diplomatic rift which pit Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain against Qatar. The three states (and Egypt) instigated a three-year blockade against Qatar, accusing it of supporting Islamists and keeping close ties with Iran. The blockade ended in 2021 during the Al-Ula GCC Summit, although some analysts suggest few concessions were made to Qatar. 

The current Saudi-UAE dynamic differs from that episode in both scale and character: where the Qatar blockade was an attempt by a coalition to isolate and discipline a smaller member, today’s competition involves the bloc’s two largest economies pursuing increasingly autonomous national strategies without seeking to isolate one another.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates remain deeply interconnected politically, economically, and strategically, yet their visions of regional leadership and long-term geopolitical positioning are no longer fully aligned.

From Cooperation to Competition 

For much of the past decade, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi appeared to operate in near strategic harmony. They coordinated closely on regional security, confronted political Islamist movements, supported parallel regional policies in several Arab arenas, and sought to reshape the political order that emerged after the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Yet, beneath this apparent alignment, important differences persisted. Over time, these differences became more visible, reflecting not merely tactical disagreements but increasingly distinct national calculations.

Both countries have long differed in domestic structure: Saudi Arabia is a unitary monarchy governed from a single center, while the UAE is a federation of seven emirates whose individual rulers, particularly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, retain significant autonomy over foreign and economic policy. These structural differences have shaped distinct decision-making styles even during periods of close alignment. The recent shifts in the Gulf, therefore, have not so much generated new divergences as they have given pre-existing divergences more space to be expressed. 

One of the earliest and most long-standing differences has been a dispute over maritime borders relating to the Treaty of Jeddah (1974). This led to the UAE decreeing Al-Yasat (a maritime territory sitting near both countries’ shores) as its own in 2005, which prompted retaliation from Saudi Arabia in the form of increased restrictions at land border crossings. The disagreement escalated in 2019 when the UAE expanded the borders of Al-Yasat, which prompted Saudi Arabia to file a complaint with the UN. The situation has not been settled, a reminder that even the most basic territorial questions between these two countries have never been fully resolved.

The two have had a number of divergences over regional politics as well. The UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020 but Riyadh held back, calculating that its own normalization would carry a higher political cost given its custodianship of Islam’s holiest sites. Likewise, when the Qatar blockade ended in 2021, Saudi Arabia moved toward reconciliation with Doha considerably faster and more warmly than the UAE, which retained deeper reservations about Qatar’s regional alignments. These were not yet signs of rivalry, but they indicated that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were beginning to calibrate their regional choices according to increasingly distinct national logics.

The emerging Saudi-UAE divergence we see today should therefore not be understood through the simplistic language of ‘rift’ or ‘breakdown’. The relationship remains far too important, institutionalized, and mutually beneficial for such descriptions to be accurate. Instead, the Gulf today is witnessing a process better described as competitive coordination—a system in which cooperation and rivalry coexist simultaneously. 

This framing reflects necessity as much as choice. Both countries remain bound by overlapping GCC institutions, a shared dependence on the U.S. security umbrella, and deep economic interdependence—exit costs that make a genuine rupture costly for both. 

Iran’s role in this paradigm has been pivotal, though not in a straightforward way: for decades, a shared perception of the Iranian threat was the principal glue holding Saudi-UAE coordination together. As Saudi Arabia has recalibrated its approach toward Tehran—first through the 2023 China-brokered rapprochement, and more recently through its proposed non-aggression framework—that shared external pressure has loosened, removing one of the strongest incentives that had previously suppressed the two countries’ underlying differences.

Shifts in the Gulf States

All the Gulf states (not only the UAE or Saudi Arabia) have changed profoundly in recent decades. Traditional security considerations have broadened to include economic diversification agendas, demographic pressures, technological ambitions, and post-oil transition concerns as drivers of policy. All of these have encouraged a more assertive form of statecraft, shifting toward a more competitive, less collaborative posture in pursuing regional economic influence.

The causal chain runs roughly as follows: large youth populations created an urgent need to generate jobs and revenue beyond oil and the public sector, which made attracting foreign investment, tourism, and corporate headquarters a matter of strategic necessity rather than mere preference. Because the pool of available investment, tourists, and corporate relocations is finite, diversification strategies that look similar on paper—both the Emiratis and Saudies are courting the same technology firms, the same airlines’ transit traffic, the same sovereign co-investment opportunities—translate directly into competition for the same resources. Technological ambition compounds this: AI infrastructure and chip access depend on a small number of United States and Chinese partners, so positioning oneself as the preferred regional partner for these technologies has become its own arena of rivalry.

The other four GCC states have adapted to these pressures in ways that, for the most part, fall short of direct competition with either Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. Qatar, still rebuilding its footing after the 2017-2021 blockade, has prioritized restoring its mediation role and its relationships with both larger neighbors rather than competing with them directly. Kuwait and Bahrain, the bloc’s smaller economies, have generally aligned with Saudi positions on regional security while pursuing modest diversification of their own. Oman has continued its traditional posture of studied neutrality. 

None of the four has the economic scale or international ambition to compete with Saudi Arabia or the UAE on the terrain that defines the Saudi-UAE rivalry, including regional headquarters, logistics, and AI investment. Their relationship to this competition is better described as adjacent, rather than as a third or fourth axis. A fuller account of how each has navigated cooperation versus competition would merit its own analysis, but for the purposes of this piece, the Saudi-UAE axis remains the primary driver of change in the Gulf’s economic and diplomatic architecture.

Economic Competition

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pursuing aggressive economic diversification policies, which put them in positions of both cooperation and competition.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is a geopolitical project to position the Kingdom as the indispensable political, economic, and diplomatic center of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In practice, this has meant an unprecedented wave of giga-projects (including NEOM, Qiddiya, Red Sea Global, and Diriyah) funded primarily through the Public Investment Fund (PIF), whose assets under management have grown to roughly $910 billion. The PIF’s international portfolio, spanning stakes in global sports, entertainment, and technology companies, functions as much as a tool of geopolitical positioning as of financial return. At the same time, economic strife in 2026 has brought a visible recalibration: NEOM in particular has undergone significant cost-cutting and project adjustments, suggesting that the financial limits of this model are becoming more apparent even as its geopolitical ambitions remain unchanged.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has developed its own model of influence rooted in logistics, finance, global connectivity, technological modernization, and strategic agility. Abu Dhabi’s regional approach has often emphasized flexibility, commercial reach, and diversified international partnerships. Concretely, this has meant building DP World (the UAE’s multinational supply chain and logistics company) into a global operator of more than 80 port terminals across roughly 40 countries, positioning Dubai’s Jebel Ali and Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa Port as critical nodes in global shipping networks well beyond the Gulf. The Emirates and Etihad airlines have similarly built outsized long-haul transit hubs relative to the UAE’s population, while sovereign vehicles such as Mubadala and ADQ pursue technology investments—including in artificial intelligence through firms such as G42—that have occasionally drawn scrutiny from Washington over their ties to Chinese technology partners.

The Red Sea, meanwhile, is emerging as one of the principal arenas of future competition between the two countries. Ports, maritime corridors, logistics infrastructure, food security chains, and access to African markets are becoming central components of Gulf strategic thinking, particularly following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In practice, this arena is proving more competitive than collaborative. 

Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in Red Sea logistics infrastructure (most notably the new NEOM Port and an expanding Jeddah Islamic Port) to offer bypass routes around the Strait of Hormuz and as alternatives to the network of terminals the UAE’s DP World has built from Sokhna in Egypt to Berbera in Somaliland. Even where commercial interests still intersect, such as DP World’s stake in Jeddah’s southern container terminal, the broader trajectory is toward competing rather than shared infrastructure, with each country building out a Red Sea network designed to reduce its dependence on the others.

This shift reflects a broader reality: the Gulf states are no longer acting merely as reactive powers responding to external security threats. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are at the helm of this change, behaving increasingly as ambitious middle powers seeking to shape regional order according to their own national visions. This has meant pursuing competing rather than coordinated strategies: each now treats logistics, energy transit, and maritime security primarily as instruments of national strategy, and only secondarily—if at all—as areas for Gulf-wide coordination.

Diplomatic Shifts

This competition extends beyond economics as well, as nuanced differences have emerged in strategic priorities and diplomatic engagements in several regional policy areas. While both countries continue to share broad concerns regarding regional instability, their approaches to de-escalation, mediation, and political engagement have at times diverged. This divergence is not new, and it did not begin with Israel or Iran. 

For much of the past decade, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have backed rival factions within the broader anti-Houthi camp in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has supported the internationally recognized government, including its Islah-aligned components (a Sunni Islamist group which advocates for a unified Yemeni state), while the UAE has cultivated the Southern Transitional Council (a secularist group which advocates for the secession of South Yemen) and affiliated militias as a more flexible vehicle for its own influence over Yemen’s southern coastline and islands. This rivalry became openly visible in December 2025, when STC forces seized territory in Hadramout and al-Mahra provinces near the Saudi border, prompting Riyadh to strike STC-linked positions and press for an Emirati military withdrawal, a step Abu Dhabi chose to accommodate rather than escalate.

A similar pattern has unfolded in Sudan, where Saudi Arabia (and Egypt) back the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan as the country’s legitimate authority, while the UAE has provided support to the Rapid Support Forces. The UAE drew international scrutiny for the arrangement, including a case brought by Sudan against the UAE at the International Court of Justice, dismissed in May 2025 for lack of jurisdiction. For Riyadh, the underlying concern extends beyond Sudan itself: if externally backed paramilitaries can fracture one Arab state’s sovereignty and capture its resource economy, the precedent could spread along the wider Red Sea. Saudi Arabia has worked to avoid this outcome through renewed military and diplomatic engagement with Egypt, Somalia, and other Horn of Africa states.

Yet, despite these long-running disputes over proxies and territorial influence, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have so far kept Yemen and Sudan contained as separate policy areas, restricting them from having significant impact on the two countries’ wider relationship. On the broader security questions that matter most to both capitals, the two countries remain substantially aligned: both continue to value U.S. security guarantees in the Gulf, even as Saudi Arabia in particular has visibly moved to diversify its security arrangements rather than relying on Washington alone (a trend explored further below); both have sought to prevent any return of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned movements to positions of power in the region; and both share an interest in avoiding renewed open warfare with Iran, even if, as discussed below, their tolerance for direct engagement with Tehran now differs sharply. In other words, the Yemen and Sudan disputes illustrate competition over regional influence and resources, but not yet a divergence over the fundamental security architecture each country wants for the Gulf.

In a similar way, the aftermath of the Gaza war has opened the door for the differences between the two countries to become more visible without signifying a complete breach in cooperation, particularly with regard to the pace and structure of regional normalization and diplomatic priorities. 

Riyadh appears increasingly sensitive to the broader political and symbolic dimensions of regional legitimacy, particularly in light of Saudi Arabia’s wider Arab and Islamic positioning. A jump into normalization with Israel could threaten Riyadh’s perception among regional partners. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, has maintained a more continuity-based approach rooted in the strategic logic of the Abraham Accords and in its privileged network of technological, security, and economic relations with Israel. 

This has become visible in official positioning: Saudi officials, including Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, have repeatedly stated since October 2023 that normalization with Israel cannot proceed without a credible and irreversible pathway to Palestinian statehood. Emirati officials, by contrast, have generally treated the Abraham Accords and progress on Palestinian statehood as parallel rather than sequential tracks, arguing that disengaging from Israel would reduce Abu Dhabi’s ability to shape outcomes for Palestinians rather than advance them.

These differing calculations are not merely diplomatic nuances. They reflect two partially distinct conceptions of regional influence: one is centered on broad political legitimacy and strategic centrality, the other on flexible partnerships, economic integration, and networked geopolitical reach. Whether this amounts to competition in the strict sense is debatable. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are not working against one another’s relationship with Israel, nor are they contesting it directly. The more accurate description is one of diverging risk tolerances: Saudi Arabia calibrates its regional posture around the domestic and pan-Arab political costs of normalization absent Palestinian progress, while the UAE treats its existing ties with Israel as a fixed strategic asset to be managed rather than renegotiated.

The restoration of Saudi-Iranian diplomatic relations under Chinese mediation in 2023 illustrated Riyadh’s growing emphasis on regional de-escalation and strategic stabilization. Saudi policymakers increasingly appear focused on reducing direct regional confrontation in order to concentrate on economic transformation, strategic diversification, and long-term development goals. One such proposal was reported on by the Financial Times (although not confirmed by Saudi officials), suggesting a Middle Eastern non-aggression pact with Iran.

While still embryonic and largely informal, this emerging approach bears some resemblance to a Middle Eastern non-aggression understanding inspired by principles historically associated with the Helsinki process: sovereignty, mutual restraint, de-escalation, confidence-building measures, and the reduction of inter-state confrontation in favor of long-term strategic stability. Riyadh increasingly appears interested in positioning itself as the principal architect of such a regional equilibrium. The UAE has similarly pursued pragmatic engagement with regional actors, including Iran and Türkiye, yet often with a stronger emphasis on economic diplomacy, technological partnerships, maritime influence, and diversified strategic balancing. While the future of any such arrangements remains to be seen, it is clear that both countries are pursuing new paths for regional stability.

The Shifting International Order 

As the strategic focus of the United States shifted away from the Middle East and toward China during the Obama Administration, regional actors began to diversify their partnerships and hedge political risks. Gulf states today maintain increasingly sophisticated relations not only with Washington, but also with China, India, Russia, Europe, and emerging Asian economies. This multidirectional diplomacy represents less a departure from traditional alliances than an adaptation to a more fragmented international system.

Within this evolving environment, broader regional patterns are also beginning to emerge. Informal yet increasingly consequential understandings appear to be developing among several major regional powers (including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Türkiye, and Pakistan) around the need to prevent regional fragmentation, contain escalation, and preserve a minimum level of strategic equilibrium.

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Pakistan, signed in September 2025, illustrates how this is taking shape; the pact treats an attack on either signatory as an attack on both. The idea of extending a similar collective framework to Turkey and Egypt has been floated by Pakistani officials. Notably, the UAE has not been a central participant in this grouping. Its more hawkish posture toward Iran and its closer security and intelligence relationship with Israel place it at some distance from an understanding whose common denominator is de-escalation with Tehran. 

The UAE’s deepening economic and strategic partnership with India (a country with long-standing tensions with Pakistan) adds a further complication to any closer alignment with a grouping anchored by the Saudi-Pakistan defense pact. Together, these factors reinforce, at the level of regional alignments, the divergence already visible in the Saudi-UAE relationship itself.

On the Road to Fracture?

For decades, Gulf politics often revolved around consensus-building under shared external pressures. Today, the region is entering a different phase, one in which strategic autonomy, economic competition, and diversified diplomacy are becoming permanent features of the regional landscape. In this context, the Saudi-UAE relationship increasingly resembles a strategic partnership between two ambitious powers whose interests overlap substantially, but not entirely. The challenge for both countries will be managing competition without allowing it to evolve into destabilizing rivalry.

So far, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi appear aware of the high costs of fragmentation. Shared security concerns, economic interdependence, energy coordination, and common regional interests continue to provide strong incentives for cooperation. Moreover, Gulf leaders recognize that the region’s broader instability requires a minimum level of strategic coordination among major Arab powers.

The future of Gulf politics is therefore unlikely to be defined by either full unity or open division. More likely, it will be characterized by fluid alignments and managed competition among increasingly self-confident regional actors, each pursuing coalitions organized around specific priorities: economic modernization, maritime security, technological competition, regional de-escalation, and selective geopolitical balancing.

Saudi Arabia appears increasingly positioned to pursue diplomatic centrality through broad regional engagement, calibrated de-escalation with Iran, and the construction of a more stable strategic environment compatible with its economic transformation ambitions. The UAE, meanwhile, is likely to continue emphasizing networked influence through trade, finance, technology, logistics, and flexible international partnerships extending across both Western and Asian strategic spheres.

This evolution may ultimately produce a more mature Gulf order, one less dependent on ideological uniformity and more reflective of the realities of a multipolar Middle East. The Saudi-UAE relationship will remain central to this transformation. 

The Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing in May came at a moment of deepening global volatility: a fragile ceasefire with Iran, continued disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, an ongoing U.S.-China trade war, and broader shifts in the global order. The Middle East crisis shaped both the timing and agenda of the summit, delaying the first visit by a U.S. president to China in nearly a decade by more than a month.  As the conflict enters its fifth month since the launch of the joint U.S.-Israeli operation in February, the crisis has become a great power stress test, exposing the limits of both American and Chinese strategy while reshaping how regional middle powers navigate the competition between them.

For Washington, the crisis has underscored the growing fragility of its role as the region’s trusted security guarantor. The United States remains the only superpower willing and able to bear the costs of enforcing regional security. Yet, the war has weakened the political foundations of that role. American military power can deter, but it can also escalate, creating new risks and leaving allies vulnerable. It can impose costs on Iran, but as shown by the collapse of the ceasefire in July, it has struggled to translate military superiority into a lasting regional order. Without a clear offramp, the conflict instead remains locked in a precarious balance between direct confrontation and fragile diplomatic efforts. 

For Beijing, the war has created economic and diplomatic openings. China has presented itself as a voice of restraint while strengthening its already dominant position in renewable energy, infrastructure, critical minerals, and digital systems. Yet, the crisis has also revealed the limits of China’s risk-averse approach. China can gain at America’s expense, but it cannot, or will not, secure the Gulf, restrain Iran, or provide regional partners with a credible security backstop.

This is the central paradox of the war. It did not produce a post-American Middle East, nor a Chinese one. American military dominance cannot by itself deliver order while Chinese geoeconomics cannot by itself deliver security. The result is a more self-protective regional system in which middle powers seek greater agency and frameworks that can operate under stress. 

The Limits of Military Power

The United States and Israel treated the war as an opportunity to reset the Iran equation. Iran’s nuclear, missile, drone, proxy, and regional infrastructure had become too dangerous to manage through deterrence alone, and a decisive campaign could degrade Iran’s capabilities and shift the regional balance of power.

The campaign did demonstrate the reach of American and Israeli military power, but the initial results were more ambiguous and revealed that strategic priorities had shifted from those initially outlined by the United States and Israel when the joint campaign was launched on February 28. The regime is intact, and the fates of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs remain subject to further negotiations. 

The ceasefire was declared void on July 8, followed by nearly two weeks of consecutive U.S. strikes on Iranian military infrastructure and the resumption of the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with drone and missile attacks on American facilities across the region, killing three American service members in Jordan. Defenders of the campaign in the United States may argue that the use of force was never meant to deliver an immediate political settlement. It was meant to buy time. Years of degraded enrichment, depleted missile stockpiles, and weakened proxies may not constitute a failure of strategy—they are the strategy. 

But a damaged Iran with a functioning regime and intact intent is not a deterred Iran. Capabilities can be set back, but the will to rebuild, retaliate, and adapt may shift the threat into asymmetric arenas rather than remove it. A more vengeful Iran is more likely to rely on missiles, drones, proxy networks, cyber operations, and maritime disruption, shifting the fight into arenas where the Gulf is especially vulnerable. 

This is the difference between military dominance and strategic resolution. Military power can destroy infrastructure and demonstrate reach. So far, however, it has not produced a political settlement or made the Gulf more secure. 

The American Position Under Strain

The United States has historically served as the region’s security guarantor, a role built on both need and trust. The war has complicated that foundation, leaving traditional allies exposed to Iranian threats and deepening doubts about whether American interests still serve regional stability.

At the same time, the decision to use force confirmed that Washington remains the only actor able to project power at scale—a reminder that the United States remains indispensable. But its approach to peace through strength is less convincing, especially when the American security umbrella fails to keep allies dry.

American protection now carries its own risks. Washington can deter Iran, but it can also widen the battlefield and leave regional partners to absorb the retaliation and economic and political blowback. From the Gulf perspective, the 2026 Iran war only reinforced this notion. For the first time in history, Iran struck all six GCC states. More than 80 energy facilities were hit, racking up an estimated $58 billion in repairs. Qatar lost 17 percent of its LNG export capacity following strikes at Ras Laffan. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz stranded 13 million barrels per day, which reflects the largest oil disruption on record. Yet, the damage goes beyond physical infrastructure and fiscal loss. The war punctured the Gulf’s core strategic asset: its reputation as a stable haven for investment and innovation.

The problem for Gulf states is not that the United States is leaving the region; it is that Washington remains deeply present but in ways that are increasingly difficult to predict and control. If the Iran challenge is left unresolved or if Washington declares success prematurely, Gulf states will be left managing the fallout: residual threats, economic uncertainty, and the political costs of having been seen to shelter under American power. They welcomed the turn to diplomacy and the cessation of hostilities under the June memorandum. But an ambiguous deal leaves them wedged between two actors that are difficult to predict: an emboldened, undeterred regime at their doorstep and a security patron whose protection they can neither count on nor refuse.

China’s Opening and its Limits

The Iran war has allowed China to present itself as a partner in mediation, reconstruction, and regional development for the “day after” in the Middle East. Beijing does not need, nor does it want, to replace Washington to gain ground. It only needs regional partners to view American power as costly and unable to produce order.

China’s model, most visible in its Belt and Road Initiative, is built around energy demand, infrastructure, ports, digital systems, and political distance from Western-led military campaigns. Beijing also signaled its expanding diplomatic ambitions in 2023, most notably in the Saudi-Iran rapprochement, although the extent of Beijing’s involvement in the direct mediation remains unclear. If American and Israeli forces do not produce a stable regional environment, China’s geoeconomic alternative becomes more attractive by comparison. 

Yet, this narrative has real limits. China could not secure the Gulf, restrain Tehran, or offer a credible substitute for American hard power. At a moment when Gulf partners needed protection, Beijing’s language of restraint was not enough.     

Throughout the 2026 war, Beijing’s official public posture sought to portray China as a neutral interlocutor, framing Gulf security as a matter of global concern while condemning the U.S.-Israeli operation at international forums—including in its veto of a Bahrain-led, GCC-backed UN Security Council resolution on the Strait of Hormuz in which it argued the text did not go far enough in its condemnation of the United States and Israel. Behind closed doors, Beijing applied real leverage to bring Tehran to the negotiating table; however, it sought a more ‘back door’ role in the mediation process by offloading direct mediation to Islamabad. This strategy allows Beijing to claim credit for success without owning its failure when the ceasefire collapsed.      

Gulf states understand that Beijing will not replace the U.S. Fifth Fleet or provide missile defense. But since the war began, and perhaps more so than before, many Gulf states still envision their future less through military alignment than through geoeconomics and geotechnology. In that world, China remains relevant, not as a security guarantor, but as a partner in the economic and technological architecture Gulf states are trying to build.

China’s regional gains will come bilaterally and unevenly. With Iran, Beijing will try to preserve influence without owning Tehran’s risk-taking. With Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will deepen its role in development, infrastructure, energy transition, ports, finance, and technology. None of this replaces American security, but it embeds China more deeply into the region’s economic operating systems.

At the superpower level, the crisis gives Beijing room to test American bandwidth. Washington has again been pulled into the Middle East at a time when China is focused on Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, and technology competition. The Trump-Xi Summit should therefore be read not only as crisis diplomacy, but as strategic positioning: China has presented itself as a necessary interlocutor/actor in the Middle East, while seeking to reduce American pressure on trade, technology, and security in the Indo-Pacific. China and the U.S. appeared to agree on a framework of “constructive strategic stability” which Beijing hopes will last for at least three years. 

The implication for the Indo-Pacific is not that China will immediately exploit the Iran war militarily. Beijing does not need to move dramatically if the Middle East crisis provides something more valuable: time. Even several years of reduced American pressure would allow Beijing to expand pressure around Taiwan, deepen grey-zone activity in the South China Sea, accelerate capabilities, and test alliance cohesion without crossing into open conflict. This strategic breathing room will allow Beijing to prepare for a contest in the Indo-Pacific on its own timeline. 

The Superpower Trap and the Middle Power Moment

For regional middle powers—particularly the Gulf states—that have long used the U.S.-China rivalry to their advantage, the current crisis represents an emerging dilemma. These powers have tried to strike a balancing act: selling energy east while buying security from the west, keeping Huawei in their networks while negotiating American defense pacts. But amid regional instability where neither superpower’s strategy fully serves their interests, the space to play both superpowers without choosing between them will start to narrow. 

Regional states still depend on the United States for security and on China for economic depth, but trust neither to prioritize regional stability. The likely response is not a dramatic pivot from one superpower to the other. It is diversification and insulation. Gulf states will deepen ties across multiple partners, including India, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and Turkey, while investing more in their own air defense, maritime security, energy transition, food systems, and industrial capacity.

Through these growing relationships, Gulf states are looking for different things from each partner. India is increasingly important for markets, energy and connectivity. Japan and South Korea bring industrial and technological capacity. Europe contributes finance and defence, while Turkey combines regional access with a growing security role that does not depend on Washington. 

This pattern did not start with the war; Gulf diversification was already underway. Under Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia aims to localize 50% of military spending. Procurement deals struck with France, South Korea, and Italy can be read as building blocks for a more localized security architecture. The UAE has taken a similar approach by deepening commercial depth; its January 2026 push to double bilateral trade with India to $200 billion—coupled with a 10-year Abu Dhabi National Oil Company long-term LNG supply deal—demonstrates a growing preference for economic depth over superpower dependence. 

What has changed is the logic of diversification. Before the war, it was largely about optimization and prestige: better deals, more partners, and a richer geopolitical portfolio. After the war, it is about resilience. Gulf states are no longer hedging against a future risk. They are responding to a risk already realized: that great-power guarantees may not align with regional interests when they are needed most. The June 2026  Turkey-Saudi agreement to revive the Hejaz railway is an attempt to bypass maritime chokepoints – like the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea – and facilitate direct trade among regional powers. Another is a discussed UAE-backed route connecting Syria’s Mediterranean ports with Iraq’s Umm Qasr and the UAE’s Khalifa Port. 

Regional connectivity still matters, but for different reasons than before. Corridors, ports, energy routes, and digital systems are more strategic, not less. Their purpose can no longer be understood through trade and regional normalization alone—now they are about resilience.

For example, the 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its revoked opening has reframed the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) from an ambitious trade project initially designed as a U.S.-led counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative to a potential lifeline. Trade corridors such as IMEC matter not only because they offer connectivity through a stable region, but because they can be redesigned as resilience platforms for an unstable one: energy redundancy, digital coordination, maritime security, emergency logistics, and technology partnerships.

For the Gulf, this is especially important. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are trying to transform their economies, attract global capital, build advanced technology sectors, and project influence across regions. These ambitions cannot rest on an unstable great-power bargain. They require diversified partnerships, protected infrastructure, and enough strategic autonomy to avoid being trapped by either American escalation or Chinese passivity.

Not Post-American, But Post-Dependence

The Iran war did not end American primacy in the Middle East, but it made it less convincing. It did not make China the region’s new security provider; instead, it exposed how little Beijing is willing to risk. The result is a more self-protective region.

Gulf states and other middle powers will continue to rely on American hard power, deepen economic ties with China, and expand partnerships with India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Europe. But they will do so with a clearer aim: to build enough resilience and room to maneuver to avoid being trapped by any one power.

When Xi Jinping arrives in Washington in September, optics may suggest a world organized around two poles. But the more consequential story will unfold elsewhere—in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, New Delhi and Ankara, where the question is no longer which superpower will deliver order, but how much room is left for the region to deliver on its own. The next Middle East will not be built by waiting for Washington to restore order or for Beijing to replace it. It will be built, if it is built at all, by regional middle powers responding to the limits of both to strengthen their own agency.

The World Cup revealed to billions of fans how power is played on and off the pitch as the planet’s finest football players displayed grit, intelligence, and brute strength. But the will of three referees sitting in the VAR booth, hidden from public view, had the force to rescript the outcome of pivotal matches. Power on the pitch and power in politics, both playing for global dominance. 

This summer issue of The Cairo Review looks over the chessboards of superpowers, moving pieces (either with precision or brute force) to control resources which fuel the global economic dynamo. But some pieces on the board are beginning to insist on moving themselves, middle powers seeking to curry favor and influence in the new paradigm of warfare. It is an issue that pays homage to the human civilization’s enduring lust for power and stability all at once and examines why the latter is much harder to attain.

The flip-flop ease of switching between ceasefires and attacks in the Persian Gulf has convinced Iran’s Arab neighbors that they can’t wait on Washington (or Tehran) to come up with an enduring and stable policy to keep the world’s energy supplies flowing. Instead, they are securing new deals with middle powers who can play an influential, if not multilateral role, that either counterweighs American power in the region or works in symbiosis with it.

In his essay “The New Gulf Realignments: Saudi-UAE Competition and the Evolution of Regional Order”, Abdelrahim Shalaby, former Egyptian Ambassador and Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, writes that “the gradual perception of reduced American strategic centrality in the Middle East has encouraged regional actors to diversify partnerships and hedge geopolitical risks. Gulf states today maintain increasingly sophisticated relations not only with Washington, but also with China, India, Russia, Europe, and emerging Asian economies.”

These strategic realignments may hint at a waning of the traditional power structures which dominated the Western Asia and North Africa regions for decades. But do they signal the limitations of U.S. power?

Yes, argue Dr Gedaliah Afterman, head of the Asia policy program at the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy and Foreign Relations at Reichman University, and Fulbright Fellow Caroline Dibble. In their piece, “The Iran War and the Limits of Great Power”, they write: “The Iran war did not end American primacy in the Middle East, but it made it less convincing. It did not make China the region’s new security provider, instead it exposed how little Beijing is willing to risk. The result is a more self-protective region.”

By the same token, the U.S.-Israel war on Iran hasn’t only highlighted the limits of great power but the dangers posed by such unrestrained might. In this issue, former Egyptian Ambassador Alaa El Hadidi reflects on the warnings of the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during the Vietnam War. Fulbright’s book The Arrogance of Power, is today a relevant critique of U.S. foreign policy, perhaps a blueprint of how American economic and military strength could prove a pitfall if equated with moral superiority. 

It is no surprise, then, that a West Asia region which seeks to protect itself from such pitfalls will likely reformulate regional efforts to deter Iran. Omar Al-Ubaydli, Affiliated Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, examines the evolution of the Arab Gulf’s deterrence strategy in an upcoming essay. 

“An added impetus for such a strategy,” he writes, “also manifests itself from some of the changes that have occurred within Iran itself as a new generation of leaders assumes control, and a redistribution of internal influence is underway toward more hardline elements of Iranian society.”

Off the battlefield and beyond the negotiating table, there is a significant play for power over wartime narratives. Hany Farid, professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, examines how three information ecosystems—states, influencers, and autonomous AI systems—are interacting to reshape narrative control of global conflicts. Acknowledging how important information integrity is during times of conflict, he writes in this issue that “the challenge then is how to preserve the benefits of a pluralistic, distributed information ecosystem while maintaining sufficient integrity that allows citizens, journalists, and policymakers to distinguish truth from falsehood, and fact from propaganda”.

Is the bishop moving, or is the video of it charging forward in a straight line AI-generated? If the rooks start looking for new regional partnerships, will they abandon their king? At the time of writing this, U.S. President Donald Trump is wooing Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear agreement conditioned on signing the Abraham Accords. Not before an irreversible path toward Palestinian statehood, the Saudis replied.

The game is never over, but the rules might be changing.

Firas Al-Atraqchi

Managing Editor of The Cairo Review

Abigail Flynn: Hello and welcome to CR Amplified, The Cairo Review’s podcast where we talk to experts and policymakers about relevant issues on the world stage. 

I’m Abigail Flynn.

Our Summer 2026 issue, titled Power Plays, explores how major powers are making major moves across the international geopolitical landscape and how small and middle powers are reacting. 

The role of hard power has come to the forefront with the recent US-Israel war on Iran. But the US has faced significant challenges in achieving its strategic goals through military force. That raises the question: is pursuing soft power the wiser choice for US foreign policy?

Today, we’ll be speaking with the authors of A Daring Enterprise: A US-Egyptian Partnership and the Case for Soft Power, authors James Harmon and Cornelius Queen. 

The book details the story of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund, a private investment fund that Mr. Harmon was tasked with starting in Egypt by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton back in 2011. 

The fund aims to bolster Egypt’s economy and improve quality of life for Egyptians by supporting the private sector. Since 2015, the fund has made 148 investments in Egypt, attracted $1.7 billion in foreign capital, and supported 58,000 jobs through its investment portfolio.

The program has seen great success within Egypt, but can it be replicated elsewhere? And does China — Egypt’s other major investment partner — present a threat to US soft power in the country today? 

Today, I’m happy to be joined by Mr. James Harmon and Mr. Cornelius Queen to discuss more. 

Hello and thank you for joining me. Before we begin, could you please take a moment to introduce yourselves?

Cornelius Queen: For introductions, I’m Cornelius Queen. I’m the Senior Vice President at the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund. And Jim…

James Harmon: I’m the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Enterprise Fund.

A.F: Thank you, and thank you again for joining us. 

For our first question, I would like to note that our listeners are generally in politics, not finance. 

So could you explain to us, in simple terms, what the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund actually is?

C.Q: The Enterprise Fund is a private investment fund authorized by the United States Congress to help support private sector development in Egypt. It’s essentially a private equity-type vehicle that takes equity stakes in Egyptian businesses to help them grow, create jobs, and attract foreign capital to Egypt. 

The mission of the Enterprise Fund is to stimulate private sector development in Egypt so that the private sector can become the leading engine of growth for Egypt’s economy.

The Enterprise Fund concept goes back to the early 1990s. It was born out of the first George H.W. Bush administration as an initiative to support private sector development during the transition to democracy in former Soviet Union countries.

A.F: Thank you for that very clear answer. 

Now, could you tell me a little bit more about why you chose to write a book about the fund, starting with experiences of Mr. Harmon when he entered the country in 2011, and then looking further at how you developed the fund over the next 15 years?

J.H: This book that we’ve written, one of the reasons we wrote this book was to explain to other governments the success we’ve had with the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund — why we do it and what was it that caused us to achieve such success with the enterprise fund. 

But we also wrote it for the American public because our key conclusion is that we wanted the enterprise fund model could be a very important part of our foreign policy. We could help a lot of other countries, not just Egypt. 

What’s interesting is that the President, in his new budget proposals, has asked Congress for additional funding to create a number of new enterprise funds.

A.F: It will be interesting to see how those potential new funds play out. 

Stepping back in time a little bit, can you share how you received the mandate to start this fund during the revolution from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

J.H: I had served in the Clinton administration as Chairman of the Export-Import Bank. So when she first spoke to me in 2011, I had to think about it before deciding to take the assignment.

The early challenges, I must say neither I nor the young assistants I took with me — a woman from the State Department and fortunately one of my assistants from my private sector fund who was Egyptian and knew the language and country well — were aware of how unhappy the population was. The violence in the square when we arrived was a surprise, but it wasn’t directed against the United States or against us; it was really against life in Egypt and the difficulties they were having.

On our very first trip, I chose to meet with the Muslim Brotherhood. That was controversial, and the American government didn’t understand why I chose to do that. I wanted to hear their point of view, just as I wanted to hear every point of view. 

On the way there, we were trapped in the violence and our car got stuck. People were burning cars, and there was a degree of violence that I had not fully anticipated.

A.F: It’s clear that you entered Egypt in 2011 facing a monumental task. 

But now can you tell me more about the obstacles you faced from the US side, particularly regarding the debates between Democrats and Republicans about how to approach Egypt?

J.H: Well, I came back from that first trip and told Hillary that I would accept the role. But Hillary and Bill Clinton, whom I was close to through the administration, were clearly Democrats. 

On the other side, we had Republicans who felt differently but also believed they understood Egypt. 

[Senator] Lindsey Graham was one of them; he had been to Egypt and felt he understood the situation. 

So we had two sides of the American political spectrum interested in Egypt, but with very different points of view.

A.F: In the book, you discuss a meeting you had with Senator Lindsey Graham after he put a hold on congressional funding for the project as a signal to President Obama that he was unhappy with the administration’s approach to the Middle East.

Can you tell us more about how that conversation went?

J.H: Lindsey Graham felt that I hadn’t gone through his party or spoken to him about what we were going to do in Egypt, why we were doing it, and how we planned to go about it. He had strong points of view because he had just returned from Egypt.

I met with him in his office, and he was yelling and screaming at me for not giving him an opportunity to advise us on the trip or on what I planned to do. I tried to explain to him quietly that I had every indication of coming back and reporting to Congress. 

I wasn’t a political person; even though I had served under President Clinton, I wasn’t politically motivated in this role. I was simply trying to keep the US Congress informed about what we saw in Egypt and how we could help.

He raised his voice in a very dramatic way, yelling and screaming. I remember, on a humorous note, leaving his office and his assistant walked me to the elevator bank and said, “I think that was a good meeting.” 

I said, “Were you in the same meeting I was?” and told her how I felt about what he had said. 

I didn’t think that as being very effective communication, but that is not unusual in Washington politics. People feel very strongly. Lindsey Graham was one of them, and he expressed himself in no uncertain terms—not so much against me, but against Obama. 

He was angry at the President and took his anger out on me because I was meeting with him.

C.Q: I would just add, Jim, that after 2011, Egypt was in a very fluid political operating environment as it went through its transition after the fall of Mubarak. 

That translated into challenges in our own US foreign policy regarding how to respond to Egypt’s transition. 

There were disagreements between Republicans and Democrats, with the Obama administration in power and members of Congress like Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain having their own disagreements with US-Egypt policy.

Unfortunately, we were a casualty of those when certain members of Congress, like Senator Lindsey Graham, put a hold on our funding. When a hold is placed on funding in the US Congress, no money comes from the government to a program like the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund. 

So we had been tasked with helping rebuild the private sector, but our own government was holding the money hostage to make a point against President Obama’s policy in opposition to his policy in Egypt. You can imagine how difficult it is to build a business when you don’t have funding.

Those were some of the early challenges from 2011 to 2013, when there was inconsistency in how much funding we received and when we would receive it. 

In 2013, Lindsey Graham lifted his hold, and we received our first tranche of funding. Those early years were difficult because we were operating in a fluid environment in Egypt, and members of Congress and their staff had concerns about deploying US capital in that context, that was very fluid, and they wanted to see results and a proof of concept before releasing all the money at once.

So we ran into funding challenges early on, but eventually we received the full $300 million. I think we were able to responsibly deploy that into several good investments that generated significant returns for the taxpayer. And now, we have bipartisan support across Congress based on our strong track record in Egypt, where we’ve helped double the US government’s money.

A.F: It’s clear that the fund faced many challenges in its early years. 

But since then, however, it seems to have made incredible progress in Egypt, which the book attributes to your decision to support local Egyptian managers rather than importing American managers. 

Can you tell me more about how you made that decision?

J.H: The most important decision I made during my first and second trips to Egypt was that I could not put Americans on the ground in Egypt in that environment. 

That decision was critical to everything we did. I realized quickly that there was a lot of talent in Egypt, capable of people fully investing.

Early on, I had a meeting with my two assistants. We had a list of candidates to lead the fund, and I turned to my Egyptian assistant, Ola, and asked her who the most successful investor in Egypt was at the time. 

That was my natural instinct as an investor: to find the Warren Buffett, the brilliant investor in Egypt. 

She named Nassif Sawiris and suggested we see him. She called him right while we were sitting there and asked, “Would you see us?”

We got on a plane the next morning, flew to London, and met with him. He looked at the list and said, “Good people, but none of them can run what you want to run. I know who can do it: my banker, Ashraf Zaki.”

I was very grateful, and I called Ashraf from London and asked him to come to New York. He came the following week, and I met with him over a series of meetings across a couple of days. At the beginning, he said to me, “I don’t want to work for the United States.” 

I remember feeling somewhat discouraged, thinking that after finding the person who could help us identify investments to deploy the $300 million, he was telling me he wouldn’t work for the United States.

That’s when I made a fortunate decision. I said, “Ashraf, how about we work for you?” He looked at me and asked, “What does that mean?” I said, “We’ll finance what you want to do. You create your own fund, we’ll provide you with up to $300 million, and we will follow your recommendations.”

When he accepted, we agreed to talk regularly. Initially, I spoke with him every Sunday—which, of course, was Monday in Egypt. Every Sunday, we had a five- or six-hour call and went through everything he was looking at and how he planned to do it. This was around 2015 or 2016, or earlier. 

He came up with some very good ideas, and he was the one who introduced me to Fawry. 

The decision to invest in Fawry resulted in probably our most successful investment…

C.Q: …which I’m sure your listeners are familiar with. It’s the largest electronic payments platform in Egypt, extending digital payment services to 55 million Egyptians — half the population — in a country where many do not have access to a bank account.

It was an important decision we made early on to invest in growing companies with platforms that could reach millions as part of our strategy to expand financial inclusion and access to financial services in Egypt. 

Given Fawry’s popularity, the uptick in Egyptians using digital payments, government support for financial inclusion in the fintech space, and Fawry’s excellent leadership, the company has grown exponentially.

We invested a little over $20 million in the company in 2015 and have generated almost $100 million in proceeds — five times our investment — while still holding a relatively significant stake in the company. 

So, it has been enormously profitable on a financial basis, but also impactful on a developmental basis by extending digital financial services to Egyptians.

A.F: Stepping back to a wider view, can you describe some of the general impacts that the fund has had on Egypt?

C.Q: Just to put things into perspective, we’ve been investing in Egypt for a little over a decade. We’ve supported seven first-time fund managers who have helped us invest in a little over 150 companies. 

Today, our investment portfolio supports close to 70,000 Egyptian jobs.

On a financial basis, we’ve taken the $300 million from Congress and almost doubled it — the current estimated market value of our assets exceeds $500 million compared to $300 million in congressional funding. 

I would add that these returns have come despite severe political instability and economic crises. The Egyptian currency has lost 80% of its value against the dollar over the last year, yet we’ve been able to generate dollar returns despite that significant devaluation.

Our message in the book is that if you can do this in Egypt, you can replicate the model in other countries to advance US foreign policy interests while supporting locally led private sector development — which, as we’ve shown in Egypt, helps create jobs and improve quality of life for the population. 

At a moment when we are seeing the limits of US military power across the Middle East, the US really needs a new playbook. And we think enterprise funds meet the moment: they support private sector development by creating partnerships between the United States and local citizens around shared economic interests, while also generating returns for taxpayers when managed well as seen in our case.

A.F: This idea of exporting the fund model and relying on soft power instead of hard power seems to be a key message the book is sharing with the public.

J.H: The reason for writing the book to tell this story is not simply because of my fondness and friendship with Ashraf Zaki — which continues to this day — or any particular story, including Fawry. 

It is because we believe the enterprise fund model can be used in a number of other countries, whether we do it or other countries do it. Bringing people in to be investors in an enterprise fund and helping create new businesses may be the most important part of our legacy.

The success of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund is greater than almost any other initiative of this kind by the United States. 

We think that it will change our own foreign policy. So that we will be more focused on investing not in the military sense — no threatening countries, not putting military into a country — but in fact by economic development helping to create jobs helping to create better lives. 

It’s not just Egypt, it could be done in a lot of frontier and developing countries throughout the world. 

A.F: Thank you. 

Now, The Cairo Review is a regional political journal, so I’m going to ask a bit more of a political question. 

One aspect that really intrigued me was in the final chapter, which framed the discussion around China and how enterprise funds can be used to counter Chinese influence. 

If you don’t mind, I’ll read a passage from Chapter 9, and then I have a question:

“The opportunities for the United States to project American values and the American way of doing business to counter the challenge of China via the now-proven enterprise fund concept are numerous. The US emphasis on sustainable development and building relationships — as opposed to China’s extractive lending practices and transactional approach to foreign aid — could not present a greater contrast.”

My question here is: many in Egypt view China as a lucrative investment partner. 

China is consistent in its funding, willing to engage in mega infrastructure projects, and does not attach many of the structural requirements that Western programs like the IMF impose regarding governance and transparency. 

At the moment, Egypt appears to be pursuing investment opportunities from both the United States and China simultaneously. 

Given that, how do you think the Enterprise Fund and other US investments are challenging — or perhaps being challenged by — China?

C.Q: From my perspective, we are modeling a different way of doing business — the American way of doing business. 

We project American values through our efforts to support the private sector in Egypt through a private equity and venture capital lens. We don’t see many investors in that specific space in Egypt.

As you rightly noted, China is a growing investor in Egypt, primarily in the Suez Canal Economic Zone, investing heavily in infrastructure projects as part of its foreign policy and Belt and Road Initiative to expand influence across the developing world. 

And so with that there have been concerns and news reports over the years regarding China’s predatory lending practices and coercive economic development models, not necessarily debt-trap diplomacy concerns where assets could be seized if loans aren’t repaid.

But I do think it presents a stark contrast to what we are doing with the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund. We are empowering locally led private sector development rather than placing Americans on the ground to run companies. 

Everything is Egyptian-led. I think we’ve read that in some cases where China builds infrastructure it brings its own workforce rather than rely on local talent, we rely on and empower local actors. 

Those actors will continue investing in Egypt long after we leave, and the relationships we help build with local investment partners will strengthen long-term the relationship ultimately between the United States and Egypt. 

So It’s a different model of economic development that we think is an interesting alternative to a more state-led Chinese model that can sometimes feel a little more transactional.

A.F: I’d like to end by asking why you think it’s so important to have a well-developed soft power approach like enterprise funds, rather than relying on hard power.

J.H: Looking back at history, my early years were during World War II when the world was engaged in a violent conflict, followed later by the Korean and Vietnam Wars. 

Gradually since then, we have seen economic conflicts and strategic challenges—with Russia, for example. 

Now, I think we are a little bit more cautious with not getting in a disagreement with China if we can.

If together we can lead this world — we have developed a model that can be successful in most countries we go into. 

Although the book focuses on what the US has done in Egypt and how this model could be used in much of Africa and much in the frontier developing world, it also does mention the difference between this approach and the Chinese approach. 

In an era of hydrogen bombs and other frightening war weapons, no one wants to have war. 

We look for ways that help meet the challenges of the United States and other countries, and to do it in a civilized and structured way. We think the model that the enterprise fund model we implemented in Egypt is a framework that can be used. 

A.F: I think that is an excellent point to end on. 

Thank you both so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to speak with The Cairo Review. 

The book was a pleasure to read, extremely well written, and I highly recommend it to our audience. I hope we see positive movement from the US side in terms of funding future programs as readers in the US get their hands on it.

J.H: Thank you, Abigail.

C.Q: Yes, thank you, Abigail.

A.F: And thanks to you, the listener. We hope you enjoyed this episode of CR Amplified.

Whenever a new political deadlock paralyzes Libya or localized clashes between powerful rival militias break out on the streets of the capital Tripoli, the global policy establishment dusts off its favourite phrases: “failed state,” “security vacuum,” and “primordial tribalism”. This lexicon serves a very specific purpose. By framing Libya’s fragmentation following the fall of the previous regime of Muammar Qaddafi as an inevitable product of native institutional incapacity and ancient internal feuds, the international community achieves a convenient double victory. It blames the victims of the crisis while completely absolving the outside architects of Libya’s ongoing paralysis.

The reality on the ground is far more calculated. Libya is not a broken state suffering from a spontaneous institutional breakdown. It is a highly functional system of “managed chaos” in an undeclared modern theatre of tutelage where a domestic kleptocratic cartel and foreign powers work in tandem to lock the country in a state of permanent instability. This ensures that Libya’s vast sovereign wealth remains easily extractable and its population permanently disenfranchised. To understand how Libya arrived here, we must dismantle the comfortable myths of the post-2011 era and look directly at the raw mechanics of what has become a highly lucrative “Cartel State”—a governance structure where formal state authority is captured by armed groups and political elites or cliques that treat national resources as their own spoils.

The Myth of the Humanitarian Rescue 

The baseline narrative of modern Libya began in 2011 with the NATO-backed intervention under the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. Framed as a noble rescue mission to save civilians from the security apparatus of the Qaddafi regime’s reported violent suppression of protesters during the 2011 uprising and his explicit threat to ‘cleanse‘ opposition-held cities (much similar to Srebrenica), the R2P intervention was framed as a triumph of global moral conscience. In practice, it was a geopolitical bait-and-switch. 

Once the regime collapsed, the international coalition did not stick around to help; Libya was in a fragile situation beset by a security vacuum and the mushrooming of armed militias. The coalition here could have shepherded the country toward a viable sovereign transition. Instead, they packed up leaving behind a structural vacuum that was immediately hijacked by regional capitals. Far from safeguarding the Libyan people, this selective intervention turned the country into a testing ground for foreign weapons and proxy ambitions. Regional powers such as Turkey, the UAE, and Russia used Libya as a laboratory for advanced drone warfare and the deployment of mercenaries like the Syrian fighters and the Wagner Group to project influence without the political cost of direct state-on-state confrontation.

Sovereignty was reduced to a conditional luxury dependent entirely on how local well-armed actors aligned with the strategic desires of outside capitals. Today, this manifests in a state of soft occupation where thousands of foreign mercenaries from Russian paramilitary networks to Turkish-backed forces and external intelligence agencies permanently dictate the security landscape. The mechanics of occupation via mercenaries in Libya function as a privatized multi-layered system where foreign patrons outsource their strategic ambitions to local Libyan militias and foreign combatants. This creates a soft occupation where state sovereignty is effectively bypassed by these entrenched networks.

The Mechanics of the Cartel State

This artificial environment of managed instability birthed a predatory domestic model: the Cartel State which capitalized on decoupling the country’s current legislative and executive bodies from popular representation. Libya has experienced a decade-long political impasse where un-elected transition-era leaders entrenched themselves as permanent fixtures prioritizing the protection of their own power and financial interests over the democratic mandate of a populace that has not had the opportunity to vote for its representatives since 2014.

The major political factions locked in a power play are the Tripoli-based internationally-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) and the eastern-based House of Representatives (HoR) and its Government of National Stability (GNS) in alliance with the Khalifa Haftar-led Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF, a.k.a. Libyan National Army) maintain a loud superficial theatre of ideological warfare. Behind closed doors, however, they share a deep mutual interest in preserving the status quo. By keeping the country divided, these elites can indefinitely postpone national elections while monopolizing the state’s financial pipelines.

This profound lack of democratic legitimacy has incentivized these entrenched factions to treat the state’s finance and monetary institutions as a prize to be seized and the true nature of this arrangement was laid bare during the explosive 2024 political warfare over the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).    

When the Government of National Unity and the Presidential Council, without the approval of the House of Representatives, forcefully removed  the Central Bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, who had previously restricted government spending by blocking out-of-budget expenditures, this triggered a retaliatory oil shutdown by eastern factions exposing the fundamental truth of the Libyan crisis: the state is not “failing” but is being actively fought over as a financial prize—a vast, state-managed oil and gas reserves coupled with a highly centralized financial control over these revenues. This makes the Central Bank and the National Oil Corporation (NOC) the ultimate keys to the treasure enabling whoever controls them an almost complete monopoly and control over the nation’s wealth without the need for taxation or popular consent as the case with rentier economy.

The international community working through the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) swooped in not to implement a democratic resolution but to broker another elite power-sharing deal over bank leadership. UNSMIL mediated a narrow deal between rival political elites to resolve the 2024 CBL crisis, therefore, effectively restarting the broken status quo by allowing competing factions to carve up the bank’s leadership and board positions among themselves. They managed the crisis just enough to get the oil flowing back to international markets while leaving the kleptocratic structure completely intact. 

By treating the CBL crisis as a technical issue that could be managed via board appointments, the international community avoided the difficult work of addressing how Libya’s political economy actually functions. They achieved the immediate objective of oil flowing back into international markets, but they did so by reinforcing the power of the exact same actors who had caused the crisis in the first place. This implied that the next crisis is merely a matter of time.

This systemic reality was formally confirmed in a March 2026 UN Panel of Experts report which explicitly concluded that Libya’s armed groups have entrenched themselves as the dominant drivers of governance exerting a “coercive and cartel-like control” over the nation’s economic institutions.

Nowhere is this explicit exploitation more visible than in the energy sector. 

Libya sits atop Africa’s largest proven oil reserves, yet, there exists an opaque production-sharing agreement bypassing competitive bidding. State-sanctioned fuel smuggling networks and deliberately convoluted central bank letters of credit systematically divert billions in subsidized fuel to foreign markets allowing entrenched political and militia factions to siphon off national wealth while maintaining a veneer of institutional legitimacy enriching an oligarchic elite and their foreign sponsors. 

The Libyan people, meanwhile, are reduced to price-takers in their own land. Following successive central bank devaluations of the dinar, citizens endure runaway inflation, chronic electricity blackouts and critical cash shortages. While billions of dollars in oil revenues (As of June 2026, Libya’s crude oil production has reached approximately 1.49 million barrels per day) flow through a centralized pipeline directly into the hands of the cartel, ordinary Libyans plunge into artificial poverty. 

Following the Central Bank’s 14.7% devaluation of the Libyan dinar in January 2026, inflation has surged into the double digits reaching approximately 14% by mid-year. This economic strain is compounded by a sharp increase in the cost of essential goods with the national Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) spiking by over 10% in April 2026 alone further eroding household purchasing power amidst chronic cash shortages at banks and ATMs. This is a highly sophisticated transnational extraction racket operating under a veneer of international diplomatic legitimacy.

De-exoticizing the Social Fabric

When international observers try to explain this breakdown, they invariably fall back on Orientalist tropes, pointing to Libya’s “tribal nature” as the fundamental barrier to a modern democratic state. This analysis fundamentally misreads Libyan society. Traditional kinship structures and local social networks are not primitive relics causing state failure. 

Historically, they have been the literal bedrock of societal resilience. When the centralized state collapsed in 2011, it was these organic local networks functioning through deeply embedded codes of collective liability and conflict mediation that prevented total societal dissolution. The tribe in Libya has historically acted as a conscious civic shield against centralized authoritarian overreach and foreign occupation. These structures, most notably the Wisemen and Elderly and Notables Councils that emerged nationwide, stepped in to act as the primary authorities in the absence of a functioning judiciary and adjudicated everything from property disputes to blood feuds. 

In the Nafusa Mountains, regional councils successfully mediated complex inter-tribal tensions between groups like the Mashahiya and Zintani that the central government could not reach. Meanwhile, in Libya’s neglected south, social councils unified their communities to provide basic services where infrastructure had disintegrated. These grassroots initiatives demonstrated that even as the formal state apparatus failed, Libyans utilized deeply embedded social frameworks to prevent total societal dissolution. 

However, we must draw a sharp line between this authentic socially cohesive fabric and the opportunistic armed groups dominating the current landscape who inverted the state into an upside-down relationship: Whereas the government should command the security forces, the security forces in the new Libya were dictating to the government how it should perform, ensuring that any political arrangement is contingent upon their approval and continued access to state wealth. 

It needs to be highlighted that the militias running rackets in western regions, particularly Tripoli, or controlling smuggling routes in the margins are not “tribal warriors”. They are hyper-modern mercantile appendages of the Cartel State itself. When they wear tribal names, they do that purely as camouflage to mask raw economic predation and racketeering. By labelling these heavily armed state-subcontracted criminal networks as “tribes,” or considering them representatives of regions, ethnicities or cities, the international community perpetuates a harmful narrative that blames indigenous culture for a political crisis that was manufactured by an international security vacuum.

The Strategy of Institutional Bypass

For years, the international community’s approach to fixing Libya has focused on top-down elite-driven deals. UNSMIL, currently under the leadership of Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) Hanna Tetteh, has effectively transitioned from an objective mediator into a manager of the status quo convening endless dialogues, structured or otherwise, to shuffle the same discredited political cards. These processes are bound to fail because they ask the very members of the cartel to sign their own political death warrants.

The failure of international mediation in Libya stems from a flawed mental image that reduces the nation to a negotiable corporate project. Since 2011, it has been defined by a series of top-down UN-led initiatives that have struggled to gain traction in a landscape of deep political fragmentation and foreign interference. Following the 2011 NATO intervention, UNSMIL was established to guide the transition, but these efforts often suffered from a lack of local ownership and a failure to meaningfully include civil society. Landmark attempts at consolidation such as the 2015 Skhirat Agreement Libyan Political  (LPA) ultimately resulted in elite power-sharing arrangements that failed to achieve public legitimacy or resolve the country’s institutional divides. 

In recent years, diplomacy shifted toward a “three-track” approach to address political, military and economic issues, yet as  analysts observe, these processes have frequently been undermined by the competing geopolitical agendas of external actors and the influence of entrenched armed groups. Consequently, international mediation has often been criticized for prioritizing quick-fix political formulas over the inclusive, Libyan-led reconciliation necessary to build sustainable, long-term stability. 

Rather than treating Libya as a society with deep-rooted needs, mediators frequently operate on a transactional logic viewing the country as a set of power maps to be rearranged by elite deal-making. This approach treats the state as a business to be restructured and its people as secondary details assuming that stability can be achieved simply by dividing power and resources between competing factions. 

Massad Boulos, Senior Advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, has proposed an initiative that epitomizes this transactional failure by treating Libya as a corporate puzzle to be solved through elite power-sharing rather than a sovereign nation. The plan proposes a multi-year transition to unify state institutions centred on a deal between the Dbeibah and Haftar families, notably involving Ibrahim Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar. Ibrahim Dbeibah is national security advisor to his uncle, Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah. He plays a central role in the administration of the western-based Government of National Unity. Saddam Haftar is the Deputy General Commander of the eastern-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF. a.k.a. the Libyan National Army (LNA)). His importance and role stems from him being the son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of the LAAF. Saddam is widely viewed as a successor to his father and a key player in U.S.-backed efforts to unify the country’s leadership. 

Against this backdrop of entrenched domestic rivalry, international efforts to ‘fix’ Libya have shifted toward transactional economy-first initiatives such as the so-called unified budget, control over oil revenues and security coordination via AFRICOM that reduces the state to a negotiation between armed and financial stakeholders. 

While Boulos continues to press his framework with considerable vigour, the initiative is encountering firm resistance. Armed and political groups in Misrata and elsewhere as well as radical Islamists and the head of the Presidential Council have denounced the proposal as a ‘forced marriage’ imposed upon Libyans and as a threat to the democratic process. 

Yet, such objections warrant more than just caution. The invocation of democratic principle here functions less as a genuine defence of the public good than as a rhetorical shield deployed by actors who fear that an accommodation between the Dbeibah and Haftar camps would marginalize them and strip away their access to power, position and resources.

Framing the contest as one between military rule and democracy, therefore, oversimplifies the complexity of what is at stake. What is unfolding is not a struggle over the character of the political order but a struggle among entrenched networks over their place within it. These factions are, in effect, signalling that any settlement which does not retain them at the centre of the emerging architecture constitutes a threat to their interests. Consequently, the language of democracy is being appropriated to defend positions of privilege entrenching divisions rather than fostering the reconciliation any durable settlement would require.

More importantly, this top-down corporate-style restructuring bypasses the Libyan people entrenching elite influence while ignoring the fundamental need for institutional legitimacy and grassroots consensus. Through a de-colonial lens, it becomes evident that international initiatives such as those currently attributed to U.S. presidential advisor Massad Boulos are rooted in a structural “mental image” that treats Libya as an object of negotiation rather than a sovereign nation. By operating on the logic of corporate restructuring rather than inclusive national reconciliation as a pre-condition for state-building, these interventions systematically undermine the prospects for sustainable peace.

Libya’s history since 2011 has shown that such top-down deals which ignore the complexities of Libyan society and the necessity of institutional legitimacy—as seen in the power-sharing deals based on the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) signed in Skhirat, establishing the Government of National Accord (GNA) as well as the establishment of the current Government of National Unity (GNU) through the UN-led Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF)—fail to resolve the crisis. 

By prioritizing the interests of factional power brokers over the construction of a sustainable state, these interventions treat sovereignty as a negotiable item and transform political discourse into a competition for government seats rather than a pursuit of justice. Consequently, local elites often succumb to opportunistic justifications shifting their principles to align with whatever external deal promises them a share of influence. 

Ultimately, this “deal-making” mindset ignores the Libyan collective memory; there is a fundamental crisis that exists because of the people’s distrust in the political process and the lack of legitimacy in the militias who cling to power at any cost.

By focusing on balancing armed and financial powers, international mediation risks turning peace efforts into fuel for future conflict. True stability cannot be manufactured through external blueprints but rather through a national project built on institutional authority and societal consensus rather than the temporary and exclusionary distribution of power.

Transformative stability will never be delivered by the current political apparatus. It must be claimed from below through an aggressive strategy of “institutional bypass”: Since the centralized state is thoroughly compromised, a coordinated civic mobilization must bypass the corrupt political centre and systematically activate local governance structures. Currently, elected Libyan municipal councils possess an organic legitimacy that the central cartel can never buy despite some exceptions. By shifting the focus of administrative and financial accountability to the local level and demanding the direct decentralized management of oil revenues to municipalities, the oxygen feeding the proxy system can be cut off. Without centralized funds to distribute to their armed appendages, the cartel’s leverage collapses.

To turn this resistance into a permanent national framework, a strategic alliance between parallel localized networks and emergent non-factional political parties must champion four non-negotiable pillars:

• Convene a Constituent Assembly: A transparent bottom-up process to draft an indigenous social contract that guarantees equitable decentralized wealth distribution.
• Establish a Unified National Democratic Agenda: Political organizing driven by programmatic parties focused on national cohesion explicitly rejecting zero-sum elitist power-sharing deals.
• Enforce the Exit of All Foreign Forces: Unifying civic and political pressure to demand the immediate unconditional expulsion of all foreign troops and mercenary structures.
• Institutionalize Direct Referendums: Returning veto power to the Libyan street by forcing direct public votes on critical macroeconomic and constitutional decisions.

Reclaiming the Future

While some critics dismiss the use of constitutional tools such as representative assemblies and referendums as an uncritical adoption of Western Westphalian state models, this view is misguided. Rather than an ideological surrender, employing these mechanisms is a form of strategic capture allowing for the reclamation and redirection of the state’s machinery toward genuine sovereign objectives. 

By anchoring these tools within local social realities and community consent, the formal legal structure is stripped of its top-down imperialist baggage and repurposed as a defensive shield to protect Libyan sovereignty from external predation. Sovereignty is not an international grant distributed by foreign capitals or UN envoys but a right to be reclaimed. The most urgent task facing the country’s civic forces is to completely strip foreign “guardians” and domestic kleptocrats of their analytical legitimacy. By casting off the myth of the failed state, Libyans can starve the cartel of its financial oxygen, dissolve the architecture of tutelage and finally become the sole architects of their own destiny.

On March 1, 2026, the European Union issued a carefully worded statement on the U.S.–Israeli strikes against Iran condemning Tehran’s indiscriminate military strikes, expressing solidarity with affected regional partners, and calling for “maximum restraint”. 

The statement was comprehensive in its list of grievances with the Iranian regime—nuclear ambitions, ballistic missiles, proxy networks, human rights abuses—and yet conspicuously silent on the most controversial dimension of the crisis: the question of whether the military operation itself, conducted without UN authorization and aimed at regime change, was compatible with the international law the EU claims to champion. The omission was not accidental. It was a diplomatic contortion born of deep internal division, one that captured, in a single document, everything that has gone wrong in recent years with Europe’s posture in the Middle East.

Anyone who has spent time in Brussels during a foreign policy crisis will recognize the pattern beginning with the emergency video call of foreign ministers, the agonized drafting session that strips every sentence of anything resembling a position, and, finally, the communiqué that arrives too late to matter and says too little to be noticed. The Iran crisis followed this script almost to the letter. But to treat this as just another episode of EU indecision would be to miss something more important. 

The fractured, hesitant European response to the events of 2025-2026 is not an isolated failure of diplomacy but the most vivid symptom of a structural incapacity to act as a coherent geopolitical actor in the Middle East and North Africa. It is an incapacity rooted in institutional design, competing national interests, and an unresolved tension between values and dependence on Washington. The consequences not only extend far beyond the Iran dossier but also erode Europe’s credibility across the entire MENA region, from Gaza to Libya to the Gulf, and leave the EU increasingly marginal at precisely the moment when its engagement is most urgently needed.

From Architect to Bystander: The Collapse of Europe’s Iran Policy

There are few foreign policy issues where the European Union once played a genuinely central and constructive role. Iran was one of the rare exceptions. The diplomatic initiative that ultimately produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 began in 2003 as a European project, led by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—the so-called E3—with the backing of the broader EU. Over twelve years, European diplomats overcame American resistance to engagement, built common ground with Russia and China, and secured a framework of verifiable nuclear inspections endorsed by the UN Security Council. When the deal was signed in Vienna, European leaders could legitimately claim they had given substance to the EU’s aspiration to be a credible security actor on the world stage.

That posture has now collapsed. The trajectory of its undoing is well documented in the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018; Europe tried to keep the agreement alive through mechanisms like the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), but these proved largely symbolic—INSTEX took over a year to become operational, and its first transaction, in March 2020, was a shipment of medical goods worth a fraction of pre-sanctions trade. Iran’s progressive escalation of enrichment activities and the E3’s eventual decision in August 2025 to trigger the “snapback” mechanism under UN Security Council Resolution 2231, led to the reimposition of all previously lifted UN sanctions on September 27, 2025 and effectively ended what remained of the deal. By early 2026, European diplomacy on Iran had already shifted from salvage operation to damage control.

The February 28, 2026 beginning of U.S.–Israeli strikes against Iran and the subsequent killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei accelerated this transformation. In a striking break with past caution, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly called for what she described as a “credible transition” in Iran reflecting the democratic aspirations of its people. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas described Khamenei’s death as opening a path to a different Iran. These were not the words of a bloc neutral on regime change; they were the vocabulary of a Europe that had, at least rhetorically, moved closer to endorsing it.

Yet, this new language masks deep internal fractures. As one Council on Foreign Relations analysis observed, the U.S.–Israeli operation was launched with little to no consultation with transatlantic allies, and European leaders’ responses revealed a continent that remains profoundly divided on questions of military intervention and the use of force. France adopted a legally critical stance as President Macron warned that military action conducted outside international law risked undermining global stability and called for emergency discussions at the United Nations. The United Kingdom pursued a carefully balanced transatlantic posture, combining criticism of the Iranian regime with calls for de-escalation—an approach that satisfied no one at home and invited Washington’s ire. Germany, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, leaned toward solidarity with the United States while carefully hedging.

The European Leadership Network captured the situation bluntly: While Iran has lost confidence in the EU as the lead implementer of the JCPOA, the new U.S. security strategy regards the EU as something closer to an adversary than an ally, and Israel will hardly turn to Brussels for strategic mediation. What was once Europe’s most significant exercise in “effective multilateralism” has become the stage on which its influence is steadily eroding.

Structural Roots: Why Europe Cannot Act

It is tempting to attribute Europe’s Iran paralysis to the particular circumstances of the moment—the shock of the strikes, the speed of events, or the difficulty of the Trump administration. But the pattern is far older and more deeply embedded than any single crisis. The EU’s inability to project coherent power in the Middle East is a structural condition, not a contingent failure.

The most obvious constraint is institutional. EU foreign policy operates under a unanimity requirement in the Council of the EU that gives every member state an effective veto on sensitive matters. This means that the gap between, say, Ireland’s willingness to champion international law and the Palestinian cause, and Hungary’s reflexive alignment with Israeli and American positions, does not produce a median position. It produces paralysis, or at best, lowest-common-denominator communiqués that list grievances without committing to action. The EU’s March 2026 statement on Iran was a textbook example as a document that catalogued every failing of the Iranian regime while carefully avoiding the central geopolitical question of the war itself.

But the unanimity problem is compounded by something harder to fix—the unresolved competition between national foreign policies and the collective European project. France, with its tradition of strategic independence and its self-image as a balancing power, pursues one logic. Germany, historically committed to deep integration into Western institutional frameworks, pursues another. The United Kingdom, no longer an EU member but still part of the E3 on Iran and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, complicates the picture further. The UK can shape the diplomatic framing while being immune to EU institutional constraints, which tends to pull the collective position in several directions at once. 

And then there are the smaller states—the Czechs, the Austrians, the Irish, the Spanish—each pulling the collective position in different directions for reasons that have as much to do with domestic politics as with any coherent reading of the Middle East. As the European Council on Foreign Relations has observed, there is a profound lack of unity in Europe’s response to challenges in the MENA region, which constantly serves to undermine its efficacy. The EU’s economic ties with the region are substantial, but these links remain devoid of any accompanying strategy that would transform them into political capital.

Underneath all of this sits the most fundamental constraint: transatlantic dependency and the Iran case illuminates this most starkly. Even when Europe took an independent position on the JCPOA after 2018, the stance was, as one analysis published in this journal argued, geared toward keeping the agreement alive while hoping for a change in the U.S. position, potentially under a new president. It was a stopgap measure, not an independent contribution to shaping the regional security environment. Europe’s Iran policy was, in essence, a bet on American elections—a dependency laid bare when the bet was lost, first when the Biden administration’s 2021–22 efforts to revive the deal stalled, and decisively when Trump returned to office in 2025. The Middle East Institute made the point sharply that from Tehran’s perspective, Europe’s credibility was destroyed when the United States unilaterally exited the JCPOA in 2018. The Europeans were left wielding only the stick of sanctions, while the carrots—namely sanction relief and security guarantees—remained entirely in Washington’s hands.

The Gaza Test: A Parallel Failure

The Iran crisis did not emerge in a vacuum. It arrived against the backdrop of another failure that had already severely damaged Europe’s standing in the Arab world: its response to the Gaza war that began in October 2023.

The dynamics were painfully familiar. A Clingendael Institute analysis published in the Cairo Review documented how votes on United Nations General Assembly resolutions on Gaza split the EU member states into three irreconcilable camps. The first, the hardline pro-Israel minority, led by Austria and the Czech Republic, voted against ceasefire resolutions. The second was composed of a moderate majority which gradually moved toward supporting humanitarian pauses. And, the third, a vocal group—Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Norway—pushed for Palestinian statehood recognition and sanctions on Israel. The EU leaders’ summit in December 2023 failed to agree on any joint statement at all. The European Parliament eventually passed a ceasefire resolution so hedged with conditions—including the dismantling of Hamas—that it effectively legitimized the continuation of the Israeli offensive.

The institutional incoherence was compounded by individual acts that contradicted the EU’s official posture. EU Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi, who oversaw relations with the EU’s neighbors, unilaterally announced the suspension of all EU development aid to the Palestinians after October 7—a solo move reversed only after pushback from the High Representative and several member states. Subsequently, with Commission President von der Leyen’s backing, Várhelyi pushed through the EU’s first-ever funding package for Israel and the Abraham Accords. The Commission, aware of the political sensitivity amid the carnage in Gaza, did not publicly announce the package.

The Clingendael analysis captured the deeper problem: the impulse among a significant segment of Europe’s political elite to align with Israel was driven by a sense of civilizational attachment and historical responsibility, as well as less openly pronounced resentments. Identity politics, the analysis concluded, had trumped both liberal, international-law-respecting foreign policy and interest-based realpolitik. This was not merely a moral failing but a strategic one. Europe’s selective application of international law—vigorous in the case of Ukraine, hesitant in the case of Gaza—did not go unnoticed in the Arab world. The double standard was not subtle; it was broadcast in real time across Arabic-language media for over a year. As the Italian Institute for International Political Studies observed, Europe’s reaction to President Trump’s Gaza plan contrasted sharply with its response to his plan for Ukraine: Europeans praised the former and avoided public criticism, while they mobilized against the latter and immediately produced a counter-plan.

The View from the Region: A Credibility Deficit

How does this diagnosis look from the other side of the Mediterranean?

The short answer is that things are worse than European policymakers seem to realize. The cumulative effect of these failures—on Iran, on Gaza, on Syria and Libya before them—has produced a credibility deficit that is not merely a problem of perception but also a material erosion of diplomatic leverage at a time when the regional order is being rewritten.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described Europe’s position on the Iran war in devastating terms when it said that Brussels had slipped into a starkly paralyzed role as mere commentator on the geopolitical upheaval on its southern flank. With its overly cautious attitude and deliberate avoidance of the most controversial dimensions of the conflict, Europe risks condemning itself to the status of a permanently sidelined player. This was all the more frustrating, the analysis noted, because the crisis actually offered a genuine opportunity for ambitious diplomatic action, with the United States in search of a strategy, Arab Gulf countries desperately in need of regional security, and Iran on the verge of a lasting domestic political crisis.

Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset framed the stakes in starker terms: the conflict unfolding in Iran, Israel, and across the Gulf is a test of whether Europe intends to shape the emerging order or merely observe its fragmentation. Inaction, he warned, is not prudence—it is abdication.

From the perspective of MENA capitals, Europe’s behavior confirms a long-standing suspicion that the EU is, in the end, a payer rather than a player. The phrase, which has haunted European foreign policy circles for years, captures something real. Europe provides substantial humanitarian aid, development funding, and reconstruction assistance. It issues statements and sends special envoys. But when the decisive moments arrive—when military force is used, borders are redrawn, and new political facts are established on the ground—Europe is absent from the room. The Center for Global Development noted at the start of 2026 that the EU finds itself exposed, stretched, and increasingly on its own, and that many member states are retreating from international development assistance altogether, redirecting resources toward Ukraine and defense spending.

Arab states have drawn their own conclusions. A Carnegie Endowment study documented how, since late 2023, Arab diplomacy has moved from transactional normalization politics toward an assertive, public Arab posture on Gaza and the Palestinian question—a posture that increasingly bypasses Europe. The March 2025 Arab League summit in Cairo adopted an Egyptian-sponsored reconstruction plan for Gaza that was explicitly presented as an Arab alternative to external proposals. The message was clear: if Europe cannot act, the region will act without it.

Strategic Autonomy: Rhetoric Without Substance

The gap between European rhetoric and actual policy outcomes could not be sharper, and nowhere is this more visible than in the EUs embrace of the language of strategic autonomy.

The language of “strategic autonomy” has been central to EU discourse since at least the 2016 Global Strategy, and it has intensified dramatically in the wake of Trump’s return to power. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, Chancellor Merz positioned Europe as capable of defending itself, noting that the post–World War II rules-based order no longer exists in its original form. President Macron underscored European strategic autonomy, warning of economic and geopolitical risks stemming from U.S. policies. Josep Borrell, before leaving his post as High Representative, had urged Europeans to “relearn the language of power”.

Yet, the gap between this rhetoric and actual policy outcomes in the Middle East remains enormous. The MEIG Programme at the University of Geneva captured the paradox: Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy is first and foremost a matter of political independence and credibility, and strengthening European decision-making capacity would allow the EU to present coherent crisis responses that are seen as credible and consistent rather than contingent on shifts in another capital’s politics. But that is precisely what has not happened. When the Iran strikes occurred, European capitals did not produce a joint contingency plan, a unified diplomatic initiative, or even a consistent public message. They produced three or four competing national positions and a collective statement that avoided the central question.

This pattern repeats across every major MENA dossier. On Libya, EU member states backed opposing sides of the civil conflict, with France and Italy supporting different factions. On Syria, the EU confined itself to humanitarian provision while Russia and Turkey shaped the military and political outcome. On Gulf security, European states continue to compete for arms contracts and investment deals on a bilateral basis, undermining any collective posture. The European Policy Centre observed at the start of 2026 that the fundamental question facing Europe is whether its internal divisions are becoming lasting features of EU politics; not a bug to be fixed, but a defining structural characteristic.

Toward a Credible European Role

The diagnosis is severe, but it need not be terminal. Europe possesses assets that no other external actor can match in the MENA region: geographic proximity, deep economic ties, institutional relationships built over decades, and—when it chooses to exercise it—a normative authority rooted in international law that remains meaningful to many actors in the region, even those who have grown cynical about its application.

Restoring credibility, however, requires more than platitudes and passionate statements. It requires structural reform, and here one is conscious of repeating prescriptions that have been offered many times before—which is itself part of the problem. The fact that these arguments are familiar does not make them wrong; it makes the failure to act on them more damning.

The most urgent reform is institutional. The EU must accept that unanimity in foreign policy is a formula for irrelevance. The debates around qualified majority voting in the Common Foreign and Security Policy (the EU’s framework for coordinating member states’ foreign and security positions) have been underway for years; the Iran crisis should give them new urgency. A mechanism that allows a coalition of willing member states to act under the EU banner—without being vetoed by states with no material stake in the outcome—would be a transformative step. This does not require treaty change; the existing “constructive abstention” provisions in the Lisbon Treaty (2009) offer a legal basis that has been dramatically underused.

Europe must also decouple its MENA policy from the rhythms of American domestic politics. The Iran experience demonstrated that a European foreign policy premised on waiting for the right American president is not a foreign policy at all. This means building genuine economic instruments—not symbolic ones like INSTEX—that can deliver on commitments to partners independently of Washington’s posture. It means developing autonomous intelligence and diplomatic capabilities in the region rather than relying on American assessments. And it means, critically, applying international law consistently—not selectively invoking it for Ukraine while falling silent on Gaza.

Perhaps hardest of all, the EU must reimagine its relationship with MENA partners as one based on mutual interest rather than conditionality and paternalism. The ECFR’s mapping of European leverage in the MENA region found that many Arab officials and elites believe Europe uses two distinct lenses to determine their regional policies—migration and counter-terrorism. 

A Europe that reduces its southern neighborhood to a source of threats rather than a space of shared strategic interest will continue to lose ground to China, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf states, all of whom engage the region on its own terms.

The Cost of Incoherence

The Iran crisis of 2025–2026 has laid bare a truth that European policymakers have spent years trying to obscure: the EU is not yet a geopolitical actor in the Middle East. It is a collection of national foreign policies loosely coordinated through institutions that lack the authority, the speed, or the mandate to act decisively in high-intensity crises. The gap between Europe’s self-image as a normative power committed to international law and multilateralism, and its actual behavior-divided, reactive, dependent on Washington, and selectively principled-is now fully visible to every capital in the MENA region.

The cost of this incoherence is not abstract. It is measured in lost diplomatic influence, in partnerships that drift toward other powers, and in regional actors who no longer factor European preferences into their calculations. It is measured in the growing perception, from Cairo to Riyadh to Tehran, that Europe talks about rules but follows power—and that when power shifts, Europe shifts with it, belatedly and uncertainly. There is a particular sting in this for a continent that built its post-Cold War identity on the proposition that it had transcended power politics.

However, Europe is not doomed to irrelevance in the Middle East. Its assets are real, and the demand for a credible, law-based alternative to American unilateralism and Chinese transactionalism is genuine. But meeting that demand requires a willingness to act—not merely to comment—in a way that the EU has so far been unable to summon. The question for European leaders is no longer whether strategic autonomy is desirable but whether they are prepared to pay the political costs of achieving it. On the evidence of the Iran crisis, the answer remains uncertain.

The U.S. Department of War’s confrontation with AI company Anthropic in early 2026 over military use of AI pushed into public view a question that had mostly circulated in AI safety circles, classified policy discussions, and speculative scenario work: what circumstances would drive a government to decide that a frontier AI lab is too important to remain under private control? 

Such a decision may often be described as a matter of “nationalization”, but that term can obscure as much as it clarifies. The more precise question revolves around issues of custody, release authority, access controls, and ultimate decision rights over frontier systems that could matter for cyber operations, biological risk, intelligence, military planning, economic management, and strategic competition. Formal seizure of a company is only the outer edge of a broader continuum. Long before reaching that point, governments can impose a variety of controls, ranging from compute licensing to priority access rules.     

The Anthropic episode shows how quickly the alignment question—the challenge of ensuring AI systems behave in accordance with intended human goals and safety constraints—becomes a question of sovereignty. Anthropic had already integrated Claude into government and classified environments while presenting itself as a company that would support lawful national-security uses subject to two red lines—mass domestic surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. When the Pentagon reportedly pushed back, the conflict was not really about whether AI should be useful to the state. It was about who gets to define the boundaries between lawful and safe use, and strategically necessary use. 

That is exactly the kind of dispute that makes nationalization plausible. A private lab can claim that its model should remain aligned to the developer’s values; a military customer can argue that lawful national-security use should not be constrained by a vendor’s categorical veto. Once the model becomes strategically indispensable, the state’s answer is likely to harden.

In addition, Anthropic’s early June essay on how AI models are getting closer to being able to improve themselves without human intervention—so-called recursive self-improvement (RSI)—added to the complex mix around this discussion. Early June also saw reports suggesting— not surprisingly—that Anthropic’s most capable model, Mythos, was being used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to assist in identifying vulnerabilities in Chinese networks, presumably for future offensive cyber operations. 

Mythos and the Threshold Problem

Anthropic’s public handling of Mythos makes the problem more concrete. The company claims that Mythos does better than humans on some tasks related to cybersecurity and generating offensive cyber operations approaches, but such a model could be dangerous in the wrong hands (meaning non-state actors). Anthropic officials have not released the model to the general public, instead only giving it to a select group of tech companies and organizations responsible for critical software. The company has also offered to work with the U.S. government to “help defend against the risk of these models”.  The NSA report suggests this process is well underway—the NSA has both an offensive and defensive mission to protect U.S. government networks.

Once a leading frontier lab says that a general-purpose model can materially improve vulnerability discovery at scale (and therefore should be withheld from general release and provided only to selected partners responsible for critical software infrastructure), it has already conceded the central premise behind state control—some model capabilities are too consequential to be treated as ordinary product launches. 

Mythos does not prove that complete nationalization is imminent. It does, however, create a precedent for a release regime in which access, custody, monitoring, safeguards, and coordination with government become central design features rather than afterthoughts. The same logic applies to OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, where high-capability cyber, bio/chem, and AI self-improvement thresholds trigger stronger controls. Once frontier models are classified internally as high-risk capabilities whose deployment depends on mitigation, monitoring, trusted access, and enforcement, the distance between corporate governance and state governance narrows sharply.

This is where my critique of Anthropic’s broader AI-leadership argument comes in. Anthropic is right that frontier systems may create catastrophic misuse risks and that democratic governments need a serious strategy for securing model weights, compute, and dangerous capabilities. But its public framing too often collapses two different claims into one: that advanced AI requires strong safety governance, and that the United States and its leading labs should a preserve decisive advantage over China. 

That fusion is analytically unstable, in my view. As the claim that frontier AI could enable catastrophic cyber, biological, or military effects becomes stronger, so too does the case for U.S. controls on China, and, as a result, for China to conclude that U.S. labs are effectively part of a national-security project. In that world, safety rhetoric can become indistinguishable from the U.S. denying Chinese access to key components as a matter of strategy. The result is not necessarily more global safety; it may be more mutual insecurity, more hedging, and more pressure on both governments to pull frontier labs closer to the state.

That is why the recent statement from OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, Chris Lehane, is important. Lehane suggested that the United States could use its AI lead to build a global governance mechanism for safer and more resilient systems, potentially including China. He also invoked a model for international coordination similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which aims to avoid nuclear proliferation between rival states by offering independent nuclear supervision. This is not a minor rhetorical shift. It implicitly recognizes that if the United States treats frontier AI only as a competitive asset to be denied to China, then Beijing will read every U.S. lab-government tie as evidence of containment and every safety standard as a potential instrument of exclusion. 

A U.S.-led framework that includes China would not solve the nationalization problem, but it would create an alternative channel for discussing release thresholds, cyber and bio red lines, model evaluation, and crisis communication before national-security establishments on both sides conclude that unilateral state control is the only safe path. The idea of a U.S.-China dialogue on frontier AI model governance was on the table at the mid-May presidential summit in Beijing, primarily because of Mythos. But there will be major political obstacles to real dialogue work, and a multi-lateral approach will surely be required.

How Close is the United States?

While it has not yet pursued total nationalization, the United States is already moving along the soft-nationalization path. The 2023 Biden AI executive order used Defense Production Act (DPA) authority (established in 1950) to require developers of powerful foundation models to share information,  including safety-test results and information about large compute clusters, with the government. The Bureau of Industry and Security then moved toward implementing reporting rules that would give the state greater visibility into advanced model development and compute infrastructure. That did not amount to seizure, but it normalized a crucial principle: frontier models and large compute clusters are not merely private assets; they are national-security-relevant capabilities subject to exceptional state visibility.

The Trump administration has pushed the issue from oversight toward operational control. The Anthropic-Pentagon conflict, OpenAI’s expanding government work, and broader efforts to ensure the Department of Defense and the intelligence community have access to frontier models all point in the same direction. The U.S. government wants best-in-class models available inside secure environments, under conditions it can shape. 

Strategic Measures?

If a leading lab refuses certain uses, if contractual arrangements with cloud providers block access, or if employees revolt against defense work, policymakers will not necessarily wait for the market to resolve the problem. They will look for statutory tools, procurement leverage, export-control authorities, security classifications, and possibly DPA-style priority measures. Discussion in a recent draft bill by Senator Marsha Blackburn makes reference to “potential nationalization or other strategic measures” around artificial superintelligence is therefore best read not as an immediate policy plan but as an early marker of contingency planning.

The most plausible U.S. trajectory is not a sudden takeover of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, or xAI. The most likely path is a staged escalation. The first stage is visibility: mandatory reporting, model evaluations, compute-cluster disclosure, incident reporting, and security requirements. This is already happening to some degree via cooperation with the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI).  (Note: A Commerce Department page touting the additions of xAI, Google, and Microsoft joining OpenAI and Anthropic on voluntary evaluation was pulled down shortly after being released, highlighting the sensitivity of the issue and major ongoing debates about how to handle the situation caused by the Mythos Moment, without any clear legal framework in place.) 

In late May, the government pulled back a new Executive Order (EO), which was intended to begin the designing of a legal framework for the government’s role in the release of frontier models. The subsequent release of a slightly modified version of the EO highlights the internal debate within the administration on the relationship between the government and leading labs.

The post-EO debate is best framed as state access without formal state control. The order rejects a licensing or preclearance regime for frontier models, but creates a 30-day voluntary pathway for covered frontier labs to give the federal government pre-release access under classified benchmarking and confidentiality protections. That puts the U.S. government closer to frontier labs as an evaluator, early user, cybersecurity coordinator, and national-security partner—but not as owner or operator. 

Another controversy has recently arisen: the temporary government-directed restriction on access to Anthropic’s Fable 5, which is a public-access version of the Mythos 5 model. Anthropic’s statement indicated that the U.S. government “believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or ‘jailbreaking’ Fable 5”, although the government did not provide evidence or specifics. It is also possible that there was classified information suggesting Chinese actors gained some level of access to Mythos capabilities, but this seems unlikely to have been a primary driver. Public reporting suggests that Amazon Web Services (AWS) alerted U.S. officials to a potential jailbreak or misuse pathway involving the model, while Anthropic has maintained that the issue was limited and did not justify broad restrictions on deployment. Although the full details remain classified or disputed, the episode strongly suggests involvement by multiple agencies, likely including elements of the intelligence community such as the National Security Agency (NSA), alongside Commerce and national security officials. 

More important than the technical merits of the reported vulnerability is the institutional question it exposed: who, exactly, has the authority to determine whether a frontier model should be released, delayed, restricted, or modified? The answer remains unclear. 

In practice, a combination of cloud providers, frontier labs, intelligence agencies, and White House officials appears to have improvised a decision process in real time—that ambiguity is unlikely to survive future incidents. Rather than reducing government involvement, the Fable 5 controversy will likely strengthen arguments for a more formal review process, clearer authorities, mandatory reporting requirements, and expanded government oversight of frontier model development.

Another lesson from the Fable 5 episode is that cloud providers may emerge as quasi-regulators of frontier AI. Public reporting indicates that AWS played a key role in elevating concerns about Fable 5 to senior administration officials. If frontier AI increasingly depends on a handful of hyperscale cloud providers for training, deployment, and security monitoring, then effective control over model release may ultimately involve a triangular relationship among labs, cloud providers, and governments rather than a simple state-versus-company dynamic.

The unresolved tension is whether this “voluntary partnership” model is durable. The latest reporting suggests the system may already be evolving beyond voluntary cooperation. Multiple AI executives reportedly now believe that frontier labs are expected to provide government officials with early access to advanced models and maintain continuous consultation around major launches. Whether formally required or not, this begins to resemble an informal pre-release review process. Anthropic-style safety advocates will see it as too weak without mandatory testing, while anti-regulation voices will still worry it normalizes government gatekeeping. In light of Trump’s separate interest in potential public equity stakes in leading labs—articulated in early June—the broader direction is toward treating frontier labs less like ordinary private firms and more like strategic national infrastructure, but without yet crossing into nationalization.

The second step in this staged escalation is conditional permission: access to frontier training runs, gating of certain deployments, trusted-user regimes, identity-linked monitoring, restrictions on model weight release, and government say over high-risk cyber or bio capabilities. 

The third stage is operational integration: classified development streams, defense and intelligence procurement dependence, government-directed capacity allocation, priority access to AI hardware and power, and secure facilities for selected models. Only after those stages fail to meet the government’s expectations, or after a crisis, does hard nationalization become a serious option. 

First Real Test

The June executive order appears to bring us further along this staged road. The Fable 5 dispute may ultimately be remembered as the first real test of this emerging system. Unlike earlier debates over model evaluations or voluntary reporting, this case appears to have involved an attempt to influence or delay deployment of a frontier model already judged by its developer to be ready for release. Whether the government’s concerns were justified is almost secondary. What matters is that the episode exposed the absence of a settled mechanism for adjudicating disagreements between frontier labs, cloud providers, intelligence agencies, and policymakers. Once that gap becomes visible, pressure typically builds for new authorities rather than fewer authorities.

Four triggers could move Washington closer to that third stage or beyond. The first is a model that crosses a widely recognized threshold in cyber, bio, autonomous research and development, or strategic planning. This could include a model capable of discovering previously unknown software vulnerabilities, substantially lowering barriers to biological engineering, or autonomously pursuing long-horizon research objectives—especially if the lab itself admits that general release is unsafe. With Mythos, we have seen an early version of this trigger. More importantly, the subsequent Fable 5 dispute suggests that once a model is viewed as crossing a government-defined capability threshold, the debate rapidly shifts from technical evaluation to questions of release authority, trusted access, and sovereign oversight.

The second is loss of visibility: a major training run, capability jump, or deployment that government regulators learn about too late or cannot evaluate independently. 

The third is military dependence: if frontier models become central to cyber operations, targeting support, autonomous systems, logistics, or strategic warning, the state will demand assured access and override rights. 

The fourth is geopolitical shock: a Chinese breakthrough, a major offshore compute loophole, or evidence that a rival has paired frontier models with military or intelligence systems in a way that appears to threaten U.S. advantage.

There is also a political-economy reason the U.S. pathway is likely to remain indirect for as long as possible. The leading labs are not just model developers; they are embedded in cloud contracts, GPU/CPU procurement, energy deals, enterprise distribution, research labor markets, and consumer platforms. A direct takeover would raise compensation, governance, liability, IP, antitrust, and constitutional questions that would be difficult to resolve quickly. 

But those obstacles do not prevent the state from creating a special frontier-lab regime that looks increasingly like the defense-industrial base: private ownership, public dependence, classified interfaces, security clearances, mandatory reporting, and government priority in crisis. That model fits the American system better than outright ownership, and for that reason, it is the more likely outcome, unless a truly discontinuous capability shock changes the political calculus. Here, we will need to watch closely how President Trump’s apparent proposal for government equity ownership in leading AI labs plays out. The administration has already taken a stake in U.S. national champion semiconductor manufacturing leader Intel, setting an interesting precedent.

On balance, the United States is not close to formal nationalization today but rather something more important—a durable governance regime in which the leading labs remain privately owned but increasingly operate like regulated strategic infrastructure. The late-2020s window matters because several pressures are converging at once. AI safety thresholds are becoming operational rather than hypothetical; the defense and intelligence communities want frontier access; the labs need government support for chips, power, permitting, procurement, and international market access; and U.S.-China competition gives every capability advance a national-security interpretation. Hard nationalization remains a crisis option. Soft nationalization is already underway. The Fable 5 controversy demonstrates that the key battleground is no longer ownership but authority. Now, the central question has become who decides when a frontier model is safe enough for broad release: the company that built it, the cloud provider that hosts it, or the government that believes it bears ultimate responsibility for national security consequences.

The Mythos/Fable controversy suggests that soft nationalization may advance less through legislation and more through ad hoc crisis response. Each dispute over cyber capabilities, biosecurity risks, model autonomy via RSI, or strategic competition creates incentives for government agencies to seek greater visibility and greater leverage over release decisions. Yet every expansion of that leverage carries a tradeoff. It increases the attractiveness of open-source ecosystems—particularly Chinese ones—that are perceived as less vulnerable to discretionary intervention by Washington. The challenge for U.S. policymakers is therefore not merely to create stronger oversight, but to do so in a way that preserves confidence in the openness, predictability, and global accessibility of the American AI ecosystem.

The China Mirror Image: Steering Before Seizure

The common assumption in Washington that Beijing could simply nationalize its leading AI labs overnight is both partly true and mostly misleading. China has far more coercive leverage over its private sector than the United States. It can use party-state channels, cybersecurity reviews, data rules, model filing and registration requirements, procurement, state-owned enterprise (SOE) partnerships, compute allocation, administrative guidance, and national planning mechanisms to shape corporate behavior. But precisely because Beijing already has this dense toolkit, it has less need to jump directly to formal seizure. In China, the better concept is not nationalization, but state steering.

Several official concepts define the likely Chinese path. “Two unwavering principles”, for example, refers to the Party-state priorities of supporting both the public economy and the private economy, with the 2025 Private Economy Promotion Law reaffirming that private firms remain an important component of China’s socialist market economy. “Coordinating development and security” captures the planning logic: innovation and control are not separate domains but must be fused. “AI Plus” points toward broad deployment of AI across industry, services, governance, science, and embodied systems rather than confinement inside a single state weapons complex. “Self-reliant and controllable” does not simply mean state ownership; it means reducing foreign dependency while ensuring that decisive systems remain governable, interoperable, and nationally legible. “Safe, reliable, controllable,” especially in military AI, places final authority with the state, but does not require that every leading lab become an SOE.

This distinction matters because China’s frontier AI ecosystem is not an old-style strategic weapons complex but an industrial policy-led ecosystem designed to leverage AI for economic growth. It depends on private and quasi-private firms, young technical talent, globally benchmarked research communities, entrepreneurial incentives, cloud platforms, open-source ecosystems, and intense competition across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and returnee networks. A blunt takeover of a leading lab could damage the very incentive structure Beijing needs to sustain. Chinese policy documents themselves reveal this anxiety. They emphasize talent attraction, compensation reform, mobility between firms and research institutes, compute access, and support for private firms. Those are not decorative policy slogans. They are signals that Beijing understands that frontier AI cannot be managed only through command mobilization.

The Chinese system, therefore, faces a paradox of control. It can compel cooperation more easily than Washington, but compulsion is not the same as frontier performance. The most important Chinese labs need access to elite engineers, open research networks, flexible product cycles, commercial customers, and enough autonomy to experiment with model architectures, agentic deployments, and overseas-facing developer ecosystems. A nationalized lab that loses its best researchers, slows iteration, or becomes primarily responsive to bureaucratic reporting lines could fall behind even if it enjoys privileged access to state compute. Beijing’s problem is not whether it has authority but rather how to exercise authority without killing the very private-sector energy that made the leading model developers useful in the first place.

China’s current approach is therefore more likely to build a strategic exoskeleton around the AI ecosystem than to absorb it wholesale. SASAC’s push for central SOEs to expand compute investment, support AI Plus industrial communities, strengthen open-source collaboration, and coordinate embodied-intelligence ecosystems shows the pattern. The state can build large compute platforms, direct procurement, create consortia, set standards, require evaluations, and pull firms into national projects without eliminating their formal autonomy. The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan’s language on government procurement of compute services, compute leasing, model evaluation, national monitoring and dispatch, and full-lifecycle AI risk management points in the same direction. Control emerges through infrastructure, procurement, interoperability, and standards as much as through ownership.

The Chinese military dimension is also more complex than the civil-military-fusion shorthand suggests. Chinese official language on military AI is unmistakably state-centered and emphasizes human-centered, safe, reliable, and controllable systems. Chinese scholarship on military AI also recognizes a risk ladder: near-term risks from autonomous weapons and lower thresholds for conflict, medium-term risks to strategic stability, and longer-term risks from superintelligence. But the institutional solution is not the moral veto of a private lab. It is stronger state governance, international rule-making, and control over military applications. In practice, Beijing would likely expect private labs to cooperate with state-defined priorities while preserving enough commercial incentive and technical autonomy to keep innovation moving. Unlike U.S. companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, there is no evidence that Chinese AI labs have been deeply involved in the Chinese military-industrial complex. This is notable, given that the Pentagon and the intelligence community are using models from U.S. AI labs, and Anthropic has embedded software engineers within the NSA to assist with cyber operations against China. 

When Would Beijing Nationalize?

Beijing would consider harder measures under several conditions. The first would be a single lab or model becoming strategically indispensable while resisting state guidance, especially on military, security, or social-governance applications. The second would be a major safety or political incident, such as a model enabling serious cyber misuse, biological assistance, large-scale social instability, or politically sensitive information flows beyond regulatory control. The third would be wartime or acute crisis conditions around Taiwan, U.S.-China military confrontation, or sanctions that threaten access to compute and model capability. The fourth, and perhaps most important, would be evidence that the United States or allied labs had crossed a dangerous capability threshold while China remained dependent on private firms whose incentives did not align with the state. The fifth would be loss of control over the compute layer; for example, if leading labs used offshore clusters, foreign cloud access, or foreign capital structures in ways Beijing viewed as strategically unacceptable.

Even then, the first move would probably not be formal expropriation. It would be tighter licensing, deeper party-state embedding, mandatory government access, controlled compute allocation, SOE or national-lab partnerships, restrictions on overseas model access, and direct administrative instructions. Beijing has many ways to make a private lab function like a national asset without changing the nameplate on the door. Formal nationalization would be reserved for a case in which those instruments failed, or a particular firm became both central and unmanageable.

This means China may be farther from formal nationalization than many U.S. analysts assume, but closer to functional state steering than the United States. On the other hand, recent U.S. actions, including the EO, suggest that things are changing more quickly than many previously thought possible or desirable in terms of state intervention. 

The Chinese state begins from a stronger supervisory baseline, while the United States is building one under pressure. China’s risk is not chaotic late intervention but gradual over-steering—the possibility that the state exoskeleton becomes so heavy that it undermines talent, entrepreneurial initiative, and frontier experimentation. The U.S. risk is the opposite and revolves around private labs retaining too much autonomy until a crisis forces rushed, legally improvised, and politically contested intervention. The EO process is designed in part to begin laying the groundwork for future government intervention in a crisis scenario.

The Strategic Stability Problem

The biggest danger is that each side reads the other’s soft-nationalization measures as evidence of hard militarization. Chinese analysts already interpret the Anthropic-Pentagon clash and the embedding of Anthropic engineers at NSA as proof that when frontier AI becomes a strategic core capability, Washington will not permit private values or safety commitments to override sovereign national-security claims. U.S. analysts, in turn, often interpret Chinese state steering as evidence that Beijing’s private AI labs are already nationalized in all but name. While both readings may be truthful assessments, they are nonetheless incomplete and miss the fact that each system is struggling with the same structural problems under different institutional conditions. Frontier AI is simultaneously a commercial platform, a scientific tool, a cyber and bio risk, a military enabler, and a symbol of national power.

Beijing is unlikely to view the Fable 5 episode as a primary safety dispute. Instead, the issue will likely reinforce an existing Chinese narrative that leading U.S. frontier labs are increasingly embedded within a national-security ecosystem involving cloud providers, intelligence agencies, defense customers, and executive-branch decision makers. Ironically, this perception may accelerate adoption of Chinese open-source alternatives among governments, enterprises, and developers outside the United States. If access to the most capable U.S. models can be modified, delayed, or conditioned through opaque national-security processes, then open-weight Chinese models begin to acquire an additional value proposition against the predictability of access and freedom from U.S. government intervention. The result could be a diffusion dynamic that runs counter to the strategic objectives of those advocating tighter control over frontier models.

That is why the Lehane proposal from OpenAI matters more than a typical corporate policy intervention. A U.S.-led global governance mechanism that includes China would not be a concession that the two systems are equivalent. It would rather be an admission, as I have previously argued, that certain AI risks cannot be managed only through export controls, procurement, or unilateral lab governance. The agenda should be narrow and concrete to include dangerous-capability evaluation, pre-release notification norms for high-risk cyber and bio systems, model weight security, incident reporting, crisis communication, and red lines around mass surveillance, autonomous weapons, and biological enablement. The United States can still compete fiercely, protect its lead, and restrict specific transfers. But if China is excluded from every serious governance forum, Beijing will have stronger incentives to assume that U.S. safety governance is simply containment by another name.

On the U.S. side, one reason the nationalization debate has become so unstable is that leading AI figures have increasingly reached for nuclear or civilizational-risk analogies to describe artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial superintelligence (ASI), even when the analogy does more political work than add analytical heft. If Beijing’s operating assumption is that the United States government and the frontier AI sector are already closely intertwined, then these analogies are not heard as private-sector metaphors but can be read as signals of U.S. state intent.

The Chinese perception that frontier AI is becoming an American strategic weapons project is reinforced when seen through recent moves such as a former NSA director joining the OpenAI board, the Biden administration invoking the Defense Production Act in the 2023 AI executive order, the movement of frontier models into classified and national-security environments, and public claims by leading lab CEOs that advanced AI belongs in the same risk category as nuclear weapons.

That is why Nvidia CEO and president Jensen Huang’s recent rejection of the nuclear analogy is important. Huang’s point was blunt—Nvidia makes GPUs used for video games, logistics, medical imaging, and countless civilian applications. He advocates GPUs to his family and customers, but “doesn’t advocate atomic bombs to anybody”. Starting from the premise that GPUs are like atomic bombs, he has argued, makes it impossible to “finish the thought”. In other words, the analogy is not just technically imprecise but can distort the entire policy frame by pushing what DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis calls the quintessential general-purpose technology, advancing compute into a weapons-control logic that accelerates securitization, export-control maximalism, and arms-race dynamics.

The problem is that the frontier-lab safety discourse often cuts in the opposite direction. Figures such as Geoffrey Hinton (the ‘Godfather of AI’), Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), and Hassabis (CEO of Google DeepMind Technologies) have invoked catastrophic-risk language to emphasize the need for governance, but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s framing goes further by fusing AI risk with geopolitical competition. 

In Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei argues that advanced AI should be developed and controlled so that democratic states maintain the upper hand over authoritarian rivals. And in “The Adolescence of Technology”, his bio-risk arguments suggest that frontier models could compress tacit expertise, lower barriers to pathogen design, and interface with increasingly automated wet-lab infrastructure. That strengthens the case for guardrails, but also supplies governments with a rationale for treating frontier AI as a controlled dual-use capability rather than an ordinary and quintessentially commercial technology. 

This is the core tension: the more U.S. lab leaders describe advanced AI as civilization-scale, weapons-adjacent, or strategically decisive, the more they make the case for exceptional state authority over release decisions, model access, compute, and eventually lab governance itself. Huang’s objection is therefore not just a corporate defense of Nvidia exports but a warning that the wrong analogy can become self-fulfilling, pushing Washington and Beijing toward exactly the national-security framing that makes some form of functional nationalization more likely.

Close to Steering, Not Yet Seizure

In the meantime, both countries remain closer to functional nationalization than to formal seizure. In the United States, the frontier labs remain privately owned, innovative, and politically powerful, but they are being pulled into a national-security architecture through reporting rules, government procurement, classified deployment, safety thresholds, and compute politics. In China, the leading labs remain commercially important and technically dynamic, but they operate inside a denser supervisory state that can steer compute, data, standards, procurement, and institutional partnerships. Driven by the risks around Mythos, Washington is moving from market-led innovation toward strategic oversight as expressed in the June EO. Beijing is moving from strategic oversight toward more selective and sophisticated ecosystem steering.

The conditions for hard nationalization are therefore still exceptional. These include a recognized ASI or near-ASI threshold, a catastrophic cyber or bio incident, a major military crisis, loss of state visibility, or a geopolitical shock that convinces leaders that private decision-making has become intolerably risky. We are not there yet on either side. But we are much closer than we were two years ago to a world in which frontier AI labs are treated as quasi-national assets. The real policy challenge is to build enough oversight, transparency, and international crisis-management capacity that neither Washington nor Beijing concludes that outright seizure is the only remaining path to safety and strategic control.

The upcoming U.S.-China AI dialogue will likely clarify the limits of cooperation more than produce real governance breakthroughs. The new Trump EO frames frontier AI primarily through cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection, and the tiresome insistence on “global AI dominance,” while creating a voluntary 30-day early-access/testing channel between U.S. frontier labs and the federal government. That makes any proposal to share something like a defensive Mythos capability with China politically radioactive. Even a carefully conditioned defensive carveout will be read through the lens of cyber espionage, military-civil fusion, and the “decisive strategic advantage” school associated with former Biden officials, RAND-linked thinking, and export-control maximalists. 

The dialogue still matters, but probably less as an arms-control venue than as a crisis-management mechanism. Can the two governments define red lines around AI-enabled cyber operations, biosecurity, autonomous military escalation, model theft, and third-party/non-state actor use? U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s reported leadership suggests the talks will be framed as engagement from a position of U.S. advantage, not concession. Meanwhile, rumored participation by Politburo Standing Committee member and Xi Jinping’s most trusted lieutenant and security czar, Cai Qi, if confirmed, would signal Xi-level political authority on the Chinese side rather than a narrow technical exchange. But that only helps if both sides bring real cyber, AI, intelligence, and lab-level expertise into the room. 

Otherwise, the talks risk becoming another high-level channel where each side repeats first principles: Washington says governance cannot become technology transfer; Beijing says safety cannot become containment. The best realistic outcome is therefore not “collaboration” in the old cooperative sense, but guardrailed competition such as narrow understandings on catastrophic-risk areas, incident communication, and non-state actor threats, while the core race for frontier capability continues largely untouched, with all the risks that implies.

Finally, the Anthropic blog post on RSI is a critical signpost for all of these issues, as it suggests that leading AI researchers are increasingly concerned that we are much closer to a “singularity”—the point where models are capable of improving themselves without human intervention—than previously believed. The implications of this are profound. It appears that leading U.S. AI labs are concerned that there is no framework for dealing with this eventuality, with the corollary that consideration of a pause in AI development should now be on the table. 

But China would have to be party to any such consideration, and the current climate in Washington, and the insistence in some quarters on “U.S. dominance” in the sector, completely misses this critical point. Time is of the essence, as we may be less than a year away from an RSI moment, but it will not be a binary moment like the Trinity detonation in the New Mexico desert, which launched the nuclear age. There is no clear definition of RSI takeoff, but keeping the process of evaluating models classified within the U.S. government, for example, does not seem wise here. Without an agreement with China that lays the groundwork for future clear guardrails around model development as we near an RSI moment, the risks around nationalization and misunderstanding on both sides will increase. We need serious progress on both sides, including new organizations, authorities, and modes of public-private partnership to corral this genie before it is too late.

The ongoing confrontation involving Iran, Israel, and the United States has demonstrated a familiar strategic reality in alliance politics: allies may share enemies without sharing the same outlook. The two remain closely connected through intelligence cooperation, military assistance, missile defense systems, and a broad commitment to limiting Iranian regional influence. Yet, beneath that durable partnership lies an important divergence in how each side interprets the Iranian challenge. 

Israel conceptualizes Iran as an immediate, geographically proximate, and multi-dimensional security challenge, manifested in missile deployments, proxy networks, cyber capabilities, and ideological hostility. Within this framework, any delay in tackling Iran is perceived as inherently risky, allowing adversarial capacities to deepen and become more difficult to reverse.

By contrast, the United States situates Iran within a broader and more complex global strategic environment. For Washington, Iran is a significant but not singular concern, competing for attention alongside great-power rivalry, alliance management, economic stability, and domestic political constraints. This wider lens encourages a more measured approach, in which policy responses are evaluated not only for their effectiveness against Iran but also for their potential costs across other theaters. 

Consequently, where Israel emphasizes urgency and pre-emption, the United States often privileges containment, deterrence, and calibrated engagement. It is important to understand the complexity of these differing approaches because they may complicate the duration of the present conflict. A permanent end to the war may remain difficult to achieve so long as the two allies continue to define the Iranian problem through different strategic lenses.

Operational Priorities and Regional Risk Calculations

These differing threat perceptions translate into distinct operational preferences and regional strategies. Israel tends to view Iranian advances, particularly through proxy actors such as Hezbollah, as cumulative dangers that must be interrupted before they become unmanageable. Its strategic doctrine favors pre-emptive action and the sustained degradation of hostile capabilities, especially in theaters adjacent to its borders. For Israel, confronting Iran is inseparable from neutralizing its regional network, with particular emphasis on proximate threats that can directly affect national security.

The United States, however, approaches these same dynamics through a broader regional and systemic perspective. Escalation involving Iran and its proxies is assessed in terms of potential spillover effects, including state fragility, humanitarian crises, and disruptions to global trade and energy flows. For instance, tensions in critical maritime corridors such as the Strait of Hormuz are viewed not merely as localized flashpoints but as risks to the global economic system. This orientation often leads Washington to balance support for Israeli security objectives with efforts to limit escalation and preserve regional stability. Thus, while Israel prioritizes the neutralization of immediate threats, the United States emphasizes crisis management and the prevention of wider systemic disruption.

This divergence is especially visible in relation to Iran’s regional network. For Israel, Iranian influence is measured through rockets, tunnels, drones, intelligence cells, and armed actors positioned close to Israeli territory. The most immediate example remains Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israeli security doctrine has long viewed Hezbollah’s arsenal as one of the gravest conventional threats facing the state. Any confrontation with Iran is therefore inseparable from Israel’s northern front. Degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities is often seen as central to weakening Tehran’s deterrent architecture.

In contrast, the United States considers Lebanon through the lens of broader regional dynamics. A large-scale Israel-Hezbollah war risks state collapse in Lebanon, humanitarian fallout, refugee movements, disruption in the eastern Mediterranean, and wider escalation involving multiple actors. Washington’s instinct has therefore often been to support Israel’s security needs while simultaneously pressing for restraint and crisis management. Israel’s strategic logic emphasizes neutralizing proximate danger, whereas America’s logic emphasizes preventing wider spillover. The recent back-and-forth on whether Lebanon was part of the temporary ceasefire is a case in point, with Israel insisting that Lebanon should be kept out of the ceasefire agreement.

The same pattern is evident in the Strait of Hormuz. For the United States, Hormuz is not merely a regional flashpoint. It is a central artery of global trade and energy flows. Any sustained disruption affects oil prices, inflation, insurance markets, maritime confidence, and allied economies from Europe to Asia. It also tests U.S. naval credibility as a guarantor of maritime access. For Washington, therefore, the management of Hormuz is tied directly to the wider global order.

Israel also monitors Hormuz closely, but from a narrower strategic point of view. It is concerned less with global shipping governance and more with how Iran might use Hormuz leverage to extract concessions, distract attention, or strengthen its bargaining position elsewhere. Israel’s principal concern remains whether Iranian coercive capacity is rising or falling. The American concern is whether the broader economic system can absorb another shock. Thus, Washington can prioritize de-escalation to preserve shipping stability, while Israel may support sharper coercive pressure if it weakens Iran’s regional posture. 

Structural Constraints and the Persistence of Strategic Divergence

The divergence between American and Israeli approaches is further shaped by structural factors, including geography, global commitments, and domestic political environments. Israel’s tolerance threshold is lower because its strategic depth is limited and its sense of vulnerability is acute. In Israeli thinking, even a near-nuclear Iran can transform regional psychology, embolden proxies, constrain Israeli operational freedom, and erode deterrence. The United States has historically been more willing to test diplomatic timelines, inspection mechanisms, sanctions bargains, and phased rollback arrangements. American power and geography provide greater room to manage ambiguity while Israel regards any ambiguity concerning Iran as dangerous. Washington globalizes the Iran war, while Israel regionalizes it. Moreover, Washington must continuously integrate Middle Eastern policy within a wider matrix that includes relations with other major powers such as China and Russia, as well as complex partnerships with states like Pakistan. 

Israeli perceptions of Pakistan have often been shaped by security concerns such as its nuclear status, domestic anti-Israel political currents, military links across the Muslim world, and the possibility of strategic alignment with anti-Israel actors. Meanwhile, the United States sees Pakistan through a more mixed framework. It can be frustrating or unreliable, yet still useful as a diplomatic intermediary, intelligence partner, logistical channel, or crisis messenger in moments when direct communication is constrained. Washington is more likely to consider Pakistan as a variable to be managed, whereas Israel is more likely to view it through a risk-based lens.

China presents a still larger divergence. For Washington, every Middle Eastern crisis now intersects with long-term competition with Beijing. A prolonged conflict that drains U.S. resources while China continues importing Gulf energy, expands economic influence, and avoids military burdens can appear strategically disadvantageous. American planners, therefore, ask whether another Middle East crisis distracts from the Indo-Pacific balance. Israel, by contrast, tends to treat China more selectively. Beijing matters in technology, infrastructure screening, diplomatic positioning, and its relationship with Tehran, but China is rarely perceived in Israel as more urgent than Iran’s immediate threat network.

Russia is also viewed through different criteria. The United States increasingly interprets Moscow’s ties with Tehran as part of a broader anti-Western alignment. Military cooperation, sanctions evasion, diplomatic shielding, and transactional coordination all reinforce that perspective. Israel’s approach has historically been more calibrated because of Russia’s presence in Syria, deconfliction requirements, diaspora linkages, and the practical need to manage military realities in Israel’s near theater. This does not imply trust, but it does create a different style of statecraft. 

Domestic politics reinforce these contrasting outlooks. Israeli governments operate under intense public expectations regarding immediate security. Rocket fire, border incidents, hostage crises, coalition fragility, and the memory of strategic surprise shorten political patience. American administrations operate under another political logic shaped by electoral cycles, congressional scrutiny, budget pressures, public aversion to new wars, and alliance consultation. Even when U.S. leaders support Israel strongly, they often seek to limit mission creep and prevent broader regional entrapment.

Enduring Partnership Amid Systemic Instability 

These differences do not undermine the alliance but rather define its operational reality. The U.S.-Israel relationship remains one of the strongest strategic partnerships in contemporary international politics. Intelligence integration, technological cooperation, missile defense coordination, and diplomatic alignment across administrations provide it with unusual depth. Yet strong alliances are not defined by the absence of disagreement. They are defined by the capacity to manage disagreement without strategic rupture. The U.S.–Israel partnership remains deeply institutionalized and resilient, yet it accommodates persistent disagreement over priorities, timing, and acceptable risk.

The challenge today is that the external environment has become more complex. The United States no longer operates in a unipolar moment where Middle Eastern crises could be handled without significant opportunity costs. China’s rise, Russia’s confrontation with the West, fiscal pressures, divided domestic politics, and contested global supply chains all reduce Washington’s appetite for unlimited regional commitments. Israel, however, cannot outsource geography. It still lives in a neighborhood where proximate threats can escalate rapidly and where deterrence failures carry immediate consequences.

As a result, both countries often speak the language of unity while practicing different strategic calculations. Israel seeks a weaker Iran and a degraded proxy network. The United States seeks a constrained Iran without a region-wide war that benefits rivals or destabilizes the global economy. These objectives overlap, but they are not identical. This divergence is likely to persist. Future crises involving Iran, Lebanon, maritime security, or missile escalation will again reveal the same pattern. Washington will combine sanctions, deterrence, naval presence, and diplomacy. Israel will continue pressing for sharper red lines, faster responses, and longer-term rollback of Iranian capabilities. Neither approach is inherently contradictory but reflects a distinct national condition. 

In brief, the United States adopts a globalized perspective on the Iranian challenge, seeking to constrain Tehran without triggering broader systemic instability, while Israel maintains a regionalized focus centered on immediate threat mitigation. This duality ensures continued cooperation, but also guarantees that future crises will reproduce familiar tensions, revealing an alliance characterized not by uniformity of strategy, but by the capacity to manage enduring divergence. They stand together politically and militarily yet are often seen pursuing two different strategic versions of the same war.

Abigail Flynn: Hello and welcome to CR Amplified, the Cairo Review’s podcast where we talk to experts and policymakers about relevant issues on the world stage. I’m Abigail Flynn. 

Today we’ll be speaking about the ramifications of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, particularly with regard to the members of the Axis of Resistance and the positions of the Gulf States whose security relationship with the United States has been brought under question, as these countries have been targeted during the current conflict by Iran. 

I am joined by Dr. Hamidreza Azizi, visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin and associate researcher at Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. 

Dr. Azizi holds a PhD in regional studies from the University of Tehran and his research focuses on security and geopolitical issues in the Middle East and Central Eurasia, Iran’s foreign and security policy, and Iran-Russia relations. Dr. Azizi has also recently published a book, The Axis of Resistance: Iran, Israel and the Struggle for the Middle East. He is joining us today to give his perspective on the current state of regional affairs. 

Dr. Azizi, thank you very much for joining us today. I wanted to get your opinion for our upcoming issue, which discusses the issue of power plays, particularly how smaller powers are handling the fact that these very large powers are coming head-to-head in many different ways, and most specifically recently with the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. So I wanted to get your perspective starting with the Axis of Resistance. What players are currently still on the board? Where do they stand? And what’s their position with regards to Iran at this point?

Dr. Hamidreza Azizi: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to join you for this conversation. Of course, the recent war, or in some way we can say the ongoing war, between the U.S., Israel on one side and Iran on the other, has been a kind of test for the Axis of Resistance. 

What had emerged as a very solid bloc gathered around the Islamic Republic in Iran since October 7, 2023, went through a lot of ups and downs. There was a moment that there seemed to be a sense of triumphalism, not just among the Iranian leaders but among other figures of the Axis like Hassan Nasrallah and others. But that was short-lived. 

Then came the blows to Hezbollah itself, the fall of Assad, and everything that eventually culminated in two wars: the 12-day war and the recent one. So one may ask, credibly, where the Axis of Resistance stands in this whole thing.

Let me start with a little bit of background from the 12-day war, where the Axis of Resistance was essentially absent. At the time, this was interpreted primarily as the Axis basically losing its capacity, especially in this case, and of course also Iran’s allied Shia armed groups in Iraq. None of which had any involvement in the war. 

That gave rise to the interpretation that this is actually the end of the Axis. We know that what had actually worked as the main deterrent for Iran vis-à-vis Israel was probably not its own missiles and drones, but the presence of Hezbollah, also armed with Iran-made missiles and drones. That was interpreted as basically the weakening of Hezbollah as a very important condition that enabled the Israeli war on Iran in June ’25.

I was among the ones who argued at the time that there were more nuances in this whole picture. To me, the main reason why the Axis was rather inactive in the war was that the threat to the Islamic Republic, to the Iranian system on one side and to the other members of the Axis on the other side, was not existential yet. 

We did see, of course, already last June, a round of decapitations against senior Iranian officials. We did see the targeting of Iran’s main nuclear facilities, but at the same time, it didn’t amount to a sense within the Islamic Republic that the system or the regime was on the verge of collapse. Same was the perception on the side of other members of the Axis—what is left of it, of course, which includes Hezbollah, the more pro-Iran camp within the Iraqi Shia militia landscape, and also the Houthis. That was the main reason. 

On the other side—and this is something that I hear argued by some Iran-based commentators close to the government—the whole network, especially in this case Hezbollah, was at the time in the process of revival and rethinking in terms of strategic orientation and structure.

So that still wasn’t the right time. But this time it was different in many respects. On the one side, it appears that the process of restructuring Hezbollah, especially in terms of its command and the way of war, has reached a decisive point. The Hezbollah that we are seeing right now engaging with Israel in southern Lebanon and northern Israel is much different than what it was two or three years ago under Nasrallah. 

Let’s say it has, in a way, gone back to its roots in early 1980s asymmetric warfare. Iran itself went through significant restructuring of its own command and control, decentralization of missile commands, etc., that we saw effectively enabling a very rapid and effective response to American and Israeli attacks. That was also a result of this whole period. 

Essentially, the sense of threat was visible all around, not just in terms of material elements, like the Iranian regime being on the verge of collapse—which in some cases the perception was that it was—as a result of a combination of internal and external pressures. And that was why it went to the extreme in targeting not just U.S. bases and Israeli targets, but also energy infrastructure in the region and all over.

So there was a sense of existential anxiety. On the side of allied groups, especially the Shia members in this case, the killing of Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, was also seen as a termination point of what I see as Shia anxiety. Someone who was not just a political leader of a country but also had many followers in the Shia world being targeted. These were the reasons why we are now seeing a restructured Axis primarily centered on its Shia actors. Iran itself, the Iraqi Shia militias, and Hezbollah are now active. The Houthis seem to be in reserve, somehow. But it seems that there’s a disconnection at this point between the Shia side of the Axis and the Palestinian groups like Hamas and others, who are now operating in a totally different environment in the post-October 7th reality.

A.F: I have a small follow-up for this question, as they are reviving with a focus on the Shia side of things. Do you think that these groups have the organizational capacity and the weaponry needed to be an effective fighting force within the Axis? Because we’ve seen over the past three years of war a real whittling down of these organizations. Do you think they have the ability to rebuild in this context?

H.A: Well, the main question here would be how we define effectiveness in the military sense of the word. 

I think one reason that the Axis ended up in that state of paralysis or semi-paralysis by the end of 2024—and I’m speaking of course of the erosion of Iran’s own deterrence by that time as a result of tit-for-tat attacks with Israel, the significant weakening of Hezbollah after the killing of its commanders and especially Nasrallah himself, and also the fall of Assad. 

One main reason for that was that the Axis had become too entrenched in the politics and economy of the host countries, which somehow limited the military effectiveness of these groups. 

Almost all of which had essentially emerged in their initial phases as very small guerrilla groups, operating in response to either occupation or foreign invasion, as in the case of the Iraqi armed groups or the Houthis.

That means that, for example, in the case of Lebanon—and again, this is something that I hear clearly from pro-Axis experts and commentators, not just in Iran but also in other countries, when they speak about what went wrong regarding deterrence being eroded and leading to the killing of commanders—they speak about Hezbollah having too many considerations in joining the fight in support of Hamas. They feared that the war would spill over into Lebanon and become destructive for the Lebanese society, which in the end happened. But caution somehow led step-by-step and in an incremental way towards the same scenario, while essentially depriving Hezbollah of the capacity to use what it had. 

So, in a very strange way, the fact that these members of the Axis now seem to have much less to lose has resulted in more military effectiveness. And of course, the innovative way of using technology—like what we are seeing in the case of Hezbollah using FPV drones—and continued Iranian support contributes to this. 

This restructuring means that they have now evolved into a network of smaller groups. Iran itself is of course excluded from the “smaller groups” definition, but in a sense they are more agile, more asymmetric warfare-oriented, and focused more on imposing costs on adversaries rather than necessarily shaping the dynamics of the countries where they are involved, because the constraints are real. So this is an adaptive process, I would say.

A.F: Okay. Now, shifting slightly from the Axis of Resistance, I wanted to hear more of your thoughts on where the Gulf States are standing. A lot of their relationship with the United States was based on a security guarantee, and now it seems that the United States has triggered a war that has resulted in a lot of destruction on the side of the Gulf States, calling into question: “Why did we cast our lot with the United States?” 

Do you think this will prompt a change in relationships? We’ve seen very recently the Financial Times report, which is unconfirmed from the Saudi government, about a potential Middle East non-aggression pact. 

What is your perspective on these types of movements with regard to where the Gulf States are going to be positioning themselves toward Iran?

H.A: Well, I think one of the other implications of the post-October 7th developments was that there’s no such thing anymore as a “Gulf position” or a GCC position. 

At the political level, or rather publicly, they still try to show unity and the contacts still continue, but the rift is real, especially between two heavyweights: Saudi Arabia on one side and the UAE on the other side. 

This is something that I have discussed in one of the chapters of my book, which is also titled The Axis of Resistance, that one of the underlying issues that was reflected in but also impacted by the October 7th developments and its aftermath was something that I call the “clash of orders”. There have been at least two diverging and competing views of regional order: one by Iran and the Axis of Resistance, and the other by Israel and supported by the U.S. The Gulf States, for quite some time, tried to position themselves somehow in between. 

But after that, and as a result of the weakening, at least materially, of the Iranian vision, Gulf States started to rethink and reposition themselves in this whole landscape.

On the one hand, we saw a growing partnership between the UAE and Israel. That was, of course, already the case with the Abraham Accords, but that went into some concrete steps that were rather difficult to imagine before, given the concerns that the UAE and Bahrain had regarding Iran—like the IMEC corridor and the UAE’s eagerness to be involved in it, and also security cooperation. 

But at the same time, Saudi Arabia started to distance itself from what would seem to be a more convergent landscape of Arabs and Israel. The normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel seems to be totally off the table at the moment, and there’s a growing threat perception—not just by the Saudis, but also shared by other heavyweights in the region like Egypt and Turkey, and supported by Qatar—that they are now seeing Israel as a threat to regional security and regional balance. This is the shifting landscape that we are seeing right now. That explains why, for example, already in this war and its aftermath, Saudi Arabia has been very supportive of the Pakistani initiative to push the U.S. and Iran toward a deal, but the UAE has a different view.

So this is important to understand. As a result of that, I think the October 7th aftermath and now the Iran war has widened the gap between these countries. Now, the region is being restructured in a way that, conceptually, is still dominated by the logic of the balance of power between different actors, but the poles in this regional balancing have shifted. We still have Iran in a reconfigured way, especially if it comes out of this war establishing some credible control over the strait, and the very fact that the regime was not destroyed or changed as a result of this war. So we still have the Iranian vision. We have a Saudi, Pakistani, and Turkish view on the other side. And then we have the Emirati-Israeli axis. These would be the main nodes, and smaller actors, either in the Gulf or in other parts of the region, will somehow try to position themselves as closer to one of these camps or try to balance between these different actors on different norms.

A.F: So going along with that, what is Iran’s primary goal at the moment? It seems that they have overcome the existential threat that the United States was originally wielding. We’ve come down from that; the regime is still intact. 

If Iran could come out of this with a peak, perfect regional alignment, what do you think that would look like? What are they trying to pursue?

H.A: Since the start of this war, Iran has pursued three interconnected goals. 

The primary goal was regime survival, and it still is. The reason why I’m saying it still is, is because of course the Islamic Republic managed to survive this war, let’s say, and the new leadership seems to be pretty much in control. But economic difficulties, like the gap between state and society, all these issues still remain. That’s one of the reasons why they are now still in this process of diplomatic negotiations with the United States; they need sanctions lifted. They need some economic dividends as a result of a diplomatic track in order to be able to effectively govern the country. So that has been the first objective.

The second objective is the reestablishment of deterrence in a sense that would guarantee that a war like this would not happen again. That’s one of the reasons that we are hearing the Iranian position emphasizing the need for guarantees and also control over the Strait of Hormuz as leverage. Or, on that matter, also the Iranian reluctance to ship their stockpile of highly enriched uranium outside as an upfront concession. 

So there’s a delicate positioning, a delicate balance here that Iran is trying to preserve. They need to maintain enough leverage to make sure that a war like this would not happen again. 

But it’s not only related to that; it also has to do with trying to impact the regional equation, especially around the Strait of Hormuz, by building on the gaps that I mentioned between different actors. For example, reaching out to the Saudis while increasing pressure on the UAE and Bahrain, and at the same time trying to coordinate with Oman some sort of a post-war arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz.

And here comes the third objective, which is a desire to change the regional equations—to redraw the lines of geopolitical competition and cooperation in the sense that Iran could reestablish and reaffirm the position that was being weakened in the period between early 2024 (especially from April 2024, let’s say, when the first direct Israeli attack on the Iranian position in Syria happened) up until this war. 

So these three objectives explain what Iran is doing at the moment, from reaching out to some Gulf countries and trying to counterbalance different pressures from the region, to its position in the talks with the United States regarding nuclear and other issues. This is the way that I would describe the landscape at the moment.

A.F: Understood. Well, that’s all the questions that I had for you today. I do want to open the floor in case there was anything that you wished to talk about that I didn’t cover so far.

H.A: Well, there’s a lot of issues we can talk about, but I think the core issue here is that the recent U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has already started to have implications beyond the immediate battlefield and beyond Iran. This all has to do, I think, with the miscalculation on the side of the United States, especially in starting a war that they don’t know how to end. 

But what’s important here is that even if the Islamic Republic and the United States manage to reach an agreement, and even if proposals—like the one that you mentioned reportedly raised by Saudi Arabia on establishing a regional framework like the Helsinki Accords did in Europe—even if all these go well and there’s a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Iran, and an agreement at the regional level, as long as the underlying hostility between Iran and Israel persists, I think it would still be too soon and too optimistic to speak about a stable regional setting. Both sides, Iran and Israel, see this battle as existential now, even more than before.

One could argue before this war that the sense of existential threat was more prominent on the Israeli side because they were constantly under the threat of Iran’s allies like Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. 

But now after two wars, it is even more the case on the Iranian side. So this enmity, this hostility, I think can manifest in different shapes and forms. For example, going back from the open to the shadows, to the gray zone. But this is not going to be solved anytime soon. 

It remains a central point of contention in the region, around which all those other dynamics that I mentioned are unfolding at the moment, and would be understood and developed.

A.F: I think you’re very correct. The ramifications of this war are certainly going to be long-lasting. 

But I want to say thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today and to give us your very thoughtful perspectives. We greatly appreciate it.

H.A: Thank you. It was a pleasure.

A.F: Thank you very much. 

Thank you again to Dr. Azizi for taking the time to speak with us today. And thanks to you, listener. We hope you enjoyed this episode of CR Amplified.