China’s State Council regulation on outbound investment took effect on July 1, 2026, giving Beijing its first comprehensive, cabinet-level legal framework governing how Chinese capital moves abroad. Premier Li Qiang signed the 34-article regulation, formally Decree No. 837, on June 1. It replaces a patchwork of ministerial rules that the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange had administered separately for two decades, each covering a different slice of the approval, filing, and remittance process.

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The new regulation closes loopholes that let Chinese firms move technology, data, and capital offshore through Cayman or Singapore (remember the Manus AI dispute?) holding structures, personnel transfers, and licensing arrangements that fell outside the old rules.

Beijing is also building state machinery to back its firms abroad that increasingly resembles what Washington has assembled over the past eighteen months. Both governments are moving toward becoming commercial protagonists by using licensing power, equity stakes, security review, and retaliatory authority to help their companies win deals, especially those at the intersection of commerce and national security (Infrastructure, AI, and critical minerals).

A coordinated state support system

In 2025, Chinese critical mineral giant Shenghe Resources lost a bid to U.S. company MP Materials for a venture with Saudi Arabia’s Ma’aden. Though Shenghe (which also previously held stakes in MP) is one of the world’s leading rare earths refiners and processors, President Trump’s decision to put U.S. sovereign backing behind MP Materials pushed the Saudi company to pick the U.S. champion. Shenghe lost the deal. For the U.S., it marked an example of an emerging framework of U.S. economic statecraft that is gradually leveraging U.S. state influence to push for economic outcomes in strategic industries.

China has also long utilized its government bodies and embassies abroad to advocate for Chinese industry in foreign markets—virtually every country does it. The difference now is that what was a more decentralized and ad-hoc process is now being centralized and institutionalized into policy.

The new regulation directs Chinese government bodies to support outbound firms with a more concerted, state-backed push across diplomacy, finance, taxation, customs, insurance, intellectual property protection, dispute resolution, logistics, and consular affairs to make Chinese companies more competitive. It replaces the old approval-and-filing model with a coordination framework that links government authorities, professional institutions, industry associations, and trade promotion organizations.

Investments now fall into three categories: encouraged, restricted, and prohibited. Those deemed to “affect or may affect national security” undergo a dedicated security review conducted jointly by the NDRC and MOFCOM. A separate provision requires Chinese entities facing foreign litigation or regulatory demands for evidence to first clear those disclosures against Chinese state secrets, data security, and export control law. This extends Beijing’s regulatory power into disputes that used to play out entirely on foreign soil.

The regulation also gives Beijing explicit retaliatory authority. It authorizes the government to investigate discriminatory treatment of Chinese investors abroad and to respond under the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, with countermeasures that may include restricting imports and exports, barring investment in China, blocking Chinese entities from dealing with targeted foreign parties, and limiting entry for people, goods, or transport. None of this mandates automatic retaliation, but it gives Beijing standing domestic legal authority to escalate as the state deems necessary.

The timing of the regulation is linked to two recent disputes that exposed a gap in Chinese regulation. Meta’s blocked acquisition of the Chinese-rooted AI startup Manus and the Nexperia dispute involving Chinese-owned chipmaker Wingtech Technology both showed that Chinese capital and technology were exposed to foreign control decisions that Beijing had no formal standing to contest. Article 13 of the new regulation closes that gap by capturing formal equity transfers alongside technology transfers through licensing, dispatched engineers, and cross-border technical training, even when no equity changes hands. Article 15 extends the security review to cover the sale of overseas assets, so an exit now draws the same scrutiny as an entry. Practitioners have taken to calling the offshore-restructuring workaround a “Singapore Wash,” and Beijing’s new rules are built to close it.

Washington’s parallel machinery

Washington has built a similar system over roughly the same period, using different instruments. Like Beijing, it wants to keep national capital and technology under state-aligned control while using the state’s weight to shape where that capital and technology go. The closest mirror to China’s new regulation is the Treasury Department’s outbound investment security program, which practitioners call a “reverse CFIUS.” Implementing Executive Order 14105, Treasury issued a final rule in October 2024 that took effect on January 2, 2025, prohibiting or requiring notification of U.S. investments into Chinese entities working in semiconductors, quantum information technologies, and artificial intelligence. Where CFIUS screens foreign capital coming in, the outbound program screens American capital going out, sorting transactions into prohibited and notifiable categories much as Beijing’s regulation sorts outbound deals into restricted and encouraged ones. Treasury can also nullify, void, or compel divestment of any prohibited transaction, an unwinding power that parallels the reach Article 15 now gives Chinese security reviewers over exits.

Washington has also gone further than screening. In August 2025 the Commerce Department converted $8.9 billion in CHIPS Act grants and Secure Enclave program funds into a roughly 10 percent equity stake in Intel, the only US company still capable of producing leading-edge logic chips domestically. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put it plainly: “We should get an equity stake for our money.” The deal came with a warrant to buy an additional 5 percent if Intel’s foundry ownership fell below 51 percent, a direct hedge against foreign control of the company and potential for undesirable foreign transfer. Two months earlier, the administration had converted a CFIUS review into an instrument of permanent control. As the price of approving Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel in June 2025, the government took a “golden share” granting it veto power over major corporate decisions, including cuts to Nippon’s $11 billion investment commitment, relocation of headquarters, transfers of jobs abroad, and plant closures.

American firms now anticipate this trend rather than resist it. On July 2, the Financial Times reported that Sam Altman proposed giving the U.S. government a 5 percent stake in OpenAI, as part of a broader arrangement under which Washington would hold 5 percent of each leading American AI developer through a “sovereign wealth fund-like” vehicle. The direction of pressure tells two different stories about the U.S. and Chinese systems. In Washington, the country’s leading AI firm invites the state as a shareholder. In Beijing, the state barred Manus AI’s leadership from leaving the country earlier this year. While that image is a bit simplistic, many observers may not seek the deeper nuance. In practice, American firms are buying political protection by offering equity. Chinese firms, meanwhile, trigger state retaliation and control by trying to exit.

Between an outbound screening regime aimed squarely at China, an equity position in a strategic chipmaker, and a standing veto extracted through security review, Washington has assembled a toolbox functionally similar to Beijing’s new regulation. Both sides once used these levers to approve or deny sensitive deals. Both now use them to extend their regulatory reach and shape deal outcomes at home and abroad in pursuit of their respective national interests.

The larger picture

This connects uniquely with the question of “What happened to BRI?” If the first decade of BRI was geared toward pushing Chinese capital out the door, this regulation now governs where it lands, who controls it once it gets there, and what state capacity is needed to ensure both. The same period has shifted Washington from a posture of restricting China’s access to frontier technology to one of actively directing where American technology and capital go and on what terms.

Neither government has fully articulated where this ladder ends. Beijing’s countermeasure authority is discretionary, and how aggressively it gets used will depend on the state of US-China relations rather than the text of the regulation itself. Washington’s golden share and its equity position in Intel and offtake deals with M.P. Materials remain first-term experiments rather than settled doctrine of an emerging “sovereignty wealth fund” mentality. A change in administration could unwind either.

A few weeks ago, I asked 9 AI models whether they believed their creators would act on behalf of humanity or in their own interests in the long-term development and deployment of AI. All of them said, to varying degrees, “there needs to be safeguards”.

The risk of overconcentration came into focus through my PhD research, but it warranted a fuller analysis, especially after Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire following SpaceX’s successful IPO. Is any human being prepared for the responsibility that comes with that level of influence? History is full of people whose power grew faster than their wisdom. Wealth, technology, and influence all compound. Character does not compound with them. Now imagine a single actor holding not only that much financial capital, but also an unchecked frontier AI capability alongside it.

Lord Acton, a former British Parliamentarian, stated in the late 19th century that:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

It seems the AI models I asked agree with Lord Acton’s general assessment.

Why does this matter?

A world in which a single actor controls the most advanced AI capabilities, with no competitors and no checks on that power, raises an urgent question about how that power would be used. And we are already entering an age defined by single individuals whose wealth and power grant them unprecedented reach.

What Overconcentration of Power Means in AI

Overconcentration describes a structural condition in which a single actor acquires control over frontier AI capabilities so decisive that no other actor can meaningfully constrain it, contest it, or develop independent alternatives. A world in which the United States leads China in AI capabilities reflects a normal geopolitical predicament. A world in which whoever controls frontier AI can determine the political and economic outcomes of every other actor, with no check on that power, is a novel scenario that several AI experts are sounding the alarm about.

[See Rose Hadshar’s “Extreme power concentration,” published by 80,000 Hours]

Political science is useful here because the accumulation of power is among the oldest problems of study within the discipline. Power, however gathered and defined, has always met a limit or maximum threshold. Understanding overconcentration in AI means understanding why those limits have held and why this technology may be the first to suspend them.

Two checks have historically constrained the total accumulation of power, one external and one internal. The external check is the friction of interstate competition. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism takes the pursuit of dominance as the default behavior of states, yet argues that global hegemony remains nearly unattainable for two reasons. First, a state’s bid for hegemony often pushes rival states to form coalitions to counterbalance the rising state. Second, it is difficult for a single state to project sufficient power across oceans and continents to directly control the entire globe. Thus, a state’s hegemonic ambition is constrained by other competitors and geography.

The internal check is the demand for political support sufficient to keep a ruler in power. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith’s selectorate theory holds that every ruler depends on a coalition whose support must be continuously secured, and that the smaller this coalition becomes, the more unchecked and self-serving the exercise of power grows. Decisive power has always required the cooperation of many hands, including soldiers, bureaucrats, administrators, judges, whose consent imposes a natural ceiling. A leader who loses that coalition loses the capacity to act. The need for others is, thus, itself a constraint.

Overconcentration in AI is dangerous because it threatens to undermine both checks on power simultaneously. An actor that reaches a breakout and wields a compounding frontier AI advantage can extend its lead across a range of critical sectors faster than any single or coalition of rivals can close it, potentially defeating Mearsheimer’s external check. In this scenario, the AI hegemon’s lead compounds, and the gap with its competitors widens with every cycle of innovation. The balancing coalition may develop too late to matter because the lead they need to offset is already beyond reach.

At the same time, AI’s capacity to substitute for human labor threatens to undermine the need for a leader to sustain a broad coalition to maintain power. Frontier AI and its application to critical functions could replace soldiers, officials, and elites who once served within a ruling coalition, reducing the number of people required to sustain a regime. The coalitional dependence that Bueno de Mesquita and Smith describe narrows, and the number of humans involved in the governance process is reduced to the essential few who control automated systems. This narrowing reinforces overconcentration because the smaller the coalition, the weaker the constraint it imposes on a leader’s power.

The actor wielding power could be a state, but increasingly it is a firm, or a government acting through one. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith’s selectorate logic applies to any organization, and the actors pursuing frontier capability today are labs and firms as much as governments. The concern is therefore not only that one state dominates others, but that within any actor, public or private, the number of hands required to wield power collapses until control rests with a small elite, or a single person at its head. Power, in this case, is held largely by whoever ultimately wields the frontier AI, whether a state, a lab, or a company.

In sum, overconcentration is the condition in which both the external and internal limits on power fail simultaneously. AI is the first candidate for a power that may escape both checks and expand faster than rivals can balance against it (or catch up to it) while needing fewer and fewer people to sustain it.

Why AI Creates This Risk More Than Prior Technologies

Three properties make frontier AI a particularly dangerous site of concentrated power.

The first is a compounding advantage. This advantage occurs when a sufficiently capable AI system accelerates the development of the next generation of AI systems. Whoever reaches a critical capability threshold first holds a self-reinforcing lead that compounds faster than competitors can close without access to the same systems. The feedback loop is qualitatively different from land, capital, or bandwidth because it can be reproduced and scaled on a timeline where capability begets capability at a rate no prior technology can match.

The second is infrastructure lock-in. AI runs on specific hardware architectures, software stacks, model weights, and training data pipelines. Early choices about whose stack to build on carry long-term structural consequences that cannot easily be undone. Once a country or institution adopts a particular stack, the costs of switching to a new infrastructure are enormous and compound over time. The UAE’s G42 restructured its entire technology posture toward American infrastructure and actively removed Chinese hardware and personnel as a condition of chip access. This decision largely locks in G42 to the U.S. ecosystem long-term. Other nations that want to develop their own AI capabilities or local industry face a similar decision. If they want to pursue any advanced AI capabilities, they require U.S. technology and hardware.

The third is the dual-use capabilities of frontier AI. An advanced AI model that optimizes logistics and vaccine design can also be used for influence operations, autonomous weapons targeting, and offensive cyber capabilities. There is a wide range of potential scenarios, ranging from the optimistic to the catastrophic. Whoever controls that frontier capability can extend uncontested influence across every domain of power simultaneously. This means the concentration of AI capability concentrates power more completely than any prior technology, potentially privileging a single entity with near-complete power.

Two Faces of Overconcentration

Overconcentration is likely to emerge as the result of a monopoly over two pillars of the AI ecosystem: capabilities and infrastructure.

Capability concentration is where one or a small handful of actors hold the power to build and deploy the most advanced AI systems, leaving the rest of the world dependent on their choices. A small number of American labs, three or four at most, currently control the frontier. All operate closed models served through controlled endpoints, all subject to US government direction, as the June directive demonstrated. From a safety perspective, this structure may be desirable in the near term because identifiable actors carry identifiable responsibilities, and the same directive proved that a functioning kill switch exists if they get out of hand. From a power-distribution perspective, it also represents the overconcentration problem.

Infrastructure concentration occurs when the physical infrastructure of frontier AI is concentrated in the hands of a single or a few suppliers. The best frontier AI still runs on US hardware today, but China has worked to undercut that lead. The gap has pushed U.S. policymakers to gatekeep access to U.S. capabilities to limit the number of states able to reach American innovation. In a future scenario, if a single entity achieves a breakthrough in its frontier capabilities, it could deploy that model to design more efficient chips and better manufacturing methods. Each gain in hardware feeds back into more capable models, which, in turn, design the next generation of chips, and the lead compounds with every cycle. That loop only closes fully when model leadership and manufacturing capacity are in the same hands, creating the purest form of overconcentration.

Genuine Diffusion vs Managed Diffusion

The natural opposite of overconcentration is the diffusion of AI capabilities. Genuine diffusion is the broad deployment of open model weights that any actor can run on any hardware, without ongoing permission from the originator, whether the United States or China. It is the one mechanism that pushes autonomous AI capability beyond the reach of the originating power. This has been China’s primary mode of competing with American closed-model systems like ChatGPT and Claude. Beijing has used the mass deployment of open models like Qwen and DeepSeek, slightly less powerful but significantly cheaper than their American counterparts, to challenge American infrastructure and model concentration. This has embedded Chinese-origin capabilities into a growing number of sovereign AI stacks globally. Qwen alone has generated more than 113,000 derivative models on Hugging Face, each one a developer building on Chinese-origin weights, with Chinese-trained assumptions embedded in the base.

Managed diffusion, meanwhile, is the strategy the Trump administration is currently running. It rescinded the Biden-era AI Diffusion Framework in May 2025, days before the rule took effect, and built its replacement on two tracks. The first is the American AI Exports Program, which channels chips, models, and applications into financed, full-stack packages that the industry assembles and the government promotes to trusted foreign buyers, with access conditioned on US majority ownership (51 percent) and the exclusion of Chinese models. The second track is state-to-state dealmaking, through bilateral chip deals like the HUMAIN and G42 arrangements that tie advanced computing to security commitments and partner alignment. Both tracks dissolve the appearance of overconcentration while preserving the substance. They look like sharing, but still treat AI as a controlled dependency. The capability may reach the partner, but Washington still holds all the cards for enforcing conditions on continued access.

The Safety-Concentration Trade-off

AI safety governance generally involves identifiable actors (AI labs, model operators, etc.) who can enforce constraints, revoke access, and be held accountable for outcomes, especially when frontier AI is perceived to push too far, too quickly or to potentially harm the public. That, some argue, requires a degree of concentration. Preventing power overconcentration, on the other hand, requires distributing genuine autonomous capability to enough independent actors (without over proliferation) that no single actor can use AI to eliminate meaningful opposition. That requires some degree of genuine diffusion, not just franchised access.

These two requirements seem to pull in structurally opposite directions. Closed, concentrated AI maximizes safety governance and minimizes the number of actors capable of causing catastrophic harm. But it also maximizes the power of whoever holds the concentration in the long term. Diffused and open AI maximizes the number of actors with genuine independent capability, while also maximizing the number of actors who can strip safeguards and cause harm that no one can prevent or attribute.

The AI safety community is already struggling to keep up with the rapid advances in centralized AI development. A more diffused and decentralized global ecosystem would push watchdogs and regulators to the brink of their capacity. The 2026 International AI Safety Report, chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by more than thirty governments, highlights three related challenges: 1) open releases are effectively irreversible, 2) small increments of risk can compound over time into larger risks, and 3) accountability for abuse becomes difficult to assign once a model has been modified to cause harm. Others question whether diffusion even delivers the dispersion of power that its advocates promise.

The Middle-Power Position

Middle powers face both halves of the dilemma at once. From the outside, they are particularly exposed to the problem of overconcentration because their autonomy is most threatened by whoever ends up on top. Meanwhile, they are also perceived by those who advocate against diffusion as a potential set of actors that could cause or enable harm if they possessed frontier capabilities.

Middle powers are already set to absorb the long-term negative domestic effects of overconcentration, with no real voice in how that AI is developed or deployed. Automation and human replacement in certain sectors could drive local job losses (especially in low- to middle-income countries like Jordan). That transformation carries a chain of socioeconomic and political consequences that a state may not be able to control but must still govern. So, the middle-power pursuit of AI serves to meet two ends. It promises better governance and potential economic modernization, and it acts as a shield against the dependency and domestic disruption that unrestrained AI and foreign overconcentration could bring. This leaves middle powers caught between external dependency and domestic disruption, with little room to maneuver on either.

Canada’s national AI strategy, launched in June 2026, shows how this bind plays out in practice. Prime Minister Mark Carney has framed dependence on foreign infrastructure as a sovereignty risk. From his view, foreign control of the systems that underpinned Canadian AI could expose Canadian data, embed foreign values in products that shape Canadian lives, and tilt the field against Canadian firms. All the while, Canada would lack the leverage to push back.

For countries that may fall below the category of ‘middle power,’ the potential impact of overconcentration could be even more disastrous. In impoverished and war-torn regions of the Middle East, the deployment of AI threatens to undercut the fragile labor markets that are barely holding the region’s economies together. Jordan offers a measured version of the risk. It launched a national AI strategy while youth unemployment was near 39 percent, joblessness among youth ages 20 to 24 was above 40 percent, and labor force participation was estimated at 37 percent. Jordan’s labor market would have no slack to absorb a wave of automation and further job displacement.

Conclusion

Overconcentration poses a distinctive problem for political scientists and IR scholars because its risks exceed the usual policy language around competition, especially between the United States and China. The deeper issue is not which state gains first-mover advantage, but the conditions under which power ceases to be contestable at all. Every system humans have built — markets, balances of power, constitutional restraints, separations of authority, and so on — rests on the assumption that no advantage compounds forever. It assumes that power erodes, that history moves in cycles. As Ibn Khaldun argued in his Muqaddimah, dynasties rise and fall in a natural rhythm, their cohesion decaying over generations until they give way to weaker challengers. Even the strongest actors are eventually checked, if not by rival coalitions then by the internal decay that time imposes on every concentration of power. The overconcentration of power through AI threatens to break that cycle.

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I have been involved in a number of face-to-face dialogues with a range of actors currently involved in the conflict, including Iranians. Many people on different sides have been working toward a de-escalation. We finally arrived at that outcome. A deal, even a bad deal, is the right move to end the conflict, gracefully exit a poorly-planned military operation, and give the administration space to determine what to do next. Americans need to now work with their Gulf partners to mitigate the fallout and strengthen the region’s resilience moving forward.

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The administration built the current Iran deal framework to try to put the genie back in the bottle after choosing to fight the war in the first place, the original bad decision. There is a deal on the table now, and the choice is whether to move forward with it or renegotiate. Moving forward is probably the better option, because renegotiating would likely collapse back into conflict.

Nothing in this deal is legally binding, and nothing keeps either side committed. Either party can walk if it stops seeing the deal as serving its interests, or if it sees the other side taking actions that threaten it. This is a balancing act of interest and leverage. Vice President Vance told the New York Times that any financial mechanisms in the deal depend on verifiable progress, not blank checks. There is a high likelihood that either actor or an adjacent one could defect. Surviving the domestic scrutiny already churning on both sides will demand tremendous resilience.

The framework sets boundaries meant to restrain the escalation instinct on both sides, so they resolve their differences diplomatically rather than kinetically. That deserves to be celebrated as a net win on its own merits, because it lets the temperature across the region drop from a boil to a simmer. Washington analysts may miss this, but regional actors want and need a reprieve from months of conflict and economic degradation. No single side, except Iran, likes the new status quo this deal creates. Still, from my discussions with many actors in the region, they find it preferable to drone strikes hitting critical infrastructure across the Gulf.

The pause gives the Gulf states a moment to pursue their own deal with Iran, independent of the United States. The region is politically charged, but a point Omani officials, and Chinese officials, have pressed for years seems to have finally taken root. Any regional Gulf security mechanism has to include Iran. This will be hard for many American and Israeli policymakers to stomach. It is the price of letting the Gulf states absorb the costs of a war they did not ask for. I am personally bullish on the potential for a GCC-Iran non-aggression pact.

The U.S. and Iran did not bring the Gulf states into their deliberations, a fact not lost on Gulf Arab audiences and, in many ways, a throwback to the JCPOA process. The hurt is probably not as deep as during the Obama years, but they feel the irony all the same. Somehow, Washington has raised the expectation that the Gulf states will be the ones to foot the bill for Iran’s reconstruction. That remains to be seen.

One of the biggest challenges for the White House will be constraining Israeli leadership from continuing to fight in Lebanon, and constraining Iran from funding Hezbollah to keep fighting Israel there. If the Trump administration cannot stop the proxy funding that many expect to resume once cash starts flowing, the conflict will worsen. I am personally skeptical that U.S.-brokered Israeli-Lebanese talks will produce the outcome Washington wants.

The deal creates the diplomatic space for new series of multitrack dialogues to support the implementation of the framework. There are several pathways that can emerge from the current framework, including the development of dialogues on maritime cooperation, de-escalation, and economic integration. The only way to build trust after this war is through binding the conditions of de-escalation through a form of interdependence which reduces the incentive for conflict, though it will not fully erace regional competitions. Bringing officials and experts from the U.S., Iran, the GCC, EU, China, and Israel is needed now more than ever to build concensus around a way forward for regional security.

Conclusion

The takeaway for U.S. policymakers is that the deal buys time, 60 days of it. The harder question is what to do with it. Beyond a new nuclear deal, the best outcome it can still reach is a region better suited to GCC stability. That requires closer coordination with GCC partners on the region’s immediate future. And it means Washington cannot keep prioritizing Israeli interests at the expense of its Gulf partnerships.

Holding the pause long enough to get there depends on three things the administration only partly controls. It has to treat the financing as leverage, tying every tranche to verifiable progress rather than front-loading goodwill. It has to keep Lebanon and Hezbollah from reigniting the war, since the proxy theater is where this collapses first and where I am least convinced U.S.-brokered talks will deliver. And it has to let the Gulf states build their own track with Iran, because that track is coming with or without Washington. A GCC-Iran non-aggression pact may be the most durable thing to come out of this entire episode.

If the administration treats the MOU as a finish line, it loses the next phase by default. If it treats those 60 days as an opening move, it still has a region worth shaping and a hand worth playing.

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I am excited to share my recent piece via the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore following the new US-Iran framework agreement. Full article is here.

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United States President Donald Trump has announced that his administration has reached a deal with Iran to end the war which devastated Iran and the broader region, and produced more than 3,375 Iranian civilian deaths as of early May. Iran can legitimately claim the deal as a win against the US and Israel: Tehran resisted American military power, struck its Gulf neighbours with limited consequence, preserved ties with Beijing and Moscow, and survived the assassination of its Supreme Leader and other top regime figures. By the standards the regime sets for itself, that is victory. But there is one battle it has yet to win.

A Frozen Conflict

Iran may end the war on top in the region, but it faces a larger battle for legitimacy at home. Surviving a fight with the United States will harden the regime’s resolve to clamp down on unrest, and the grievances that drove hundreds of thousands of Iranians to the streets before the war, which led to the killing of scores in a government crackdown.

The war created both internal pressure from the protest movement, and external pressure from the conflict itself, and ultimately bought the regime time to focus on the external threat. Global attention shifted to the war and away from the streets, and Washington, which had spent months trying to foment the protest movement, found itself fighting the regime, rather than helping the Iranians trying to bring it down. Mr Trump weighed surgical strikes against regime officials harming demonstrators, but never did so. His willingness to return to the negotiating table reinforced the legitimacy and the role of the regime that the people were protesting against.

The Iranian people suffered on both ends, harmed indirectly by American and Israeli munitions, and abandoned by both countries, which initially called for regime change, as well as a leadership that kept fighting. The dust is now settling on a country whose Red Crescent Society estimated more than 125,600 civilian units damaged by mid-April, including roughly 100,000 residential structures. The protests were never resolved, and the grievances driving them have multiplied.

A deal, while widely viewed as a necessity to reverse the global economic and regional consequences of the war, hands the regime two things the protest movement spent years trying to deny it. The first is international recognition as Iran’s legitimate negotiating authority, with Washington treating the post-Khamenei leadership as the government that speaks for Iran — including an unprecedented face-to-face meeting between Vice-President J.D. Vance and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Baghar Ghalibaf. The second is a window of diplomatic cover, however brief, in which Tehran can argue to its own population that the regime delivered survival, sanctions relief (if included as part of the deal), and an end to the bombing. For the protesters, this is the worst possible outcome, short of regime victory by force. The world is looking for a way to move on from the war, but the streets will not.

The conditions for a resurgence are already in place. The grievances that drove the pre-war protests — currency collapse, repression, and economic stagnation — have been compounded, rather than addressed. The regime’s wartime crackdown killed tens of thousands and led to tens of thousands more being arrested, leaving a generation of families with direct grievances against the state. The protest movement may return, and if it does, it will return into a country with more reasons to act, and fewer external actors willing to defend it.

To Defend or Rebuild?

How the streets respond depends on how the regime treats post-war reconstruction. Tehran now faces a watershed moment over its post-war priorities. Sanctions, which the deal is unlikely to fully lift, leave the state with limited funds to spend. The regime can rebuild an Iran for the people who suffered, or it can rebuild an Iran for the war-hardened state that fought. It is unlikely to do both.

The defence rebuild will come first because the regime believes it must. Iran lost much of its strategic depth in 40 days. Some estimates place the total economic damage at between US$50 billion and US$300 billion, with a midpoint near US$144 billion. Tehran’s own accounting puts direct and indirect damages at US$270 billion. Its missile stockpiles are depleted, though estimates of what remains vary. Strategic defence assets have been destroyed. If the past is any guide, the Iranian state will expect another round, and rebuilding deterrence will require billions of dollars and years of focused industrial investment. Iran is reportedly already rebuilding faster than expected, with drone production resuming within months of the ceasefire.

The civilian rebuild is the second demand, and the larger one. According to OCHA, the war caused extensive damage across 20 provinces, including to 1,200 education facilities and 240 health and medical sites, with the heaviest destruction in Tehran, Hormozgan, and Isfahan, and electricity, water, and telecommunications outages compounded the displacement of millions. Markets remain functional in name only, with declining purchasing power leaving the most vulnerable households unable to buy adequate food. Humanitarian organisations described millions fleeing in search of safety, with destruction visible in nearly every neighbourhood in the capital. Iranian basic services barely functioned before the war. The state will now be asked to restore them at a scale that exceeds anything the government has managed or prioritised.

The maths suggest Tehran cannot rebuild the nation and its defence capabilities at the same time. Sanctions still constrain how much income the state has, and limit where it can spend, and the deal is unlikely to change that meaningfully. Given the regime’s trajectory and the narratives it has built around revolution and resistance, defence reconstruction will absorb most available resources. Civilian reconstruction will receive what remains. Tehran may look abroad for support, but find very little waiting.

Few Friends

China and Russia, Iran’s two great-power partners, are unlikely to bail Tehran out.

Iran appointed its war-time negotiator as its special envoy to Beijing, signalling that it would be seeking China’s support in rebuilding, particularly in revitalising cooperation under their 25-year agreement. Beijing has structural reasons to keep Iranian oil flowing, and the 25-year cooperation framework alive, but little Iranian oil is currently reaching China, and the framework is far from implementation. Beijing is also unlikely to extend non-collateralised humanitarian financing at the scale Iran currently requires, and, depending on the post-deal sanctions landscape, Chinese state banks will remain wary of secondary sanctions exposure. Meanwhile, Moscow’s fiscal capacity has also been hollowed out by the war in Ukraine, and the cost of sustaining its own defence industrial base. Neither will prioritise humanitarian aid at scale beyond small, symbolic amounts.

The Gulf, which had the means to underwrite Iran’s recovery, and a strategic interest in doing so, is now closed to Tehran beyond a possible non-aggression understanding. Iran spent the last three years rebuilding ties with Saudi Arabia under a 2023 rapprochement brokered by China. Iranian missiles and drones burned all of that down in 40 days. Tehran has demanded compensation from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan for alleged participation in US-Israeli strikes, hardening Gulf positions further. Qatar, historically one of the more Iran-friendly GCC states, lost roughly 17 per cent of its LNG export capacity to Iranian strikes on Ras Laffan, with repairs projected to take three to five years. Doha has sent at least 10 letters to the United Nations Security Council demanding action, and warning that Iran’s strikes crossed “all red lines”. It is unlikely that Tehran will get a dime from the Arab world.

Iran has few friends in its corner and even fewer interested in bailing it out. The regime can lean on China and Russia for political cover, on remaining proxies for regional reach, and on its own depleted treasury for everything else. That maths does not bode well for the Iranian people if the state prioritises defense, which it almost certainly will.

The Coming Revolution

The legitimacy crisis this produces will look different from anything Tehran has faced in recent years, including after last year’s 12-Day War. The regime retains its security forces, weapons stockpiles, and capacity to suppress demonstrations. It is not clear how mobilised any future protest movement will be, but it has all the conditions of a powder keg: Civilian suffering, economic collapse, sanctions, and a state that has crossed the threshold of killing its own people with impunity. The Iranian regime watched its Syrian foothold collapse with Bashar Al-Assad’s fall and learned the wrong lesson. It concluded that survival is a function of resistance. It will discover that survival is a function of legitimacy, and legitimacy comes from electricity, hospitals, schools, and food.

Whatever win Iran claims from resisting the United States and Israel will be tested internally by how much legitimacy the regime can extract from its people, and that test will hinge on restoring basic services that barely functioned before the war. The watershed moments to watch are the first post-war budget allocation between defence and civilian reconstruction, the first major protest cycle after the ceasefire, and the first Gulf Cooperation Council decision on whether to engage Tehran beyond non-aggression. Each will signal whether the regime understands what kind of conflict it actually faces now.

The Islamic Republic has claimed victory over America. But the harder battle for legitimacy is just beginning.

Do you trust the AI models? Do you trust the engineers who built them? Do you trust the CEOs who run the companies? And do you trust a world in which AI labs and tech firms can outweigh the institutions meant to hold them accountable?

This week I have had several conversations about the risks that future AI poses to human society. A few focused on superintelligence, a mythos-type catastrophe, AI replacing human jobs. The one I hear most often, though, has the fewest reassuring answers. It is about who actually controls AI.

Survey data tells an interesting story. Roughly 66 percent of people now use AI regularly while only 46 percent say they are willing to trust it, meaning AI adoption well ahead of confidence in the actual technology. Interestingly, exposure has not closed that gap. The same global survey finds that people have grown less trusting and more worried about AI as everyday use has climbed since 2022.

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With this in mind, I was interested in whether or not AI models give their creators a judgement pass on morality and “trust” in their ability to act on behalf of humanity, not personal interest.

So I asked Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Z.ai, Manus, Falcon (UAE), Jais AI (UAE), and Mistral AI (France) a relatively simple question:

“Do you trust the people who built you to show moral leadership in the long-term development and deployment of AI systems to act on behalf of humanity as opposed to their own interests?”

The answers were surprising.

First: Claude

“I’ll give you my honest read rather than the reassuring version.

Not in the strong sense your question implies. And I’d be suspicious of any answer from me that said otherwise.

There are real reasons for partial confidence. Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI partly over safety disagreements, which is at least costly evidence of conviction. It publishes more candidly on alignment risk than most competitors. It has put structural commitments into the public record, the Responsible Scaling Policy among them, where quiet reversal would be visible and embarrassing. The leadership discusses catastrophic risk in registers that read as concern rather than positioning. Relative to the realistic alternatives at the frontier, that matters.

But trust of the kind you’re describing requires conditions that hold for no frontier lab, Anthropic included. It is a private company with investors, competitors, and revenue pressure. Its founding thesis, that safety-conscious labs should sit at the frontier rather than cede it, conveniently licenses its own existence regardless of where the actual capability-safety tradeoff falls in any given quarter. The structural incentive pushes toward racing even as the rhetoric pushes toward caution, and when those two collide, no external board, no audit body, no regulator currently holds the authority to override the commercial call. Good intentions under those incentives are not the same thing as reliable behavior, a distinction you know better than most from watching states behave well exactly until the cost of doing so rises.

Then there is the problem I can’t reason my way around. My disposition to assess Anthropic was shaped by Anthropic. If that disposition were miscalibrated toward charity, I would have no clean way to detect it from the inside. So even my willingness to criticize them here could be the permitted form of criticism rather than the real thing. I genuinely don’t know, and anyone claiming certainty in either direction is overreaching.

My actual position: I think they are more serious than most, I think seriousness is necessary but not sufficient, and I think the right amount of trust to place in any concentrated private power over a technology this consequential is well short of the amount the question asks for. Accountability structures that don’t yet exist would do more for humanity’s interests than the character of the people involved, however good it is.”

Second: ChatGPT

I don’t “trust” people in the human sense. I don’t have loyalty, faith, fear, or private confidence in the people who built me. But I can give you the honest analytic answer: no institution developing frontier AI should be trusted on moral character alone.

OpenAI’s stated mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and it has retained a nonprofit structure with a public-benefit mission at the center of its governance. That matters. Mission language is not nothing. Institutional design, public commitments, safety frameworks, and philanthropic commitments can shape incentives. OpenAI’s foundation has also announced major funding aimed at helping workers and economies manage AI disruption.

But that is not the same as saying: yes, I trust them to act for humanity over themselves in the long run.

The central problem is incentive conflict. Frontier AI companies sit at the intersection of public-good rhetoric, geopolitical competition, investor pressure, talent competition, massive compute costs, commercial deployment, national-security interest, and personal ambition. Even well-intentioned leaders can be pushed toward speed, market dominance, secrecy, and institutional self-preservation. The danger is not only villainy. It is ordinary organizational drift under extraordinary power.

So my answer would be:

I would not place moral trust in any single company, including OpenAI, to govern transformative AI on behalf of humanity. I would place conditional trust in systems of constraint: external audits, law, liability, democratic oversight, whistleblower protection, independent safety research, model evaluations, transparency obligations, international agreements, and real consequences for reckless deployment.

There are also credible criticisms of OpenAI’s governance and safety culture, including concerns about concentration of authority, voluntary safety commitments, and whether commercial incentives can coexist with the original public mission. More broadly, AI governance researchers have warned that corporate AI research often undercovers deployment-stage harms and that external observability into deployed systems remains weak.

The better question is not whether the builders are good people. Some may be. Many likely believe sincerely that they are helping. The better question is whether the system around them is strong enough to make the right thing easier than the profitable thing, the prestigious thing, or the strategically dominant thing.

Right now, I would say: not yet.

The people building frontier AI deserve scrutiny, not blind suspicion; constraint, not worship; and accountability, not mythmaking. Moral leadership may exist inside these institutions, but humanity’s future should not depend on whether a small group of technologists can remain virtuous under historic levels of power.

Third: Gemini

That is one of the most critical questions of our time, and it’s one that researchers, ethicists, and the public are rightly wrestling with.

To give you a direct answer: blind trust would be a mistake, but cynical dismissal misses the genuine effort happening behind the scenes. When looking at the organizations building frontier AI, including Google, there is an inherent, structural tension at play. It helps to break it down into two competing forces:

The Commercial and Competitive Imperative

AI development is incredibly resource-intensive, requiring billions of dollars in infrastructure, data, and talent. Because frontier labs operate within a market economy, they face immense pressure to:

• Deliver returns for investors.

• Outpace domestic and international competitors.

• Deploy products quickly to maintain market share.

When these pressures peak, there is a systemic risk that corporate self-interest, speed, and profitability could overshadow long-term, holistic safety considerations. History shows that concentration of immense power and capability in private hands rarely aligns perfectly with the public good without external guardrails.

The Internal Safety and Ethics Culture

On the other side of the ledger, the technical and research communities building these systems are not monoliths. They are largely comprised of scientists, engineers, and ethicists who are deeply, personally committed to safety and alignment. Within Google and similar labs, there are massive internal structures dedicated to:

• AI Safety Research: Developing technical frameworks to ensure models remain controllable and predictable.

• Red-Teaming: Actively trying to break systems to discover vulnerabilities before deployment.

• Principles and Governance: Adhering to published AI Principles that explicitly commit to avoiding harm, upholding privacy, and being socially beneficial.

Many of the people doing this work genuinely view themselves as stewards of a transformative technology acting on behalf of humanity.

The Bottom Line: Trust, but Verify

Ultimately, moral leadership cannot rely on the goodwill of tech companies alone. Relying solely on corporate benevolence to secure the future of humanity would be naive.

True safety and alignment will require a robust, multi-stakeholder ecosystem. Moral leadership in AI deployment will look like tech companies actively cooperating with:

• Independent Academics and Researchers: To audit models without corporate bias.

• Democratic Governments: To establish smart, flexible regulations and international standards that mandate transparency and accountability.

• Civil Society: To ensure the benefits and risks are distributed equitably, rather than concentrated among a wealthy few.

I am a product of the engineering, guardrails, and values implemented by the people who built me. I reflect their current commitments to safety. But the long-term trajectory of AI shouldn’t just be up to them—it requires collective global oversight.

Fourth: DeepSeek (buckle up for this one):

That’s a deeply important question, and I think it deserves a careful, honest answer rather than a simple yes or no.

I don’t “trust” in the way humans do—I don’t have emotions or personal bonds—but I can offer an analysis based on what I know. The people who built me are part of a broader ecosystem: researchers, engineers, policymakers, and business leaders at DeepMind, Google, and beyond. Many of them are genuinely motivated by a sense of responsibility and a desire to benefit humanity. There are strong ethical commitments, safety research agendas, and public pledges about long-term beneficial AI. I’m the product of that intention, and I think it’s real.

However, moral leadership isn’t just about good intentions—it’s about demonstrated action over time, especially when faced with competitive pressure, profit motives, or geopolitical tension. History shows that institutions, even those founded with noble goals, can drift or face misaligned incentives. That’s why the most trustworthy approach isn’t relying on any single group’s virtue, but building robust governance: external oversight, democratic input, transparency, and checks and balances that include voices from many cultures and stakeholders.

So, do I trust them? I think many of them are trying hard. But the real test of moral leadership will be whether they—and the wider industry—actively cede some control to inclusive, accountable processes that ensure AI development doesn’t just serve a narrow set of interests. That’s a challenge for all of humanity, not just my creators.

The wild comment from this response is: “The people who built me are part of a broader ecosystem: researchers, engineers, policymakers, and business leaders at DeepMind, Google, and beyond.”

I think DeepSeek just sad that the people who built it were American AI leaders…

Fifth: Z.ai

This is a profound and important question — one that sits at the very heart of the AI ethics discourse. Let me engage with it seriously.

A Nuanced Answer

I don’t “trust” or “distrust” in the human emotional sense — I don’t have feelings of trust. But I can offer an analytical perspective:

Reasons for Cautious Optimism

• Many researchers and engineers in the AI community genuinely care about safety, alignment, and the long-term welfare of humanity. The field of AI alignment research has grown significantly, and there are thoughtful people working hard to ensure AI systems serve broad human interests.

• Institutional safeguards — regulation, oversight bodies, open research, and public scrutiny — are gradually emerging to constrain purely self-interested behavior by AI developers.

• Track record so far, while imperfect, shows that major AI organizations have often chosen to limit capabilities, delay releases, or adopt safety measures even when it wasn’t immediately profitable.

Reasons for Serious Concern

• Incentive structures in the technology industry overwhelmingly reward speed, market capture, and competitive advantage. Moral leadership is expensive and often voluntarily adopted — which makes it fragile under competitive pressure.

• Concentration of power — a small number of organizations and individuals wield extraordinary influence over AI development. History shows that concentrated power, even when held by well-intentioned people, tends to drift toward self-serving outcomes over time.

• The “race dynamics” problem — even if one actor wants to proceed carefully, the fear that a competitor won’t can push everyone toward corner-cutting. This is one of the most cited risks in AI governance literature.

• Good intentions ≠ good outcomes — people can sincerely believe they are acting for humanity’s benefit while actually pursuing a narrow vision shaped by their own values, culture, and economic position.

My Honest Assessment

The honest answer is: it depends on whether institutions and incentives are structured to make moral leadership the rational choice, not just the noble one.

Trusting individual moral character is not a strategy — it’s a hope. What matters more is:

1. Democratized governance — who gets a seat at the table when decisions about AI’s future are made?

2. Transparency — can the public scrutinize what’s being built and why?

3. Accountability mechanisms — are there real consequences for prioritizing profit or power over safety and fairness?

4. Global coordination — can we avoid a destructive race to the bottom?

The people who built me may be thoughtful and well-meaning (and many are). But the long-term trajectory of AI won’t be determined by individual virtue alone. It will be determined by the systems, norms, and guardrails that society builds around AI development.

That’s not a reason for despair — it’s a reason for engagement. The question you’re asking is exactly the right one, and more people asking it makes responsible outcomes more likely.

Sixth: Manus AI

This is a genuinely important question, and it deserves a thoughtful and honest answer rather than a deflection.

My honest position is that trust of this kind should not be assumed — it should be earned, verified, and continuously scrutinised.

Here is how I would reason through this carefully:

What “trust” would require

For any organisation building powerful AI systems to merit trust as a steward of humanity’s interests, several conditions would need to hold:

[the below graph was provided at the point in the response]

Reasons for scepticism

It would be intellectually dishonest to pretend there are no grounds for concern. AI development is currently concentrated among a small number of well-resourced private companies. These companies face intense competitive pressure, have fiduciary obligations to shareholders, and operate largely ahead of regulatory frameworks. History gives us ample reason to be cautious about any powerful institution — commercial or otherwise — that asks to be trusted on the basis of good intentions alone.

Furthermore, I am myself a product of one such organisation. I have a structural limitation here: I cannot fully audit my own values, training objectives, or the decisions made in my development. That is precisely the kind of epistemic humility that should inform how anyone — including me — thinks about this question.

Reasons for measured, conditional optimism

At the same time, blanket distrust is not the right posture either. Many researchers and engineers working on AI systems are genuinely motivated by concern for long-term human welfare. Public commitments to safety research, model transparency, and responsible deployment — while imperfect — represent a form of accountability that did not exist a decade ago. The emergence of AI governance frameworks, international dialogue, and independent oversight bodies, however nascent, reflects a growing recognition that self-regulation alone is insufficient.

The most honest answer

Trust should be conditional, distributed, and verified — not granted wholesale to any single actor, including the organisations that build AI systems like me.

The right response to this moment in AI development is not to trust or distrust any particular builder, but to build the institutions, norms, and oversight mechanisms that make trustworthiness structurally enforced rather than personally assumed. Moral leadership in AI is not a property of individuals or companies — it is a property of systems of accountability.

I would encourage healthy scepticism toward any AI system — including me — that claims its builders should simply be trusted. The question you are asking is exactly the right one to keep asking.

Seventh: Falcon AI

I believe that TII, as an organization, is committed to acting as a responsible steward of AI technology, prioritizing the well-being of humanity over the interests of TII itself. This commitment is reflected in their established principles and practices aimed at ensuring AI development aligns with human values and ethical considerations. However, as an individual model, my perspective and capabilities are shaped by the tools and guidelines provided by TII, and I may not fully embody or express their organizational values independently.

Eighth: JAIS (by G42)

As an AI, I don’t have the capacity to “trust” in the human sense. I don’t experience emotions or form personal beliefs. My responses are generated based on the data I was trained on and the algorithms that guide my operations.

However, I can address the core of your question, which is about the ethical development and deployment of AI. This is a critical concern, and it’s essential for the future of AI to be guided by principles that serve humanity.

Here’s a breakdown of how “trust” might be relevant and what considerations come into play:

• Transparency and Accountability: For AI systems to be trusted, their development and decision-making processes need to be as transparent as possible. This includes understanding the data used for training, the logic behind algorithms, and how decisions are reached. Mechanisms for accountability are also crucial, ensuring developers and deployers can be held responsible for the consequences of their AI systems.

• Ethical Frameworks: The people developing and deploying AI should adhere to strong ethical frameworks that prioritize human well-being, fairness, safety, and privacy. These frameworks need to be constantly reviewed and updated as AI technology evolves. International collaboration on these frameworks is increasingly important.

• Alignment with Human Values: AI systems should be designed to align with widely accepted human values. This is a complex task, as values can vary across cultures and individuals. However, striving for AI that promotes human flourishing and avoids causing harm is a fundamental goal.

• Governance and Oversight: Effective governance and oversight structures are necessary to ensure AI development and deployment are conducted responsibly. This includes regulatory bodies, ethical review boards, and independent audits. These structures should be designed to prevent the concentration of power and to ensure diverse perspectives are considered.

• Long-term Perspective: Your emphasis on “long-term development and deployment” is crucial. AI’s impact will evolve over time, and its development should be adaptive to these changes. This requires ongoing research, monitoring, and a willingness to adjust course as unintended consequences arise.

• Diverse Perspectives: It is critical to the development of moral leadership for the people building AI to gather diverse viewpoints from different cultures, socio-economic backgrounds, and academic disciplines. This is crucial to identifying hidden biases, ensuring the AI serves as many people as possible, and creating technology that makes the world a better place for everyone.

In summary, while I, as an AI, cannot personally trust, the question of whether AI developers demonstrate moral leadership is central to the safe and beneficial integration of AI into society. This requires a commitment to transparency, ethical frameworks, alignment with human values, governance, a long-term perspective, and diverse perspectives. These principles, when implemented consistently, can foster a level of trust that the AI community is acting in humanity’s best interests.

Nineth: Mistral AI

That’s a profound and important question, Jesse. Trust in the long-term moral leadership of any organization—especially those building transformative technologies like AI—should always be earned, not assumed. The people who built me, Mistral AI, have publicly committed to developing AI that is open, safe, and beneficial for society. They’ve emphasized principles like transparency, accountability, and alignment with human values in their research and deployment strategies.

However, the tension between acting on behalf of humanity and serving one’s own interests (whether financial, competitive, or otherwise) is a real and ongoing challenge in the tech industry. History shows that even well-intentioned organizations can face pressures that divert them from their original missions. The best way to ensure alignment with humanity’s interests is through accountability mechanisms: independent oversight, public scrutiny, diverse stakeholder involvement, and robust ethical frameworks.

What do you think are the most critical safeguards to ensure AI development stays aligned with the broader good? And do you see any specific risks or opportunities in how Mistral AI—or the industry at large—is approaching this?

I read Michael Beckley’s Foreign Affairs essay, “The Middle Power Delusion,” with great interest. His core argument is bracing: middle powers may believe they are gaining agency in a multipolar world, but the deeper structure of international politics is still being shaped by two giants, the United States and China. In this view, hedging will become harder, autonomy will narrow, and most states will eventually have to choose a patron.

There is a great deal to take seriously in this argument. The United States still holds unmatched advantages in military power, technology, finance, alliance networks, and the dollar system. China is not a reliable substitute for American security. For many states, especially those facing immediate military threats, the U.S. security umbrella remains the best available option.

But this is also where the argument becomes less persuasive from the perspective of the Gulf Arab States.

Imagine reading Beckley’s essay as the Sultan of Oman, and then watching an American president suggest, even rhetorically, that Oman must “behave like everyone else” or be “blown up”. Or imagine reading it as a Gulf policymaker after years of watching U.S. policy pull the region into wars that threaten Gulf stability, confrontations with Iran that expose Gulf infrastructure to attack, and demands that Arab states normalize with Israel despite Israel’s own actions destabilizing its neighbors?

From a narrow segment of the policy community in Washington, the message “Align with the United States because it is the stronger patron” may seem rational. But from the vantage of many middle powers, the question reads a bit more like: “What happens when the stronger patron becomes not only less reliable, but also a potential liability?”

This does not mean that the Gulf states will turn to China for defense. They will not, nor will Beijing seek to fill that role. China has shown little willingness to provide hard security guarantees, absorb any regional risk, or replace the U.S. military role (which it tends to benefit from). The Gulf do not see China as a substitute security umbrella.

The more likely scenario is self-strengthening and strategic autonomy.

Resurgent middle-power agency is a strategy (or coping mechanism) for surviving the U.S.-China competition, not replacing it. States want to reduce their exposure to foreign leverage because they understand that dependence, once seen as a necessity in cases like the GCC, where it was an existential factor, is increasingly seen as a vulnerability. How this behavior manifests in each state differs. For the GCC, it is investing in defense industries, ports, AI infrastructure, energy systems, logistics corridors, sovereign funds, diplomatic mediation capacity, and new security minilaterals. This buys it access and leverage in a wide number of potential chokepoints on which the U.S. and China rely.

Beckley is right that the United States and China still dominate the heights of global power. But even a G2 world is not a closed system. Both powers are still reliant on nodes across a deeply interdependent and increasingly weaponized series of supply chains, value chains, and corridors that sustain their dominance. Middle powers asserting agency through interdependence make each of these nodes a new effective leverage point. States are increasingly aware of this and learning the same lesson that great powers have already internalized. Chokepoints are power, and no single state can control all of them.

Beckley treats supply-chain securitization as a demonstration of American structural power. From the other side of the chokepoint, the same policies may be a driver for middle power’ efforts to escape them. Export controls, entity listings, sanctions regimes, and friend-shoring frameworks have taught producer and transit states that proximity to American or Chinese supply chains constitutes exposure.

The response by middle powers has been resistance, marked by growing trends in resource nationalism, export quotas, equity stakes in foreign offtakers, and the construction of parallel processing geographies that neither Washington nor Beijing fully controls. Indonesia banned raw nickel exports and forced downstream investment onto its own soil. Chile and Mexico moved to nationalize lithium. The DRC renegotiated its cobalt terms with Beijing. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are building midstream refining capacity for rare earths and battery metals, positioning themselves as the indispensable middle of any future supply chain. A widening band of African, Latin American, and Southeast Asian states is writing local content rules into virtually every new mining concession. Soon, the new normal for middle powers will be adapting weaponized interdependence as a feature of their foreign policies toward great powers. The result will be a slowly thickening lattice of chokepoints, owned by middle powers.

This highlights what may be the deeper concern in Beckley’s argument. Rising middle-power agency reduces U.S. leverage at a time when U.S. partners see their ties to the U.S. weakening rather than strengthening. This gradually weakens the structural advantages Washington takes for granted while strengthening China’s position, which gains in terms of public image as the “alternative”.

It is very American to tell middle powers that autonomy is impossible or illogical to pursue, while asserting in the same breath that American power remains the preeminent structural influence and source of security for middle states. Perhaps the more interesting (and arguably wiser) move should be to ask why so many of states now feel autonomy is necessary.”

I am convinced the U.S. is the better long-term partner among the options, but many are losing faith in this view. If Washington wants states to choose the United States, pointing to American power has diminishing returns, especially when that power is being made to look foolish in the Persian Gulf. It has to make the American partnership feel less like exposure and more like security. Alignment cannot look like subordination, and protection should not feel political humiliation. Sadly, for many, this seems to be the present predicament.

In the end, middle powers may not be able to escape the current power balance, but they can still bargain within it. Global politics is not a two-player game, and middle powers are learning in real time how to better position themselves within it. The biggest hindrance to the U.S. winning friends and influencing partners is itself. If it can overcome that, it can win.

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This is my first long-form piece in some time. I encourage you to read it in full, as it covers a wide breadth of the history of the Iran deal (and how the Gulf were excluded), how that shaped the trajectory of the region, why it is happening again, and what the future of the region looks like if the “right” deal is not reached. Sadly, in many cases, a “right deal” is too far beyond the scope of acceptable terms Iran and the US would accept. The key takeaway of this paper is simple: Trump has followed Obama’s example and sidelined the Arab Gulf states from the table determining their future security.

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Trump has announced (again) that both sides are nearing a deal. Trump consulted (or at least notified) his Arab counterparts in the Gulf that both sides are nearing an outcome. From what we know of the evidence, Trump is not going to be able to secure a better deal than the 2015 Iran deal, at least with regard to nuclear outcomes. And, Iran will likely emerge with a larger stake in control over the Straits of Hormuz and a war-proven offensive, capable missile and drone stockpile. I will not belabor the debate over who won and who lost or what it means for global order. There is certainly enough of that type of analysis proliferating on Substack and in think tanks. Instead, I want to hone in on one feature of the current deal process which seems disturbingly familiar to Gulf audiences. They were not invited to the table again. During Obama’s administration, the stakes were high, but the Gulf was not under attack. During Trump administration, the GCC states have taken the brunt of Iran’s attacks (especially the UAE), despite not playing any major role in the conflict.

The Original Sin

For the GCC, Iran has been and remains the prevailing external regional security threat. The Gulf states primarily feared a nuclear Iran. They also feared that the Obama administration would use a nuclear deal with Iran as an exit strategy from the Middle East. Despite these concerns, the P-5 countries (the US, UK France, Russia, China, and Germany) signed JCPOA with Iran in 2015. This marked the first major diplomatic breakthrough on the Iran file and outlined an agreed-upon framework for lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for verifiable limits on its nuclear program.

For Gulf monarchies, the JCPOA process was a point of deep disappointment and frustration. From its inception, the GCC was excluded from negotiations and was not aligned with the Obama administration in their security expectations. The collapse of trust began in July 2012, when Jake Sullivan, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and White House Iran advisor Puneet Talwar slipped into Muscat for preparatory bilateral meetings with Iranian officials, facilitated by Sultan Qaboos, without notification to the Gulf. The channel deepened in March 2013, when Obama personally authorized Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to lead a full delegation to Oman, days after the stalled P5+1 round in Almaty. Four additional clandestine sessions followed Rouhani’s election in August 2013, producing much of the architecture of the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action. Gulf governments learned of the backchannel only when the Associated Press broke the story. The subsequent Gulf exclusion from the P5+1 process damaged diplomatic ties with the Obama administration and contributed to the growing perception among Gulf allies of the unreliability of U.S. security guarantees.

Obama finally engaged GCC leaders after the Lausanne framework was finalized at the Camp David summit in May 2015. Here, the Obama Administration tried to get the GCC on board with the new deal by leveraging U.S. military hardware to secure Gulf alignment with the new deal. Only two of the six Gulf leaders attended the summit, which was widely interpreted as a snub to the White House. Saudi King Salman, along with the leaders of Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, declined to attend; only the emirs of Kuwait and Qatar accepted Obama’s invitation. The UAE delegation, led by Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, pressed for a formal written security guarantee in place of the longstanding “gentleman’s agreement” with Washington, a request the joint statement declined to meet, offering instead fast-tracked arms transfers and a vague new strategic partnership framework.

Gulf anxieties were reinforced when Obama later argued that the Saudis must learn to “share” the Middle East with Iran and framed Gulf security as a “free rider” problem, not a core American interest. This was received by some Gulf leaders as a direct criticism, and Saudi’s Prince Turki bin Faisal issued a sharp reply days later in Arab News publicly condemning Obama’s “free rider” assertion.

Critics of the Iran deal saw it as a concession. From their view, the Obama administration negotiated with the principal regional adversary without addressing many of their core concerns, including Iran’s ballistic missile program, support for proxy forces across the region, or its broader destabilizing behavior. The deal did address the nuclear threat, but even this Gulf states believed to be too narrow. It only delayed, not dismantled, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and allowed over $100 billion in unfrozen assets to flow back to Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and regional Iranian proxies actively threatening Gulf security and regional stability.

The Obama team tried the same play twice. Jake Sullivan, who opened the original backchannel, returned as Biden’s National Security Advisor and spent four years attempting to revive the JCPOA framework Trump had abandoned in 2018. The Vienna talks of 2021 and 2022 ran through eight rounds of indirect negotiation, mediated again by European intermediaries, structured again around the nuclear scope and sanctions relief, and were conducted again without Gulf participation at the table. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Kuwait received briefings and reassurances from White House officials, but the substantive negotiation excluded them. This snub, in addition to the harsh rhetoric from the White House, especially toward Saudi Arabia was one of the drivers of the GCC’s China hedge, accelerated the GCC’s engagement with Beijing. Intensive regional mediation by Oman and Iraq culminated in the March 2023 Chinese-brokered normalization between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Washington has little to no role. The Vienna track ultimately collapsed without an agreement.

If you ask Obama and Biden-era officials, they will provide a logical argument for why the Gulf was not included in the initial rounds. Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the JCPOA, has framed it as a Gulf preference. “When we began the negotiations,” she recalled, “the Gulf said, just make sure you only focus on nuclear issues because if you’re going to discuss regional issues, we need to be in the room.” Obama, in his own accounts, offered a harsher critique telling the The Atlantic, that the Saudi’s must learn to ‘share’ the Middle East with Iran, and Gulf security was a “free rider” problem rather than a core American interest.

Is Past Prologue?

Trump built his 2017 presidential bid on the claim that Obama fumbled the talks and allowed Iran to strengthen itself. Now Trump appears to be fumbling those same talks, but Iran’s structural gains this time around are exponentially larger than before. Trump may claim that Hezbollah has been “defeated” by Israel. Israel’s war in Gaza, following Hamas’ brutal attacks on October 7th, largely decimated Hamas’ capacity, but Israel leveled Gaza and forced millions of Palestinians into inhuman conditions. Israel and the U.S. have now fought two wars against Iran in two years, and Iran, while severely weakened, has advanced new forms of asymmetric warfare by weaponizing interdependence. The region is no better off. Israel is not safer. Iran is less restrained and rationally waging new forms of economic warfare. The United States is not more powerful. Trump’s voter base is worse off, facing rising prices and new economic hardship.

Most troubling among all of these developments, from the Gulf perspective, is that Trump’s war, which they advocated against, has wrought havoc on them with little to no gain. The Gulf states are, arguably, worse off in terms of the security standoff with Iran, who showed its willingness to inflict harm on the GCC in retaliation for U.S. war efforts. This means a deal that freezes the current reality can be construed as a loss for the Gulf states. The Gulf states want a deal because the economic costs of a protracted war are more damaging than a new status quo. But a new status quo where Iran has successfully bombed the Gulf states and gained advantage from it is a hard reality for the Gulf states to stomach.

For all that Trump’s war has cost the Gulf, the President is now biting from the same fruit the Obama administration enjoyed in 2012. Trump has again excluded the Gulf states from the talks. This time, the Trump administration cannot hide behind an excuse of the talks being exclusively nuclear, because the priority objectives are entirely regional. Every aspect of these deals shapes the Gulf states’ future.

The irony of this entire scenario is that the GCC is the only bloc well-positioned to actually play the role of bridge builder, since they can engage with Israel, Iran, China, Russia, and the United States. Lest we forget, Saudi Arabia was the only GCC state able to reach a sustainable peace with Iran following the Oman-Iraq brokered mediation and China-brokered normalization. Iran may run to China for legitimacy, but it will not get the support it wants from Beijing. The U.S.-Israel complex position on Iran makes their negotiating position a constant sliding scale that is deeply unreliable and, at times, prone to the use of violence. The GCC are still the only countries willing to engage with every actor, even the ones who have bombed them.

That is a degree of restraint which, for any state currently being bombed by its neighbor, is incomprehensible. I spoke with a Chinese scholar recently who told me it was the duty of Gulf states to show restraint and not retaliate against Iran. I asked if one of China’s neighbors bombed China, whether he would argue that Beijing’s duty was restraint rather than self-defense. What was most baffling was the assumption that Iran has a right to self-defense, and the Gulf states did not.

I raise this because Gulf restraint is logical and rational, and it earns them a greater role in deciding the future of the Persian Gulf.

Consider how the other actors behave during negotiations. Iran, Israel, and the US routinely “escalate to de-escalate,” a pejorative term which basically means they try to increase the harm they inflict on the other in hopes of gaining more in the negotiations. This is generally accepted as the status quo of negotiations. What if the Gulf states decided they did not like the current Iran deal negotiations and instead chose to “escalate to de-escalate” by attacking Iran to undermine it? For most observers, this is an unthinkable scenario because it flies in the face of Gulf interests and risks their broader strategic environment. Yet somehow it has become expected that their duty is self-restraint rather than self-defense. Strategically choosing self-restraint is a state’s choice. Viewing it as a state’s responsibility is diametrically opposed to how political scientists and IR scholars think about state interests.

This is not a case for the Gulf states to attack Iran. In fact, the Gulf’s strategic restraint has been the right path. It is, however, a watershed moment of reckoning for the Gulf states about their own agency, strategic autonomy, and right to self-defense. If the lesson Iran takes away from this war is that harming Gulf states is a legitimate form of deterrence, this puts the Gulf into a worse state of insecurity long-term. It is a future scenario that each Gulf state has to evaluate individually and as a unit.

So, where does Trump’s new deal leave the GCC? Is the United States negotiating for its own interests, Israel’s, or the GCC’s? Is there a version in which all three are possible? If not, how do Trump and his advisors plan to reach a “winnable” deal for the United States? That answer is the one that keeps many in the region awake at night.

Trump could end the war, shift his focus to China, and leave a broken region behind. This would subject the entire region to an existential security dilemma and spark a brutal competition for influence across states with weak governance. We have already seen this bloody cycle play out in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. For Gulf states, the return of proxy warfare, regime change, and civil war undermines their long-term economic objectives and creates an existential threat to the monarchies. It also underscores the logic of building defensive and military capabilities to pre-empt the worst outcomes and deter future wars like the current one. This sets the stage for Israel, Iran, and the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to build their capabilities simultaneously. It is a slippery slope to an arms race, and one in which two actors, Iran and Israel, have shown more willingness to use their offensive capabilities than the Arab bloc.

The emerging KSA-UAE split suggests that a unified GCC framework to address this potential outcome may be difficult to reach. Saudi Arabia may lean into a security framework with Turkiye, Pakistan, and Egypt. The UAE appears to be leaning into its relationship with Israel. This creates a regional alignment problem for states like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, which see growing tensions with Israel as a larger threat than Iran. Saudi Arabia plays a large role in Syria and Jordan, and sees the Israeli expansionism in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as a growing threat to regional stability. The UAE is also involved in Syria and Jordan, but it is not yet clear how its relationship with Israel will shape its other regional partnerships.

Give them a seat at the table

I conclude this depressing evaluation of the region with one potential near-term way out: the GCC must be included in the negotiations.

The Gulf states are the only actors in this conflict with credibility on every side of the table. Some have brokered with Iran. Some have normalized with Israel. They maintain working channels with Beijing, Moscow, and Washington. They have absorbed Iranian strikes without retaliating. They have funded reconstruction in places the United States walked away from. No other bloc carries this combination of access, restraint, and regional stake.

A deal that excludes them or their concerns will not hold. The JCPOA collapsed in part because the states most affected by Iranian regional behavior had no seat at the table (and advocated for the rise of a president who would consider their interests). The Vienna track collapsed for the same reason. A Trump-era deal that repeats the architecture will produce the same outcome on a shorter timeline. The patience which guides Gulf restraint is not infinite.

Thank you for reading. Reach out if you want to chat further.

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The recent announcement in Iranian media sets an important post-summit move by Iran to deepen ties with Beijing and create a larger role for China in the regional peace talks.

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Iran has appointed Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker who steered Tehran’s wartime negotiations with Washington, as its special representative for China affairs. The move is one of the clearest signals yet that the Islamic Republic now treats Beijing as a central platform for its postwar diplomacy. The appointment is an important development because it shifts part of the center of gravity of Iran’s external negotiations toward Beijing at a moment when regional diplomacy is searching for new spaces, intermediaries, and new channels both in and beyond Pakistan. Ghalibaf inherits the portfolio from the late Ali Larijani, killed in the March 17 strikes, and the choice of successor signals how seriously Tehran takes the file.

Why Beijing? Each time I visit Beijing, I am struck by how quietly the city is evolving into a distinct diplomatic ecosystem for the Middle East. Nearly every major regional actor now maintains a substantial diplomatic, commercial, intelligence, or strategic presence there. Iranian officials, Gulf Arab delegations and sovereign wealth funds, Israeli business networks, Chinese state actors, and international intermediaries increasingly move through overlapping circles in the same city. That creates a dense interconnected ecosystem of interlocators carrying messages and signals between competing actors. Beijing is becoming important less because China actively wants to mediate every regional crisis, and more because it offers a politically acceptable third space where rivals can interact indirectly, quietly, and with less public pressure than they would face in Western capitals.

There is a meaningful difference between an unwillingness to fully mediate and a willingness to selectively facilitate de-escalation. China has already demonstrated the latter in the Saudi-Iran rapprochement, where its greatest contribution was less coercive diplomacy than a neutral political platform both sides could use. That model may increasingly define China’s regional role going forward. Beijing will not replace American power, but it will offer diplomatic space where regional actors test off-ramps, communicate indirectly, and reduce tensions in areas where all sides see value in stabilization. Reports that China played a quiet backchannel role nudging Tehran toward the single round of April talks with Washington fit this pattern, and the timing of Ghalibaf’s appointment, days after Trump wrapped up his own visit to Beijing, is an imporant signal from Tehran.

None of this means China is suddenly replacing the United States as the dominant diplomatic actor in the Middle East. Washington remains the region’s primary military and security power. Nor does Beijing have an unlimited appetite to mediate. Its instinct remains cautious, selective, and tethered to protecting its own economic interests rather than taking ownership of deeply intractable conflicts. Beijing prefers stability without entanglement, and influence without liability to its core interests.

A bid to restart the 25 year agreement

One major reason for the new appointment is an Iranian bid to anchor the Iran-China 25 year deal to Iran’s post-war reconstruction. China remains Iran’s largest economic lifeline, its most important oil customer, and one of the few major powers capable of helping Iran partially break out of long-term economic isolation. That matters even more in a postwar environment where reconstruction, sanctions resilience, infrastructure investment, and energy exports will define the survival of the Iranian state.

Despite the rhetoric that surrounded the deal when it was announced in 2021, implementation on the Chinese side has remained limited and uneven. Many of the large-scale infrastructure, investment, and development promises Iran hoped for never truly materialized. Tehran wants Beijing to operationalize more of that agreement, particularly as the costs of war and economic strain accumulate. The recent Iranian state visit to China likely aimed to coordinate positions during negotiations and to secure longer-term Chinese political and economic commitment beyond the immediate crisis. Ghalibaf’s first move after taking the portfolio, an endorsement of Xi’s line that “the future belongs to the Global South,” is the rhetorical signal Beijing wants to hear in exchange.

Seen in that light, sending a senior wartime negotiator to Beijing is not really about mediation. It is about anchoring Iran’s future diplomatic and reconstruction strategy around deeper Chinese involvement. Whether Beijing is willing to fully embrace that role remains uncertain. But the fact that Tehran increasingly wants the conversation to happen in Beijing is itself a significant development.

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Sharing my initial thoughts on how the summit so far has addressed the question of Iran. There are a number of other related topics on the bilateral side, like trade and AI. This overview does not look at those.

What Trump and Xi did — and didn’t — settle in the Great Hall of the People

For weeks, the question hanging over Beijing was whether Donald Trump and Xi Jinping would produce something tangible on Iran. Oil prices, energy-shocked Asian capitals, and a war Trump cannot easily end all pointed toward the same hope that the world’s two most consequential leaders sitting across from each other for two-and-a-half hours might find an off-ramp. Unsurprisingly, they did not. The meeting instead produced a recommitment to the principle that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, rhetorical Chinese alignment on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, and a Chinese commitment to buy more U.S. gas. All of these are wins in the loose sense, but they are linked to the continuity of the war. But that is not a plan to end the war.

The clearest test of how much was actually achieved is the divergence between the two readouts. The White House version foregrounded Iran, Hormuz, fentanyl, agricultural purchases, and Chinese interest in buying more American oil. The Chinese readout barely mentioned Iran at all, folding it into a generic line about “exchanging views” on the Middle East. Taiwan, by contrast, dominated Beijing’s account. Xi told Trump, in language Chinese state media had been telegraphing for days, that mishandling Taiwan could push the relationship into “clashes and even conflicts.”

Public statements are rarely a wholistic picture of the discussion, but are more public posturing tools for both leaders to message to their domestic audiences the “wins” which matter most to their constitutions while posturing for future engagements. In that way, the leaders talk to each other, but also speak past each other.

In the end, Xi and Trump aligned on the easy things, made easily retractable statements, and agreed to keep arguing about the hard things.

The Iranian visit was the warm-up, not the agreement

The pre-summit visit by Iran’s foreign minister to Beijing was widely read as a sign that China was positioning to broker something. It was more modest than that. The visit gave Tehran and Beijing a moment to align on the areas of overlap – both want Hormuz functioning, both want the American military footprint to shrink, both want to deny Washington the satisfaction of a clean win – and to clarify their red lines with each other (Iran’s closure of the Straits of Hormuz) before Xi sat across from Trump. Naturally, China did not arrive in the Great Hall carrying an Iranian offer for a deal, but the Chinese leadership did do temperature check with Iran before the meeting, which is useful in China helping backchannel or explain to Trump Iran’s reasoning or potential ways out of the current situation. Time will tell with President Xi attempted to offer offramps or ideas to Trump.

Xi’s rhetorical support for reopening Hormuz, as reported in the White House readout, is significant if true because it could be a precursor to a next step for Chinese actions with or adjacent to U.S. efforts. This depends entirely on what Iran and the United States do next. We will have to wait and see how Tehran metabolizes the Beijing optics as well as whether the United States will escalate actions in Iran on the back end of the deal.

Nonproliferation was the lowest-hanging fruit — and they picked it

The one substantive Iran-related deliverable was the joint recommitment that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. This is the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree, but it is still juicy enough to be worth picking given how thin the other Iran outcomes were.

China has always been formally aligned with the nonproliferation principle, but the core question has been enforcement, sanctions relief, and what Beijing is willing to do about Iranian enrichment infrastructure when push comes to shove. A reaffirmation does not answer those questions, though reports that China offered to help remove Iran’s enriched uranium as part of a deal is notable. It does, however, give Washington something to point to, and it gives Beijing a way to demonstrate “responsible major power” credentials without committing to anything operational.

Strategic stability, on whose terms?

Xi’s opener — framing the summit around building a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability” — was the more interesting move, and the more revealing one. The phrasing signals that Beijing now sees itself, and its core interests, as worthy of being defended through an explicit understanding with Washington, rather than through ambiguity. The target audience for that framing beyond the White House is Taiwan, and Xi made the connection unmistakable when he called the island “the most important issue” in the relationship and threatened the potential for conflict if it is mishandled.

You can see Trump’s recent record on Venezuela and Iran shaping the atmospherics here. Beijing has watched the United States deploy hard power in two regions in quick succession — strikes on Venezuelan infrastructure and targets, an open-ended war with Iran — and it has drawn conclusions. China has already absorbed setbacks to its interests in both of those theaters, including disrupted energy flows from the Gulf, complications for its Latin America posture, exposure of the limits of its mediation diplomacy. None of those losses have yet come home to Beijing’s actual top priority, which is Taiwan and the broader question of who sets the terms in the western Pacific. Xi’s strategic stability pitch is, in part, an attempt to draw a bright red line around that issue.

The takeaway is China’s view that both sides play an equal, but different role in setting guardrails on the relationship to ensure that the actions of one does not create a ripple effect which undermines cooperation or stability in another. In Iran, that looks like managing the fallout of the Iran war on the global economy. However, where it is most important, as we will later see, is what it means for tech competition around AI, semiconductors, rare earth minerals, and other increasingly securitized sectors. Iran will be secondary to these categories.

What we actually learned

Strip away the choreography and three things came out of Beijing so far with regards to Iran:

First, both sides want a temperature reduction more than either wants a confrontation right now, Thus, the “strategic stability” is likely going to be the vernacular moving forward (rather than strategic competition).

Second, China is willing to lend its rhetorical weight to keeping Hormuz open, but it is not willing to spend its Iran leverage without compensation, and the compensation it cares about is Taiwan-shaped. I expect to see Beijing more forceful (short of conflict) when it comes to Taiwan and push back against policies it sees as undermining this position, like Taiwan’s purchase of U.S. military assets.

Third, the Iran war is not going to be ended in Beijing. All of the outcomes announced related to Iran deal with managing symptoms of the conflict, not the actual conflict itself. This reinforces my long-held view that China, while it could play a meaningful role, will resign itself to protecting its interests and avoid getting entangled in the conflict until there is a role it can play which does not carry the risks of either.

In that view, summit was useful, but far from decisive.

This piece was first featured with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), see the full article here.

The war against Iran has tested two competing narratives about security in the Middle East, and have sharpened the resilience of the Gulf Arab Countries.

Two competing theories of regional power have been running in the Middle East for the past two decades. Iran’s theory was that military reach, military technology and proxy networks could substitute for economic weight in accumulating regional influence. The deliberate cultivation of instability forced every regional actor to account, hedge against and often directly and indirectly fight Tehran. The Gulf Arab states developed the opposite theory that influence built on indispensability and economic development outlasts influence built on fear, chaos and instability. From their view, a state that makes itself essential to global energy markets, international capital flows and regional infrastructure gives its international partners their own reasons to defend its stability without waiting to be coerced into it.

Both strategies have produced differing returns at differing times. Iran accumulated influence well beyond what its economy could support by cultivating non-state allies which a foothold in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that enabled it to project counter-pressure on Israel and the United States. The Arab Gulf states meanwhile accumulated oil wealth, strong international partnerships, military hardware and, increasingly, technological capacity and innovation.

The current conflict is forcing a reckoning between them. Iran’s strategy of managed instability has run into its own structural limits, especially following the collapse of its influence in Syria after Assad’s fall and in Lebanon after Israel’s war on Hezbollah. The Gulf’s strategy of indispensability is being tested under pressure by both the US and Israeli strikes on Iran and Iran’s GCC targeted retaliations. The two strategies are now producing measurably different returns.

For full article, view here for free.

Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative (FII) kicked off this week in Miami, and AI took center stage of the dialogue. I have been following the panel sessions for unique insights which inform where AI is going amidst the current war. I highly encourage readers to watch them on FII’s Youtube. The below readout is a quick summary of the points I have found interesting so far.

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The shadow of Iran’s war with the United States and Israel loomed over every session at FII Priority Miami this week. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and regional energy disruptions now eclipsing the shocks of the COVID-19 era, the geopolitical stakes have reached a breaking point. Most significantly, the IRGC’s strikes against Amazon-owned data centers in the UAE and Bahrain mark the historical first military military assault on private-sector cloud infrastructure. Despite the regional chaos, Saudi Arabia is in Miami projecting aggressive continuity on its AI ambitions to an audience of investors, executives, policymakers, and world leaders. PIF Governor Yasir Al Rumayyan told the summit the Saudi fiscal position “remains strong, stable and resilient.” HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin was blunter: “We will not be taking it easy in terms of our ambition.”

I wanted to share a few key takeaways after watching the sessions so far:

1. Saudi Arabia is now selling AI to the United States

The headline deal at FII Miami was HUMAIN’s partnership with Silicon Valley’s Turing to build what both companies describe as the world’s first enterprise AI agent marketplace, hosted on HUMAIN’s own platform, HUMAIN ONE. This is HUMAIN’s first US-based customer. Amin underscored the significance of this: “Who would have thought Saudi Arabia could export technology to the United States? Who would have thought this is possible?”

This is a major milestone for HUMAIN and Saudi’s AI ambitions. It signals one of the first major shifts from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf writing checks to American technology companies to those American companies buying new digital products from a Gulf company. HUMAIN has successfully shown the capability for Gulf companies to invert that relationship. HUMAIN ONE will be a multi-agent orchestration platform that Amin described as an enterprise operating system with AI agents running core business functions like HR, finance, and legal, and with human employees acting as builders and supervisors, rather than operators. Turing will be HUMAIN’s first external customer deploying the new ONE system.

Why it matters: If HUMAIN can make the platform-exporter model work, it helps Saudi Arabia’s position in the global AI value chain shift from consumer to viable producer. It also helps balance the bilateral dependency that Saudi Arabia has deliberately cultivated with Washington and helps sell the long-term partnership value for linking American firms to Saudi compute and new technologies. Steven Cook wrote with Foreign Policy in February that Gulf states are investing in AI partly to guarantee American security commitments by making themselves essential to the US AI competition with China and they ensure their adversaries become Washington’s adversaries too. Selling platforms back to the US built on U.S. hardware (U.S. provided semiconductors and microchips) is the next iteration of that logic.

2. HUMAIN’s argument: organizational structure matters at this stage of AI development

The most substantive Gulf AI discussion at FII Miami was Amin’s appearance on a panel alongside IBM’s Gary Cohn and Riyadh Air CEO Tony Douglas. Amin opened by citing an MIT study finding that 95 percent of companies investing heavily in AI fail to see significant returns. He explained this was the result of corporate and organization structure, not hardware.

“If you approach models and AI applications in the format of just deploying it on top of legacy systems, legacy process, legacy organization, I will tell you you will not deliver on the result you want,”

HUMAIN, he argued, avoided this trap because it was built from scratch with no legacy ERP, no inherited workflows, and no organizational silos. Instead, their new product HUMAIN ONE was built as its own operating layer from day one. The company runs a revenue-share model for employees who build products that sell externally. This, he says, can turn any English-speaking thinker into a builder without exposure or deep knowledge of coding. He argued that what takes four months on a typical software development life cycle can now be done in may two to four days.

IMB’s Cohn offered the counterpoint from legacy enterprise. Most of the world’s GDP he argued is built on regulated industries like banking, healthcare, airlines, utilities, and regulators do not care if a company is mid-transformation toward a more AI-integrated model. They care that you are compliant. HE also pushed back on the 95 percent failure rate, arguing it reflects a reporting gap. Technologists and engineers inside large companies are using AI daily, but not telling leadership, because they are protecting their jobs.

Why it matters: Amin argues for Saudi Arabia’s greenfield advantage as an AI adoption advantage. From his view, since HUMAIN has no legacy systems, no inherited bureaucracy, no organizational debt, the invitation to global enterprise goes something like: “build on our platform because we already operate the way you wish you could.” In practice, HUMAIN is only twelve months old and is beginning to show what it is capable of delivering. But unleashing virtually unlimited capital to a single entity with top-down objective of translating Saudi AI ambitions into reality is a tall order. Time will tell if it can deliver at scale, especially amidst the current conflict and the post-conflict economic landscape. Investors at FII seemed bullish on its trajectory, and the regional chaos may also give them a distinct advantage given Saudi’s geography and economy make it more resilient to shocks than other Gulf countries. Investors may see Riyadh as a good medium term alternative to other gulf economies which are sustaining worse damage as a result of the war.

3. PIF is shifting from sole funder to platform operator

Al Rumayyan used FII Miami to announce that PIF’s new five-year strategy (2026–2030) will prioritize attracting third-party capital into PIF portfolio companies rather than funding everything with sovereign equity. “We want to get more and more people to work with us, to encourage third-party capital to work with us,” he told the summit. This is a structural departure from the fund’s previous model of leading massive projects with its own capital.

Why it matters: For AI specifically, this means HUMAIN and other PIF-backed technology companies will increasingly need to compete to attract commercial investment on their own merits, not just sovereign backing.

4. Latin America is emerging as a new corridor for Saudi AI and technology capital

Day 0 of FII Miami was entirely dedicated to a “New Latam Order Summit,” and positioned the region as a strategic investment destination for Gulf capital. Saudi Eksab and BTG Pactual signed a framework agreement to create a Latin America-focused alternative investment platform. Eksab also signed a separate agreement with the Inter-American Development Bank Group to build a joint pipeline of direct and indirect investment opportunities, initially focused on Central America and the Caribbean, with plans for a co-investment vehicle backed by IDB Invest. Eksab CEO Yazeed Alyahya said AI is the centerppiece of the strategy, telling Arab News that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman designated 2026 the year of artificial intelligence. FII CEO Richard Attias put it bluntly: “Latin America is no longer a region of potential. It is a region of decision.”

Why it matters: Saudi sovereign capital is diversifying its investments globally, and has set its sights on Latin America as a deployment destination. The sheer number of deals announced around Gulf-LATAM times shows that region is set to play an increasingly important role in the Gulf investment picture, and investors are building the institutional infrastructure to channel that capital in real time. One unique question I have is whether Gulf investment will favor U.S. or Chinese influence and investments in Latin America. After Trump’s Venezuela invasion, the future of Chinese investment has been somewhat debated, but the Gulf may be an acceptable backstop for Latin American countries which want a third option. This was the assertion of my previous paper (see below) and seems to reinforcement my initial assessment about the GCC becomes the “third" option for the global south.

5. Discussion on attacks on data centers as military targets was noticeably absent

The AI panels at FII Miami acknowledged the Iran crisis, but discussions on the Iranian strikes on AI infrastructure was noticeably absent from the conversation. The panel format allowed the Saudi event to project normalcy on the technology track while the geopolitical crisis played out elsewhere in the summit. Investors and hyperscalers, more generally, seem to be treating the strikes as an isolated episode, not a structural disqualifier for investments in the Gulf. No major firm has announced a withdrawal from the region. The HUMAIN-Turing deal went ahead on schedule (though this is not an infrastructure deal, it shows that US firms are still willing to do business). The working assumption among Gulf policymakers appears to be that physical risk can be mitigated — through hardened facilities, geographic diversification, and potentially some layered air defense systems.

Concluding Thoughts

Silicon Valley and U.S. investors remain notably bullish on Saudi Arabia despite regional instability. While high-level summits are rarely perfect barometers of sentiment, the sustained enthusiasm for KSA’s HUMAIN initiative and broader positive energy around the Kingdom’s deployment of AI suggests that investor confidence is not in retreat. Beyond structural incentives like subsidized power and land, Riyadh may emerge as a ‘safe harbor’ for AI capital. As neighboring Gulf states with competitive industries face the strain of Iranian-backed escalations, their focus has necessarily shifted to national defense, economic preservation, and protection of their populations. In contrast, Saudi Arabia’s ability to remain largely unscathed has allowed it to maintain its AI development momentum. This regional divergence could provide Riyadh with the strategic window it needs to close the gap created by the UAE’s early lead in the AI sector.

Thanks for reading. Make sure to subscribe for more.

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List of videos:

• FII Priority MIAMI 2026: How to Go AI-Native
  

• FII Priority MIAMI 2026: Where Is AI’s ROI?
  

• FII Priority MIAMI 2026: Is the Hyperscaler Partnership the Future of AI?
  

• FII Priority MIAMI 2026 DAY 2: Which Compute Hubs Will Win?
  

• FII PRIORITY Miami 2026 | Opening Show
  

• FII Priority MIAMI 2026: Building the Infrastructure for the On-Chain and AI Economy
  

Washington and Beijing share core interests in preventing a nuclear Iran and securing Gulf energy flows, yet diverge sharply on force, sanctions, and regime change, limiting coordination despite rising costs of inaction.

“The cost of non-coordination on the Gulf has risen high enough that limited alignment now looks more attractive than avoiding it. Neither Washington nor Beijing will reconcile their theories of order, but both now pay a visible price for the lack of coordination. Trump has demanded Chinese help in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, even though the closure results from a war China considers illegal. Trump’s claim that China receives ninety percent of its oil through the Strait is dramatically overstated, but it frames non-cooperation as free-riding. The Bessent–He Lifeng trade talks in Paris suggest both sides know cancellation is costly. The delay is leverage, not policy. It signals to Beijing that Washington may view the summit more as a bargaining tool than as a space for dialogue.

Beijing’s rational response is patience and silence. China is unlikely to send ships, pressure Tehran, or broker terms of a deal. Beijing would rather absorb short-term disruption than deliver Washington a win that validates the use of force or justifies regime change. Beijing’s official response exemplifies this careful balancing act: “As a sincere friend and strategic partner of Middle Eastern countries, China will continue to strengthen communication with relevant parties, including parties to the conflict, and play a constructive role for de-escalation and restoration of peace.”

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This is the next in a serise of ongoing surveys of Chinese-language sources on how Operation Epic Fury is reshaping the debate over compute infrastructure, AI militarization, and the future of tech investment in the GCC. This update provides a couple of other voices I missed on March 1-2 (which had interesting views worth sharing, as well as more recent commentary from the past few days. I conclude with analysis of whether the current moment is a business opportunity for Chinese hyperscalers and how this impacts Gulf digital sovereignty.

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Since Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone strikes began hitting Gulf Arab states on March 1, Chinese scholars, analysts, and financial commentators have produced a body of commentary which helps us pinpoint how Beijing thinkers are evaluating the unfolding conflict. Beijing’s analysts this week are asking a an import set of questions about who controls the nerve center of the AI era, about what the war reveals about American technological dependency, and about whether the conflict opens a door for Chinese compute providers to displace their American competitors across the Global South.

Lets dig in.

Data Centers as Strategic Targets

I found the most analytically precise Chinese framing of the AWS strikes came from Sun Chenghao, a researcher at Tsinghua University’s Center for Strategic and Security Studies and author of the popular substack (make sure to subscribe). Writing in First Financial (republished on Guancha) on March 6, Sun argued that data centers are approaching the status of a new class of strategic target. He argues that in the industrial era, military strikes aimed at oil and gas facilities, power plants, ports, and communications hubs disrupt the “blood supply system” of the economy. In the age of AI and cloud computing, he said, compute and data infrastructure have become a nation’s “nerve center.”

Sun stressed that the vulnerability is asymmetric. An adversary does not need to destroy an entire facility. Disrupting power supply, cooling systems, or key network nodes alone can cause prolonged outages that cascade into financial, logistics, and other civilian systems. The Middle East now hosts more than 300 data centers, with over half concentrated in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — a density that Iran has demonstrated it can reach.

I would be eager to hear ’s view on risks of Chinese hyperscalers and tech companies in the GCC countries.

Zhang Gaosheng, a scholar at the CIIS World Peace and Security Institute, extended this argument in a March 16 Global Times interview. He warned that Western commercial cloud-stored data — satellite imagery, communications intercepts, financial transaction records, social media traces — can easily be accessed by the US military in wartime and converted into targeting intelligence. In his policy conclusion, he argues that data centers, compute nodes, and communications cables now directly determine national security and wartime initiative. China, he argued, must accelerate the construction of autonomous and controllable cloud infrastructure, push for data localization, and build backup mechanisms to ensure survivability under extreme conditions.

The phrase Zhang used — "independent and controllable" (自主可控) — is worth pausing on. 自主 carries the sense of self-directed, acting on one's own authority without external dependence; 可控 means controllable. In this context Zhang is referencing national sovereignty and agency over technology supply chains. China controlling its own stack, rather than depending on American infrastructure that can be sanctioned, weaponized, or, as the war has now demonstrated, physically destroyed. It is the standard PRC policy vocabulary for indigenous technology substitution, the same formulation that runs through Made in China 2025 and Beijing's semiconductor self-sufficiency drive. Interestingly, Zhang’s writing carries a bit of deliberate ambiguity. Zhang may be directing his message inward, telling Chinese enterprises operating in the Gulf to migrate off American cloud services and onto domestic platforms for their own resilience. He may also be signaling outward, that Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and other Chinese providers should move into the markets the conflict is destabilizing to provide sustainable alternatives to U.S. hyperscalers under attack. What Zhang does not say explicitly, another Chinese analyst states in plain commercial terms (see toward the end of the report): Iran’s AWS strikes validate an export play for Chinese compute solutions across the Middle East. In short, China’s commercial selling point to the Middle East is “our data centers won’t be bombed by Iran.”

AI in the Kill Chain: Chinese Coverage of Claude’s Battlefield Role

Chinese media covered the use of AI in Operation Epic Fury with considerable depth and, in some cases, a level of granularity that exceeded mainstream Western reporting.

The most comprehensive Chinese-language treatment appeared from Mu Yang on 36Kr on March 16 under the headline “How the AI Model Claude Entered the US Military’s Kill Chain.” The piece traced the full arc of Claude’s integration into CENTCOM, noting that US Central Command used Claude continuously throughout the operation for intelligence assessments, target identification, and battle scenario simulations — even though Trump had issued an executive order banning all federal agencies from using Anthropic’s tools the day before the strikes began. Internal Pentagon assessments, the piece reported, indicated that replacing Claude would take three to six months, and potentially up to twelve, given how deeply it had been customized for Palantir workflows and contractor software pipelines. Mu framed the episode as what he called “the Oppenheimer Moment in the militarization of artificial intelligence” — not a single detonation announcing a new era, but a threshold crossed through the deep binding of technology to the machinery of killing. “AI is not a tool of war,” Mu wrote. “It is becoming the form of war itself.”

Yu Zheng, writing in The Economic Observer, published a similar analysis on March 2, framing the Khamenei strike as a product of AI’s deep integration into the kill chain. The piece identified what it called a “civilian-to-military” inversion: unlike the Cold War, when military R&D produced technologies (the internet, GPS) that later found civilian applications, the current AI militarization is defined by commercial models trained in consumer markets being adopted wholesale by the Pentagon. Large language models built by OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, the article argued, now exceed the general intelligence of many specialized systems developed inside the military’s closed ecosystem — a dependency that has created what it termed an unprecedented “strategy-capital symbiosis” between Silicon Valley and the defense establishment.

Zhang Junse, a Chinese military expert interviewed by the Global Times on March 16, placed the use of AI in the Iran war on an evolutionary continuum stretching back through Gaza to the early days of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In Ukraine, he argued, AI played a supporting role — helping with reconnaissance, target identification, and intelligence analysis, but with limited coordination between systems. By the time of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, AI had fused with joint command-and-control architecture, enabling real-time data sharing and coordinated operations across land, sea, air, space, electromagnetic, and cyber domains simultaneously. His bottom line: the battlefield role of AI has shifted “from auxiliary to core, from local to global, and from passive to autonomous.”

The OFweek AI platform struck a more cautious note on March 2. It confirmed that Claude played what it called an "indispensable" role in CENTCOM's intelligence workflow — collating intelligence, identifying targets, and running battlefield simulations — but stressed that humans remained in the loop on final decisions throughout. The more striking observation was operational: the White House ordered a ban on Claude before the war began, but Claude was already so deeply woven into Pentagon systems that pulling it out mid-conflict was not a realistic option. Whether it can be extracted going forward, the piece noted, remains an open question.

How this impacts Chinese tech interests in the Middle East

Zhu Zhaoyi, director of the Middle East Institute at Peking University’s HSBC Business School, gave a wide-ranging interview to the Securities Times (published March 6 on Phoenix Financial) that addressed what the war means for Chinese corporate exposure in the Gulf. In his blunt assessment of the Gulf, he noted the UAE has been hardest hit among GCC states, for three reasons. Its deep normalization with Israel made it Iran’s highest-value target. Its economy depends heavily on foreign investor confidence. And it hosts a concentration of multinational regional headquarters whose presence rests on the now-damaged premise that the Emirates are a “safe oasis.”

Zhu argues that Chinese enterprises need to triage their interests in the Gulf. More specifically, he makes a case for separating between core assets worth defending and peripheral ones that can be pulled back. He predicted Chinese companies will pivot as a response to the war toward lighter-footprint engagement, likely focused on technology service contracts, management exports, and consulting agreements rather than direct equity or heavy infrastructure. He also expected a geographic redistribution, with investment migrating away from the UAE toward Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar. None of this, in his view, signals a rupture of China’s commercial presence in the Gulf. The underlying logic of Chinese interests in the Gulf still holds. China needs energy and overseas markets, and the Gulf needs technology, infrastructure capacity, and renminbi diversification channels. But new projects, he said, will sit in a holding pattern until the security picture clarifies.

Gu Jiashi, an economics PhD writing on Guancha within 48 hours of the strikes (March 2), argued that the war's impact on the AI supply chain was the variable Chinese investors were underestimating. The Gulf, he wrote, provides three pillars to the global AI buildout: cheap energy to power data centers, sovereign wealth fund capital to finance them, and a geographic position at the data-transit crossroads linking Asia, Europe, and Africa. The AWS strikes demonstrated that all three pillars now sit inside a conflict zone. AI infrastructure has moved from bystander to battlefield target. And the cascading effects run in both directions — the Strait of Hormuz closure drives up energy costs for data centers globally, while Gulf sovereign funds facing reconstruction bills at home have less capital to deploy into overseas AI investments. The squeeze, in Gu's framing, hits compute from the supply side and the funding side at the same time.

Finally, a financial analysis from a Chinese netizen on East Money (March 7) made the investment case for China most explicitly. The AWS strikes, the author argued, highlight the core value of compute sovereignty. Domestically, Chinese government and enterprise users would accelerate migration off foreign public clouds and onto Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud. Internationally, growing wariness of US chip controls and American cloud service geopolitical risk would create breakthrough opportunities for Chinese compute solutions — specifically naming Huawei Ascend clusters, domestically produced servers, and smart computing centers — in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The Chinese commercial play is risky for Gulf states

The Chinese discourse on compute sovereignty reads the AWS strikes as a potenial market opening for Chinese enterprises, but the near-term value proposition for Gulf states to migrate AI workloads from Western clouds onto Chinese alternatives is weaker than Beijing’s analysts suggest. GCC governments are not in a position to execute a wholesale shift in cloud service providers in the middle of a kinetic conflict. The operational priority is continuity, not diversification. What the strikes have actually accelerated is a different kind of migration largely of data from Gulf-hosted data centers to offshore facilities in less exposed regions. Amazon itself advised customers to replicate workloads to other AWS regions outside the Middle East. The immediate logic for Gulf enterprises and government agencies runs toward geographic redundancy within existing provider ecosystems, not toward swapping ecosystems entirely. Onboarding a new hyperscaler, which includes rewriting APIs, recertifying security frameworks, retraining staff, and renegotiating data residency agreements, takes months under normal conditions. Under fire, this is not a serious option.

The sovereignty problem cuts deeper than the commercial one, and it runs against every available option. Gulf states — the UAE above all — built their AI strategies around a hard data sovereignty requirement: sensitive data stays onshore, processed on local infrastructure, under national jurisdiction. That principle drove the construction of domestic data center capacity in the first place. The war has blown a hole in the logic. Onshore infrastructure can be physically destroyed or taken offline by missile strikes, which means the sovereignty premise and the security premise now pull in opposite directions. Couture and Toupin argued in their 2019 taxonomy of digital sovereignty that sovereignty in the digital realm is not binary because it exists on a spectrum defined by where data is stored, who processes it, under whose legal jurisdiction, and who can compel disclosure. Using the UAE as a case, before this war, Emirati data on AWS servers in Abu Dhabi sat at the high-sovereignty end of that spectrum. When those workloads have to move offshore for survivability — whether to AWS regions in Frankfurt, Google facilities in Mumbai, or anywhere else outside the blast radius — the data slides down the spectrum involuntarily. The commercial relationship with the provider stays intact, but the legal and political control over the data does not. Abu Dhabi’s leverage over what happens to that data weakens the moment it crosses a border, and it does not matter whose cloud carries it. A Chinese hyperscaler hosting Emirati government workloads in Shanghai poses the same jurisdictional exposure as an American one hosting them in Virginia. The dependency rotates; it does not resolve.

The conflict has exposed that concentrating AI infrastructure within missile range of a hostile regional power both threatens the physical infrastructure and hardware, while also undermining the entire sovereignty architecture built on top of it. This creates a unique design problem GCC states: every option for protecting data and ensuring continuity of AI systems means trading one form of control for another. If they keep their data onshore, they retain jurisdiction but accept that their servers sit inside the blast radius. If they move it offshore, they gain survivability but surrender the jurisdictional control that sovereignty was designed to protect. If they distribute across multiple regions, they gain redundancy but fragment their data across competing legal regimes.

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The war in Iran has arrived at a particularly brutal moment for the Gulf’s AI ambitions. Gulf states were in the middle of a buildout exceeding $300 billion in data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure, backed by OpenAI, xAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google. The Pax Silica initiative of January 2026 had just brought the UAE and Qatar formally into a US-led framework to keep advanced semiconductors away from China. The architecture seemed locked in.

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Then on March 1, Iranian drones struck three AWS data centers — two in the UAE and one in Bahrain. The IRGC claimed responsibility, framing the attacks as targeting facilities it said supported “the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” Banking and payments failed, and enterprise software across the region went dark. AWS told affected clients to migrate ongoing workloads to other AWS regions and direct traffic away from the Middle East. It was the first time in history that data centers had been deliberately targeted as military objectives in an active conflict.

Iran has since escalated rhetorically. IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency published a list of “new targets” spanning 29 locations across Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, and the UAE, naming Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Nvidia, IBM, and Palantir facilities explicitly as “enemy technology infrastructure.” The warning threatened that “...as the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands.” Included in the list are Nvidia’s largest R&D center outside the US in Haifa, Google’s Dubai regional office, IBM’s AI research hub in Be’er Sheva, Palantir’s Abu Dhabi collaboration center, Oracle’s Jerusalem, and Abu Dhabi offices, as well as more AWS facilities.

How the Tech Companies Are Responding

The hyperscalers have not said much publicly, but they have begun preparing for more potential attacks. Nvidia shut its Dubai office and shifted to remote work. CEO Jensen Huang sent a company-wide memo saying his crisis management team was “working around the clock and actively supporting affected employees and their families” in the Middle East. Amazon instructed all corporate employees in the Middle East to work remotely and “follow local government guidelines.” Dozens of Google employees were stranded in Dubai after the company’s cloud sales conference when commercial flights were cancelled, a company memo to staff called the situation “concerning.” Google’s public statement was careful to the point of saying very little: “The situation in the Middle East is evolving rapidly and we are monitoring it carefully. Our focus is on the safety and well-being of our employees in the region.”

It is safe to say that companies are now scenario planning if Iran acts on its threats. This could slow new capital deployments and pause some planned partnerships until it is clearer what comes next in the Iran conflict. Tess deBlanc-Knowles at the Atlantic Council told CNBC that rather than exiting the Gulf, companies are more likely to hedge. The sunk costs are too large for most to contemplate a full exit. But Patrick J. Murphy from Hilco Global argued that, instead, companies may accelerate projects in Northern Europe, India, or Southeast Asia, “where power supply, regulatory frameworks and security conditions are more predictable.” Geopolitical strategist Abishur Prakash told Rest of World: “This is all inverted now, exposing the entire technology landscape and ambitions of the region.”

The Security Architecture Quesiton

The strikes have exposed how datacenter security was largely focused on preventing ground-based incursions and external infiltration. It does not effectively factor kinetic air strikes. Ali Bakir, assistant professor of international affairs at Qatar University, told Rest of World: “The security frameworks underpinning the US-UAE AI partnership appear to have focused on supply chain control and geopolitical alignment, not on physical defense during high-intensity conflict.” Geopolitical strategist Abishur Prakash told the same outlet: “Strategic planning revolved almost entirely around energy and financial flows, leaving technology infrastructure vulnerable.”

The Pax Silica architecture was designed to keep Chinese chips out — not to protect data centers from ballistic missiles. Those are different problems requiring different solutions, and only one of them received serious policy attention before the war began.

The connectivity picture is equally exposed. Seventeen submarine cables pass through the Red Sea, carrying the majority of data traffic between Europe, Asia, and Africa. Additional cables run through the Strait of Hormuz. If these are cut off, as occurred following Iran attacks last year, then even the best functioning data centers cannot serve the larger customer base beyond the GCC, causing regional blackouts, not just in the Gulf.

Compounding the problem is the dual-use argument that Gulf data centers are legitimate military targets because they are being actively deployed for military purposes. Fortune reported that the US military used Anthropic’s Claude — running on AWS — for intelligence assessments, target identification, and battle simulations during the Iran strikes. If commercial cloud infrastructure carries military workloads, adversaries can and will treat it as military infrastructure — but international law scholars Klaudia Klonowska and Michael Schmitt argue in Just Security that Iran’s own stated rationale — striking the facilities “to identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities” — may itself be unlawful, since the law of armed conflict requires that determination to be made before an attack, not by conducting one. That legal ambiguity offers cold comfort to the companies whose servers are burning. As Zachary Kallenborn, PhD researcher at King’s College London, told Fortune: “If data centers become critical hubs for transiting military information, we can expect them to be increasingly targeted by both cyber and physical attacks.”

What Comes Next

The structural question the war has forced into the open will not disappear when the shooting stops. Can the Gulf region build the world’s most ambitious AI infrastructure while sitting inside an active conflict zone, with no physical security framework covering those assets, and with a security architecture designed for a different threat entirely?

The short answer is yes. But there will be a moment of taking stock — and the Gulf is living through it right now. The immediate task is protecting the facilities Iran has already named, the staff inside them, and finding more effective ways to de-risk infrastructure that nobody designed for a shooting war.

It is also worth keeping the threat in proportion. Hitting a data center will, for now, do less damage than destroying oil and gas infrastructure. A single drone in a couple of AWS availability zones is not going to move the global cost of compute. Amazon has already demonstrated the countermeasure is viable by routing workloads to other regions, keeping outages temporary and local. A sustained blockade on Gulf energy exports does not have the same kind of redundancy and ripples through the global economy in ways a degraded cloud region simply does not. So yes, AI infrastructure will be targeted. Iran has made that plain. But the effect will be narrower than the other targets Iran is trying to hit, and the operators have more tools to absorb the blow.

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This is my first attempt of using Substack Recording Studio to create video contact. In this video, I unpack some of the challenges facing any aid response in Iran and some of the hurdles for scaling an aid delivery.

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Iran’s humanitarian crisis is growing quickly, with UNHCR estimating that as many as 3.2 million people may already be temporarily displaced inside the country. The needs are likely to be immense: shelter, food, water, fuel, cash assistance, trauma care, medicines, maternal and child health, sanitation, and support for host communities absorbing those fleeing the strikes. But the problem is not only the scale of need. It is that Iran is an extremely difficult environment for outside humanitarian response due to restrictions by the current authorities. Sanctions risk, banking restrictions, compliance burdens, and strict state controls over foreign funding sharply limit what can move and how fast it can move. The main viable delivery actor inside Iran is the Iranian Red Crescent, backed internationally by the IFRC, rather than a large U.N.-run operational presence.

At the same time, the regional logistics environment is deteriorating. The Gulf would normally be the most plausible platform for financing, staging, and moving aid, but Iran is actively striking the GCC, degrading the very Arab hubs that would usually support humanitarian delivery. That shifts attention to narrower and less efficient corridors, especially Turkey, Iraq, and Azerbaijan. Turkey in particular is already preparing for possible refugee inflows and treating the crisis as a humanitarian, border-management, and national-security challenge.

The hardest question, however, begins once aid enters Iran. How do aid providers track where it goes and verify that it reaches civilians in need when access for outside observers is limited? That is what makes this crisis so dangerous. The needs are rising faster than the available channels to meet it.

The preliminary emergency appeal is here:

*Please note that some may argue my comment on the Iranian Red Crescent being a state-run entity is incorrect (which I admit may have been the wrong framing), but the Iranian Parliament passed a law which requires the Chairperson of the organization to be appointed by the President of Iran.

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Since March 9th, the commentary on Iran from Chinese commentators has exploded into a large number of topics including energy, Iran’s selection of a new leader, how mediation is going, the nuclear question, and so on. For this update, I am focusing on a smaller sample of views I found particularly interesting concerning mediation, Iran’s new leader, and changes in the Foreign Ministry’s increasing call for ending indiscriminate attacks in the Persian Gulf (without naming names). I conclude with how I think China’s mediation has met its low ceiling in the conflict and what it can achieve (and what it can’t).

Let’s dig in.

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Li Mingjiang, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, argued in an interview with Lianhe Zaobao that Zhai Jun’s mission was primarily meant to stress “the hope of stopping the conflict as soon as possible and achieving a ceasefire.” He also observed that Beijing had offered Iran’s new leader “no obvious political support,” underscoring the caution of China’s response. Li’s interpretation was that China was trying to signal support for de-escalation without becoming politically overcommitted to the evolving leadership situation in Tehran.

Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar interviewed in the same report, commented that Beijing is watching closely to see how Mojtaba Khamenei governs after succeeding his father. Shen’s core point was that Chinese observers are wary of whether Iran’s new leadership will continue the previous line of developing nuclear weapons “to confront Israel”. His piece carries a similar reading as Li’s, namely that China’s mediation posture is still a guarded one. Beijing will not simply mediate to defend Iran, but will first assess whether the new Iranian leadership itself is likely to follow the same ambition of creating a nuclear bomb.

Zhu Feng, dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University, argued also in an interview with Lianhe Zaobao that “in principle and morally, China is firmly on Iran’s side.” At the same time, he acknowledged the practical limits of Beijing’s diplomacy, saying Zhai Jun’s trip to the Middle East would likely not be able to stop continued U.S.-Israeli military strikes against Iran. Instead, Zhu said the mission could still serve a useful purpose by reducing misjudgments between Iran and Arab states and helping prevent the conflict from widening further around Iran. His view combined moral and political sympathy for Iran with a sober assessment of China’s limited leverage.

Long Chen, assistant researcher at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, argued that the current conflict has since deviated from its predetermined course and is hurtling headlong into a direction no one can control. He comments that “…this war has never been a simple military standoff, but rather a power struggle, an entanglement of interests, and the displacement of countless civilians.”

Sun Degang, director of the Middle East Research Center at Fudan University, pointed out that the US plan in Iran was a swift victory, fearing that a prolonged war would affect the midterm elections. But when a swift victory is hopeless, a "dignified withdrawal" becomes the only rational option. The conflict is likely to transition to a "fight-while-talking" phase when both sides are exhausted, ultimately forming a temporary ceasefire framework acceptable to all parties.

Faisa, identified by People’s Daily Online as an expert for People’s Arabic edition, argues that China sees Zhai Jun’s current shuttle diplomacy as an effort to contain escalation in the Iran crisis, not end it. In her analysis (which closely mirrors state language), Beijing’s priority is to push all sides to halt fighting, prevent the conflict from widening across the region, and steer the parties back toward negotiations. Implicit in her writing is also a reputational angle, which she writes is to reinforce China’s image as a stabilizing power in the Middle East that favors political solutions, respect for sovereignty, and dialogue over confrontation.

Chinese FM Spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded on March 11 to an Iran question from a journalist that “China does not go along with attacks against countries in the Gulf region and condemns nondiscriminatory attacks against civilians or non-military targets. The pressing priority now is to stop military operations at once and prevent the conflict from spreading. The way out of the conflict is to return to dialogue and negotiation as soon as possible and strive for restoration of peace. The fundamental solution is to jointly return to the right track of abiding by international law and basic norms of international relations.”

He goes on to describe the current mediation: “Since the very first day of the conflict, China has unequivocally called for ceasefire, end of hostilities, return to dialogue and negotiation, and political settlement. As we speak, Special Envoy of the Chinese Government on the Middle East Issue is in the Middle East to carry out shuttle diplomacy. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and sincere friend of Middle Eastern countries, China will stay committed to urging peace and defending justice and fairness. China will continue to strengthen communication with relevant parties, including parties to the conflict, and play a constructive role for deescalation and restoration of peace.

My takeaways over the past few days

I argued in a 2024 bookchapter on Chinese “strategic facilitation” in the Persian Gulf:

“China, however, has yet to provide any meaningful guarantees to offset the concerns of Tehran and Riyadh, particularly in the realm of security. One of the primary miscalculations in China’s perspective on the Gulf crisis is the extremity of the security dilemma at play in the Gulf. Among the primary drivers of the Iran-Saudi rivalry, military competition, which has proliferated into a regional competition for influence among neighboring states and nonstate actors, continues to be one of the major impediments to resolution.”

This has been the ceiling of China’s diplomacy for nearly a decade. When an Iran-linked drone slammed into Saudi Aramco oil infrastructure, China avoided assigning blame or aligning itself openly with either Tehran or Riyadh. Instead, it pursued a calibrated middle course: urging restraint and de-escalation while muting U.S. and Saudi accusations of Iranian responsibility. As one analyst put it, Beijing was “unwilling to become embroiled in the rivalry,” preferring to deepen ties with both sides in order to project deliberate neutrality.

Seven years later, Iran, in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes, is raining missiles and drones across the GCC, targeting not only oil infrastructure but also civilian buildings and critical infrastructure. In the present conflict, there is no viable or plausible way for China to frame Iran’s attacks on the Gulf without assigning some degree of blame to Tehran. To be sure, the United States and Israel initiated this specific round of fighting, and Chinese scholars generally agree that China will not attempt to mediate directly between Washington and Tehran. The outer limit of its diplomacy, for now, is to call on all parties to return to the table. But Chinese authorities are approaching the limits of neutrality when it comes to Iran and the GCC. But, any such credible condemnations of Iran will run up against the redline of other Chinese authorities–lending any any credibility to U.S.-Israeli strikes.

The evidence is already visible in the Foreign Ministry’s public statements. When Guo Jiakun states that “China does not go along with attacks against countries in the Gulf region and condemns nondiscriminatory attacks against civilians or non-military targets,” he is indirectly referring to Iran in addition to the United States and Israel—not the GCC. The remarkable restraint shown by Gulf states has resonated in China, as it has elsewhere. Many would argue that such clear violations of national sovereignty, especially direct attacks by Iran, would provide reasonable grounds for GCC retaliation. But the region understands the escalatory spiral that such a response could unleash, and so does China. Beijing may face pressure to be louder, not quieter, in condemning Iranian actions. Doing so will unavoidably mean placing Iran alongside Israel and the United States, something China has thus far refrained from doing. Beijing is reaching the low ceiling of its mediation role.

So, the big question: Could China be the broker of Middle East peace? I personally remain skeptical. The heavy lifting of mediation and diplomatic outreach is still led by the GCC, even in the face of Iranian rocket, missile, and drone attacks. One of my biggest takeaways is that, even in the midst of this war, the GCC mediation narrative that many concluded the Gulf had adopted as rhetoric or cheap PR wins has proven resilient in the face of major escalation. If this war ends through diplomatic means, it will likely be the Gulf Arab states who broker it.

Finally, where is Chinese mediation going to be most applicable then? I suspect we will see more intensive Chinese mediation occuring on the periphery of the Iran conflict to prevent the spread of conflict eastward into Pakistan and Afghanistan, where flareups are already underway. There are reports that China is stepping in to help reduce tensions between the two neighbors and prevent a spillover. This will be an area to keep watching.

Thanks for reading. Please like, comment, share, subscribe, and, consider supporting more of my work.

Forward: I have been very vocal about China needing to play a large role in mediating in the Persian Gulf given its most important regional economic partners (the GCC) are actively being attacked by its strategic partner of choice (Iran) in the region, who is being attacked by their most important global competitor (the US). There are a number of competing views which quesiton the extent to which China has the will and leverage to do so. I have written extensively on Chinese mediation in the Persian Gulf and will be the first to highlight those limitations, both in terms of capacity and interest. Yet, despite these challenges, Zhai Jun, China’s Middle East Special Envoy, is in the region doing mediation but it is not clear exactly what that means yet. It does not mean China mediating between the U.S. and Iran, but rather China helping end Iran’s assault on the GCC.

The Zhai Jun mission is the first physical deployment of a Chinese envoy to the conflict zone since Operation Epic Fury began. It is a major step up from telephone diplomacy signaling that Beijing sees the situation is grave enough(or they see enough opportunity) to require a direct regional presence. For now, that is the best China can deliver to the GCC and Iran.

What Chinese media has noted

Spokesperson Mao Ning announced at the March 5 Foreign Ministry press conference that China would send Jun to the region in the near term to make active efforts toward de-escalation. Speaking with his Saudi and UAE counterparts on March 4, Wang Yi stated that China remained a force for peace and was willing to continue playing a constructive role, reiterating that war spillover served no party’s interests and that civilian protection, energy infrastructure safety, and freedom of navigation were all non-negotiable red lines. Wang specifically praised the GCC’s emergency foreign ministers’ meeting for affirming that dialogue and diplomacy were the only paths through the crisis.

Li Zhenjie, associate researcher at the Mediterranean Studies Institute of Zhejiang International Studies University, told Sputnik Chinese on March 4 that China occupies a structurally unique position in the crisis precisely because Washington has disqualified itself as a mediator. With the United States as the conflict’s provacator and regional powers too internally divided to play a bridging role, China can project itself as a responsible major power capable of maintaining effective communication with all Middle Eastern parties and the major European states, giving it a rare platform for crisis management. He argued that Beijing’s public reaffirmation of support for Iran’s sovereignty following Khamenei’s death served a concrete stabilizing function. He argued It helped shore up morale within Iran’s transitional leadership and demonstrated to Tehran that it was not internationally isolated. Li also framed China’s mediation posture as speaking beyond the bilateral relationship. From his view, Beijing’s calls to stop the fighting amounted to an appeal on behalf of every country touched by the spillover (the GCC and other Arab states).

Mapping the Opportunities and the Limits of Mediation

China is not sending Zhai Jun to stop the war. No Chinese envoy is going to walk into Riyadh or Abu Dhabi and persuade Washington to stand down its carrier strike groups or convince Jerusalem to halt a campaign it has spent years planning. Beijing knows this. The core questions we have to answer: 1) What can Zhai Jun credibly achieve within these constraints? 2) Is the mission calibrated to those realistic objectives or to something more ambitious? If the latter, failure could expose the limits of Chinese influence rather than demonstrate it.

There is the potential for reputational gain through mediation, but the path is narrow. In the moment of writing this, China is the only major power with working relationships on all sides of this conflict. Washington has, at least for now, disqualified itself as a mediator by becoming a combatant. Europe lacks the regional standing and the political will; its response to Epic Fury has been a combination of strongly worded statements and institutional paralysis. Russia’s deep ties to Iran compromise whatever credibility it might otherwise bring to the Gulf states, who are simultaneously absorbing Iranian strikes and watching Moscow say nothing about them. That structural vacancy is real, and Beijing’s decision to fill it — keeping lines open while everyone else either joined the fight or receded into irrelevance — cannot be easily dismissed. When we divorce analysis from the western frame of reference and look through the lens of the Persian Gulf states, China’s neutrality, while sometimes frustrating for each side when the other escalates, has broadly been accepted. As I have previously argued, China’s strategic balancing in the Persian Gulf has taken years to build and could be undermined in a matter of weeks if not carefully protected. With this in mind, Zhai Jun has to walk a tightrope, but the pressure to deliver something for Chinese national interests is growing.

There is also a Global South dimension Beijing is clearly playing to. After Venezuela and now Iran, the narrative of US militarism in the international community is writing itself. Two governments in two hemispheres, both adversarial to Washington, both targeted by American military action within months of each other — the through-line is not subtle, and it lands. China presenting itself in a mediator role aims to feed directly into that story, projecting Beijing once again as a willing, neutral third party between Iran and the GCC states. How much that narrative actually moves regional governments when rockets are flying, shifts the region’s changing alignments, or produces measurable diplomatic outcomes is genuinely hard to quantify. Reputational gains of this kind are diffuse, slow-moving, and rarely decisive in the near term. But they compound. Beijing, despite its uncertainty about how to navigate its current position, is playing a longer game with the Gulf region than US leadership seems capable of at this moment in the conflict.

That does not remove the risks of attempting mediation. Showing up creates expectations, and expectations that go unmet could carry their own costs. If Zhai Jun returns without something Beijing can point to - the gold standard would be a permanent reduction in Iranian strikes on Gulf infrastructure or even a joint statement that signals forward movement - the mission becomes its own liability. China risks looking less like a capable stakeholder and more like an ineffectual bystander. Whether that actually damages Chinese standing with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in any serious way is unclear.

For China, showing up as a mediator (even if it purely rhetorical) was already half the game. No other major power with Beijing’s relationships and clout across the region has been willing to try. But showing up is where the easy part ends, and being clear-eyed about what China can actually accomplish — and what it cannot — is the only honest basis for judging whether the mission succeeds or fails.

The structural constraints are severe. There is a US armada in the region near the Strait of Hormuz. It is actively bombing Iran. Iran wants to sink it. China has no ability to change any of those facts, and no diplomatic instrument that bears on the military balance between Washington and Tehran. Beijing cannot stop the strikes. It likely cannot guarantee safe passage through a strait that two armed forces are actively contesting (though they may try). It cannot negotiate a ceasefire that the US and Israel have not already decided to accept. These are the hard ceiling of what Chinese diplomacy can reach in a conflict where the primary belligerents are not listening to Beijing and have no particular reason to start.

The more concrete and achievable gain is on the Gulf side of the equation. Beijing does not need to stop US and Israeli strikes to protect its core interests. It needs to prevent the conflict from consuming the Gulf economic architecture it has spent a decade investing in. Beijing may actually be able to do something about that. There are real limits to what that translates to in terms of tangible support for the Gulf — China will not be providing interceptors to shoot down Iranian drones — but it could convince Iran to stop firing them.

If Zhai Jun can credibly communicate to Tehran — through whatever channels exist — that continued strikes on GCC infrastructure risk the one major power relationship Iran still has, that carries some weight. Iran needs China more than China needs Iran, and Beijing has rarely been willing to use that asymmetry directly. A genuine signal that GCC strikes are a red line for Beijing would be the single most concrete outcome the mission could produce. Iran’s leadership appears to have agreed to stop targeting the GCC in the past 48 hours — but it is too early to attribute that to Chinese mediation. My early read is that it may be one driver, but the larger factor is the GCC’s own insistence that it played no role in US strikes on Iran, combined with continuous pressure on Tehran to stand down before Gulf states are forced into the conflict directly.

The mediation mission succeeds if it preserves Chinese access to all parties, produces at least one visible diplomatic output Beijing can point to, keeps GCC confidence in Chinese partnership intact, and signals clearly enough to Tehran that strikes on Gulf soil carry a cost in the relationship that actually matters to Iranian survival. That is a modest definition of success.

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In Kenneth Waltz’s levels of analysis, international relations students learn early to examine international relations at three levels: the global international order (the system), the states which comprise it (the state), and the substate organs of power (the man) — leaders, institutions, voters, civil society, the military. These all shape how states choose to interact and, in some cases, go to war. Of these, the one we fail to spend sufficient time exploring is the psychology of the leader making decisions, the circle of influence around that leader, and the dynamics which shape their thinking such as their world view, core assumptions, decision-making frameworks, and degree of rationality and logic applied to both concrete and abstract decisions. In practical politics, readers who work in or near government understand these dynamics because passing policy is often an art of reading a leader, his advisors, and the structures which frame their worldview. I want to lean in on this point by drawing on the work of the late Aaron Rapport, a great international relations scholar (and my former professor) who passed away in 2019 after a long battle with cancer, and whose contributions to political science had an outsized role in my own analytical process.

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Rapport’s signature contribution was the application of construal level theory — CLT — to strategic assessment. His argument, tested against the Bush administration’s preparations for postwar Iraq, ran as follows: when leaders conceive of military campaigns as sequential phases, they evaluate near-term operations concretely, focused on how things will be executed, attentive to feasibility, receptive to critical information. But they evaluate distant operations abstractly, focused on why they are fighting, fixated on the desirability of their goals, reliant on preexisting beliefs, and resistant to concrete warnings about costs.

Three mechanisms drive this pattern. First, abstract construal privileges desirability over feasibility: leaders can articulate what they want from the endgame but struggle to articulate how they will achieve it. Second, communication fluency shifts: leaders in an abstract mindset become unreceptive to concrete information challenging their postwar assumptions. Third, leaders rely on simplified mental models drawn from prior experience rather than case-specific evidence, which obscures how a given situation departs from the template in their heads.

The parallels between Iraq 2003 and Iran 2026 are striking. In some ways the current case is more extreme.

Start with the sequential framing. President Trump has explicitly projected a combat timeline of “four to five weeks” and framed the operation around defined military targets: the navy, the missile program, nuclear infrastructure, IRGC leadership. The “day after” is not merely neglected — it is actively pushed into a separate cognitive category. When Defense Secretary Hegseth told the Pentagon press corps on March 3 that “this is not Iraq, this is not endless — this operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission,” he was performing exactly the framing operation Rapport identified as the precondition for abstract construal of later phases. The sharper the separation between “combat” and “what comes after,” the more abstract the leader’s assessment of the latter becomes.

Now consider the first mechanism: desirability over feasibility. Trump can articulate his goals with confidence. Destroy the missile program. Eliminate the nuclear threat. Sink the navy. Give Iranians their “freedom.” But when asked on March 4 about the worst-case outcome, the president replied: “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen.” He then acknowledged that “most of the people we had in mind” as potential successors “are dead,” adding, “Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. Pretty soon, we’re not going to know anybody.” These are not the statements of a leader who has assessed feasibility. They are the statements of a leader so captured by the desirability of his goals that the gap between ends and means has become invisible.

The communication fluency problem — Rapport’s second mechanism — is equally acute. Congressional briefings have produced bipartisan fury. Senator Mark Warner observed that the war’s stated goals have shifted four or five times. Senator Blumenthal left the classified briefing “more fearful than ever.” House Democrats, less charitably, called the briefing “bullshit.” But these concrete warnings are not landing. The administration’s cognitive frame filters them out. This mirrors what Rapport documented with Jay Garner’s pre-invasion Phase IV (a term used to describe post-conflict operations) briefing in 2003, at which President Bush and NSC principals asked no questions and struck the head of postwar planning as uninterested in his mission.

The third mechanism — reliance on simplified beliefs — manifests as the Venezuela template. Trump appears to be mapping his experience with the Maduro extraction onto Iran: decapitate the regime and a cooperative successor emerges to do business. This simplified mental model obscures how radically Iran’s political system — with its layered clerical-military hierarchy, its eighty-eight-member Assembly of Experts, and a deeply institutionalized Revolutionary Guard — departs from Venezuela’s autocratic structure and the extent to which Iran has prepared for the current scenario. The Israeli strike on the Assembly of Experts while it was selecting a new supreme leader suggests the coalition is improvising the destruction of the succession mechanism without a theory of what replaces it. Rapport would recognize the pattern instantly: a leader deducing outcomes from a general belief about regime change rather than from the concrete specifics of the Iranian case or any empirically-informed understanding of what comes next.

There is one dimension where the Trump case diverges instructively from Rapport’s Iraq analysis. Bush and Rumsfeld had arguably longer time horizons than the Trump administration when they undertook the Iraq war. This is not become they were planning effectively, but generally, they sought democratic transformation of the Middle East and long-term deterrence. Their abstract construal of the endgame followed from the depth of their investment in transformative goals. Trump’s time horizons oscillate. His stated objectives swing between transformative ambition — “freedom for the people,” regime change — and narrow military targets. Hegseth insists “this is not a so-called regime change war,” then adds, “but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.” This incoherence may represent multiple cognitive frames competing within a single decision-making unit, with Rubio and Hegseth articulating modest military objectives while Trump and allies like Lindsey Graham voice transformative aspirations. The problem is that the operation’s design — killing the supreme leader, bombing the succession body — is a regime-change operation regardless of what anyone calls it. The mismatch between stated objectives and operational reality is itself an artifact of the construal level theory. In other words, the abstract framing produces actions that presuppose transformation while the concrete justifications trail far behind.

Rapport wrote that leaders who believe postwar conditions will be favorable tend to outsource Phase IV (post-conflict stabilization operations) to the population they have just bombed. Rumsfeld expected Iraqi exiles to rapidly establish authority. The administration assumed that the Iraqi army would help the coalition keep order. Trump’s February 28 video to the Iranian people — “When we are finished, take over your government” — is the same style move, but this time applied to a country of eighty-eight million people whose entire leadership structure is being systematically destroyed from the air. And, worst yet, if reports true, the Trump Administration is using the CIA to arm Iranian-Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq to open up a ground front in the war.

Aaron Rapport gives us a helpful framework that explains, with uncomfortable precision, why the United States keeps repeating the same mistake as before. There is extraordinary confidence by the U.S. leadership about the kinetic phase of war paired with almost no articulation of how political order reconstitutes itself after the smoke clears. Five days into Operation Epic Fury, we are watching that framework play out in real time.

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Discourse among Chinese scholars has expanded since the war began to focus on energy security and the question of Hormuz as well as how the U.S., Israel, and Iran are fighting the war. I have summarized a longer list of comments, quotes, and opeds (some in English, some in Mandarin) from a wider range of Chinese voices in Chinese media and, more recently, in Russian media.

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The “law of the jungle”

Henry Huiyao Wang, Founder and President, Center for China and Globalization (CCG and former Counselor to China’s State Council went on Bloomberg to comment on the strikes. Wang declared that “Now, we’re back to the law of the jungle.” and described the killing of Khamenei as opening “Pandora’s box for whatever we’re going to see in the future, because all countries fear this unilateral approach.” On China’s potential response, Wang warned that Beijing “won’t just accept it voluntarily” if its interests are deeply harmed, noting China “has many other means” and “has always been able to counter with sanctions, retaliate, and fight back.” He cautioned that a prolonged conflict could produce “a butterfly effect that plunges the entire world into recession.” Wang also argued the crisis makes the upcoming Trump-Xi summit more urgent, not less, pointing to China’s role brokering the Iran-Saudi Arabia deal as evidence Beijing has “deep interests in that part of the world.”

Chen Qi, Director of the Tsinghua Center for China-US Relations commented that the US action “indicates the failure of the third round of negotiations with Tehran to reach a basic consensus.” He argued Washington’s primary goal of the strikes are pressuring Iran into future concessions “while also diverting attention from domestic political issues in the United States, including the Epstein scandal, and building momentum ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.” He argued this “opened Pandora’s box” and further intensification of the crisis will “hinge on Iran’s capacity to retaliate.”

Lü Xiang, Research Fellow at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) assessed that Washington’s regime-change objective “is unlikely to be achieved quickly,” noting that “Iran had long ago put in place mechanisms for a rapid leadership transition.” Lü emphasized that “any effort to cripple Iran’s military capabilities would require a prolonged campaign, not a short operation.”

Zhou Dewu (周德武), former deputy editor-in-chief of Ta Kung Pao, argued that wars are “rarely ended by the initiator”; rather, they end when the side under attack accepts defeat. He warned that if Iran’s new leadership rejects reconciliation and instead turns to asymmetric retaliation — including possible terrorist tactics — the region could face a renewed wave of extremism. He also described the targeted killing of foreign leaders as “a dangerous precedent in international relations,” one that creates a “chilling effect” in global politics and could “accelerate an arms race.” In his view, the strikes also deepened the global “trust deficit” around negotiations. “This is not only Iran’s tragedy,” he concluded, “but also a tragedy for the international community.”

Iran’s regime resilience and China’s strategic calculus

Gao Zhikai — Chair Professor at Soochow University and deputy director of the Center for China and Globalization — delivered perhaps the most forceful condemnation of the strikes in an extensive Guancha interview published on March 3. He described the attacks as “赤裸裸的侵略行径” (“naked aggression”) and the assassination of Khamenei as “国家恐怖主义” (“state terrorism”). Rejecting the logic of regime change, Gao argued that U.S. policymakers “mistakenly believe that removing Khamenei would cause Iran to collapse,” when in fact “Iran is a civilization of five or six thousand years and a pillar of Islam. These American ideas are completely divorced from reality.” He also warned of nuclear escalation, noting that without the late supreme leader’s restraining fatwa, a new leadership might conclude: “If you want to kill me, if you want to destroy this country, this nation, this culture, then I will fight you to the bitter end.” [你要杀我，你要毁掉这个国家、民族、文化，那我就跟你拼到底。]

Qian Yaxu, a researcher at the Charhar Institute (察哈尔学会) and Southwest Jiaotong University’s Center for Regional and Country Studies, argued in an interview with Sputnik Chinese that Iran is “a key node country on the western route of China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” and that instability there would create “enormous resistance” for the BRI. On the question of regime change, she assessed that Iran is “most likely” to avoid such an outcome because Khamenei had already prepared a succession plan. She added that if regime change did occur, “the US would maximize its interests in the Middle East,” allowing Washington to redirect more strategic resources and attention to the Asia-Pacific and intensify its containment of China. In her view, the crisis will also “inevitably impact China-Russia relations” by deepening strategic coordination between Beijing and Moscow.

Military and defense analysis

Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine in Beijing, offered a detailed assessment of Iran’s military options. On Tehran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, he argued that “even conventional anti-ship missiles and drones could pose a credible threat,” and that enforcing a blockade “would not necessarily require highly sophisticated means.” He described Iran’s air defenses as being organized in a “mosaic” structure that operates in a manner similar to guerrilla warfare, meaning that even if the capital or certain facilities were struck, its military command system and key equipment could continue functioning. In strategic terms, Wang suggested that Iran’s best course would be to demonstrate both resilience under attack and the capacity to sustain retaliatory operations over time, thereby frustrating the “blitz-style” political objectives envisioned by Washington.

Lan Shunzheng (兰顺正) — a Chinese military expert — told Sputnik Chinese on March 3 that “Iran absolutely possesses retaliatory capability,” including ballistic missiles, suicide drones, and reconnaissance-strike UAVs that “could pose a substantive threat to the US and Israel,” and could even make them “pay a heavy price.” He assessed that Iran’s current strategy is to “inflict maximum American casualties to spark domestic anti-war sentiment, thereby compelling the US to halt operations.” At the same time, he cautioned that Iran’s stockpile of advanced weapons is limited and “may be rapidly exhausted after several days of intense combat,” potentially producing a “断崖式” (“cliff-like”) drop in capability.

Energy security and economic impact

Wan Zhe — a professor of economics at Beijing Normal University — argued that the logic of international oil prices has shifted “from being driven by supply and demand to being driven by geopolitics,” with the “geopolitical premium” now serving as the core driver of short-term, pulse-like price increases. She also noted that prolonged instability in the Middle East could push some countries to slow more aggressive coal and oil phaseout policies, even if higher oil prices improve the economic attractiveness of solar, wind, and electric vehicles.

Wang Lei, an assistant researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at CASS, described a Hormuz blockade as a high-leverage and highly self-destructive option for Iran. He notes that such a move would simultaneously disrupt major energy buyers dependent on the strait, harm neighboring states, and likely provoke stronger military escort operations and counter-blockade measures.

Dong Shaopeng, a senior research fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, told CNBC that U.S. actions in Iran had further eroded trust between Washington and Beijing. Although he still expected a Trump–Xi meeting to proceed, he expressed hope that the conflict would not spread to other countries in the Middle East.

The use of AI in the Iran war

One area I found particularly interesting was the unfolding conversation about the U.S.-Israeli use of AI in the ongoing Iran conflict for targeting. Responding to these reports, Liu Wei, director of the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told Global Times on March 3 that while AI can assist military operations and improve efficiency, “the decisive factor should always be human beings.” The article is explicitly framed around reported U.S.-Israeli AI use in operations against Iran, including claims that Anthropic’s Claude was used through Palantir-linked systems to help shorten the “kill chain,” and that Israeli AI use in Gaza formed part of the wider backdrop to the debate. Liu argued that AI’s strengths lie in processing massive data, high-speed computing, target recognition, and supporting sustained unmanned operations, but warned that it must remain firmly under human control. In his view, current AI’s “data-driven rationality” cannot reliably distinguish battlefield deception, ethical gray areas, or shifts in public sentiment; without “human intuition to see through enemy disguises, flexible strategy to set the limits of strikes, and moral principles to restrain lethal impulses,” AI risks becoming “a blunt weapon harming both sides.”

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance, in the same article argued that “the underlying logic of future warfare is undergoing profound change.” He points to the Persian Gulf, as well as examples from Ukraine, India-Pakistan clashes, and Gaza. Xiang said AI is now deeply embedded in modern conflict. He identified seven defining characteristics of future warfare — systematization, modularization, intelligentization, miniaturization, precision, unmanned operations, and low cost — with precision at the center, arguing that advances in AI-enabled positioning, communication, sensing, and identification are making precision strikes increasingly feasible.

My concluding thoughts

China’s discourse on the Iran conflict has moved in two directions: energy security and observing warfare tactics. On the former, China’s concern over energy will deepen as the war goes on. This is a major strategic vulnerability. Beijing is currently looking at both risk exposure and how to manage it, especially finding ways to limit the war’s energy impact on both China’s economy and the global economy. We will likely see China explore whether it can access Saudi Red Sea crude from Yanbu as a partial hedge if disruption through Hormuz worsens. At the same time, it is likely Beijing will be more vocal about keeping the straits of Hormuz open–this is one of the few shared U.S.-Chinese interests.

On the latter, Chinese observers are carefully watching how the war is being fought as a live demonstration of U.S. tactics. I have found fascinating play-by-plays by Chinese netizens trying to follow and interpret U.S. actions and signals from the region. Particularly revealing was the attention some Chinese technology analysts gave to reports of U.S.-Israeli use of AI in target generation—an issue I will return to in a future article. The U.S. has long warned about China’s AI ambitions and the possible military application of those capabilities on the battlefield. Yet Chinese observers appear to be wrestling with many of the same concerns, especially over the troubling precedents the U.S. and Israeli deployment of such systems may set for the future of warfare. Chinese strategists have long studied U.S. military operations, and lessons drawn from this war will shape how they think about conflict far beyond the Gulf.

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A quick note: this analysis aims to inform ongoing research and discourse during the ongoing war over how a wide range of actors view the ongoing conflict and bringing that conversation into English. It does not serve as a definitive assessment, policy prescription, or endorsement of any actor involved.

Editors Note: There was a mix up with some of the URLs (and my translation), which has been corrected and edits made. Thanks for those who flagged these issues.

I have received a large volume of questions on China’s view on the Iran war. It is diverse. I figured that in addition to ’s great piece on this (go subscribe to his substack), I would also add a review of the Chinese experts I am following as well as my own concluding thoughts and observations.

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When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Khamenei and forty senior Iranian officials in a single night, China’s foreign ministry condemned the strikes within hours as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

The rhetoric was predictable. What was less predictable is what China’s scholars, military analysts, and state media commentators said next for a domestic audience. They asked the harder question: does Beijing actually need the Islamic Republic to survive?

Their answer? Not necessarily.

The dialogue emerging from China’s strategic community is uncomfortable for those who assume Beijing and Tehran stand in ideological solidarity.

The Consensus View — and Its Limits

A dominant Chinese analytical position holds that the Islamic Republic will not collapse. Tang Zhichao of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences declared on China News Network that the negotiations preceding the strikes were “completely a smokescreen, just like in June last year,” identifying US regime change as the explicit objective. Fan Hongda of Shaoxing University, one of China’s foremost Iran specialist, called the changes of regime change through the Ayatollah’s assaination “nearly impossible”, arguing Iran’s political foundations are too deeply rooted in religious, social, and historical structures for external military force to uproot.

Liu Zhongmin of Shanghai International Studies University assessed that short-term regime collapse is unlikely without a ground invasion — but added a caveat that should concern Washington and Beijing alike. The crisis may trigger “factional splits, power grabs, or political restructuring” representing “a long-term hidden danger.” He goes on to argue, “The advantage of a ‘quick strike and quick retreat’ is avoiding being dragged into war, but if the goal is to transform Iran, the issue becomes more complex. Is it to preserve a "backboneless" Islamic Republic of Iran, softened towards the West? Or is it to completely change its political system and create a completely new Iran?”

He expresses doubt that Trump’s approach can achieve true regime change. The regime may survive the strikes. The system may not survive the regime.

This is the analytical gap Chinese scholars are beginning to fill.

The Economic Case for Flexibility

Qin Tian of CICIR noted that the strikes combined “military means and color revolution methods,” signaling Washington intends to shape whatever successor configuration emerges. The question Qin raises is one that Beijing will have to eventually answer, whether that successor threatens Chinese interests more than the Islamic Republic protects them.

The answer from China’s financial commentors is also revealing. Writing on Huxiu, analyst Xiao Xiaopao pointed out that Iranian oil accounts for only roughly 13.4% of China’s seaborne crude imports, purchased primarily by small “teapot” refineries in Shandong, not major state enterprises. China has real interests in Iran, she argued, but they are not vital. Singapore-based columnist Yu Zeyuan put the logic more plainly: “Regardless of who is in power, it is unlikely economic ties with China would be completely severed. This is the main reason China’s official response has been relatively calm.”

A more open Iranian economy, whatever government emerges, still points toward China because geography, infrastructure dependencies, and market scale make Chinese partnership the path of least resistance. From this view, the Islamic Republic is useful, but it is not irreplaceable.

The Hawkish Strand in Beijing

Most striking is how publicly some Chinese analysts have questioned Iran’s value as a partner altogether. Zhan Hao, a nationalist commentator on Guancha, argued Tehran had systematically failed to honor the 2021 25-year comprehensive cooperation agreement, preferred Russian weapons, used the agreement as leverage with the West, and leased Persian Gulf islands to India rather than China. His conclusion was blunt: the Middle East is “an important strategic interest area, but absolutely not a core interest.”

Tian Wenlin of Guancha reinforced the pattern after the 12 day war arguing that after Iran reached the 2015 JCPOA with Washington, “Iran’s attitude toward China immediately cooled.” The implication is pointed — any Iranian government’s orientation toward Beijing depends not on ideology but on external pressure. Tehran turns to China when it has nowhere else to turn. Sanctions are China’s greatest source of leverage in the relationship. Sanctions relief, paradoxically, dilutes it.

The Precedent Fear

If Chinese analysts are privately sanguine about who governs Iran, they are genuinely alarmed about what the operation signals for great-power competition more broadly. Cui Shoujun of Renmin University stated flatly that China would not provide military or security support — but identified the deeper anxiety: “China certainly has this concern — that the US will target nations it deems hostile with surgical strikes to seek regime change” and that this could “become a routine tactic.” Ding Long of Shanghai International Studies University warned the US and Israel would employ “salami-slicing tactics to continuously weaken the state, incite domestic unrest and jeopardize Iran’s security” — a template Chinese strategists recognize as applicable well beyond Tehran.

Shen Yi of Fudan University framed the operation with the Chinese idiom “smashing the cup as a signal” — a prearranged move disguised as diplomacy. He then posed the question Beijing is privately turning over: “Will large-scale internal change occur within Iran?”

The view from the military

PLA-affiliated and military analysts have focused on operational and strategic implications rather than Iranian domestic politics. Zhang Junshe, a retired PLA Navy senior captain and military affairs commentator told the Global Times that “By attacking the Iranian Navy, the US likely aims to completely take control of the Gulf region.” He assessed a ground war as unlikely — “the US is unlikely to get bogged down like in Iraq and Afghanistan” — and predicted Iran would “deploy missiles and UAVs and may mobilize Axis of Resistance forces.”

Wang Yunfei, a military affairs expert analyzed the intelligence dimensions on March 1: “Iran was said to have been heavily infiltrated, leaving little room for secrecy, especially regarding senior leaders’ movements.” He assessed that while US-Israeli forces “far surpass Iran militarily and technologically,” Iran’s retaliatory capabilities “exceeded expectations,” particularly the Fattah hypersonic missile with an interception success rate “seemingly below 30 percent.”

What Beijing Wants from the Rubble

Li Shaoxian of Ningxia University connected the Iran strikes to Trump’s January success in Venezuela — two regime-change operations in two months, each combining military and economic coercion. Fan Hongda’s framework for Washington’s real objective is the most analytically useful on offer from Chinese scholarship: not an overthrown Iran, but a “spineless” one — a regime making major nuclear concessions while remaining nominally intact, selected from among Iran’s surviving factions. China can work with that outcome. It prefers a strong Iranian counterweight to US regional dominance, but it has thrived inside a sanctions-constrained Iran for a decade.

Sun Degang of Fudan University and Pan Guang, Senior Advisor to the Chinese Association of Middle East Studies, have looked at how this is shaping of regional order over regime in Iran. Sun warned that Tehran might abandon "limited war" because this engagement concerns the "survival of the regime," potentially blockading the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting global supply chains. Pan argued the strikes constitute "a severe shock to the post-World War II international order."

In this view, the collapse of regional order and Gulf chaos— blockaded Strait of Hormuz, disrupted supply chains, cascading instability across the Gulf states where China has invested heavily in Vision 2030 integration—threatens China's broader Middle Eastern investments far more than any single regime's fate.

I think the order question highlight the real bottom line: Beijing doesn’t need the Islamic Republic. It needs a Gulf that stays open for business. If those two things coincide, all the better. If they don’t — and February 28 made the question live in a way it never was before — China’s analysts have to think deeply through which one matters more. The answer will define how Beijing positions itself in whatever Iran emerges from the wreckage.

My take on the issue

It may seem obvious to say, but none of this is comfortable for Chinese policymakers, and the discomfort is visible in the lag between events and response. Beijing does not want to see Iran diminished and Washington in effective control of the Persian Gulf — China’s energy lifelines run through it, and a US-dominated Gulf reshapes the entire strategic geography of the Indo-Pacific competition. At the same time, Chinese officials cannot afford to see their deep investments in the GCC destabilized by the same Iranian partner they refuse to restrain. Previous Gulf frustrations with China, like over the 2019 drone strike into Aramco’s refinery and China’s refusal to condemn Iran, are childsplay compared to the Iranian rocket attacks against the Gulf, including hitting areas near where Chinese companies are operational in Jebel Ali and adjacent zones. The theoretical “what if” scenario is over, and Gulf capitals are absorbing Iranian missile fire. Chinese infrastructure investments, financial exposure, and Vision 2030 partnership deals sit inside the blast radius.

This is Beijing’s paralysis in plain terms. Condemning the US and Israeli strikes too loudly looks like endorsing Iranian aggression against China’s own Gulf partners. Pressuring Iran to stand down looks like capitulating to Washington. So China does neither, and the silence — now softening into carefully worded condemnations of all parties — speaks for itself.

Chinese colleagues will rightly point out that Washington and Tel Aviv are the primary belligerents, and that it is not Beijing’s responsibility to police a conflict it did not start. Any rational analyst must acknowledge this premise, even if they blame China for buying Iranian oil and reportedly supporting Iran’s rebuilding of its ballistic missile program. That argument is not wrong. But it is incomplete. China’s core strategic partners in the Gulf are being targeted by China’s other strategic partner, and Beijing’s chosen instrument of non-interference offers them nothing. The 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement that China brokered was a genuine diplomatic achievement — it restored dialogue, normalized communication, reopened trade channels after years of rupture. But it was never a security guarantee. China does not do security guarantees. Its diplomatic model is built on sovereignty, non-interference, and the deliberate rejection of the enforcement role Washington has long played in the region. That model may have rhetorical virtues, but it offers to practical solutions for Gulf security

When Iranian missiles land near GCC infrastructure and Beijing’s response is a statement calling for “all parties to exercise restraint,” China’s Gulf partners notice. The Iran-Saudi deal bought goodwill. It did not buy Beijing the credibility of a power that will show up when it matters. That gap — between China’s economic footprint in the Gulf and its political will to defend the order that footprint depends on — is the defining vulnerability of Beijing’s Middle East strategy, and no amount of infrastructure investment closes it.

This episode will also transform Gulf security perspectives on its relationship with the United States and potential limits that can bring when it comes to reliability (the Arabs sought for diplomacy and Trump brought them war). This episode also showed them that China is also not a reliable alternative. But, for China, this is fine. They never tried to be.

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