The realist who saw the end of the Middle East coming

There is a particular moment after any geopolitical crisis when someone, somewhere, pulls a book off a shelf and says: this is the one that got it right. 

For the Iran war, that book is West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East.

Its author, Mohammed Soliman, has spent a decade arguing that the Middle East is over and West Asia has taken its place, and the war has made that argument hard to ignore.

Although he works at strategic advisory firm McLarty Associates and is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Mohammed is neither a stereotypical consultant nor a conventional scholar.  In fact, he is not easy to place. 

He is an engineer by training but also holds  a Georgetown foreign service credential. Most days, he works out of a K Street address that Washington insiders would instantly recognise. But he also maintains a presence in the Gulf, and regularly travels across Asia and Europe.

At McLarty, he works alongside people who have held some of the most consequential positions in American government since the end of the Cold War. 

His circle includes Mack McLarty, former Chief of Staff to President Clinton; Geoffrey Pyatt, former Assistant Secretary of State for Energy and Washington's emissary to Ukraine and Greece; Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff to President Trump; and John Negroponte, the first Director of National Intelligence. 

At the same time, Soliman also directs the AI and Technology Program at the Middle East Institute, where he is building the research architecture on the AI infrastructure in the Middle East that policymakers and investors have come to rely on as the region's techno-economic transformation accelerates faster than most anticipated.

It is because of this multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral expertise that he has quietly become one of those figures that senior officials in multiple governments rely on when situations become difficult to understand.

His book, West Asia, has traveled further than most foreign policy volumes tend to. It was published a few weeks before the Iran war began, at the precise moment the argument it makes started being validated in the real world. 

Soliman’s book has been reviewed and argued over from Berlin to New Delhi, Athens to Rome, and Seoul to Riyadh, which roughly reflects the geography the book is about. 

That reach is partly a function of the argument and partly a function of the foreign policy intellectual behind it. 

Soliman is a frequent presence on global television and summits explaining what he calls “the new Middle East,” a region being remade by the rise of Asia and the gravitational pull of AI. He has become one of the more recognizable voices translating a fast-moving story for audiences that range from financial institutions to foreign ministries.

We recently sat down with Mohammed Soliman to discuss the book, the moment and what comes next.

What experiences inspired you to develop the recontextualization of "West Asia"?

For about two years, I split my life between Jeddah and Washington. 

I was living in Saudi Arabia while moving frequently through Abu Dhabi and Doha, and regularly traveling onward to Tokyo and Delhi. 

That kind of movement changes how you see yourself on the map. 

From Washington, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia appear as separate regions. 

From my home in Saudi Arabia, it made sense to read these subregions as a single system. 

The Middle East, as we’ve understood it, no longer made sense to me. 

As a framework, it can’t explain India’s growing focus on the Mediterranean, its deepening alliance with Israel, and its engagement with Greece and Cyprus. 

Nor does it capture Turkey’s expanding footprint in Somalia and its partnerships with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Maldives. 

And it certainly falls short of explaining the Gulf’s global role as a nerve center linking Europe to the Indo-Pacific, or its economic reach across the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa.

Today, what emerges instead is a more coherent space stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, increasingly oriented eastward. 

That is what I call “West Asia,” the title of my book, and it is an integral part of a broader Asian system.

What became clear over time is that the shift of power to Asia is running through the Gulf. You see it in the numbers.

India’s trade with the UAE and Saudi Arabia is getting close to what it does with the entire European Union. 

South Korea built the nuclear plant in the UAE, and Japan is showing up in the region’s space program. 

And you feel it in the movement. 

Flying from Dubai or Doha to Delhi or Tokyo no longer feels like crossing entirely different regions. 

It feels like moving within the same system. Even airlines like Qatar Airways and Etihad start to feel less like “Middle Eastern” carriers and more Asian.

You also see it in the work that is being done. I work with companies operating out of the Gulf that are already living this reality – servicing India or Africa from Dubai, raising capital from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf to build AI infrastructure in Europe. 

And that’s really what West Asia is. 

It is the manifestation of these connections in practice. 

My work on the corporate side made that clear early on and proved that this isn’t an academic exercise; it’s real deals, real numbers, and real consequences. 

And part of my job is to turn this into literature and academic work to make sense of these shifts for policymakers and scholars. 

But it’s clear that investors have moved faster; they’ve already internalized West Asia in practice, while policymakers are only just beginning to catch up. 

Are West Asian states themselves beginning to adopt this framework, or are they still stuck in traditional Western paradigms?

When Mohammed bin Salman talks about Vision 2030, he is describing a G20 economy deliberately repositioning itself at the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe, which is precisely what the West Asia framework predicts. 

When the UAE is building AI infrastructure in France, Italy, Greece, and India, that is West Asia in practice. 

Its capital, compute, and connectivity flow across what used to be treated as separate regions, now operating as a single West Asian system.

India’s posture offers one of the clearest external validations of this shift.

Policymakers in Delhi now treat the Gulf as part of India’s extended neighborhood, and Modi’s frequent visits reflect a deliberate westward expansion as a strategic actor. 

Demographics, trade, energy, and AI all form the foundation of this confluence of two seas between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea.

Egypt is already operating within the West Asian system, a tell-tale sign of which is its expansion along both the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, alongside a growing security footprint across these two fronts. 

The country is gradually shifting its demographic and economic center of gravity toward the coasts, and this emerging two-sea identity has a clear strategic dimension: a dual-coast naval posture and expanded external deployments, including in Somalia, that reflect Egypt’s repositioning within this wider system.

Turkey, in many ways, is the country that most powerfully validates the West Asia thesis. 

Erdoğan is constructing his own version of West Asia: an Ankara-centered order stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean through Somalia and Pakistan toward maritime Southeast Asia. 

This is proof that the West Asian geographic conception is real and consequential, and that capitals across this system are organically orienting themselves within it in real time.

The language may still lag, but the behavior is already there. 

And my book, West Asia, is the first to theorize this systemic shift from the Middle East to West Asia. 

Will Asian integration diversify Gulf economies, or harden their hydrocarbon dependence?

It’s ultimately a question of timing and sequencing and of the inflection points now approaching for the Gulf and the global economy.

The Gulf is using hydrocarbon revenues to fund its own exit from hydrocarbons. 

But that only works if the transition happens fast enough, before those revenues decline sharply or the global energy transition erodes their value faster than anticipated in the simulation models. 

And the Iran war could be an inflection point for the global economy, and at the heart of this is the Gulf.

With or without the Iran war, the Gulf’s diversification push is real and already well underway, backed by years of policy, capital, and structural reforms across sectors. 

If anything, the war only sharpens the urgency for diversification. 

Dubai built a non-oil economy years ago around logistics, finance, and talent. 

Saudi Arabia is deploying capital at a scale we haven’t really seen before through the PIF. 

And the UAE has moved early on AI, positioning Abu Dhabi as one of the few places where energy, capital, and geography all come together for compute.

In my view, integration with Asia isn’t uniform; it plays out very differently across countries. 

China’s relationship with the Gulf has evolved quickly from oil and state-backed financing to 5G, space, cloud, and EVs. India is different. It’s more organic, more embedded. 

Then you have Japan and South Korea, as mentioned above. Both are more industrial, more precise.  

Indonesia sits somewhere else in this picture. Less visible, but increasingly relevant. A large Muslim-majority industrial economy with growing ties to the Gulf in finance, labor, and halal industries and is gradually moving into a broader economic relationship.

And as I argue in the book, the Middle East is, in many ways, already Asian, and West Asia is the natural evolution of the region, defined by its deepening ties to the rest of Asia’s economies across the rimland.

How will Gulf AI and tech ambitions interact with South and East Asia?

I always go back to the first principles when it comes to compute infrastructure. 

The world is about to need something like 200 to 300 gigawatts of compute capacity over the next five years, up from roughly 80 gigawatts today. 

And each gigawatt costs, conservatively, $30 to $50 billion to build when you factor in chips, data centers, and energy.

Someone has to build that. And if it’s not the Gulf, it’s not going to be Europe. 

Europe simply doesn’t have the energy profile, capital, or permitting speed to deliver at that scale. 

The Gulf has cheap, abundant energy, capital, the ability to move quickly, and, more importantly, the political commitment to AI.  

Then there’s the question of latency. 

If you’re trying to serve South Asia, East Africa, or the Eastern Mediterranean, where do you place that infrastructure? 

The Gulf sits in the middle of all of it. 

You’re talking about four billion people reachable within acceptable latency thresholds from Gulf-based AI infrastructure. 

That’s a physical advantage. And it makes Gulf compute capacity integral to the digital transformation of South Asia, which will require massive infrastructure to serve nearly two billion people. 

As the Gulf climbs the technological ladder, its interaction with East Asia is deepening, especially around semiconductors, with the UAE engaging firms like Samsung and TSMC on the possibility of building fabs in the region.

And of course, the Iran war may shift the political risk profile, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals that make the Gulf the central AI theater outside of China and the United States.

Can West Asian states enter the semiconductor market, or is it too dominated by others?

The short answer is: not in leading-edge fabrication, at least not in the near term. 

The barriers are extraordinarily high, not just in capital, energy, and talent, which the Gulf has in abundance, but in geopolitics. 

AI chips sit at the center of strategic competition, and especially after the Iran war, the risk profile has shifted. 

That is likely to translate into national security constraints from Washington that would make advanced fabrication in the Gulf very difficult. 

That, more than anything, is the main hurdle.

That said, I do think the Gulf can build the institutional knowledge, supply chain depth, and engineering talent over time. 

More importantly, the question is often framed too narrowly. 

The semiconductor ecosystem is much broader than fabrication, and there are several entry points where Gulf states can realistically build capability and influence.

The first is packaging and assembly, which is less technically demanding than wafer fabrication and represents a strategic chokepoint in the AI chip supply chain. 

Advanced packaging, which is the process of combining chips into high-performance modules, is an area where new entrants could potentially gain a foothold.

The second is design. The Gulf’s AI investments are creating real internal demand for chip architecture expertise. 

The UAE’s work on Falcon and Jais required serious hardware optimization, and Saudi Arabia is moving in the same direction as it develops its own models such as ALLaM and AI stack. 

Building chip design capability alongside model development is a natural progression for both.

The broader point in West Asia is that the Gulf should focus on embedding itself across the semiconductor value chain, packaging, design, and legacy chip manufacturing, while strengthening its position in terms of building compute that serves nearby markets. 

That combination creates the leverage needed to secure access to advanced chips today, while building the capability to move into more sophisticated manufacturing over the medium term.

How can Egypt compete in the AI and digital era given its capital constraints?

The short answer is that Egypt doesn’t compete the way the Gulf does and it doesn’t need to. 

Cairo’s advantage is its dense engineering talent spread across a vast geography. 

Over decades, it has built a deep, scalable engineering base that very few countries can match. 

You see it in chip design, embedded systems, and the steady integration of Egyptian engineers into global semiconductor supply chains. 

This has been compounding quietly for years.

So the strategy should lean into that reality. Not fabs or capital-intensive bets, but design, verification, embedded software, and system integration. 

That’s where Egypt is already competitive and where global firms are increasingly plugging Cairo into their R&D networks. 

In the West Asian system, Egypt plays a different role. 

The Gulf brings capital and compute; Egypt brings talent, R&D, and design. 

When those two come together, you start to see a real ecosystem take shape.

Can West Asian states leverage geographic proximity to Africa to compete for critical resources?

Geography gives West Asian states access to Africa’s critical minerals, but access alone isn’t enough because the real constraint, in my view, is processing these minerals. 

Not every country can refine, separate, and industrialize these resources at scale. 

That’s where a few players start to matter, Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular, because they can anchor the industrial layer needed to turn raw materials into usable inputs for the AI and energy economy.

At the same time, not everyone can absorb those materials into high-value manufacturing and infrastructure. 

Building hyperscale data centers, AI clusters, and digital ecosystems requires capital, energy, and enterprise coherence. 

That’s where the UAE and Saudi Arabia come in. 

They are among the few places that can actually convert minerals into compute, turning lithium, copper, and rare earths into functioning AI infrastructure.

What you’re seeing is the emergence of a West Asian-African corridor. 

The real advantage lies in connecting extraction, processing, and compute into a single, integrated chain, that’s where West Asia begins to matter.

Does the U.S. technology sector operate with Cold War mentalities when seeking international cooperation?

The short answer is: yes, but it didn’t start that way. 

If you go back to 5G, that’s where the shift really began. 

The fight over Huawei and ZTE, the Clean Network Initiative, was the first moment where technology stopped being treated as just commercial infrastructure and started being treated as strategic terrain.

Then, it escalated. 

The 2022 export controls on advanced chips to China changed the game. 

Since then, it’s expanded more controls, tighter guardrails, and now rules around AI diffusion and who gets access to compute. 

At this point, we’re not talking about one sector. It’s the entire stack.

What’s new is that there’s a clear push to expand compute capacity within the American stack and extend it outward. 

You see it in how Washington is thinking about exporting the American AI stack (chips, cloud, models, cooling) through trusted partners. 

The AI Action Plan is more about shaping where and how AI infrastructure gets built globally.

So yes, there’s a Cold War instinct: control, denial, and alignment, but it’s paired with something else: construction. 

Building a network of aligned compute nodes, not just blocking competitors.

And it’s happening in a deeply interconnected system. 

There aren’t fully two clean blocs. Supply chains, capital, and talent are still entangled. 

Which is why places like the Gulf matter so much. 

They’re where this expansion of the American AI stack is actually being deployed at scale, and where the balance between systems is being worked out in real time.

How does the West Asia framework account for Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria — and how can they use it to improve their positions?

The way I think about Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria is through spillover, because that’s how this system actually works.

West Asia isn’t built evenly. 

It’s anchored in the Gulf through capital, energy, infrastructure, compute, and governance and then it radiates outward. 

The question for countries like Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria is whether they can plug into that flow or remain outside of it.

Iraq is already partially inside the system through gradual energy integration with the Gulf, growing connectivity, and a geography that makes it hard to ignore. 

Lebanon is more complicated, but even there, the potential exists through services, finance, and diaspora networks, if the political system stabilizes, of course.

Syria is the biggest question, and, in my view, the biggest opportunity over the next 10-15 years. 

The real bet in West Asia is reconstruction. 

If Syria stabilizes even partially, you’re looking at a Saudi-led connectivity push from the Gulf through the Levant to the Mediterranean. 

Infrastructure, logistics, energy grids, and eventually digital infrastructure.

That’s where spillover becomes real. 

Gulf capital doesn’t stay in the Gulf, it moves across the region, creating tangible spillover effects that can benefit neighboring countries, especially Syria. 

It builds ports, roads, data centers, and industrial zones across the West Asian system. 

Syria, because of its geography, sits right in the middle of that potential corridor. 

The closer they align with the flows of capital, connectivity, and infrastructure coming out of the Gulf, the more they benefit.

The risk is staying disconnected. The opportunity is becoming part of the West Asian system.

The 2025 India-Pakistan war shocked many observers. How does your West Asia framework account for South Asia, and what does that conflict reveal about the region's interconnectedness?

The Indian Ocean connects the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, making India and Pakistan constitutive of the West Asian system itself. 

And as I argue in the book, any strategic framework that treats South Asia as a separate theater is doomed to fail. 

And when you see Islamabad hosting backchannel diplomacy in this Iran war, it reinforces the thesis.

For India, West Asia is where its most consequential strategic bets are now being placed, and Delhi knows it. 

More than half of India's crude oil imports come from the Arabian Gulf. 

The Indian diaspora in the Gulf, over eight million people, generates remittances equivalent to roughly three percent of India's GDP. 

These are structural dependencies that give India a profound material stake in what happens in the Gulf, independent of any particular government's foreign policy preferences. 

Indian power cannot be fully realized in Asia and globally without a new relationship with the Arabian Gulf. 

And let me be clear: the Gulf is not looking to replace the United States with another resident power, nor to host a successor. 

If anything, the lesson from the Iran war is the opposite. 

The Gulf is investing in its own ability to defend itself and will double down on military capacity and integration going forward. 

India, therefore, shouldn’t view the Gulf as a space for power projection or a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Meanwhile, Islamabad has deep, historically rooted relationships across the Gulf that predate the modern state system. 

Pakistan remains one of the largest diaspora communities across the Gulf, with millions of Pakistanis living and working throughout the region. 

And Pakistan's engagement with Turkey and the weight of China's CPEC investments running through Pakistani territory means that Islamabad is simultaneously inside multiple overlapping orders in the West Asian system.

The 2025 India-Pakistan war marked the geopolitical rehabilitation of Pakistan after years of being dismissed. 

Islamabad has re-emerged as a security actor with renewed relevance through its defense ties with Saudi Arabia and its role in the current Iran war. 

That shift doesn’t erase the asymmetry with India, but it complicates it and makes the balancing act much harder going forward.

The nuclear dimension is the layer that the West Asian framework has to incorporate rather than wish away. 

The nuclear risk of escalation in any serious India-Pakistan confrontation is a constraint on every actor in the system. 

It limits Indian freedom of maneuver. It limits Gulf mediation. It limits American options. 

The Gulf's interest in mediating India-Pakistan tensions (for instance, the UAE played a meaningful role in facilitating the 2021 Kashmir ceasefire, a fact that received far less attention than it deserved) is rational self-interest. 

A stable South Asia is a prerequisite for a West Asian system to function as a coherent geoeconomic unit. 

Instability on the subcontinent is a West Asian problem, which is precisely why my book insists on treating it as one.

How has the Ukraine war changed Europe's relationship with West Asia?

My book is getting a lot of attention in Asia.  

But I’m not only speaking to Asian scholars and policymakers; I’m also engaging Europeans. 

I wrote the Europe section after extensive conversations with policymakers from the UK, Greece, Germany, Italy, France, and beyond to map out what a new strategic posture for Europe would look like following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

In my book, I argue that East of Suez has taken on a new, multipolar meaning. And Europe will have to engage with it differently.

The Suez Canal is one of Egypt's most important geopolitical assets. 

But the argument I make in West Asia is that Suez is simultaneously Europe's most important strategic asset that Europe does not control, and that the war in Ukraine has made this dependency visible in ways that will permanently alter how European governments think about their own security.

Before 2022, Europe's relationship with the Suez Canal was nearly invisible. Oil and gas flowed. Container ships moved. 

The chokepoint existed, but it belonged to Egypt and its allied navies that patrolled those waters. 

Russia's invasion of Ukraine destroyed that comfortable assumption in a matter of weeks. 

With Russian energy effectively removed from the European equation, Europe turned with genuine and poorly disguised urgency to Algeria, the Gulf, and Egypt as alternative supply sources. 

West Asia, through the Suez, is indispensable to European energy security in a post-Russia world. 

In addition to the energy question, there is the flow of Gulf capital, which is becoming instrumental to Europe’s AI infrastructure. 

There is also the expansion of trade linking Europe to the Gulf and India. 

On top of that, the Gulf’s position as the nerve center of an emerging Asian order, one that increasingly connects Europe to Asia.

What this means for European strategic identity is profound. 

For seventy years, European foreign policy was organized around a single axis: the Atlantic relationship, with Washington as the security guarantor and NATO as the vehicle of engagement. 

The Middle East is a region that Europe tried to manage at arm's length, important enough to worry about, close enough to cause problems, but never quite central enough to reorganize European strategy around. 

What the Ukraine war and the Iran war have demonstrated together is that this posture is no longer available. 

Europe’s energy security, and by extension, its economic security and political stability, runs through West Asia. 

And, in turn, into the broader Asian system, with Euro-Mediterranean countries increasingly acting as West Asian players.

You write about what you call "Asia-Minus-China." Can you explain what you mean by that, and where does the Gulf fit into that architecture?

In the book, I try to articulate what I call “Asia Minus China,” even though it requires saying what most governments would prefer to leave unsaid. 

I describe a meaningful and growing group of Asian states (Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia) that are pursuing economic integration and connectivity in ways that serve as counterweights to Chinese geoeconomic primacy.

This is not ideological, and it’s not an anti-China alliance in the Cold War sense. 

It’s a rational techno-industrial hedging strategy. 

These countries remain deeply tied to China through trade and the sheer weight of its economy, but are increasingly uneasy about the political and security implications of that dependence. 

So, quietly and without much fanfare, they are building alternative structures that de-risk their economies and increase their collective geoeconomic weight.

The Gulf's role in this Asia Minus China ecosystem is as a fusion center. 

A geographic and financial node that connects the Indo-Pacific with the Mediterranean, and through which an Asia-Minus-China architecture can achieve the connectivity and institutional depth that China's Belt and Road has spent a decade constructing. 

The ASEAN-GCC block, which I discuss in the book, is one of the clearest expressions of this: a deliberate effort to institutionalize Gulf-Southeast Asian connectivity in ways that create alternative supply chains and diplomatic frameworks outside of Chinese-dominated structures. 

It received surprisingly little media attention, which tells you something about the blind spots the old Middle East framework produces.

Let me be clear. Chinese economic gravity is real, and it is not going away. 

China is the Gulf's largest trading partner. 

It is a major player across both the Gulf and Southeast Asia. 

Any version of Asia-Minus-China that requires the Gulf to treat China as an enemy in commercial terms is not a serious strategy. 

What is serious, and what I think is actually happening, is selective decoupling in strategic sectors rather than wholesale confrontation. 

You can do business with China and still make structural choices about where your critical infrastructure gets built and who has access to your most sensitive systems.