Reverse Engineering the New Middle East: West Asia and the U.S.-Israel-Iran War

REVIEW ESSAY
West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East
by Mohammed Soliman
Polity Press, 2026, 272 pages

Like many thoughtful works, West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, written by Mohammed Soliman, begins with a grievance. Upon his arrival at Georgetown University in his mid-twenties, Soliman did not find the kind of foreign policy thinking he identified with Washington, D.C. “Much of the scholarly work on the Middle East felt outdated, sometimes by a generation or two,” he writes.¹

Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, Soliman asks “where is the Middle East, and who defines its boundaries?”² This question motivates West Asia, and he takes the difficult step of reframing commonsense intuitions about what constitutes this region by providing a heterodox answer. Accordingly, Soliman conceives of West Asia as a region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indo-Pacific. He defines it as the western anchor of a rising “Asia-minus-China” geopolitical order, populated by techno-industrial and security coalitions that function outside the reach of Beijing’s geopolitical and economic gravity.³ Soliman reinterprets the region’s significance to the global balance of power and explains why American policymakers should care.

The publication of West Asia in the United States coincided directly with the U.S.-Israel-Iran War that began on February 28 of this year, providing a rare opportunity to evaluate the book’s arguments and recommendations against real-world events unfolding in the Arabian Gulf. Against this dramatic backdrop, West Asia shines in its descriptive analysis of the order taking shape in the Middle East as it avoids the tired tropes that so often accompany discussions of the region and the United States’ role therein. The prospects for a techno-economic coalition in West Asia are informed, positively and negatively, by this event, providing ample food for thought for the region’s possible futures.

Why West Asia?

West Asia makes a two-pronged argument. First, it asserts that West Asia is the proper geographic lens through which to understand the Middle East’s relationship to the global balance of power. Second, moving from this, West Asia lays out recommendations for order-building within the region, principally aimed at American policymakers. Soliman takes care to distinguish order-building from nation-building, or the use of American military, economic, or diplomatic resources to arbitrarily impose upon states a status quo more aligned with American ideals. This approach is firmly rejected by the West Asia thesis, to important effect.

West Asia’s thesis has a structural realist flavor. The relative distribution of power, having shifted eastward, entails a redefinition of the Middle East: “The global balance of power,” Soliman writes, “has changed radically since the end of the Cold War. . . . the story is not America’s fall, rather it is the rise of the rest.”⁴ This shift is not merely a result of Chinese development. Arabian Gulf states along with South Asian states increasingly assert their interests in international affairs, Soliman argues, backed by diversifying economic foundations and through a foreign policy geared to serve their internal development. As a result, the Middle East finds itself as a critical intermediary between Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

In this vein, Soliman writes of a “reawakening” of ancient trade routes that characterized the region before European geopolitical dominance. The persistent image of the Middle East––conceived through its ability to export oil, divined in the context of British empire––is a holdover that hampers, in Soliman’s view, any strategic understanding of the contemporary region.⁵ He thus proposes a reconceptualization of the region as a “geopolitical bridge between Europe and Asia.”⁶ The book’s thesis carries a sense of urgency: the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes clear, for Soliman, the necessity of Europe pivoting away from Eurasian integration. In Soliman’s view, West Asia provides the necessary energy and connectivity infrastructure to stabilize the continent’s southern flank.

At least four, interlocking observations about West Asia underscore this new conceptualization. First, Middle Eastern states, especially Arabian Gulf states, are no longer side players in a global landscape neatly divided by great powers and their subservient partners. These states, Soliman argues, are intent on diversifying the foundations of their economies away from traditional revenue sources, namely, crude oil exports, and are asserting their interests in selective foreign policymaking. As evidence, Soliman cites President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar in May 2025, as well as the Gulf States’ shared focus on renewable energy, technology, and tourism.⁷

Secondly, the Middle East is increasingly a conduit between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.⁸ Soliman conceives of the emerging Middle East as a historical rhyme, as the “resurgence of historical frameworks [that] offers nations a blueprint to navigate a world shaped by competing powers and shifting alliances.”⁹ The India-Middle East-Europe (IMEC) corridor is interpreted as the clearest manifestation of West Asia, with this trade network possessing logistical “backbones” geographically, including Mumbai, Dubai, and Trieste.¹⁰

Next, he highlights South Asian states––particularly India, but increasingly Pakistan as well––that have recognized the critical role of West Asia to their own development. Soliman cites Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s many visits to the UAE, various forms of bilateral cooperation (e.g., the UAE-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement), and certain security links as evidence of this shift in perception.¹¹

Lastly, Soliman argues that the traditional American understanding of the Middle East, grounded in the Carter Doctrine’s focus on “narrow energy and security interests,” is increasingly detached from the new regional reality.¹² “The rise of capital-heavy digital industries” in the Gulf, initially aided in large part by Chinese investments in sectors such as telecommunications, now represent a more suitable foundation of U.S.-Gulf relations.¹³ Indeed, Soliman argues that reliable supplies of energy, differentiated data centers, and semiconductors constitute the “Compute Triangle” and that access to the triangle is necessary to build out the infrastructure that underpins the development and deployment of technologies like AI.¹⁴

Soliman’s novel conceptual framework diverges from recent Middle Eastern commentaries. Consider, for example, the May 2025 visit by President Trump to the Gulf, flanked by American tech CEOs, and the AI deals that resulted. Soliman interprets this visit as “further cementing Washington’s recognition of the Gulf’s rising geopolitical and geoeconomic weight,” hence the emphasis on access to the “Compute Triangle.”¹⁵ Others viewed these events differently, no doubt influenced by an alternate characterization of the region altogether. Sam Winter-Levy of the Carnegie Endowment, for example, questioned the deals’ relevance to the national interest: “Why would [Americans] want to offshore the infrastructure that will underpin the key industrial technology of the coming years?”¹⁶ Alasdair Phillips-Robins similarly argued that chip exports to the Gulf risk long-term U.S. dependency on this region.¹⁷ From this divergence arises a straightforward and critical question: does the United States alone have the capacity to meet its AI firms’ need for capital, computing capacity, reliable energy, and land? Unlike Winter-Levy and Phillips-Robins, Soliman believes that it does not.

Soliman thereby argues against an independent “Indo-Islamic” order envisioned by Turkey.¹⁸ He instead recommends an “Indo-Abrahamic” order that builds off an emerging, transregional order that sees a mutual pursuit of economic health and security through trade and defense networks. Continuing a theme, Soliman describes this order as a “return” to a pre-European-centric order.¹⁹

In formulating his proposals to American policymakers, Soliman adopts a structural realist conception of the international system in which the U.S. remains a powerful actor yet–– burdened by the pressures of this anarchic system––is incapable of mustering the resources it needs to serve its interests alone. Here, the role of technology diplomacy takes center-stage: “West Asia, as conceived in this book, is the locus of such strategic cooperation, and technology is the conduit through which the end of order-building can be achieved.”²⁰ For Soliman, “the new foundation of the U.S.-Gulf relationship” is “Compute, not Crude,” dispensing with the narrower energy and security interests that have previously defined this relationship in favor of critical tech infrastructure.²¹ Thus, he proposes a “Techno-Economic Coalition” premised on the strategic importance of technologies including AI, renewable energy, satellite technology, financial tech, and biotechnology. This coalition is structured around two specific recommendations.

The first is a Tech “Datalogue” with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which Soliman argues should be used to affirm that the United States is updating the Carter Doctrine and to hammer out bilateral technological collaboration issues that revolve around the buildup of physical digital infrastructure.²² Second, Soliman envisions the building of a West Asian “AI Backend” through energy and compute integration and the acceptance of an “AI-First Doctrine” by the United States.²³ This AI Backend is to be supported through at least two, broad-based initiatives. One is support for the “full integration of electricity grids across the [Gulf Cooperation Council] and extending interconnection to Egypt.”²⁴ The other is still more ambitious:

The deliberate build-out of AI clusters across the region – from the UAE’s expanding hyperscaler footprint to Egypt’s Suez-based industrial corridors and Saudi Arabia’s Humain-led AI zones. Just as the U.S. once underwrote oil infrastructure through the Carter Doctrine, it must now embrace a new AI-First Doctrine to shape the emerging techno-industrial order.²⁵

One senses that West Asia conceives of a technology like AI first in terms of its enabling infrastructure, including electrification and data center expansion, with the specifics of the technology existing only as an extension of such infrastructure. This is an engineer’s preferred approach, consistent with Soliman’s stated background “as an engineer specializing in critical infrastructure.”²⁶

Aligned with this focus on enabling infrastructure is the recommendation for a security coalition of likeminded states, varying in responsibilities but centered around common interests. The coalition avoids efforts to induce ideological unity among its members and instead adopts a tiered “Lattice-work Partnership.”²⁷ These tiers include the “distinct but interconnected domains” of air defense, maritime security, and counterterrorism, with the first being a “top priority.”²⁸ U.S. Central Command is envisioned as the cornerstone of this multilateral coordination: it could “bring together all the chiefs of defense and design a coordinated common air defense strategy.”²⁹ Soliman’s proposals, based on the matching of national interests with available resources, accord with the principles of restraint-based foreign policy, a view that is partly motivated by a wariness of American nation-building in the region.³⁰

I view alliances as dynamic mechanisms designed to advance shared interests, with the element of time playing a pivotal role in shaping the structure of these alliances. However, I do not advocate for dismantling current alliance frameworks or undermining them strategically or tactically. Instead, I propose agile approaches in West Asia that deviate from the century-old alliance structures in Europe and Asia.³¹

Other proposals for techno-alliances have appeared in recent years, often adopting the following core tenets: upholding of liberal-democratic values; asserting the primacy of the U.S. and its interests; prioritizing comprehensive and internally binding commitments among members of the alliance.³²

West Asia differs on all three counts. The techno-economic coalition proposal explicitly rejects forming an alliance around the internal values, norms, or political institutions of the states involved. Soliman also rejects U.S. primacy in the proposed coalition, instead opting for an influential American role followed by subsequent equalizing (borrowing from Emma Ashford’s “first among equals” approach).³³ Lastly, he repeatedly emphasizes that his proposed coalitions be flexible, tiered, and voluntary.

Following from this intricate vision, the question arises whether Soliman’s conception of an emerging order in West Asia, shaped by his focus on enabling infrastructure in techno-economic coalition-building, is sufficient to explain the region writ large and inform American involvement therein.

Proof of Concept: West Asia and the Present War

The unexpected reality of the current conflict gives immediate form to this question. West Asia launched in the United States in February. On the last day of February, the United States and Israel jointly launched airstrikes on Iranian territory, quickly decapitating the Iranian government’s leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Strait of Hormuz became inaccessible for non-Iranian transit, with mines being laid to prohibit the flow of petroleum and liquefied natural gas that constitute roughly one fifth of global shipments.³⁴ A framework agreement led to a ceasefire in April 2026, but it is unclear if it will hold at the time of writing.

In light of this war, West Asia remains strong on conceptualization and relatively weak on implications for near-term American decision-making and techno-economic coalition-building. Crucially, the war has seen Iranian retaliation against Gulf partners in areas of U.S. technology cooperation. The early days of the war saw three data centers, two in the UAE and one in Bahrain, struck. An additional data center in Bahrain was reportedly struck on April 1.³⁵ Iran made clear that data centers that subserve consumer applications are militarily valuable targets, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-affiliated Tasnim News Agency posting on X that “major tech firms” are “legitimate military targets” on March 31.³⁶

The strikes, with the use of Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, indeed disrupted consumer services reliant on regional data centers in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi.³⁷ They have also led to a public re-evaluation of the Gulf’s role in building out data centers that subserve AI services. The Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar suggested that it is an “obvious blunder to concentrate” critical infrastructure in one, risky region just as it was to concentrate chip manufacturing in Taiwan.³⁸ Sam Winter-Levy noted that the complexity and interdependence of data centers’ construction make them “soft targets” where partial damage can disable the entire system.³⁹

Data centers must be built to serve the consumer and defense applications of (inter)national interest. Some of these data centers will be built beyond U.S. territory given that American electrical grid modernization and the cultivation of an expert workforce has been partly circumvented by the “migration of production,” to say nothing of the capital-intensive needs of such buildouts that even American firms cannot shoulder alone.⁴⁰ Because some of the data centers built in the Gulf are located in a region split between West Asia’s “new” Middle East, characterized by technological ambition, and recurrent conflicts, these data centers will be vulnerable to attack. Disruptions, some predictable and others not, are always on the horizon.

The United States looks to have sharply departed from the disposition to engage in the material, cost-benefit analyses that drives West Asia’s recommendations (involving, at the least, close consultation with the Gulf on energy transit in the event of prolonged conflict). The strategic reasoning that West Asia imposes on President Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Gulf appears contradicted by the February 2026 decision by the administration to join forces with Israel in decapitating Iranian leadership, followed by continued fighting.

West Asia therefore must square the following circle. The U.S.-Israel-Iran War appears to be a war of choice as it was initiated by the United States and Israel of their own accord, and without sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to the security of either stemming from Iranian nuclear ambitions. This war has led to the imposition of serious costs on Gulf partners of the United States, partners in both security affairs and technological diffusion, in a manner that arguably sidelines the interests of the Gulf states who Soliman sees as integral components of his techno-economic coalition.

The burden imposed on Gulf states beyond the most immediate impacts on oil exports should not be understated. As noted, the suitability for American data center expansion in the Gulf is now being questioned given the unpredictability of the security environment. This, in turn, raises the question of whether the Middle East, and the Gulf states especially, can serve as a bridge between Europe and Asia: a bridge that West Asia envisions as built upon technology diplomacy.

First, the good news: West Asia successfully preempts these security risks, both in its analysis of the conditions in the region prior to the 2026 war and in its recommendations. The framework Soliman builds in West Asia is cold to the idea of American war with Iran, having explicitly warned against, at least, strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure, also noting their potential knock-on effects in the Gulf.

Even if Israel were to act alone . . . Tehran is likely to calculate that the United States was complicit or provided support—prompting retaliation not only against Israeli targets but also against American personnel and assets in the region. Such a response would carry broader consequences, potentially destabilizing the Arabian Gulf—the main economic engine of the broader region—and placing vital infrastructure, energy flows, and commercial routes at risk.⁴¹

This is a striking passage against the reality of not only perceived American complicity in strikes on Iran (beyond its nuclear facilities), but also active and open participation.

Simultaneously, West Asia likewise preempted the security needs of the critical tech infrastructure now drawn into relief by the U.S.-Israel-Iran War. Soliman recommends, alongside the techno-economic coalition proposal, integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) as part of a security coalition: air defense is fertile ground for future cooperation and American engagement in West Asia. Yet while the U.S. has participated instrumentally in the aerial defense of its partners in the region, Israel has followed Soliman’s prescription of integrated, Gulf-spanning air defense most faithfully. Recent reports detail, in a first for the Jewish state, that one of its Iron Dome batteries, in addition to “several dozen” ground troops, was moved to the UAE in the opening phases of the war to important effect.⁴² Clearly, this portends a more robust and integrated security architecture between regional partners in the years to come. In any event, however, there is a sense now that public commentary on the security of American data center expansion in the Gulf has been late in a notoriously tumultuous region.

In another light, we may question whether Soliman’s descriptive account of the pressures that the international system imposes on American decision-makers is sufficient to justify their current action in West Asia. The book did not anticipate the near-term American decision-making that would result in these precarious conditions. Indeed, U.S.-Israeli engagements in the February 2026 war far exceeds the scope of Soliman’s comments above on the narrower possibility of kinetic strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, a scope already exceeded in the U.S. strikes on these facilities in June 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer.

The locus of Soliman’s shortcoming is a relatively innocuous judgment by which he placed too much significance on President Trump’s May 2025 visit to the Gulf. In particular, he mistook the aims imputed to the Trump administration in making this trip, flanked by tech CEOs, for the rational, sustained pursuit of ends in technology diplomacy. The strategic reasoning this visit appeared to offer––continued, close U.S.-Gulf consultation in matters pertaining to the latter’s security and technological landscape––was not at the top of the agenda in February 2026. This is made self-evident by the current war, which began without robust consultation in the Gulf. It is worth noting here that Emirati and Saudi allies implored the Trump administration to “keep fighting until Iran is decisively defeated” in late March, but they were initially surprised and offended by the lack of notice they received from Washington at the outset of the war.⁴³

While Soliman’s techno-economic vision remains alive, the immediacy of geopolitics––an ostensibly opportune window for the upheaval of the Islamic Republic––superseded this long-term trajectory. Perhaps some in the Trump administration believed that sustained, techno-industrial growth among partners in the Gulf could only truly ensue once the threat of Iran had been nullified.

In any case, one could posit that the Trump administration merely changed their reasoning over time, shifting from a dual security-tech diplomatic posture in 2025 to a strictly security-focused stance vis-à-vis Iran in 2026, perhaps brought on by new threat perceptions.⁴⁴ This objection would be well paired with the execution of Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, one month after the tech deals of May 2025, when the United States carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities (with earlier strikes by Israel), a key scenario Soliman rather undervalues.⁴⁵

There are reasons to doubt this characterization, however, which work in Soliman’s favor. First, Operation Midnight Hammer was a narrowly tailored exercise that better squares with historical American framing of the nuclear threats perceived from Iran. Second, were preventative measures vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear capability the American priority in February 2026, one would expect the Trump administration to have been clear on this count at the war’s initiation. But the explicit justifications offered by the Trump administration varied, invoking the prevention of Iranian nuclear enrichment after the war began as but one rationale, despite insufficient evidence of imminent threats to the security of the U.S. or Israel stemming from Iranian ambitions.⁴⁶

Finally, this objection neglects a better explanation for the Trump administration’s actions: the successful capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during Operation Absolute Resolve in January 2026, one month before Operation Epic Fury in Iran.⁴⁷ The tactical and operational success of this mission (relatively narrow and tailored to the objective of capturing Maduro) likely provided the Trump administration with a false picture of the straightforwardness of regime decapitation abroad. Thus, the decapitation of the Iranian government has occurred without robust consultation amongst Gulf partners, at the expense of regional AI investment.

Overall, recent events have departed from Soliman’s vision. Data centers in the Gulf have been struck by Iranian forces without due preparation. Postulating the organizing principle behind post-2025 U.S.-Gulf relations means little if it fails to surface in actual decision-making.

But there is long-term risk as well here, and only time will tell if Soliman has rightly forecasted the trajectory of American foreign-economic policymaking in the region. The current supply chain and security disruptions to Gulf states caused by the war are significant, including the knock-on effects of increased energy prices on data center operation and delayed deliveries of chips due to air and shipping transit obstacles.⁴⁸ Supply chains underpinning Gulf AI infrastructure buildouts supported in part by American firms are intertwined and fragile, making the war a potential gut-punch to a techno-economic coalition.

Moreover, the ability of Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to act on their commitments to U.S. technology firms––reaffirmed, to be sure, by the Emirati Ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, in March 2026––may be constrained should capital be diverted from these international projects toward rebuilding after the war’s completion (if there is such a clean-cut endpoint).⁴⁹

Even if the war is a mere bump in the road, Gulf plans could nevertheless be damaged by American private sector actors’ lowered risk tolerance for data center expansion in the region. Although American firms are unlikely to show diminished interest in data center expansion per se, Iran has identified a sensitivity. Indeed, the IRGC reportedly threatened to bomb the Stargate UAE data center in Abu Dhabi in response to President Trump’s threats to strike Iranian power plant facilities.⁵⁰ Private sector actors are no doubt increasingly conscious of such vulnerabilities. But after untold quantities of wealth have been invested into the Gulf, it is equally unlikely that tech firms will simply up and leave at the first sign of trouble. The Trump administration will certainly take note of this element and seek solutions to protect the immense American investments now tied up in the region. Thus, Soliman’s vision remains useful and worthwhile.

Moreover, West Asia provides a framework that allows for some level of circumvention. The framework Soliman develops is explicitly non-reliant on specific international venues (like IMEC) and specific private sector actors. A strength of this position is that it allows Soliman some distance between his assessment of the pressures imposed on actors in the international system today and the precise configurations of international relationships tomorrow. It likewise plays into a theme in the book on the long-term nature of order-building in West Asia and affirms its advice in favor of nimble initiatives based on shared material interests rather than rigid alliance structures.

There is value in this view even if it has proven insufficient to preempt American near-term decision-making. The chief shortcoming of West Asia’s framework, then, rests not in the analysis of (what Soliman calls) West Asia, nor in its recommendations. Rather, it is in the near-term descriptive account of American foreign policy decision-making. As for the techno-economic contours and pragmatic security formations gradually taking shape between the United States and its regional partners, however, West Asia remains a thoughtful and informative forecast.

West Asia as Future Paradigm

West Asia fills a much-needed gap that has limited the reach and endurance of American foreign policy in domains where geopolitics and technology intersect by deliberately linking an engineer’s perspective on the latter with a strategist’s perspective on the former. This is a rarer synthesis than it sounds. Most books in this space operate from one register or the other: the technologist who discovers geopolitics, or the strategist who gestures at technology. Soliman is fluent in both. He likewise does not treat technology as a form-fitting widget to be inserted into existing strategic frameworks, instead treating it as the load-bearing structure that determines which frameworks are viable at all.

Soliman’s ability to bring questions of technological development into a structural realist framework without sacrificing the engineer’s perspective will be of particular value to those whose engagements with emerging technologies have predominantly involved the nature of their capabilities. West Asia is therefore an exercise in the realpolitik of the industrial and AI era. It is indeed reminiscent of a classical intellectual style that mixes dispositions from seemingly disparate domains in the service of overarching grand strategy.

While Soliman failed to predict the circumstances of the present, he skillfully outlines a viable, long-term vision of technological abundance and security coordination in a deeply important region, epitomized in a novel geographic paradigm to symbolize its relevance.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published April 30, 2026.

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Notes