The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. Emma and Mohammed discuss why American leaders need to focus not only on designing the future – but building it, how industrial policy ties into foreign policy, and what role AI and new innovations might play in shaping America’s role abroad. Emma and Mohammed’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy. *The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
The Strategy Sessions is a limited-run podcast hosted by Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center. Today, Emma talks with Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. Emma and Mohammed discuss why American leaders need to focus not only on designing the future – but building it, how industrial policy ties into foreign policy, and what role AI and new innovations might play in shaping America’s role abroad.
Emma and Mohammed’s discussion is part of the New Visions for Grand Strategy Project, a collection of essays, videos, and podcasts in which out-of-the box thinkers discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy.
*The Strategy Sessions Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Emma Ashford: The 2020s are likely to be a pivotal decade in determining the future of America’s role in the world. Global dynamics are changing. The era of unchallenged U.S. global dominance is ending. And China and other states are rising. At home, the United States is also going through a period of transition and change in foreign policy — from bipartisan consensus to debate and division. The only thing certain is that change in U.S. foreign policy is inevitable.
In these discussions, our guests engage with some of the most challenging questions facing U.S. policymakers, bring distinct perspectives to bear on these questions, and offer their own vision for the future of U.S. grand strategy. These are The Strategy Sessions.
Hello. I'm Emma Ashford, a senior fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program here at the Stimson Center. Welcome to The Strategy Sessions, a series of discussions with forward-looking, out-of-the-box thinkers on the future of U.S. foreign policy.
Joining us today is Mohammed Soliman. He's a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and has a forthcoming book called West Asia. Welcome!
[00:01:19] Mohammed Soliman: Thank you, Emma, for having me.
[00:01:20] Emma Ashford: I really appreciate you joining us for this conversation. And in part, you know, I think, your book in which you call the Middle East ‘West Asia’ instead suggests that you might have a slightly different way of looking at the world than some people in D.C.
So, let me start, I guess, with a big-picture question. How do you see the world that is emerging? What differentiates it from the post-Cold War period, the Cold War period? What's the world going to look like in the next few decades in your mind?
[00:01:49] Mohammed Soliman: Not an easy question, but I will try to take a crack at it. I see it as return of Asia. I believe that this is somehow a fusion between before hegemony, what's after hegemony, and this is the return of Asia.
What do I mean by that? I mean, you have a continent that's more than 50% of manufacturing, more than 45% of GDP. Clearly, this is the demographic center of the globe. And I would say that this is going to come with ramifications. Those ramifications you already see in Ukraine, where you have North Korean troops over there. You see it with the contest between the United States and China that's taking shape over every single layer of power, from tech to AI, to space, let alone geopolitics. So, the return of Asia is the defining theme of what we're going to see in the next 40 to 50 years.
[00:02:41] Emma Ashford: So, does that mean that the world for you is bipolar? Multipolar? Is the return of Asia mostly about China or is it about Asia more broadly? Or I guess, the Indo-Pacific? We are sitting in D.C. We have to rename the whole region.
[00:02:56] Mohammed Soliman: It's a very difficult question. I think it's about Asia as a system. It's the return of Asia as a system where most of the global geopolitics will revolve around what's happening in this continent. And of course, China is core to that. I would say the United States itself is somehow an Asian power by the virtue of being a Pacific power and all our own base across the Pacific and our own connection, military and economic, to the Asian Rimland. But the Asian Rimland itself, also, is going through, I would say, a phase of cohering, as they are becoming more overlapped, more connected. And you see this with some of those diplomatic initiatives recently. So, you have the GCC-ASEAN framework. You have the India-Middle East-Europe corridor. You see the Chinese building their own initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. Those frameworks, in a way that they're aligning, are giving us an idea that this Asian Rimland is becoming more of a system. And China is core to that but not the only player there.
[00:04:06] Emma Ashford: That's really interesting. I never thought about it this way, but I mean, implicit in some of the arguments about prioritization that you're seeing in D.C. is the notion that we're shifting from an Atlantic-centric world towards a Pacific-centric world, one in which the U.S. stays important but, you know, Asia seems to matter more than Europe. And I think that's an implicit assumption that people are taking.
[00:04:30] Mohammed Soliman: I agree. And I think some of the main questions then we have to answer is, is this, like, a multipolar? Is this a bipolar structure? And to be honest, I don't know. And the reason why I don't know, it'll depend on a few things. It'll depend on, will the United States be much more in a reaction mode? Are we able to adjust to the, sort of, new reality where Asia is the most decisive theater and we're no longer going to be fumbling in the Middle East and we need to focus on Asia? Also, China, what China will be doing while it is rising in Asia will bring some other powers along for the ride? Will you see a China-centric system that includes Southeast Asia? So, how is it going to be shaped? But nevertheless, I would argue that China and the United States will be two leading powers in a much more multipolar environment in the next 20 to 30 years.
[00:05:24] Emma Ashford: Well, this is, I think, a great pivot towards the essay that you did for us, because, I think, unlike, again, some traditional grand strategic approaches, you actually have taken a step back and you're talking in the essay primarily about the physical basis for power. You argued that the United States has the industrialized focus extensively on, sort of, financialization of the economy. And China's done almost exactly the opposite. They've gone for this techno-industrial fusion as a strategy. So, why start there? Why start with industry and industrialization and economic questions rather than strategy?
[00:06:01] Mohammed Soliman: When you asked me to write an essay, and that was during my paternity leave, I was thinking about, what should I write about when it comes to grand strategy? What's the story that matters the most and I think we should revisit? And for me, that was the question of industrial policy as a grand strategy. The material foundation for American power greatly eroded. This is where you see in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, the American power that won the Second World War, against Nazi Germany, has eroded. Part of it is post-Cold War thinking that the globe is flat, that everything more is about IP — we’re ideas country, we’re not really manufacturing country. And because we forgot how to manufacture, how to produce, I think we undermined the foundation of American power. And I think this is quite opposite in China. The Chinese believe, and of course, it's quite a statement that I believe that Chinese have one collective idea, but based on what we read from Chinese thinkers, that they believe that the material foundation of power is the decisive factor for Chinese power projection.
Think about it as infrastructure, as a projection. Think about digital goods, manufacturing, EV, solar panels, AI, semiconductors as part of your own power projection as a country. We’re no longer looking for a new territory to conquer, right? That's already done deal 150 years ago. What countries and powers, and particularly China, are looking for is to build the next frontier. And this frontier is information systems. The next frontier is space and space exploration. And I think this is where I find industrial policy, on its own, is a grand strategy, is how we are able to project our own system overseas and get people to adjust to it. That will be your next challenge. It's no longer going to be about liberal values, it's going to be about infrastructure.
[00:08:02] Emma Ashford: This is what I find to be so interesting, right? Because I think you can make a very good argument, that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, I mean, we were lucky in many respects, right? The U.S. doesn't have its industrial capacity destroyed, it's able to bring over, basically, all the good scientists from Europe and have them working here. And that gave the U.S., in addition to its, sort of, natural resources, gave us a huge ability to shape the reindustrialization of the Western world. But we have allowed that to atrophy. And I think what I want to be clear about is, you are not arguing for reindustrialization, right? You are arguing instead for forward-looking industrialization. Would that be one way to think about it?
[00:08:47] Mohammed Soliman: You're absolutely correct. I’m particularly saying that we need to go back to the 1940s, 1950s traditional manufacturing in Michigan. I'm not saying that. I'm saying we are going through a major phase of change in human history, and the way we're thinking about industrialization. It’s going to be a phase that's much more characterized by physical AI. All these AI models are going to be integrated at scale with industrial capacity.
So, this is why I call it techno industrialism, or this is the name that I usually use to describe this phase. And we need to be at the forefront of that. I don't want us to be trapped in conceptual arguments about what's AI, what's AGI, what's super intelligence. We need to be much more focused on applications — day-to-day applications — across the American ecosystem, from social services to econ, to manufacturing, because this is going to be defining our role that we're going to be playing globally.
I think we are also in a moment globally where there is a new layer of techno industrialization that's taking shape. I would say that it started with the 5G network and how China was the major exporter for this sort of technology. And now, we are going into the next phase. And this next phase will be the AI models, physical AI that's going to be defining this phase in the next 10 to 15 years.
[00:10:13] Emma Ashford: Yeah. It almost feels like a debate from a different time, but remembering all those arguments about Huawei and the arguments in D.C., that U.S. allies shouldn't be adopting Huawei. But at the same time, there weren't many good alternative Western-based models for them to adopt.
So, I mean, I have a lot of questions I want to drill down on here, but the specific one that arises from that is, as the United States, or let’s say more broadly in the West, are we actually in a position to compete in many of these technologies? Is China, sort of, out ahead of us on the most important things?
[00:10:48] Mohammed Soliman: I have bad news. I believe we have a scale problem. Back in the day, all these papers and essays about the missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union ended up being a bit more not true. I would argue right now that we are having a clear scale gap scale problem with China. Someone close would call this Chinese overcapacity. I don't think we should be fixated on whatever that term is.
What we're seeing right now is China is able to produce at a scale good enough goods, infrastructure that all these rising emerging powers require a need for their own socioeconomic development/military development as well. And this is a market that I'm afraid that China has a lock on. It's the scale that they bring they're able to scale. And we have seen this in every single major industry. We have seen this in 5G solar panels, electrical vehicles.
I was just in Mexico City a few weeks ago. Everything that you'll see is Chinese EV. They're effective. Their costs meet the demands of the Mexican middle class. So, there's high utility. And I'm afraid that we're entering a phase where AI and physical AI could follow suit and be part of Chinese power projection overseas.
[00:12:13] Emma Ashford: There seems to be a general pattern across a lot of these industries that the U.S. does high tech niche, I mean, frontier technology very well. But we don't do scale. It seems to me like that incentivizing, that scale is probably the biggest obstacle to the strategy you're suggesting. So, let's stick down to this a little bit.
First, the last administration tried industrial strategy. They focused on chips. They talked a lot about green technology. I'm not sure if they actually made a serious push on it. But they emphasized, right, manufacturing, industry reshoring. Where did they go wrong? Or, why didn't this work? Because I assume we wouldn't be having this conversation if you thought it was working.
[00:12:56] Mohammed Soliman: I'm afraid that the gap between us and China has grown too much that the amount of efforts that this administration and the previous administration had to do have to do – enormous. And it'll be much more focused on trying to defend our lead, our current lead, in some of those niche ideas and able to scale that.
And I'm going to go to a conversation in the AI ecosystem between the two administrations that are shaping how we're thinking about AI. The previous administration treated AI as a strategic asset. And we have to make sure that people who will have their hand on that strategic asset are very much aligned with us. And we're going to limit it as much as we can in terms of exposure to that. And this is why you have seen Jake Sullivan being at the forefront of export control policy. And that started from October, 2022, I believe. So, that was hand in hand with the CHIPS Act. So, export control interior chips, NVIDIA chips, ASML tools, chemicals, anything that's part of the chip ecosystem, so we can maintain a lead over China and make sure that they're a bit constrained in this sort of bottleneck for chip manufacturing. And this is the main gateway for AI.
So, this was the previous administration thinking on this issue. The Trump Administration 2.0, with David Sacks, the leading figure on AI, can be a different view. “We actually want American stack to be the main system overseas. We're going to have a lot of guard rails around it, we're going to have a lot of security mechanisms around it, but we actually want you to use our AI stack.” And I think they're coming into this from the VC Silicon Valley understanding of the scale problem. And we need to make sure that we are the foundational layer for the next digital transformation for the global economy.
So, you have seen the U.S. AI action plan that was released last week that’s talking about exporting the American stack overseas. And I think that goes to the core of this conversation around how to play catch up with China. Is it, let's try to maintain that, sort of, gap in niche technology, or let's play with China in its own game when it comes to the scale and make sure that our own technology is the foundation. We clearly need to see how that’s going to play out in the next two to three years. But this is where we are on this, sort of, AI as industrial policy framework.
[00:15:24] Emma Ashford: Yeah, no. And I think it applies more broadly than AI as well, you know, that the last administration was very much focused on, you know, erect the barriers so that our stuff does not flow out. And this administration seems to want to sell overseas. Now, admittedly, they're running into other problems with trade policy, the fact that they're more focused, I think, on erecting barriers to things coming into the country. But the AI strategy does seem to be an interesting start to a more open policy. So, we've talked about AI. What other technologies should we be focusing on?
[00:15:58] Mohammed Soliman: I would say space is as equally important as AI as people think. Space is the next frontier for power projection overseas. And there's a first mover advantage for nations to build their own space infrastructure. And I would say we are, clearly, the leading nation right now when it comes to space. And when it comes to building space infrastructure, we have reentry capability when it comes to sending satellites into space. Think about our coverage from low orbit satellite.
This being said, we're not the only player. I would say China is extremely good, back to the main point of the conversation, which is the scale gap that we have. They're able to produce at large scale a fraction of the cost because this is how their system is designed. And if we are going to have a multi-polar space, what does it mean for our power projection? I think it's a challenge that we did not really endure before. So, we'll see. It's completely different than the Soviet Union. And they had that piece where I made the argument that China is not the Soviet Union. It's a completely agile, innovative nation, extremely capable of innovating building at scale. And clearly, their technologies are becoming the gold standards overseas.
[00:17:13] Emma Ashford: I mean, I think, in some ways, what worries me about this conversation is that it sounds like China is relatively analogous to the U.S. after World War II. It's playing the same strategy. It’s got many of the same advantages. And we don't, right? We have these economic barriers, these disincentives, that make it difficult to manufacture here to build at scale. But, you know, let me devil's advocate, make the opposite argument to you. So, some people would say that Americans don't want to work in factories. They don't want to be making, you know, widgets to explore overseas, and that, even if you did that, wages would be so high that no one would want to buy them anyway. So, you know, America would be better doubling down on things that are post-industrial instead. And I think that's the counter argument to your approach.
[00:18:03] Mohammed Soliman: I mean, I also do not want people to think about manufacturing as we're talking about low value manufacturing of garment or clothes. We're speaking about very specialized, highly sophisticated technologies. We're speaking about chips manufacturing, designing, EVs, batteries. And those are very niche that requires a lot of technical skills. So, we're not with these speaking about bringing Americans to the 1930s, 1940s, steel mill, you're working with your bare hand. I don't particularly believe that this is the case. Two, we also need to think a bit differently about some of those technologies and manufacturing capacities. I think they're going to be very much tied to American security and American grand strategy and American projection.
So, not only you have the financial, economic incentive to have this level of manufacturing home, it's you actually have to do those sort of things here in the United States. And think about where we were on this conversation before COVID. And then when COVID happened, we have seen this, sort of, fragmentation of supply chain for all sort of reasons. Part of it, it was the COVID lockdown itself, but second was every country for itself, sort of, mentality or one just basic medical material that we needed. So, the idea of trying to bring extremely critical infrastructure/supply chain into the United States, I would say, is an imperative for the country as we're entering this phase.
I would say, also, finally here, and this is more about the larger political scene, we are no longer peace, no longer war phase of the global order. We have Gaza-Ukraine taking place at the same time. We have India-Pakistan war at the same time. And then we have Iran confrontation. And we have the Thailand border standoff a few days ago.
What does it tell us? It tells us that there is a phase in the global order where, actually, no one really is in charge. We have a lot of inflection points. It's giving me the feeling that the idea of a broader conversions of conflicts are not really a farfetched idea. So, in this case… play along with me here. In this case, you're better off making sure that some of the things that we really, really need, we need to have here in Arizona and Texas and Georgia rather than overseas. And then we're trying to scramble to make sure that they're secure and we can bring them home when we need to.
[00:20:27] Emma Ashford: Yeah, I mean, I think it still baffles me that we're having these conversations about stockpiles, defense stockpiles, after COVID, after several years of the war in Ukraine. And we don't seem to be able to resolve that problem. Let's briefly talk about the rest of the world, because we spent most of our time here talking about U.S. and China. You obviously see the rest of the world as a market, right, for both of those great powers. But are there other roles states play? Does the U.S. rely on allies in this world? Are we, sort of, on our own? Are there powers we really should be paying attention to? Where does everybody else fit in?
[00:21:02] Mohammed Soliman: Excellent question. If you accept my premise that we have a scale, problems such a scale gap with China, this means that you need to outscale China's capabilities. And this means that you need to outscale China through partnerships.
And let's talk about AI since I work extensively on this. Compute is the main layer of AI, and this is a bunch of things in the ecosystem that constitute compute. That could be energy, chips, capital. By the way, that's extremely important human talent. So, for example, if you want to scale out your compute, you're going to go to the Gulf States because this is where all these compute elements exist. And this is how we're able to solve that sort of problem. If we need to offset our problem with critical minerals, we need to rethink about Chile, about Indonesia, about other countries as well. If we're thinking about heavy manufacturing, then we need to reconsider the way we're integrating with countries in Latin America, particularly, in Mexico.
So, it depends on what layer of production. I think, based on that, you're going to be thinking about your partners and allies. And I know I sound more of, like, industry-first person in terms of the way we should think about internationalization, I don't believe so. But also, a reflection of my own feelings, my own understanding that we're heading towards an environment where blocks are going to be much more centered around functionality rather than values. We are going to be in an environment where I don't believe liberal democracy and questions around the global order are going to be the most decisive when it comes to partnerships and alliances. I think it's going to be mostly about interest and in a much more material way. Supply chain integration, ecosystem integration systems that are going to be able to enable all these countries, including the United States, to scale up to the next level.
[00:22:59] Emma Ashford: That's a really interesting point. I think there's been a fair amount of writing and thinking lately on the scale question. And one of the responses, I think, most notably from Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell has been the idea that it's allied scale that the U.S. needs. And that is government driving the industrial cooperation. And I think, in the Biden administration, that was the approach that they took. But it seems to me that you're talking much more about a more distributed, not necessarily bottom up approach, but that this isn't something that the federal government is going to direct at a large scale.
[00:23:32] Mohammed Soliman: I agree 100% with this. I don't disagree with the argument that Doshi and Campbell did in their essay. I'm saying it's going to be much more expansive than allies. I don't believe that there's going to be, like, a five eyes NATO. I don't think that this gives us what we need for this sort of questions. I think we need to think expansively about post-NATO alliances and partnerships. And again, I'm not calling for the dismantling of NATO. That's not really my position. I'm just saying it's not going to be the only utility that we need. If we believe that Asia is a center of gravity, we need to rethink about our own alliances and partnerships within an Asia lens.
Two, I mean, think about the U.S.-UAE AI partnership that was announced. This was, like, a five-gigawatt AI cluster in the UAE that was very much driven by private sector. That was very much driven by the Sam Altman OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and trying to come up with a framework about how to think about that.
So, I agree with you, there's some things that we, as United States government, will have to manage, we have to create an incentive structure around it. But then there are other things we're going to have the American private sector that's very global, very much aware of the global dynamics. We'll come to you as a U.S. government and say, “Hey, this is what we have. This is our proposal. Can we get your focal support, your focal cover for that?” And you're going to see a mix of both.
[00:24:56] Emma Ashford: Great. Well, so we are running outta time here. But before we do wrap up, I have one question we ask everybody, because I think it's great to hear all the different answers. So, here at the Reimagining Grand Strategy program, we are all about questioning assumptions about U.S. foreign policy. And so, what is your one big assumption about U.S. foreign policy that you think should be reexamined?
[00:25:17] Mohammed Soliman: There is an assumption that America's role globally has to be the global police. And people who make this argument define that anything south of America deploying forces overseas everywhere all the time as isolation. That's no America's rule, and we no longer can do that because we are a one military country. We have financial resources, we have tradeoffs. You likely talked about the defense missile stockpile. And this is a real issue, because of our entanglement in so many inflection points across two different continents at the same time. So, we need to be much more cautious about American posture, about where we're going to allocate our own resources. And the idea that we always have to be the global police is a misconception. We need to actually revisit this and the assumptions and the politics and the policies that come along with this.
[00:26:15] Emma Ashford: That's a great one, not just because I agree, but I think also because it really speaks to your argument here. This is a grand strategy that is, if not industry-first, then it's not military-first. That's for sure. And so, I think that assumption plays right into this.
So, that is, I'm afraid, all we have time for today. But I really appreciate you taking the time, Mohammed. Thanks, again!
[00:26:36] Mohammed Soliman: Thank you, Emma. I really appreciate that.
[00:26:41] Emma Ashford: That's all for this episode of The Strategy Sessions. You can find the full set of episodes, along with the accompanying essays, at stimson.org or by searching for us on your favorite podcast app. A big thanks to Stimson's communications team for their assistance with the taping and to University FM for providing audio editing services. I'm Emma Ashford. Thanks for listening!