Talking the End of America's Middle East

I spent the last week taking part in a series of panels focused on the question of the durability of America's Middle Eastern regional order. First, last week I joined Greg Gause and Suzanne Maloney for an event hosted by GW's Middle East Policy Forum and chaired by Foreign Affairs editor Chloe Fox. Here's the video:

I also gave a talk at GW's Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics about my new project on digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and AI in the Middle East. No video link, but you'll be hearing a lot more about this soon. In the meantime, I strongly recommend the report just released by APSA based on a presidential task force to assess AI and the political science discipline. Edited by Joshua Tucker and Nate Persily, with contributions from a large number of colleagues, this is a terrific collection that takes up some of the core issues facing academia today. For what it's worth, POMEPS has just released its own policy on the use of AI in our publications and workshops after deliberations by a team including Rich Nielsen, Shamiran Mako, Rana Khoury, Sean Yom and Calvert Jones. Check it out here. This stuff isn't going away, and we need to assess both the positive and negative use cases.

Then on Monday, Shibley Telhami's Sadat Forum hosted a great webinar with me, Gause, and my former GW colleague Elizabeth Saunders. You can check that one out here:

Finally, I spoke yesterday along with the great John Calabrese at a conference at the Texas A&M Bush School's Washington campus on the strategies of small states in this rapidly changing world order. No event video for that one, but I recommend checking out Calabrese's contribution to this new Middle East Institute publication on the Middle East after the Iran war for a taste of the discussion.

Time for a break!