Beyond Rivalry: The Middle East as the Pivot of Great Power Competition

How Gaza, Technology and Asian Ascendancy Are Reshaping the Region’s Strategic Imagination

Hello and welcome back to States of Play, the newsletter and podcast exploring how the world is changing - from geopolitics to technology, from defence to demographics.

The theme of today’s essay is the Middle East, a region I have long loved. Indeed, I have just returned from the United Arab Emirates, a place I first visited a quarter of a century ago when it still felt like a confident but tentative outpost rather than a global node. That first trip was at the turn of the millenium, when Dubai’s skyline stood only half-assembled and Abu Dhabi was still more desert than city.

The contrast today is astonishing. You step now into an immaculately engineered world of glass, algorithmic efficiency, and a very deliberate sense of future-building. The roads, the architecture, the logistics, the service culture, the relentless ambition - all create the impression not of a peripheral region racing to catch up, but of a rising centre of gravity pulling the world’s energy and attention eastwards.

It struck me powerfully on this recent visit: if you want to see what the future looks like, you do not go to rural England or the ageing infrastructure of much of the West. Or indeed, America. You go to Asia, including the Middle East.

There is a confidence and velocity here at the edge of the desert that mirrors the industrial and architectural swagger of East Asia’s great boom decades. And unlike in the West, where the conversation is dominated by scarcity, decline, and public-sector malaise, the Gulf speaks the language of possibility. Though the region retains its own fragilities, it is evidently becoming a pivot in a shifting world order above and beyond oil and gas - a bridge between the old power centres of the Atlantic world and the new ones emerging across Asia.

This raises a question that preoccupies policymakers in Washington, Beijing and indeed the Gulf capitals themselves: is the Middle East dividing between China and America, as the Cold War metaphors imply? Or is something more complex and more revealing under way? The answer, I think, is decidedly the latter. The region is not