How the US Weaponizes Tech in the Middle East w/ Laleh Khalili

0:00 Obviously, that you know, hypocrisy is a kind of a complete and total defining characteristic of the kind of liberal empire the United States is. It's a liberal empire that supposedly prevents these kinds of access to everybody, but on the other hand, allies can do whatever the hell they want to, including committing genocide as we're watching it.

1:07 After Donald Trump went to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year, I knew that this was something I wanted to talk about. I knew I wanted to do an episode on it. But then after seeing the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities more recently, I figured, okay, you know, it's time to have this conversation.

1:23 It's time to dig into this important topic, especially when there is so much going on in the Middle East that, yes, is related to broader political issues, but also does have a relationship to what we are talking about on this show because of how technology is so integral to so much of what we do. And not just digital technology, but other forms of technology as well, as we'll get into in the show.

1:47 And so as I was thinking about this topic, there was a clear name that came to mind who I wanted to speak to about this, and that was obviously Lale, even though she was only on the show a few months ago. But still, it was fantastic to have her back on the show to dig into these really important details, where we talk not just about how the United States wants to control which technologies different countries can have access to because of the relative level of power that that gives them, but also how it uses technology in order to try to increasingly keep certain countries within its sphere of influence while others are ejected from it or, you know, not allowed to enter into it.

2:22 But also how different countries within the Middle East, whether it's Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, seek to pursue certain technologies because of different goals that they have as they try to increase their power, protect their economies, or in the case of Israel, you know, subject a population whose land it wants to seize.

2:41 And so I really don't feel that this topic needs a lot more introduction because I really think that we should just get into the meat of it with Lale. So if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.

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3:27 Lolly, welcome back to TechWon't Save Us.

3:29 Oh my God, I'm so excited about this. I really enjoyed our last time, and I'm looking forward to this conversation as well.

3:34 Awesome. I I'm very much looking forward to talking to you again. I happy you could come on the program again so soon. I feel like obviously we're all paying a lot of attention to the Middle East these days. We often do because of like the cycles of conflict that are fueled often by outside actors that are interfering in the region, you know, but also, you know, the different powers that have been set up that are not 100% aligned ideologically and on the kind of world that they want to see and all these sorts of things.

4:00 But I feel like it can often be a talk about ideologies, about conflict and war, narratives that justify it that say, oh, it's just been going on for thousands of years and which are not totally accurate, of course, but help to justify, you know, this kind of uh continual conflict that happens there.

4:16 But I'm talking a lot about conflict, but I feel like when we look at this region, it's also a place where thinking about technology can be very relevant and you know, the role that the United States plays as this kind of global arbiter of who can have certain technologies, who can use certain technologies, and you really see that playing out within the Middle East, not just in this moment, but in recent decades as well.

4:36 And so maybe we can start there by just having you talk a bit about, you know, the role that the United States plays as this kind of country that seems to feel that it has the unique role to decide who can have certain technologies and how the standards for different countries can be very different based on who is aligned with the United States and who is not.

4:54 I mean, that's a really fabulous question. And I think in part it has to do with the fact that all empires decide, and particularly all empires since the start of the industrial capitalist age, have decided that they will be the ones that determine what degree of technological transfer happens or not.

5:13 And in fact, all the old school Marxists of the 1950s and 60s, when they talked about the question of empire or colonialism, actually focused extensively on the question of technological transfer because so much of imperial extraction was about the technology being concentrated in one place, whereas the sort of the raw human labor, often very racialized, often massively exploited, often in contexts in which the environment was also being devastated, being located in another place.

5:41 It's also really important to note that part of the reason for this wasn't just actually a technological transfer, it was also because the kinds of technologies that were needed were often needed for not just value-added production, which is how capitalism in the advanced world accumulates capital, or how capitalists in the global north accumulate capital, but also these kinds of technologies were needed for the extraction of increasingly difficult to get at sorts of primary materials.

6:13 We know about all the technologies that emerge in order to go, for example, exploring for oil, the kinds of seismic exploration or the kinds of sideway drilling. You know, I've been doing a lot of readings about geology of oil just in the last few weeks. And so you find that it's it's those kinds of technologies which end up becoming really important as well.

6:33 And again, who gets to have access to those technologies means that there are the sort of the distribution or allocation of those natural resources ends up falling under the banner of those companies that have the access to those technologies. And so to give you an example that has really been kind of significant to me, and again in the last few weeks because I've been reading about technology, has been exploration for various kinds of minerals.

7:04 In the 1960s and 70s, the United States Department of Interior and various other government-attached bodies, like the US Geological Survey, actually went off overseas looking for strategic minerals, looking for, looking to actually map the world's resources. And in order to do so, they needed to have a certain kind of both scientific but also technological knowledge and technological access, taking cores of a particular kind, you know, in particular locations, being able to map spaces from up above or, you know, from ground level.

7:39 Some stuff that seems to us basic now, but which back then, obviously, it required a certain degree of technological know-how. And this kind of an access to a map of the world that had, you know, strategic minerals mapped onto it, it ends up being really quite significant now because it, of course, as Megan Black writes in this wonderful book she's called Global Interior, is about that kind of an imperial extension or projection of the United States, but through its in the Department of Interior kinds of bodies that helped do that.

8:10 And this happened in Saudi Arabia, for example. So I'm about to write an article about how the US Geological Survey did this incredible mapping exercise from the 1960s to the 1990s of every square inch of Saudi Arabia with all these US geologists. And that information obviously is, you know, it was available, it was presented to the Department of Mines, to the Ministry of Mines in Saudi Arabia, but it also sits in the archives and libraries of the US Geological Survey.

8:40 A second example, which I think is actually really interesting, although I haven't done a huge amount of research on this, and I think there are people who are writing about this now, so I'm looking forward to the research that comes out, is the way that desalination technology ended up being a really important axis of interconnection between the US and various Middle Eastern countries, in particular those that had a kind of a semi-arid or arid climate, and therefore access to sort of potable or usable water, undesalinated water was really important.

9:17 And there are scholars that are writing about this in Saudi Arabia. But what is fascinating to me is if you go to Frost, the Foreign Relations of the United States online resource that is available to anybody who wants to use it, and it's really fabulous, if you go to the Frost records of the 1950s, what you find is that there is this insane obsession about Israel getting desalination plants.

9:45 And if you read between the lines, or if you have the hindsight, which is 2020, looking back, you realize that this is actually about the transfer, covertly or overtly, of nuclear technology to Israel. And it is happening because, of course, desalination technology requires a huge amount of energy. It seems to make sense in the context of countries which have oil coming out of their ears, so to speak.

10:14 That's why you have loads of desalination plants along the coast of this Arabian Peninsula. It's an arid climate and huge amounts of energy available fairly easily and, you know, with very little transportation cost. And so you can plop down a desalination plant anywhere. Israel had absolutely no energy sources.

10:34 So the fact that they were using the need for desalination, for agriculture, supposedly, as a way of excusing the establishment of a nuclear reactor there seems to me to lay the groundwork for the Israelis receiving that nuclear technology. I think they got it from France, although recently somebody had published an article about how they also stole some of that technology from the United States.

10:59 So that so that we don't actually know the details of that. But certainly desalination was often in that context a way of A, transferring a certain kind of necessary technology for accumulation of capital, but B, in this case, as being a cover for transferring nuclear technology.

11:18 That is so fascinating to know more about that history, right? Because if you're really just thinking about like today, or or even just looking back, like, you know, a decade or two in the past, like you miss so many of those early details of the broader importance of technology to empire, the long-standing demands of technology transfer that you were talking about.

11:36 Even I've done research in other fields, like looking at electric vehicle kind of stuff. And when you're thinking about the minerals, the US Geological Survey still comes up as this like really important source of information for like where all these minerals are located in the world, right? And, you know, not just around oil, but but so many other things.

11:54 And I feel like when you're talking about these technologies, and we're going to get into a few different examples looking at different parts of the Middle East. You know, you've already brought up Israel and we'll talk about that a bit more. But you know, when we think about the kind of US desire to control which countries have certain technologies, in recent years, we can think very clearly about China and how it's trying to restrict access to chip technology and other technologies to China.

12:16 But it feels to me, even more recently, we see that very clearly with Iran, right? And obviously we saw these strikes that the United States did on Iran very recently, you know, trying to target its nuclear program. And, you know, the issues with Iran's nuclear program have been long-standing among Western countries.

12:34 And I feel like that very much fits into what you're talking about there, where, as you're already saying, you know, you can see on the one hand the justification for giving Israel nuclear technology that is originally nuclear energy but becomes nuclear weapons, and how that program does not have to be held to a standard of inspections or having Israel join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

12:55 But on the Iranian side, it's like they don't even want them to have the capability of enriching uranium, let alone kind of nuclear weapons. So can you talk about that kind of distinction or or the difference in the approach of why these different countries can have these technologies and others can't?

13:12 So part of this, of course, has to do with the fact that the US has appointed itself the policeman of the world and it claims that it wants the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to be functioning as a kind of a as a way of, well, preventing proliferation. But of course, we also know that when apartheid South Africa was still in power, the US turned a blind eye to the South Africa's acquisition of a nuclear weapon in collaboration with Israel and conducting atmospheric testing with their nuclear weapon.

13:44 So, because apartheid South Africa was an ally of the United States. And so there is this obviously that you know, hypocrisy is a kind of a complete and total defining characteristic of the kind of liberal empire the United States is. It's a liberal empire that supposedly prevents these kinds of access to everybody, but on the other hand, allies can do whatever the hell they want to, including committing genocide, as we're watching it.

14:08 In the case of Iran and access to nuclear technology, I think a longer history is actually really relevant. The Shah of Iran was very interested in nuclear technology, not only because he at the time was very aware of the fact that Pakistan next door was acquiring nuclear weapons, but also because the Shah was rather interestingly very interested in using the acquisition of nuclear know-how as a way of boosting Iran's techno-industrial kind of capabilities.

14:37 And maybe we should just say quickly as well, the Shah is kind of the dictatorial leader who comes after you know the overthrow of Mossadegh.

14:45 I mean, he was the Shah before that. The Shah Shah means the king. So he was the king of Iran. He was the monarch of the Iran until uh Iran until 1979 revolution.

14:54 The period you're talking about, though, is that after the overthrow of Mossadegh?

14:57 Absolutely. Yes, it is. Yeah. So he wasn't dictatorial before the overthrow of Mossad, he became one after. So yes, he came to power with the support of the US and the United Kingdom. But he, because precisely because he's he had been one sidelined, he had this kind of uh paranoid obsession with being sidelined again.

15:18 And he really wanted to be a kind of a regional power. He was also megalomaniac, like a lot of very short men. I hope you're not very short.

15:26 I'm not. We're good.

15:27 Okay, good, excellent.

15:28 I think I'm average height, so I'm fine. Yeah.

15:31 He was very Napoleonic in his kinds of ambitions. And so, for example, one of the facts, one of the things that stayed as a cause of contention between Iran and the US after the revolution was that Iran had paid for an aircraft carrier from the United States and the US never delivered it, but also kept the money.

15:49 Makes me think of Australia's concerns today that they're never going to get the nuclear submarines.

15:54 Exactly, right? So the Shah already had some sort of an ambition about setting up sort of nuclear reactors for power, but also really, in his case, for nuclear weapon development. In the case of Iran post-revolution, one of the things that is significant is that I do think, to some extent, I do take Iran's contention that it is really developing nuclear technology in order to have civilian uses.

16:18 I do take it at some degree of face value. And part of the reason that I do is because Iran's population has trebled since the revolution. It is now 90 million people, where it was at the time of the revolution, 35 or 36. And this population obviously requires things like electricity. In the South, it probably requires desalinations, which requires energy.

16:40 And of course, Iran is also among the sort of the mega producers in the region. It is one of the ones that have a larger percentage of GDP coming from non-oil related kinds of industry and agriculture. And so it probably needs energy for industrial causes as well. In addition to all of that, Iran has also developed is one of the best sort of medical technology centers in the Middle East.

17:07 And of course, you need some degree of civilian nuclear development in order to be able to have top-of-the-line advanced medical kinds of diagnostic capabilities. So part of that has been that. But also looking at what has happened in the last month or so, but also looking back again to 2010, where Israel and the United States led a campaign of assassination of civilian nuclear scientists in Iran and then had the Stukneck virus, which uh this disabled a lot of the sort of the nuclear power plants.

17:41 And I think it was downloaded via Microsoft, one of Microsoft's back doors. It's kind of unsurprising that Iran may want to acquire a nuclear weapon. I mean, look at North Korea. They have a nuclear weapon and nobody's gonna bomb them. And so, in some ways, I think that that is a factor in whatever calculations they're going to have from this point forward.

18:06 On top of that, Iranians also were watching closely at what the UN inspectors did in Iraq, which basically they acted as conduits for intelligence about Iraq's various kinds of weapons technologies to the United States. And so they they have a degree of suspicion about the international institutions which in fact serve the United States.

18:30 So that kind of a differential proliferation is really something that is one of the most stark ways that the US determines the distribution of certain kinds of technologies. Because one of the things that we don't hear about is that Saudi Arabia, which has one of what has the second largest, I think, oil reserves in the world, is also looking to acquire nuclear technology, ostensibly for nuclear energy production.

18:56 And we don't hear very much about that. Whereas for the last 20 years, all we've heard is that Iran is within weeks or months of acquiring a nuclear weapon.

19:04 I believe I was reading since 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying that about Iran. Then it also stands out that Iran agreed to the nuclear deal with the United States and European countries to restrict its enrichment, to not develop a nuclear weapon. And it was the United States that actually pulled out of that agreement and then was back at the table again recently, you know, until Israel started killing its nuclear scientists, tried to kill its top negotiator, you know, in the United States, bombed its nuclear facilities, that it was willing to engage in another deal that would have restricted, again, enrichment and its ability to develop a weapon.

19:41 And even though a nuclear weapon allows North Korea to be somewhat protected from attack, I'm sure that the Iranians don't want to be as isolated. And it seems quite clear that they don't want to be as isolated as, say, like in North Korea, right?

19:53 Yeah. But I think that Iran also won't be as isolated in part because of its strategic location, but also in part because of its population and the fact that it produces the one commodity that still continues to be one of the sort of the desiderata of all industrial development. It is also interesting because Iran won't be isolated in part because, since we're on a technology podcast, in part because it produces it has an incredible university system which produces an unbelievable kind of quality of engineers and technologists and scientists of various sorts, who then go on to work in lots of different places.

20:35 I mean, there was a period of time where Australia, you mentioned Australia earlier, where Australia, for example, was specifically recruiting from among Iranian engineers and technologists, in part because they were so their education was so up to date and so incredibly easily flottable into the kinds of needs that at the time Australian economies seemed to have.

20:56 And so that also is another factor that distinguishes Iran from North Korea, perhaps.

21:01 Yeah, no, a very good point. And I just want to go back to something that you were saying before, right, about the way that the United States has kind of appointed itself this global policeman. And it feels like when you look at this desire to say, restrict Iran's ability to access nuclear technology or China's ability to get access to advanced chipmaking capabilities and things like that, it feels like you can very much see this desire to ensure that it remains, you know, the most powerful player, the technologically superior player, the United States and broadly its allies as well, and trying to ensure that these countries that are not as aligned with it, that it doesn't see as within its sphere

21:40 of influence, are not going to be able to reach a point where it can like technologically rival the United States.

21:47 That's absolutely right. I mean, the US also has the necessary apparatus for such a sort of a hegemony, right? They have the intellectual property laws that are obeyed and enforced in all sorts of places emanate from the United States. The university system, which actually at the moment the Trump administration and its cronies are doing everything they can to dismantle, is also one of the sort of the most significant sources of the development of new technologies.

22:12 And what's interesting about that is that I don't think that the know-nothings of the Trump administration and the Republican Party quite realized. I think they have some sort of a fantasy in their head that somehow throwing money at Silicon Valley is where innovation is done. But in fact, in the United States, it's the universities which are doing the innovations.

22:30 And then those innovations, inventions, scientific discoveries, technological advancements are then moved out through investments by Silicon Valley and the billions that they managed to raise on various kinds of markets and venture capitalists. That's the conduit for their transfer. So if the United States actually dismantles its own system of education, it will certainly deal a major blow to its hegemony.

22:59 But then we've also learned that sheer use of coercive power is also what the US is very good at. So yes, it could dismantle this, but it could also prevent others from developing their kinds of technologies. It could authorize its own technology firms to completely and totally undermine intellectual property by, for example, training their AIs on material that it itself considers to be pirated, but then prevent everybody else from doing so.

23:28 And so there's this kind of a power asymmetry, which to varying degrees various US administrations have fed into. And the extent to which they've highlighted the carrot or the stick has really depended on both the character of the president and the kind of party that has been in place. But largely this is this is the way that the United States, as a kind of a technological empire, has really benefited from its hegemony and has managed to accumulate it again and again and again and again after every war, after every expenditure on any, you know, this vast kinds of investments in kinds of assaults on different parts of the world in whatever form, as either as an approved war or sanctions or whatever,

24:11 it has always invented technologies that have moved from the Pentagon into the public sphere, and then it's been used as a way of accumulating capital. So that marriage between the US's war-making capabilities and its technological advancement has actually been inseparable for, I don't know, a couple of centuries.

24:30 In fact, from the very beginning of the United States' birth, if you want to go for that far back.

24:35 Yeah, it really feels like one of the most distinct aspects of like the Trump presidency over other presidents is more just, you know, not so much that the United States is now pushing other countries around or bullying them or things like that. The United States has always done that, but just dropping the mask of what is really behind it and just being completely open about being this bully, being aggressive toward other countries, saying, you do what I want you to do, or there are going to be consequences, that seems much more distinct.

25:02 And I think I think there are many parts of the world who that always recognize that, that always saw the United States in that way. But I think the real shift now is that a lot of like Western allies and people in other Western countries are also now seeing that face of the United States. And you kind of wonder like what the long-term impacts of that are going to be.

25:22 Yeah, it's difficult to say. I think this is our Caligula period of the Roman Empire, of the Roman US Empire. But what's also interesting about this is that although, you know, what you're speaking about allies, and since I know the Middle East, I can talk about the allies in that sense. Some of the US's closest allies in the Middle East, setting aside Israel, is are actually those in on the Arabian Peninsula, the United Arab Emirates, specifically Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.

25:49 And what is really interesting is also to me the way that the transactional nature of the relationship between the United States and those two countries has to some extent shifted from not just sort of oil for security, which is one of the old, oft-set cliches about the relationship, but what it seems to be now is for petrodollars for technology.

26:12 And so whereas the United States puts massive limitations on, for example, on the latest NVIDIA chips going to some places, they have just waived some of those limitations and restrictions on the importation of NVIDIA or the exportation of NVIDIA chips from the United States to Abu Dhabi. And that to me is fascinating.

26:32 I have a colleague at SOAS who's working on data centers in the Middle East. And she, Sarah Al-Razaz, talks about how there is this incredible kind of ravening for data centers in these places, in part because of this kind of a fantasy of the AI becoming an alternative source of economic growth in these places.

26:56 Of course, there has been since the 1960s or 70s. There has been both from the left who see in oil as a sort of a single commodity, as a way of maintaining the kind of global hierarchies, because it's only a primary commodity, it doesn't require industrialization, it doesn't require the development of an industrial workforce.

27:17 So the left is opposed to extractivist capitalism that an oil economy often develops, but also coming from the sort of the Washington consensus that says that you have to develop kind of alternatives to oil. And so finding forms of investment in kinds of internal industries. And what I have been finding interesting is the kind of an insane adoration of AI.

27:42 Now, I think that in in places like the United Arab Emirates, again, particularly Abu Dhabi, and to some extent Dubai and Saudi Arabia. And I think that comes from a number of different sources. So one of the sources that is particularly significant is the development of an acquisition of surveillance software.

28:02 These are incredibly authoritarian states, and they either love to be able to acquire or to actually develop their own surveillance kind of technologies. So surveillance ends up being one of the axes through which that kind of a tech capital travels. We know, as a matter of certainty, that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have long acquired Israeli surveillance technologies in order to keep tabs not only on their own citizens but on who comes and goes and elsewhere.

28:36 And it in fact, there's a there's a fabulous Lebanese artist called Walid Rad, who did this wonderful exhibition something like 20 years ago, long before the Abraham Accords, about how I don't know if you remember, you may have been too young to remember this, but Israel assassinated tried to, no, it did assassinate a Hamas official in Dubai.

29:02 And within days, the United Arab Emirates government posted the pictures of the 26 Mossad agents under various kinds of Western passports who had gone into Dubai to commit that assassination. The facial recognition software that Abu Dhabi had used in order to recognize them was had actually, as Wally Draad shows, had actually been acquired from Israel itself.

29:27 No way.

29:28 Yes, and this was long before Abraham Accords. So there's this kind of an interesting, there's the surveillance element is a huge and important part of this. Again, Abu Dhabi has been also acquiring a lot of surveillance tech development know-how from former CIA and various other kinds of NSA experts in the United States who come there and set up their own company.

29:52 So that's one conduit of the transfer of technology where you know these former employees of the US government probably actually nobody really ever leaves CIA, right? So that they're probably formerly employees, but in order to go on to do that kind of work for a foreign government, they probably have to have permission from the United States.

30:13 And so there is not just implicit but explicit kind of an alliance between them. But there's a second, and I think that we underestimate the extent to which the question of labor also goes into this AI fantasy. As uh, you know, as an as a number of amazing scholars, including, for example, Adam Hania, have written about the Gulf.

30:35 One of the things that allows for the Gulf to develop the kind of a system that it has, that the sort of the incredible accumulation of capital, massive inequality. And this is not related to the Gulf alone. Singapore functions like this, Hong Kong functioned like this for a long time. A lot of city-states do this.

30:53 So it's not an Arab thing. And I think it's really important to note that because I often find that people talk about that there's a certain degree of a kind of anti-Arab disdain. In fact, actually, Israel is now in the, you know, has been developing this system on the back of Palestinians, but is now doing the kind of a developing a kafala system with the exact same South Asian workers who might instead be going to, I don't know, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or whatever, but they're now going to Israel to work.

31:18 Well, you remember after October 7th when the hostages were taken and there were Thai hostages, and they were just like completely out of the discussion, it felt like, you know, they didn't matter.

31:27 Completely and totally. And in fact, because after October 7th, and I'll come back to that, but after October 7th, when Palestinians were blocked from going to a large number of Palestinians who live in the West Bank, and actually a significant number also lived in Gaza and went through checkpoints into Israel to work often in low-wage jobs.

31:48 And when they were blocked from going, so in fact, anybody who was present in Israel at the moment of 7th of October, any Palestinian that was from the occupied territories that was inside the Green Line was actually arrested and detained for months on end. But they actually then signed a deal with Modi to import Indian workers to replace them.

32:08 And we know how much Modi and uh you know his project love Israel, right?

32:12 Yeah, and they're bodies, right? And but but they have been very explicit about how they want a kafala system. I mean, they actually have used that word. So the kefala system, though, particularly in the in in the Arabian Peninsula, it is essentially an apartheid system, right? Because you have this kind of these groups of workers who do not have citizenship rights, who are deportable, who often don't have even the right to bring their families, although some of that is changing in, for example, in the United Arab Emirates, in part because of the need for expertise.

32:44 And so, what is the fantasy of having work that is done without the messiness of having to worry about the citizenship of the workers and without the possibility that these workers might strike or might withdraw their labor or might sabotage AI? Woo-hoo, right? I mean, it is also the fantasy actually of American technologists.

33:08 I don't know where I was reading this. I think it was a Bloomberg newsletter, but they were talking about how now the newest measure of most technology firms is the amount of investment per head. So the fewer number of workers you have, obviously, this is like the best metric for how well you're doing.

33:28 And I think that this, particularly in an authoritarian state that is built on the backs of disenfranchised labor, AI is supposed to kind of replace that. Some of the earliest blueprints for NEOM in Saudi Arabia, which is now mired in delays and overruns and whatever.

33:46 What a surprise. Yeah.

33:48unknown Yeah.

33:48 Was precisely that was like robotic net maids and AI teachers. The fascination with AI is also partly because of that. And finally, the third is, of course, as you know, because you're working on data centers, data centers require electricity. And where else are you going to get energy better than the place where you know you stick a stick in the ground and oil gushes out?

34:12 So I think that that also that you know, the development of data centers in places where energy is plentiful and cheap, as long as one doesn't take into account the environmental or ecological devastation that comes with it, then that tends to be the third reason behind all of this. So all of these factors, uh diversification of the economy, question of labor, um question of surveillance, and of course the abundance of energy sources are part of the reason why the countries in the Arabian Peninsula want the technology.

34:47 And the hunger for petrodollars, sovereign wealth fund investments is part of the reason why, and also, of course, the the this sort of network of surveillance into which also Israel fits is also part of the reason why the US is willing for that technology transfer there. It also seems to me that a lot of this talk has accelerated since the Abraham Accords and the establishment of I2U2.

35:17 So India, Israel, that's the two I's, and then United Arab Emirates, United States of America, that's the two U's. Since the Abraham Accords, that kind of a commercial slash strategic security kind of uh alliance has intensified. I think that part of the ability of the United Arab Emirates to wrest some concessions around technology from the United States is also because the US really wants I2U2 to work.

35:46 Just picking up on some of the things that you were saying there, one of the things that really stands out to me is, you know, you talked about many of the factors that are driving the desire for the Gulf states to acquire this AI technology, to try to present themselves as major players in this like AI race that is going on now.

36:03 And it really feels that this pursuit of AI has become a real geopolitical football as well, right? With all of these powers trying to position themselves as key players in this game or in this race, regardless of whether the AI technology is really actually going to pay off at the end of the day or what it's actually going to meaningfully result in.

36:22 And, you know, we were talking earlier about the distinction between Iran and Israel and how Iran is presented as this real bad force and Israel as you know the ally of the United States, even as it commits a genocide and its nuclear program is outside of the norms that are expected of other countries.

36:39 But then when we look at, say, the Gulf states and the acquisition of AI, we often hear these narratives from the United States that, you know, we need American companies to be developing AI because then it's like aligned with human rights and liberal values and not these kind of authoritarian values of like Chinese AI.

36:57 But you know, there's no kind of worry from the United States about them working with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, making sure they have these technologies, because that also feels like part of this broader geopolitical game that is playing out, where part of transferring those technologies to the UAE and Saudi Arabia or, you know, giving them access to chips and whatnot, is also to try to keep them out of that Chinese sphere of influence.

37:20 Yeah, I think there's something definitely true about that. And I want to bring Israel into this because I think it's really important to think about this in larger, in the context of the sort of the larger arc of imperial extension. More than a century ago, Theodore Herzl, the sort of the god the father of Israeli statehood, Herzl actually envisioned in a fundraising effort to US the US Jewish community before obviously this establishment of the State of Israel.

37:48 So something, I think, in 1902, he talked about Israel being a bulwark against the Asian hordes, the Asiatic hordes. And so the idea that Israel is going to be part of this kind of a, if you want, a great wall to keep out the Asiatic hordes from fortress Europe or indeed actually from the US interests in the Mediterranean is a very old one.

38:12 And I can see that this kind of a technological wall that the US wants to build now extends to the Indian Ocean as well, with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, of course, being closer to the Indian Ocean. Oman is also part of that equation, although it's a much quieter country when it comes to those kinds of things.

38:30 And of course, the US has no control over Yemen, and that's part of the reason why the US really likes to attack it. So this is also partially about maritime control or the control of kinds of vast both maritime and coastal spaces. So that's hugely important. And of course, with the rise of China as the factory of the world and the way in which China does not use a language of regime change or democracy or whatever, and but it just has basically cordial commercial relations with various countries.

38:59 It also, you're absolutely right that the US does want to ensure that these countries don't move into the Chinese sphere. So I think that is also a huge and important factor in all of this. And of course, there is very little. I mean, you you talked about how Silicon Valley talks about liberal values, but there is very little of that talk now among the Silicon Valley grandees.

39:24 The newest book by one of the founders of Palantir, Alex Carp, in fact, very openly talks about how frivolities like consumer applications should be set aside and technology firms need to start focusing on the defense of the West. The chief technology officers of Palantir and Meta and Thinking Machine, the chief technology officers of all of those companies have donned camo and been recruited into the US Army Reserves at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

40:04 I mean, aside from cosplaying boys with guns, there's something so incredibly here in the UK, we call it Shag the Flag, about that kind of ethos of let's let's pick up guns so we can actually go on and defend the Western civilization. But it really is also about the fact that given the way that all public expenditures on knowledge and research is being slashed in the United States, it's unsurprising that all these companies want to eat at the trough of the Pentagon.

40:42 And so what better way to do it than enroll their CTOs uh in, you know, uh however it is, one weekend a month playing at being an officer?

40:50 Yeah, meanwhile, the military budget is still going through the roof.

40:53 Oh, absolutely. Ballooning, ballooning, it's now it is above one trillion dollars. It's unimaginable. So you're absolutely right that this, both in stated and unstated ways, is about the US trying to simulate yet another kind of Cold War, in part because what is a better way for an empire to maintain its imperial standing than just then just constantly waging war and using that as a means of strengthening itself domestically.

41:25 The difference between this moment and say the early 20th century is that when those massive military expenditures were done in the early and middle of the 20th century, a lot of that trickled through a kind of a liberal scientific education, it trickled through these kinds of inventions that ended up being kind of civilian used by civilians.

41:49 Now it's all about force. And I do wonder about where we might be heading. This is a kind of a rabid imperial power that is unreliable. If Obama can sign a treaty and then the next administration comes and cancels it, to what extent can the word of the United States as a state be dependent upon? And to what extent a country that now sees itself in these civilizational terms in ways that are completely and totally stated explicitly and that the window dressings have now been completely removed, as you say, to what extent can its allies also rely on it?

42:31 Well, and especially when you see this kind of focus on developing military technologies that are going to have less and less of like, you know, the human in the loop, whether it's, you know, what we saw recently with the way that Israel used AI-generated targeting in order to justify the degree of kind of death and destruction that it meted out in Gaza.

42:51 But also how you see in the United States the longer history of the drone war, how drones are becoming a big part of war even more now. But now how there's the desire to like upgrade those systems with AI targeting, with just kind of leaving it to the computer to determine when the shots are going to happen, when the bombs are going to drop.

43:11 And even a few years ago, you know, we saw Israel use that kind of um AI-powered gun or whatnot to kill a nuclear scientist, I believe it was, in Iran. This was reported on by the New York Times. So you can see how, you know, there's this desire to move this warfare, move these weapons into this realm that potentially makes things even more dangerous than where we are today.

43:34 I mean, you're absolutely right. When, you know, when the Reaper drones were being operated out of Nebraska, there was all this concern about the operators actually suffering PTSD from having to do that. I mean, the AI targeting has long been part of what the US has been doing, like the disposition matrix.

43:53 That's a kind of an extremely Orwellian term that was used in order to talk about the kind of AI patterns for technology. Targeting people that was used under Obama in order to target people by drones is essentially an AI pattern matching kind of process. The thing about it is that as you say, the human is being completely taken out of it, number one.

44:13 And number two, there is now these kinds of things they've taken the stuff that people write about in dystopian novels and have turned it into a kind of manual of warfare. So drone swarms, Andoril, this company that is now one of the sort of the most talked-about Silicon Valley companies pitching itself to the Pentagon, its main product is software to run drone swarms autonomously, completely and totally without the intervention of humans.

44:43 The thing about it is such technology leaks, right? And my question is if it leaks, then the proliferation of these kinds of technologies is going to be a really interesting thing to watch. Because whereas in order for you to develop nuclear weaponry, you have to have the scientists, you have to have access to uranium, you have to have access to the incredibly advanced kind of technologies that allows for the enrichment of that uranium and on and on and on and on.

45:13 If you can buy a drone off Amazon and then write a software, or buy a dozen drones off Amazon and then write a software for it, which you can probably grab by grabbing one of those drones and the sort of the operating information off the network on which it operates, in fact, that is exactly what happens in a kind of an asymmetric type of warfare, where a kind of a ragtag army is going to have a much easier time duplicating the kinds of successes of that kind of a drone swarm.

45:42 Well, I guess we've already seen the role that, say, drones have played in the Ukrainian war with Russia, right?

45:47 Indeed. So I think that's really one of the things also that it's kind of the seeds of its own destruction type of warning attached to the development of these technologies. But that's also the function that Israel serves in this broader US imperial sphere. It is, as others have written, it is a laboratory for testing this stuff.

46:11 But it is also one that is absolutely unconstrained by any kind of international humanitarian law. They are not signatories to the Geneva Accords, they're not signatories, Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, they're not signatories to any of these treaties. And therefore they have absolutely, and they're of course the US's uh 51st state, so they have absolutely under no compunction to obey any kind of laws.

46:37 And we, as we have observed, they also don't have any kind of ethical uh constraints on their behavior. And so it is the perfect kind of place that they're well-educated, technologically supported people that have been in various units of their military, then very comfortably move into technology firms that are in many ways inseparable from the Israeli security apparatuses.

47:05 They receive a huge amount of venture capital funding from the United States, and the products that they produce can then be absorbed either into the United States or be sold uh extensively. We've seen that with Albit, which produces a lot of different kinds of surveillance technologies, drones, but also things that were, for example, used by the United States in under Trump administration one to, for example, sensors for watching people along the wall that was being built between the US border and Mexico.

47:36 And so again, these technologies travel. And so US venture capitalists love to invest in Israeli technology because they have these ready-made applications that can then be sold in a much larger market. Because, as we are seeing, that market also extends to countries which are either ostensibly our Israeli enemies or are undeclared allies, like the Saudi Arabian government.

48:03 And so I think this technological diffusion and the unequal and asymmetric ability of different countries to have access to those technologies, whether they develop it themselves or acquire it from sources that are that do have those technologies, is completely and totally best encapsulated and can be observable in the context of the Middle East.

48:28 And in fact, you don't even have to go to North Africa, you could just look at it from in the area east of the Mediterranean and or indeed across the Gulf. And so to me, that's what the next round of incredibly horrendous set of conflicts are going to be pitched around is going to be the question of technological access.

48:50 Yeah, no, I think very well said. And I just wanted to pick up on what you were saying about Israel and its development of technology because I spoke to Anthony Lowenstein some time ago, you know, and he was kind of explaining how not just did Israel see the development of these surveillance technologies and weapons technologies as key to its survival and its ability to extend its influence in the Middle East and subjugate Palestinians, but then also to kind of buy diplomatic support from other countries around the world, regardless of their authoritarian nature or or what have you, by kind of selling them or making those technologies available to them as kind of like a bargaining chip, right?

49:26 And I wonder, you know, to close off our conversation, as we look ahead, I wonder if you have any thoughts on kind of what we should be looking for, paying attention to with regard to the Middle East, the diffusion of technologies there, the kind of geopolitical relationship with the United States, because, you know, unfortunately, uh, I don't think this region is going to become less important in the near future and our eyes are not going to be uh turned away from it.

49:51 No. I think actually one of the things that has been really interesting for me was something that you posted not too long ago about you trying to go off of all US-built technologies. And you were trying to find alternatives to applications that are emerging out of the United States. One of the rumors, because we don't have confirmation for this, but one of the rumors that came out of the sort of the bombings in Iran was that Meta had shopped various Iranian officials and scientists' WhatsApp locations to Israel.

50:22 And when Iran made this accusation, Meta gave a non-denial denial. So it really actually didn't deny that it had done so. And so my sense is that the thing that is going to be really interesting, and perhaps this is also why countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also developing their own technologies, because although they're authoritarian clients of the United States, they're also very aware of the capricious nature of US power, is the way that they're all going to develop their own.

50:49 So you're going to essentially have a proliferation of the kinds of deadly technologies that we're seeing, much the same way that we had a proliferation of nuclear weaponry in the 1950s. What we're going to see is that those kinds of technologies developing. And I think that that is going to translate into a focus on further training for people to actually do the kind of technology developments that we're seeing, but it's also going to see a redirection of investments into kind of deadly areas rather than those that allow for life to flourish, which is a really depressing place to end on.

51:26 Yeah, unfortunately it is, right? And even as you know, you talk about maybe Iran developing its own technologies or what have you, but even as we've seen more of those discussions in, say, Europe or Canada, often the focus or or the first, the primary focus has been we need to secure defense technologies, put so much more money into the military rather than thinking about other things.

51:46 And you know, it's really depressing to see how this kind of broader rearmament or kind of refocusing on military technologies around the world really, not just in any particular region, is really escalating. And yeah, I think there's a lot to be concerned about there.

52:01 This is a moment of horror really to live through, is the extent to which the expenditures are being rooted towards technical killing technologies essentially and surveillance ones, rather than those that could actually benefit us all, is really to all of our shame. And and it is also a complete and utter crystallization of the extent to which democratic control over the development of these kinds of technologies has been lost.

52:28 Because I think if some accountability was possible as a whole, a public that is paying attention probably wouldn't want to have its taxes going towards the killing, that this kind of an unadulterated, unsupervised killing machine.

52:42 Yeah, I think very well said. And, you know, obviously it's a grim topic to be discussing, but it's also one that we need to properly understand if we're ever to think about trying to push back on it and fighting against this trajectory that we're on. I I always appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you.

52:55 Thanks so much again for taking the time to come on the show.

52:57 Thank you so much for having me.

53:01 Lolly Khalili is Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author of the forthcoming book Extractive Capitalism. Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine that is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

53:18 You could join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening, and make sure to come back next week.