Climate Change and Regional Instability in the Middle East
Report from Center for Preventive Action
Report from Center for Preventive Action

Climate Change and Regional Instability in the Middle East

The Middle East has suffered from protracted instability in recent decades, and climate-related disasters compound existing suffering. Marwa Daoudy argues that the United States and its partners should center mitigation efforts in assistance to the region. 

October 2023 , 36 Pages

Report

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is home to over sixteen million refugees and internally displaced persons due to decades of conflict and instability, and the United Nations estimates that over seventy million people in the region need humanitarian assistance. At the same time, it is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to the deleterious effects of climate change; the region has seen 0.2°C (0.36°F) of warming between 1961 and 1990, and the rate of warming is intensifying. Climate-related disasters like droughts, increasing desertification, declining crop yields, population displacement from low-lying coastal areas, and worsening sand and dust storms already threaten human security in the region, and therefore increase the likelihood of violence during a scramble for resources. 

Marwa Daoudy
Marwa Daoudy

Associate Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service

Marwa Daoudy, nonresident scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center and associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, argues that it is crucial for the United States and its international partners to recognize the interplay between instability and climate change, which is influenced by “structures of power, individual governments’ policies, and interstate negotiation (or, often, the lack thereof).” Weaponization of water access in particular is an issue in the region; the depletion of groundwater resources, stressed by both mismanagement and droughts, allows both state and nonstate actors to use access to water “to establish legitimacy and domination over a population in times of peace and as an offensive and defensive tool during war.”

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Middle East and North Africa

Climate Change

Food and Water Security

Yemen

Iraq

The cost to human security of this exploitation of natural resources is great. In Yemen, for example, existing water scarcity issues were exacerbated by Saudi-led blockades, leading to some of the highest cholera-related death rates in the world between 2016 and 2021. In Iraq, ISIS was able to recruit fighters more easily from areas experiencing drought, while Turkey used water shutoffs in northeastern Syria to crush expanding Kurdish autonomy.

Daoudy cites four compounding challenges to successful climate adaption in the MENA region: government mismanagement of climate change’s effects, transboundary resource management, urbanization and migration, and regional economic inequality. All will need to be addressed in order to safeguard human security, and the United States has “a significant number of strategies at its disposal,” Daoudy argues, “including prioritizing climate-forward data sharing and development assistance, leveraging relationships with allies to protect the most vulnerable, mitigating the effects of instability, and utilizing international organizations to foster resource-protection norms.”

“In the Middle East,” Daoudy writes, “where conflicts tend to be recurring and protracted, prioritizing climate adaptation can prove difficult. However, a failure to do so can undermine future prospects for overall stability.”

This is the fourteenth Discussion Paper in the Managing Global Disorder series, which explores how to promote a stable and mutually beneficial relationship among the major powers that can in turn provide the essential foundation for greater cooperation on pressing global and regional challenges.

This Discussion Paper was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

More on:

Middle East and North Africa

Climate Change

Food and Water Security

Yemen

Iraq

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. In May, the Trump administration killed the diffusion rule, days before it would have been set into motion, in part to facilitate the export of these cutting-edge chips abroad to the Gulf powers. This represents a fundamental pivot for AI policy, but potentially also in the logic of U.S. grand strategy vis-à-vis China. The most recent era of great power competition, the Cold War, was fundamentally bipolar and the United States leaned heavily on the principle of non-proliferation, particularly in the nuclear domain, to limit the possibility of new entrants. We are now playing by a new set of rules where the diffusion of U.S. technology—and an effort to box out Chinese technology—is of paramount importance. Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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