Tech & Geopolitics & EMEA @MiddleEastInst. Fellow @FPRI & @TrilateralNA. Prev. @GUDiplomacy & @USIP & @georgetownmsfs. Book: West Asia (Polity, 2026)
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Big news to share: my book West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East is coming out in November 2025 with @politybooks.
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Mohammed Soliman retweeted
AI can process information quickly, but it cannot replace human intelligence. And don’t ask it to do your homework for you.”
— Pope Leo XIV
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"The most effective naval strategists think globally and geographically, using maps to express maritime strategy."
Latest with @USNIProceedings below. Thanks to many friends from @NavalWarCollege and @SAISStrat who helped refine the arguments.
usni.org/magazines/proceedin…
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Not clear, if this time, Turkey would strongly back Abiy Ahmed as it did in the past saving the capital
In Ethiopia, the process that began when seven armed groups declared an alliance on 20 September has now carried the fighting all the way to Addis Ababa. Almost every analyst is asking the same thing: who will win? But that is not the question that matters.
Look at the years since Abiy Ahmed took power in 2018 and one thing stands out: the core of Ethiopia's internal and external security equation has not changed. An era that opened with promises of reform and was crowned with a Nobel Peace Prize failed to prevent the Tigray war, the Fano insurgency in Amhara, the armed conflict in Oromia, or the persistent tensions with neighbours, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia chief among them. Even ceasefires like the Pretoria Agreement never hardened into lasting stability. As the guns fell silent on one front, another opened.
The skyscrapers, wide boulevards and showpiece projects rising in Addis Ababa tell Ethiopia's growth story. Step outside the capital, though, and the picture changes entirely: regions where state authority has frayed, armed groups, millions of displaced people, and daily life shaped by insecurity. The gulf between these two Ethiopias is the country's greatest vulnerability.
That is why predicting a winner only scratches the surface. If Ethiopia wants to endure, with Abiy or without him, it has to stop asking whether it can win this war and start asking how it escapes the cycle of insecurity that has been reproducing itself for years. aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/2…
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Some truly astonishing figures in this piece:
- More than 80% of Brazilian families are in debt
- Families spend nearly 30% of their income on debt payments
- Brazilians lost about $7 bn to licensed betting sites last year, compared w/ $4 bn in 2024
tinyurl.com/pf2572t5
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IMO it’s very smart to partner with CMU rather than attempt to start Griffin University.
University prestige is one of the longest-duration network effects in the economy… CMU itself is the newest university in the top 50 in the US, from 1900!
A degree is valuable in large part because everyone agrees it’s valuable. Students want Harvard because employers and grad schools value Harvard. Employers value Harvard partly because great students go there. Great students go because great faculty, alumni and other great students are there. Successful alumni donate, the school gets richer and more selective, and the cycle compounds.
It’s a coordination equilibrium that becomes incredibly hard for a new entrant to break.
You can spend billions and buy a beautiful campus, labs, great professors and scholarships, but you can’t buy generations of alumni, employer recognition, applicant demand and the shared belief that a degree from your institution means something.
Stanford is the most recent ultra elite university, founded in 1885. It was absurdly well capitalized and benefitted from the West Coast being a huge underserved market.
Essentially no new entrant has broken into the top tier of American universities, despite some good attempts (Olin, Minerva, UATX)
Imo the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy is a very interesting experiment. They’re explicitly trying to build an elite institution from scratch for young builders. The first class will be tuition-free and have access to people like Jensen, Sama, Satya, and Patrick Collison, plus employer partnerships with a bunch of top companies.
It’s polarizing, but putting Horowitz and Andreessen in the name is very smart imo.
The fundamental problem with starting a university is that a new institution has no reputation, but they get to borrow a reputation from day one… Andreessen and Horowitz already mean something in the exact network they’re targeting. The name signals something to ambitious young builders, founders, investors and tech employers, they are borrowing prestige from them and the people that students will have access to.
They’re effectively trying to bootstrap the network effect instead of waiting 100 years for it to emerge.
Which gets back to Griffin. With $2B, he could build Griffin University. Instead he’s essentially building a new university in Miami and putting CMU’s name on it.
Ken can buy almost everything a university needs except the hardest asset to create: the accumulated belief in the name, and CMU has a good one!
So why is it that today donors create all these satellite campuses of existing schools (CMU Miami, Cornell Tech, NYU Dubai) instead of new universities? Carnegie and Mellon didn't create Harvard Pittsburgh, why is this not Griffin University?
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This is exactly what Miami needed to take its transformation to the next level. Miami can’t be a real AI hub without the talent pool that places like SF and NYC already have.
Hedge-fund titan Ken Griffin is donating $2 billion to start a Carnegie Mellon University campus in Miami, part of the largest-ever individual gift toward higher education on.wsj.com/4AGpvMq
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Mohammed Soliman retweeted
A source close to the Saudi royal family told @Jerusalem_Post : “Israel needs to understand that normalization cannot be forced.”
🇸🇦🇮🇱 Officials in Israel were confident that Saudi Arabia would approve an Israeli civilian rescue flight to rescue the Israelis from Saudi Arabia — and were surprised when it did not happen, sources told the @Jerusalem_Post
Some political and security officials were certain that the Saudis would allow such a flight. El Al submitted a proposal, and the Israeli Air Force also put forward an option. There was even a proposal for an unmarked aircraft to arrive.
But ultimately, the Saudis said “no.”
The Israelis were eventually brought home on another Flydubai flight.
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Meta Enterprise Platform will use our strengths that few other companies have: advanced models, leading agents, large-scale infrastructure, and years of working closely with many businesses. Initially, we will focus on bringing our full technology stack, including the Muse agent, Meta Business Agent, Muse API, Muse Code, and more to businesses and developers to help them grow.
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Scoop in @dealbook : Instinct, the hot AI assistant, is now worth $10 billion! With only 14 employees. It raised $1 billion from @benchmark, @sequoia and @coatuemgmt.
nytimes.com/2026/09/28/busin…
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Breaking news: Nvidia is launching the biggest ever share buyback by a US company with a $150bn repurchase scheme, as the Silicon Valley chipmaker continues to reap huge profits from its perch at the top of the AI supply chain. ft.trib.al/HfurnvK
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We are going to learn how many systems only work today because they are built around friction that will no longer exist soon.
Fascinating.
Chief Economist at Apollo: agents could cause a bank run by sweeping household cash into accounts paying 3-5% instead of the 0.1% national average, causing banks to lose a large share of their cheap deposits.
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nothing has ever aligned so precisely with my interests
📚 Au Japon, des gens vont désormais en boîte de nuit… pour s’asseoir silencieusement et lire un livre pendant qu’un DJ joue de la musique d'ambience.
Le concept s’appelle JUCY BOOK RAVE et se déroule notamment dans un club souterrain de Shimokitazawa, à Tokyo. Ici, pas besoin de danser ni de hurler pour parler à la personne située à 30 centimètres de vous. Les participants viennent avec un livre, s’installent dans la pénombre et lisent pendant que la musique accompagne leur soirée.
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Toll station employee listening to Um Kalthoum. Everyday , somewhere in Egypt and beyond, her voice is still being heard. She physically died in 1975 but her voice still exists outside the boundaries of time.
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“The Iran conflict has demonstrated that data centers and radar installations can be disrupted or degraded, while satellites remain operational and on station,” Mohammed Soliman, senior fellow at the @MiddleEastInst where he focuses on the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and business in the Middle East, told @FortuneMagazine .
“That lesson will shape how the Gulf states think about the intersection between space and national security. The Gulf’s investment in space infrastructure is a logical trajectory.”
“What both companies are trying to sell is proximity to terrestrial pricing at unprecedented scale,” said Soliman.
“They want to make satellite connectivity economically viable against ground-based networks, using a model that’s already proven itself in the mobile industry.”
fortune.com/2026/09/23/satel…
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Airmen carrying a rolled-up red carpet across Andrews for Xi. That’s how Washington is measuring Chinese power right now.
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“There’s no baseline forecasting on where to go from here when it comes to the geopolitical situation [in the Gulf],” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the @MiddleEastInst, a Washington research organization, told @dealbook.
nytimes.com/2026/09/23/busin…
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