Welcome back to Situation Report, where we’ve spent the week alternating between frantically tracking the news and cleaning up after a normally rambunctious but currently sick Goldendoodle named Indy (after John’s favorite archaeologist/adventurer). Needless to say, we’re thrilled to inform you that tomorrow is Friday.
The news cycle has indeed been frantic, with a resurgence of violence in Gaza and Yemen as well as the firing of more than 1,000 journalists and staff members at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. You can read about those stories from us and our colleagues elsewhere on our pages, but we’re going to use today’s lead story to bring you up to speed on a development that went relatively under the radar in Washington this week.
Here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump hosts the UAE national security advisor for a banquet dinner at the White House, DOGE scraps a Yale program tracking abducted Ukrainian children, and Turkish police arrest a key rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In an event that got little attention—in part because it was not on Trump’s public daily schedule—the U.S. president hosted Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor, for a banquet dinner at the White House on Tuesday evening.
“The evening demonstrated the long-standing ties and bonds of friendship between our countries. UAE and the U.S. have long been partners in the work to bring peace and security to the Middle East and the World. Discussions also included ways for our countries to increase our partnership for the advancing of our economic and technological futures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the meeting.
The brother of Abu Dhabi’s president and ruler, Sheikh Tahnoon is an extremely influential official in the UAE involved in everything from national security to finance and economic affairs to technology.
Artificial intelligence was particularly high on Sheikh Tahnoon’s agenda during his White House visit. The UAE Embassy’s readout of the meeting contained several mentions of AI, and Tahnoon’s Washington meetings included Elon Musk and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Like other oil-rich Gulf states, the UAE has spent years parlaying its immense wealth into technological leadership, courting Washington and Silicon Valley in equal measure. The deals have flowed thick and fast—last year, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, an Emirati AI company (whose chairman is Sheikh Tahnoon), while money flowed the other way from Dubai conglomerate DAMAC and Abu Dhabi-based AI investment fund MGX (the latter also chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon) into multiple U.S. firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Musk-owned xAI.
The checkbook diplomacy has continued into the Trump administration, with MGX investing in the $500 billion “Stargate” project to develop U.S. AI infrastructure that Trump announced from the White House two days after taking office. This week, Microsoft and G42 jointly inked a deal with the Abu Dhabi government to create a cloud computing system for AI-enabled government services, while Emirati sovereign wealth fund ADQ (whose board chairman is, you guessed it, Sheikh Tahnoon) signed a $25 billion partnership with U.S. energy investor Energy Capital Partners to “serve the growing electricity needs of data centers.”
While the close economic relationship between Washington and Abu Dhabi dates back over a decade, AI has kicked the relationship into overdrive, said Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute and member of the strategy advisory firm McLarty Associates who focuses on technology issues.
“Technology and AI are at the core of how the United States and the UAE are thinking about each other right now,” Soliman told SitRep.
Defusing diffusion. Readouts from both sides focused on the positives, but multiple experts told SitRep they would be surprised if a slightly more uncomfortable topic wasn’t part of the agenda.
One of the last announcements from Trump’s predecessor, President Joe Biden, was a Commerce Department policy proposal referred to as the “AI diffusion rule.” The rule, put forward days before Trump’s inauguration, divides countries into three tiers of access to advanced U.S. semiconductor chips. The top tier features 18 close U.S. allies who enjoy near-unrestricted access, including Canada, Germany, and Taiwan, while the bottom tier includes roughly two dozen arms-embargoed adversaries such as China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, where chips exports are totally banned.
The UAE, like most other countries, is in the second tier that will be subject to strict licensing requirements for advanced chips critical to developing AI models and data centers. U.S. tech giants including Nvidia and Microsoft slammed the rule, with the latter specifically calling out the UAE as one of the “American friends” who will suffer as a result.
“I assume that Sheikh Tahnoon came in with a broader framework between the U.S. and UAE on AI cooperation,” Soliman said, “that maybe is trying to balance between the security concerns of the United States but at the same time not to cap them when it comes to how many chips they can access in a way that hammers their own ambitions.”
The Biden administration left a 120-day gap for the diffusion rule to go into effect, meaning implementation will be left up to the Trump administration. That creates an opportunity for companies and countries to lobby Trump for a reprieve, but it could also result in some troubling dynamics.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump administration either gets completely wooed and sweet-talked into dropping the whole diffusion framework country categories, or changes it in a way that ultimately undermines the framework itself,” said Georgia Adamson, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., who focuses on AI and semiconductors. “That’s obviously a cynical view of the Trump administration, and I would like to think that their regard for national security is not that low,” she added.
The White House and the UAE Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to questions on whether the AI diffusion rule was discussed.
China conundrum. One of Microsoft’s key arguments against the AI diffusion rule was that it would encourage countries like the UAE to look elsewhere for alternatives—specifically, to China.
The UAE and other Gulf countries have long seen themselves as a melting pot between east and west, and that remains true when it comes to technology. The UAE’s exposure to Chinese tech became a sticking point on several occasions under the Biden administration in its efforts to curb China’s AI rise, including a rare intergovernmental agreement between Washington and Abu Dhabi as part of the Microsoft-G42 deal that required the latter to sever ties with Chinese companies, with several U.S. lawmakers expressing concerns that the deal would risk U.S. tech ending up in Chinese hands.
The UAE has repeatedly stressed that the U.S. is its preferred AI partner. “As of today, they are committed to Team America on AI,” Soliman said. “The tech side of the China-Gulf relationship is not as front and center as it used to be.”
But the Emiratis haven’t completely severed their Chinese ties, Adamson said, highlighting an Abu Dhabi government delegation of 140 people that traveled to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong last month to explore bilateral investment opportunities. “There are very credible reasons to believe that the UAE is not decoupling to the extent that it claims that it is from China,” she added.
The UAE and its neighbors are uniquely positioned to play both sides. “The Gulf is going to be a region of AI competition between China and the United States,” Soliman said. “Whoever is going to win the Gulf AI ecosystem is going to be in a very favorable position when it comes to the AI race globally.”
Recent hires in Trump’s White House:
- Adrienne Pena-Garza as associate director at the Presidential Personnel Office
- Stephanie Buesser has a new position as special assistant on the National Security Council
- Maj. Gen. Jamelle C. “Jami” Shawley as director for defense policy and strategy on the National Security Council
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Tracking abducted Ukrainian kids. The Trump administration recently terminated a U.S.-funded program at the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab that tracks alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including the abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. A bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers this week raised alarm that a database the program compiled with information on the identities and locations of the children may have been deleted. The State Department has acknowledged ending the initiative, but denies that the data was deleted in the process.
The abduction of Ukrainian children is one of the most sensitive issues in the war in Ukraine. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for allegedly overseeing the mass abductions.
Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday amid ongoing efforts to secure a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. The White House said that during the call, Trump asked Zelensky about the missing children and “promised to work closely with both parties to help make sure those children were returned home.” But Trump’s administration may have made that process more difficult by scrapping the program at Yale, which is part of a broader trend of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency targeting federal funding for initiatives related to the promotion of democracy and human rights.
Mass protests in Turkey. Police in Turkey on Wednesday arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, the main political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prompting mass protests. Imamoglu faces charges of graft and aiding a terrorist group, which his supporters have dismissed as politically motivated—an allegation the government fervently rejects.
The arrest occurred just days before Imamoglu—who won a second term as Istanbul’s mayor last year, soundly defeating a candidate from Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party—was expected to be named the presidential candidate for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). This all comes amid speculation that Erdogan will move to revise the constitution so he can pursue another term as president.
Imamoglu’s arrest and the emerging fallout are indicative of the headaches Turkey has caused for NATO over Erdogan’s more than two decades in power. Turkey is a key member of NATO, but the country’s slide into authoritarianism under Erdogan has led to tensions between the alliance and Ankara.
Militarizing the border. The Trump administration is reportedly considering establishing a military-controlled buffer zone at the U.S.-Mexico border amid its widening crackdown on illegal crossings. Under the plan, U.S. troops would be empowered to temporarily hold migrants who enter the U.S. illegally before handing them over to immigration officers.
The plan could face potential legal obstacles, including the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars active-duty troops from engaging in most law enforcement missions.
There are already more than 10,000 active-duty U.S. troops involved in border security efforts as the Trump administration continues to escalate its hard-line approach to immigration.
Supporters of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu take part in a demonstration against his detention in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 19.Kemal Aslan/AFP via Getty Images
Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote an op-ed for Just Security this week on how climate change has become a global security threat due to the instability it is causing around the world. “The climate crisis is not a future concern. It is here now, and it is destabilizing communities, disrupting economies, fueling conflicts, and driving mass displacement of people,” Panetta wrote.
As the Pentagon under Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth takes steps to cease all of the Defense Department’s climate-related work, it’s worth reading what a former defense secretary has to say about climate change’s security threats.
Monday, March 24: The Canadian parliament is set to hold its first session since the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The United States is expected to hold separate meetings with Ukrainian and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia as part of a push for a cease-fire in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“It’s only because of France that the Americans aren’t playing cricket and singing God Save the King.”
—Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull posted on X this week in reaction to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stating that “it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.” Leavitt was addressing a call from a French member of the European Parliament for the Statue of Liberty to be returned to France, which gifted the iconic monument to the United States roughly 140 years ago.
This piece of news might make you spit your coffee out. Singapore recently banned a Malaysia-made coffee, Kopi Penumbuk, after discovering it contained tadalafil, a drug used to treat erectile dysfunction. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) is advising against purchasing or consuming Kopi Penumbuk, which it said has been “marketed on local e-commerce platforms as a coffee product with claims of male sexual enhancement effects.”
Tadalafil should only be given under medical supervision, the SFA said, adding that inappropriate use of the drug is “dangerous and can increase the risk of serious adverse effects, including heart attack, stroke, headache, migraine, irregular heart rate and priapism (painful and exceedingly long erections).”
