Dervish Zayed

AI, Geoeconomic & Geopolitical Risk Analyst @OxfordEconomics | Polyglot exploring techno-political economy, coloniality, cognitive science & cosmology.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

A running thread of #books on geoeconomics, technology strategy, industrial policy, and the future of power. Only books that meaningfully improve how we understand the emerging world order.

🧵

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Dear and dearest @grok what's the demand of content in X right now?

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

The surface story is that two unrelated events occurred within forty-eight hours: China sanctioned ten US military-linked companies, while the US Senate passed a war powers resolution constraining escalation against Iran.

The deeper story is that both events reveal the same phenomenon: the gradual fragmentation of executive power in a multipolar world.

For three decades after the Cold War, American power rested on two assumptions. Externally, Washington could impose costs on rivals with limited retaliation. Internally, the presidency could often dominate foreign policy through military, financial, and sanctions tools. Both assumptions are now under pressure simultaneously.

China's sanctions are less significant for their immediate economic effect than for their symbolism. Beijing is signaling that sanctions are no longer a uniquely Western instrument. More importantly, China paired retaliation with expansion. While sanctioning US defense-linked firms, it simultaneously deepened industrial integration with Europe through manufacturing investment. This reflects a mature geoeconomic strategy: punish where necessary, integrate where beneficial.

The Senate resolution represents a parallel constraint from within. Regardless of whether it ultimately changes policy, it signals that future military escalation against Iran now faces higher domestic political friction. Executive power remains substantial, but no longer appears unconstrained.

The implications for Iran are profound. Tehran's negotiators are likely reading these events not as isolated incidents but as evidence that Washington's coercive credibility has weakened. If Congress can restrict escalation and political divisions can challenge enforcement, Iran gains confidence that future threats may be less durable than before. Ironically, opposition to a "weak deal" in Washington may strengthen hardliners in Tehran who already distrust American commitments.

The most overlooked dimension may be India. While attention focuses on sanctions and diplomacy, Beijing is quietly repositioning itself inside European industrial ecosystems. A Chinese EV produced in Europe ceases to be merely a Chinese export; it becomes part of the European manufacturing base. For India, this is not a geopolitical abstraction but a direct competitive challenge. The battle is moving beyond tariffs and sanctions into ownership of production geography itself.

The common thread connecting all three developments is that power is becoming less centralized. The United States faces constraints from rival states abroad and institutions at home. China is shifting from export dependence toward embedded manufacturing. Middle powers like India must navigate an increasingly complex industrial landscape.

The real question is not whether American power is declining. It is whether the age of unilateral power, by any actor, is ending altogether. What emerges next may not be multipolarity in the traditional sense, but a world where every major decision is constrained by overlapping networks of states, legislatures, supply chains, corporations, and technological dependencies. In such a system, power does not disappear. It becomes negotiated.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Susan Williams’s White Malice forced me to reconsider one of the most widely accepted stories of the twentieth century: that decolonization marked the end of empire. The conventional narrative is familiar. European colonial powers withdrew, new nations gained independence, flags were raised, constitutions were written, and sovereign states emerged across Africa. Williams presents a far more unsettling argument. Political independence did not necessarily mean the disappearance of imperial power. In many cases, empire simply changed its form.
https://t.co/ve28ZADfmn

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

A running thread of #books on geoeconomics, technology strategy, industrial policy, and the future of power. Only books that meaningfully improve how we understand the emerging world order.

🧵

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Why Washington Keeps Misreading Iran

The United States negotiates in election cycles.

Iran negotiates in civilizational cycles.

This is the analytical mistake at the heart of nearly every Western assessment of Iran. Washington repeatedly assumes that sanctions, deadlines, military threats, and political pressure will force rapid concessions. Yet Iran has been living under varying forms of American pressure since 1979.

Forty-seven years.

Nearly half a century.

When U.S. officials say, "You have 60 days," they are speaking from a temporal horizon shaped by elections, media cycles, quarterly economic indicators, and changing administrations.

Iran is not.

The IRGC's strategic signaling, parliamentary delays, calibrated escalation, and dual-track diplomacy reveal something deeper: a state operating on a multi-generational timeline. The current crisis is not viewed as a defining event but as another chapter in a struggle that predates most contemporary policymakers and will likely outlast many of them.

This creates a profound temporal asymmetry.

Washington seeks immediate behavioral change.

Tehran seeks strategic endurance.

The result is predictable. What appears as Iranian stubbornness is often a fundamentally different conception of time itself.

For Iranian decision-makers, presidents come and go. Administrations change. Sanctions expand and contract. Regional crises emerge and fade. Yet the broader contest remains.

This is why pressure campaigns frequently fail to produce the outcomes their architects anticipate. The underlying assumption is that pain automatically creates urgency.

But pain accumulated over decades often creates adaptation.

The longer a society survives external pressure, the less effective short-term coercion becomes.

The real lesson is not about Iran alone.

It is about time as a geopolitical variable.

Great powers often assume their material superiority guarantees strategic leverage. Yet history repeatedly shows that actors with longer political memories and longer temporal horizons can absorb pressures that appear overwhelming in the short term.

The question is not whether Iran can withstand the next 60 days.

The question is whether Washington understands that Tehran is still calculating from 1979.

And on a 47-year timeline, the current administration may ultimately be remembered as a footnote rather than a turning point.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Trump has said Iran will agree to nuclear inspections.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Why Washington Keeps Misreading Iran

The United States negotiates in election cycles.

Iran negotiates in civilizational cycles.

This is the analytical mistake at the heart of nearly every Western assessment of Iran. Washington repeatedly assumes that sanctions, deadlines, military threats, and political pressure will force rapid concessions. Yet Iran has been living under varying forms of American pressure since 1979.

Forty-seven years.

Nearly half a century.

When U.S. officials say, "You have 60 days," they are speaking from a temporal horizon shaped by elections, media cycles, quarterly economic indicators, and changing administrations.

Iran is not.

The IRGC's strategic signaling, parliamentary delays, calibrated escalation, and dual-track diplomacy reveal something deeper: a state operating on a multi-generational timeline. The current crisis is not viewed as a defining event but as another chapter in a struggle that predates most contemporary policymakers and will likely outlast many of them.

This creates a profound temporal asymmetry.

Washington seeks immediate behavioral change.

Tehran seeks strategic endurance.

The result is predictable. What appears as Iranian stubbornness is often a fundamentally different conception of time itself.

For Iranian decision-makers, presidents come and go. Administrations change. Sanctions expand and contract. Regional crises emerge and fade. Yet the broader contest remains.

This is why pressure campaigns frequently fail to produce the outcomes their architects anticipate. The underlying assumption is that pain automatically creates urgency.

But pain accumulated over decades often creates adaptation.

The longer a society survives external pressure, the less effective short-term coercion becomes.

The real lesson is not about Iran alone.

It is about time as a geopolitical variable.

Great powers often assume their material superiority guarantees strategic leverage. Yet history repeatedly shows that actors with longer political memories and longer temporal horizons can absorb pressures that appear overwhelming in the short term.

The question is not whether Iran can withstand the next 60 days.

The question is whether Washington understands that Tehran is still calculating from 1979.

And on a 47-year timeline, the current administration may ultimately be remembered as a footnote rather than a turning point.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Why Washington Keeps Misreading Iran

The United States negotiates in election cycles.

Iran negotiates in civilizational cycles.

This is the analytical mistake at the heart of nearly every Western assessment of Iran. Washington repeatedly assumes that sanctions, deadlines, military threats, and political pressure will force rapid concessions. Yet Iran has been living under varying forms of American pressure since 1979.

Forty-seven years.

Nearly half a century.

When U.S. officials say, "You have 60 days," they are speaking from a temporal horizon shaped by elections, media cycles, quarterly economic indicators, and changing administrations.

Iran is not.

The IRGC's strategic signaling, parliamentary delays, calibrated escalation, and dual-track diplomacy reveal something deeper: a state operating on a multi-generational timeline. The current crisis is not viewed as a defining event but as another chapter in a struggle that predates most contemporary policymakers and will likely outlast many of them.

This creates a profound temporal asymmetry.

Washington seeks immediate behavioral change.

Tehran seeks strategic endurance.

The result is predictable. What appears as Iranian stubbornness is often a fundamentally different conception of time itself.

For Iranian decision-makers, presidents come and go. Administrations change. Sanctions expand and contract. Regional crises emerge and fade. Yet the broader contest remains.

This is why pressure campaigns frequently fail to produce the outcomes their architects anticipate. The underlying assumption is that pain automatically creates urgency.

But pain accumulated over decades often creates adaptation.

The longer a society survives external pressure, the less effective short-term coercion becomes.

The real lesson is not about Iran alone.

It is about time as a geopolitical variable.

Great powers often assume their material superiority guarantees strategic leverage. Yet history repeatedly shows that actors with longer political memories and longer temporal horizons can absorb pressures that appear overwhelming in the short term.

The question is not whether Iran can withstand the next 60 days.

The question is whether Washington understands that Tehran is still calculating from 1979.

And on a 47-year timeline, the current administration may ultimately be remembered as a footnote rather than a turning point.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

SpaceX at $1.77 Trillion Isn't a Valuation. It's a Civilizational Milestone.

For the first time in history, markets are pricing humanity's expansion beyond Earth.

The significance is not the rockets. It is the infrastructure.

A Ukrainian drone operator navigating GPS-spoofed airspace. A doctor in rural Congo conducting telemedicine. Emergency responders in disaster zones. Refugees connecting to the outside world. Military planners coordinating battlefield operations. All increasingly depend on the same orbital network.

This is the defining condition of the twenty-first century: the infrastructure of human progress is simultaneously the infrastructure of warfare, commerce, communication, and humanitarian survival.

What investors are valuing is not a company. They are valuing control over future connectivity, orbital logistics, data flows, launch capacity, and perhaps the foundations of a multiplanetary economy.

Yet there is a deeper question.

If colonialism transformed oceans into trade routes and continents into extractive frontiers, are we now witnessing the privatization of humanity's next frontier before humanity has even arrived there?

The market does not distinguish between a refugee accessing information, a surgeon saving a life, or a military operator identifying a target. Their value is aggregated into the same revenue stream.

Capital measures utility, not ethics.

The real threshold, therefore, is not that humanity is reaching space.

It is that we are exporting our political economies, power structures, inequalities, and governance models into orbit.

The future is no longer being built beyond Earth.

It is being priced.

And the most important question may not be whether humanity becomes multiplanetary.

It may be: which version of humanity gets there first?

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

I think one of the greatest intellectual casualties of colonialism was precisely this memory.

Today, many people unconsciously associate reason, logic, and systematic inquiry almost exclusively with the European Enlightenment. Yet centuries before Descartes, Kant, or Hegel, Islamic intellectual traditions had already developed sophisticated traditions of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, medicine, mathematics, and jurisprudence.

Think of Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. These were not anti-rational thinkers. They debated causality, consciousness, ethics, ontology, and logic with extraordinary rigor.

What colonial narratives often obscured was that Islamic civilization never viewed reason and revelation as necessarily opposing domains. Logic (mantiq) was cultivated as a tool, not a rival to faith. Knowledge itself was understood as plural: revelation, reason, intuition, observation, jurisprudence, and spiritual experience all occupied legitimate epistemological space.

Ironically, modern stereotypes often portray Islamic thought as inherently irrational or anti-intellectual. This is less a historical reality than a colonial inheritance. European colonial discourse frequently represented Muslim societies as stagnant, emotional, and incapable of rational inquiry precisely to justify imperial domination.

The deeper irony is that medieval Islamic philosophers were arguably less dogmatic about knowledge than many modern secular frameworks. They recognized that logic was powerful, but not exhaustive. Human existence contained dimensions that could not be fully reduced to formal reasoning alone.

Perhaps the real lesson is that intellectual history itself was colonized. Entire traditions of reasoning were reclassified as "religious" or "pre-modern," while Europe became positioned as the sole custodian of rationality. Recovering figures like Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd is therefore not merely historical correction. It is part of recovering a more plural understanding of what reason itself can be.

[ش @fatalmusings]

Medieval Islamic philosophers were incredibly logic-oriented. At the same time, they valued other epistemological frameworks that did not rely on logic.

Arguably, they were among the thinkers most infatuated by and committed to pure logic. They used logic (mantiq) alongside revelation. Scholars considered it an essential tool for protecting faith from faulty arguments and structuring theological debates.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

I think one of the greatest intellectual casualties of colonialism was precisely this memory.

Today, many people unconsciously associate reason, logic, and systematic inquiry almost exclusively with the European Enlightenment. Yet centuries before Descartes, Kant, or Hegel, Islamic intellectual traditions had already developed sophisticated traditions of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, medicine, mathematics, and jurisprudence.

Think of Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. These were not anti-rational thinkers. They debated causality, consciousness, ethics, ontology, and logic with extraordinary rigor.

What colonial narratives often obscured was that Islamic civilization never viewed reason and revelation as necessarily opposing domains. Logic (mantiq) was cultivated as a tool, not a rival to faith. Knowledge itself was understood as plural: revelation, reason, intuition, observation, jurisprudence, and spiritual experience all occupied legitimate epistemological space.

Ironically, modern stereotypes often portray Islamic thought as inherently irrational or anti-intellectual. This is less a historical reality than a colonial inheritance. European colonial discourse frequently represented Muslim societies as stagnant, emotional, and incapable of rational inquiry precisely to justify imperial domination.

The deeper irony is that medieval Islamic philosophers were arguably less dogmatic about knowledge than many modern secular frameworks. They recognized that logic was powerful, but not exhaustive. Human existence contained dimensions that could not be fully reduced to formal reasoning alone.

Perhaps the real lesson is that intellectual history itself was colonized. Entire traditions of reasoning were reclassified as "religious" or "pre-modern," while Europe became positioned as the sole custodian of rationality. Recovering figures like Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd is therefore not merely historical correction. It is part of recovering a more plural understanding of what reason itself can be.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

The hidden insight I analyse here is that most failures are not failures of effort but failures of self-assessment. What fascinates me is that we readily acknowledge institutional incompetence, yet assume our own judgment is exempt from the same scrutiny. The hardest skill is not execution. It is accurately knowing the limits of your own competence.

At the same time, there is a paradox. If we only act when fully convinced of our competence, growth becomes impossible. The challenge is finding the balance between humility and agency: seeking guidance without surrendering responsibility. Wisdom begins when confidence becomes evidence-based rather than ego-based.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

This gets much closer to how Chinese policymakers themselves tend to think about technological development.

The Western narrative often focuses on access: who stole what, who copied whom, who obtained which blueprint. The Chinese approach has historically focused on absorption capacity. Technology is rarely a static object; it is a living ecosystem of suppliers, engineers, universities, production processes, tacit knowledge, organizational culture, and continuous iteration.

China's rise in sectors such as high-speed rail, batteries, solar panels, shipbuilding, drones, EVs, and increasingly AI was not primarily because it acquired technology. Many countries acquired similar technologies. The difference was China's ability to mobilize capital, train millions of engineers, build industrial clusters, scale manufacturing, and relentlessly improve products over decades.

In that sense, know-how is less a secret than a capability. A semiconductor fabrication process can be documented. A jet engine can be reverse-engineered. But replicating the institutional ecosystem that continuously improves them is far harder.

I would add one nuance though. Learning capacity itself is not an accident. China spent decades building it through educational expansion, technology transfer requirements, special economic zones, state-backed industrial policy, research institutes, and integration into global supply chains. What looks like "learning" today is partly the result of a forty-year national project to increase the country's absorptive capacity.

Perhaps the real strategic lesson is that technological competition is no longer about who possesses knowledge. It is about who can learn, adapt, scale, and improve faster than everyone else once knowledge becomes available.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

This is an imaginative extrapolation, but the paper itself is much more modest: it argues that advanced civilizations would likely migrate into rich galaxy clusters because those regions retain the largest reservoirs of matter gravitationally bound against accelerated cosmic expansion. The leap from that to “building Dyson spheres around millions of stars” and surviving “100 billion years” is speculative engineering fantasy, not the paper’s claim.

The deeper critique is political as much as cosmological: even the far-future imagination is shaped by abundance thinking, as if survival is solved only by ever-greater accumulation. The more serious question is whether any civilization that expands without limit is actually mastering entropy, or just postponing collapse by scaling the same extractive logic across the stars.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

What stands out about China is not loud disruption, but patient system-building. Beijing is pairing frontier-model releases with an industrial policy that pushes compute, chips, data centers, and procurement into domestic hands. Reuters reported that DeepSeek’s latest model was adapted to run on Huawei chips, Alibaba launched Qwen3-Max with more than 1 trillion parameters, Zhipu released open-source GLM-4.5, and China accounted for 1,509 of 3,755 large-language models released globally by July 2025.

Beijing has also targeted 100% self-reliance in smart computing infrastructure by 2027 and is reportedly planning about $295 billion in nationwide AI data centers over five years.That is the quiet part many people miss. China is not only trying to build a better model, it is trying to build a more sovereign stack. Open source helps diffusion, but the real leverage sits in chips, energy, cloud, model hosting, and procurement rules. A model can be copied; an ecosystem is harder to dislodge. That is why this looks less like “AI hype” and more like long-term statecraft.

The cybersecurity angle is real, but I would frame it more carefully. What governments are reacting to is not one model magically “breaking” major systems, but the broader reality that frontier AI lowers the cost of reconnaissance, phishing, vulnerability discovery, code generation, and influence operations. The U.S. is already treating this as a national-security issue: Reuters reported export restrictions on Anthropic’s advanced models, and Anthropic has stopped selling to majority Chinese-owned groups. That tells you the strategic class is already behaving as if AI is becoming a dual-use asset, not a neutral tool.

So yes, cybersecurity should remain a major investment theme, but not only in the narrow sense of endpoint protection. The bigger market is identity, model governance, red-teaming, data-loss prevention, secure inference, hardware trust, and critical infrastructure defense. The next wave of risk is not just “hackers using AI.” It is states, firms, and proxies using increasingly capable AI systems inside a fragmented tech order. China’s advantage is that it seems to understand this as a long game, not a headline cycle.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

The interesting part is not the ban itself. It is what it reveals about how Chinese statecraft is evolving.

For years, Beijing largely responded to U.S. restrictions defensively. Today, it increasingly operates through reciprocal institutional mechanisms. Rather than framing every response as ideological confrontation, China is building a toolkit of procurement controls, export restrictions, standards-setting, industrial policy, and market-access leverage. In other words, it is beginning to behave less like a participant in a U.S.-led system and more like a co-author of the rules.

What many observers miss is that this is also part of China's broader de-hyphenation strategy. Beijing no longer wants every issue filtered through the lens of "U.S.-China competition." It is simultaneously trying to deepen ties with Europe, the Gulf, ASEAN, Latin America, and Africa while selectively responding to Washington. The goal is not simply confrontation; it is demonstrating that engagement with China can continue regardless of U.S. preferences.

At the same time, I would be cautious about portraying this as evidence that China "stands alone" against the United States. The reality is more pragmatic. Beijing remains deeply integrated into global trade, technology supply chains, finance, and manufacturing networks. Its objective is not autarky but strategic resilience. There is a difference.

The deeper trend here is the emergence of techno-economic statecraft as the primary arena of competition. Procurement lists, semiconductor controls, cloud infrastructure, AI models, rare earths, standards, batteries, and data governance are increasingly doing the work that tariffs and military posturing once did. Power is moving from the battlefield toward the supply chain and from ideology toward infrastructure.

The real question is whether this marks the beginning of a stable pattern of managed competition or whether reciprocal restrictions gradually create parallel technological ecosystems that become harder and harder to reconnect.

Which outcome do you think Beijing is actually pursuing: strategic autonomy within an interconnected system, or the gradual construction of a parallel one?

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

https://t.co/N90lG6GUYm

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

the machine learned my silence.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

@ArsheyBhardwaj @gharkekalesh I can't understand why is it so. I feel a cultural difference too here.

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

@ArsheyBhardwaj @gharkekalesh Is this happening for real or kind of staged?

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

Mình hoàn toàn đồng ý. Điều thú vị là nhiều người nhìn giá dầu chỉ qua lăng kính cung–cầu ngắn hạn, nhưng bỏ qua những lực lượng cấu trúc dài hạn đang định hình hệ thống năng lượng toàn cầu.

Theo mình, Trung Quốc và Ấn Độ không chỉ làm tăng nhu cầu năng lượng; họ đã thay đổi toàn bộ trọng tâm của nền kinh tế thế giới. Khi hàng trăm triệu người bước vào tầng lớp trung lưu, nhu cầu về hạ tầng, vận tải, sản xuất và tiêu dùng tạo ra một áp lực khổng lồ lên hàng hóa cơ bản.

Điều mình thấy đặc biệt quan trọng là dầu mỏ không đơn thuần là một loại hàng hóa. Nó là nền tảng của trật tự địa chính trị hiện đại. Vì vậy, mỗi biến động giá dầu đều phản ánh không chỉ kinh tế mà còn là sự dịch chuyển của quyền lực toàn cầu, từ Trung Đông đến châu Á và xa hơn nữa.

Mình tò mò một điều: bạn có nghĩ rằng quá trình chuyển đổi năng lượng hiện nay sẽ thực sự chấm dứt "siêu chu kỳ" dầu mỏ, hay chỉ đơn giản là chuyển cuộc cạnh tranh từ dầu sang lithium, đồng, đất hiếm và các khoáng sản chiến lược khác?

[Dervish Zayed @dervishzayed]

I think this comparison oversimplifies both China and Europe. The key question is not how much the state intervenes, but where and for what purpose.

China often appears laissez-faire at the micro level because local entrepreneurship, manufacturing clusters, and SMEs enjoy considerable operational flexibility. Yet this exists within a framework where the state ultimately shapes credit allocation, land access, industrial policy, technology priorities, capital flows, and strategic sectors. Markets operate, but within boundaries set by developmental objectives.

The deeper blind spot is treating China as anti-statist. China's model is better understood as selective statecraft: minimal intervention where market dynamism serves national goals, maximal intervention where systemic risk, social stability, technological sovereignty, or geopolitical competition are involved.

Europe's challenge is different. Much of its regulation emerges from managing mature post-industrial societies rather than building national power. China's state asks, "How do we accelerate development?" Europe's often asks, "How do we manage complexity and risk?"

The real distinction is not capitalism versus communism, but developmental state versus regulatory state. China disciplines capital when it threatens state priorities; many Western systems increasingly struggle because capital often shapes the state itself. That is a political economy difference far more significant than the amount of regulation on a dishwasher.