In a foreign policy discourse still reflexively organized around the gravitational pull of US–China rivalry, Mohammed Soliman, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, argues with deliberate force that the real story is not China’s rise but rather Asia’s systemic return.
In West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East (Polity, 2026), Soliman challenges the prevailing architecture of the Indo-Pacific debate by extending Shinzo Abe’s strategic cartography westward, beyond the Malacca Strait, beyond the Arabian Sea, and into the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean.
The Indian Ocean, he insists, does not end at India’s western shore; it flows into a civilizational corridor that historically bound Southeast Asia, the subcontinent, the Gulf, and the Levant into a dense web of commercial and technological exchange.
By viewing West Asia not just as a side area for major power rivalry but as a key part of a changing Asian system, Soliman shifts the focus away from Washington’s China-centered view and highlights the importance of other countries, including Việt Nam, whose economic connections to the east and west are quietly changing the geopolitical landscape.
His concept sounds deceptively simple: Asia minus China, or more precisely, Asia as a system that exists independently of and prior to the question of Chinese power. Beijing has dominated the Indo-Pacific debate in Washington, which focuses on strategies to contain, deter, or accommodate it.
What this framing systematically obscures is the agency of the other Asian powers: India, Japan, South Korea, the ASEAN states, and, in Soliman’s telling, the Gulf states themselves, whose trade, capital, technological, and diplomatic relationships have been tilting steadily eastward since the end of the Cold War, not because China pulled them but because Asia’s economic gravity did.
The story of the Gulf’s Asianization is not a story about China. It is a story about the return of a multi-civilizational system that predates European naval dominance by centuries and is now, slowly and consequentially, reasserting itself.
The Vietnamese Magazine spoke with Soliman.
What strategic tools is Việt Nam using to strengthen its presence in the Middle East?
Việt Nam doesn’t make big announcements. In a region saturated with great-power signaling, that restraint is itself a powerful signal. Hà Nội has been quietly building commercial footholds across the Gulf through the unglamorous work of trade and manufacturing partnerships and the patient cultivation of economic relationships with states that are themselves in the middle of a profound reinvention.
The Gulf is moving from crude to compute; Việt Nam is moving from assembly line to technology builder. The interests converge more naturally than the diplomatic optics suggest.
What makes this story worth watching is precisely what makes it easy to overlook. Việt Nam carries none of the baggage that accompanies American, Chinese, or European engagement in the region—no colonial memory, no security footprint, and no instinct to export a political model.
It shows up as a counterpart, and its presence means a lot in the Gulf. In my book, West Asia, I argue that the Gulf’s most durable relationships in the coming decade will not be built through the accumulation of exactly this kind of transactional density. This type of transactional density fosters interdependence even before individuals consciously choose to become interdependent.
Việt Nam is doing that work quietly and effectively, and in doing so, it is helping to stitch together the Asian system that runs, in the argument of my book, from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Mediterranean, held together by the weight of commerce.
How does Việt Nam navigate the US-China rivalry in its Middle East engagement?
This is precisely where the Asia-beyond-China framework becomes essential and where I think the conventional debate goes wrong. The Asianization of the Gulf is routinely narrated as a story about Chinese strategic expansion. India, Japan, South Korea, and the ASEAN economies, including Việt Nam, collectively represent a deeper and more durable form of Asian engagement with the region than China alone, and that engagement is driven by its own logic, its own commercial imperatives, and its own civilizational history.
In West Asia, I argue that the pre-Portuguese Indian Ocean system, connecting Mamluk Egypt, the Italian city-states, and the merchant networks of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, was already a West Asian system in all but name. Việt Nam was part of that pre-Portuguese Indian Ocean system. Its re-engagement with the Gulf is, in the long view, a restoration rather than a geographic invention.
Which sectors offer the greatest potential for Việt Nam-Middle East partnerships?
Three areas stand out. The first is energy transition infrastructure. Việt Nam has ambitious renewable targets, and the Gulf states have both the capital and the strategic interest to finance clean energy projects abroad.
The second is food security and agriculture, which moved to the top of Gulf priorities after the pandemic and the Ukraine war exposed the fragility of global supply chains. Việt Nam is one of the world’s leading exporters of rice and seafood, and Gulf sovereign wealth funds have been actively seeking agricultural partnerships across Asia.
The third, and over the next decade, the most consequential, is digital and AI infrastructure. In West Asia, I describe the Gulf’s shift from “crude to compute”: a move from exporting fossil fuels to exporting computational power.
As Gulf states expand data centres, AI capacity, and digital infrastructure, they are looking to connect that capacity to the vast markets of South and Southeast Asia. With a fast-growing technology sector and roughly 75 million internet users, Việt Nam is a natural partner in that emerging architecture.
What is taking shape is not a project designed by any single great power. It is Asia rediscovering the Gulf as part of its own economic and technological system, a reconnection that feels less like something new and more like a return to an older pattern of exchange that the Indian Ocean world sustained for centuries before European naval power interrupted it.
What is Việt Nam’s potential contribution to regional stability and conflict mediation in the Middle East?
Việt Nam’s contribution to regional stability is likely to be structural rather than diplomatic, and that is not a diminishment. In West Asia, I argue that the most durable foundation for regional order is not just mediation, which treats symptoms, but the construction of commercial interdependence that gives states a material stake in one another’s stability.
Việt Nam is contributing to exactly that kind of order-building by just deepening its economic integration with Gulf states and participating in emerging connectivity networks.
Its own historical experience, balancing sovereignty, development, and great-power pressure over decades and at considerable cost, also gives it a form of credibility that more powerful states often lack. Việt Nam arrives with trade, investment, and a lived understanding of what development under great power pressure actually requires. In the current environment, that combination is a more persuasive credential than most.
How does Việt Nam’s engagement fit into the broader global realignment you describe in West Asia?
Việt Nam is a living illustration of the book’s central argument: that the most consequential realignment of our time is the emergence of Asia as an integrated system stretching from the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean to the Gulf.
This system is not being constructed from above by great-power competition but from below by the cumulative weight of trade, investment, and infrastructure ties that non-Chinese Asian powers are building on their own terms.
This is the Asia that West Asia argues Washington has systematically underestimated: Việt Nam’s manufacturing networks, India’s digital ambitions, Japan’s connectivity financing, and the Gulf’s expanding compute capacity, all gradually knitting together into a coherent economic space that resembles, in its basic architecture, a system that existed long before European naval dominance reordered global trade and is now reasserting itself with the confidence of returning familiarity.
***
Việt Nam’s methodical engagement with the Gulf illustrates how the emerging Asian order is being constructed not through military blocs or ideological crusades, but through the cumulative density of commercial interdependence.
This is a structural transformation unfolding beneath the rhetoric of rivalry: sovereign wealth funds, data corridors, supply chains, renewable grids, and technology ecosystems knitting together a transoceanic space that resembles, in its architecture, the pre-European Indian Ocean world more than the Cold War’s Atlantic system.
In this light, Hà Nội’s posture is neither marginal nor opportunistic; it is emblematic of a broader historical reversion in which Asia reclaims the Gulf as part of its own economic bloodstream.
The decisive shift of our era, Soliman contends, is not a new bipolar standoff but the reconstitution of a multi-civilizational order stretching from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Mediterranean, an order built less on spectacle than on the steady, irreversible weight of commerce.
Hà Nội’s engagement with the Gulf, in that context, is not a footnote to the China story. It is part of a much older and ultimately more consequential one. The story of Asia.
