The Future of the Middle East: My Dialogue with Gad Saad

I met the controversial Gad Saad last November at the Freedom of Intellectual Navigation Conference at the University of Chicago. When the subject of immigration came up, Saad argued that immigration from the Middle East would eventually make the West look like the Middle East. Rather than dispute the premise, I asked: “What will the Middle East look like in 20 or 30 years?” Somewhat to my surprise, he responded with curiosity rather than doom-saying. Since I’ve recently been exploring the jewels of the Middle East, and Saad, born to a Jewish family in Lebanon, clearly had a lot of first-hand knowledge of the region, I thought it would be fun to have a wide-ranging conversation on the Future of the Middle East.

We scheduled over a month before the Iran War broke out, but the latest troubles in the Gulf make our conversation all the more exciting.

While we didn’t get to every topic, here is the list of questions I was working with.

1. Intro – how we started talking about the future of the Middle East. Compartmentalization! If immigration will make West more like ME, where is the ME itself heading?

2. Basics – where Gad is from, what are all of the ME countries he’s been to and for how long

3. The (much smaller range) I’ve seen

4. Country by country, how bad is the ME now?

5. How are these countries evolving? Note the extreme variation.

6. Regression to the mean or divergence?

7. Monarchies and the ME

8. Economic, political, religious, social change, factor by factor.

9. Best-case/worst-case/most likely case scenario after Iran War

10. Best case/worst-case/most likely case for 2050. Note that’s almost exactly the time gap between Iraq War and today!

You can watch the whole conversationbelow . Enjoy!

P.S. If you post questions for Gad in the comments, perhaps I can persuade him to respond.