Hi, I'm Ravi Agruwal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief.

This is FP Live.

So we have a bonus episode for you this week.

I'm traveling in the Middle East right now and last weekend at the Doha Forum in Qatar, I sat

down with Jared Cohen, the co-head of the Goldman-Sax

Global Institute. Jared co-wrote an essay in foreign policy last week that is grandly titled

The New Wealth of Nations, a play on the original book by Adam Smith, and it's about a very

clear trend in geopolitics. the growing salience of industrial

policy and sovereign wealth funds. Now, this is happening in America and China, of course,

but the biggest shift is in the Middle East. Think about it. Donald Trump's first foreign

visit in his second term as U.S. president

was not to Europe, not to a big Asian economy, but to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE,

all countries with large sovereign wealth funds and the ability to deploy that capital to

geopolitical ends. Now, it's not just the Gulf, of course. Norway and Singapore also

have very large sovereign wealth funds, although they operate differently. And the idea of state-deplied

capital isn't new. Think of the Dutch East India Company several centuries ago. But something new

is happening right now.

And as the United States and China compete with each other,

and as the scramble for AI dominance continues,

I thought it was worth looking into this new dynamic,

this new wealth of nations.

FP has a partnership with the Goldman Sachs Global Institute this year.

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