As the United States deepens its investments in artificial intelligence (AI) partnerships abroad, it is moving fast — signing deals, building labs, and exporting tools. Recently, President Donald Trump announced sweeping AI collaborations with Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These agreements, worth billions, are being hailed as historic moments for digital diplomacy and technological leadership.
But amid the headlines and handshakes, I keep asking the same question: where is child protection in all of this?
As someone who has worked across the Middle East and North Africa on children’s rights and protection, I have seen how fast-moving technologies can amplify harm when ethical safeguards are missing. In countries where digital regulation is still evolving and where vulnerable communities already fall through the cracks, introducing powerful AI tools without clear protections is not innovation, it's a risk.
And yet, these deals are being signed without a single line publicly dedicated to the safety of children, the protection of personal data, or the prevention of exploitation.
The MENA region is home to more than 100 million children, many of whom live in contexts shaped by displacement, economic hardship, or legal invisibility. The digital world, once imagined as a safe space for learning and connection, has also become a space where grooming, abuse, and trafficking happen at alarming speed.
The INTERPOL report from 2020 warned that during COVID-19, online child sexual exploitation surged. Isolation, lack of oversight, and increased internet use created the perfect conditions for harm, and we still have not caught up.
Now, imagine adding AI to this landscape of facial recognition, predictive policing, and machine learning systems in countries that are still building their legal frameworks. Who decides how these systems are used? Who is responsible if they misidentify, exclude, or endanger a child?
This isn’t a critique of progress. The Gulf region is making major investments in tech, education, and infrastructure and that can bring real opportunities. But when the U.S. exports technology without including rights-based standards, it is exporting risk.
In all the official announcements, I’ve yet to see mention of child rights impact assessments, ethical use policies, safeguarding conditions, or civil society consultations. These are not extras. These are not nice-to-haves. They are essentials.
The U.S. cannot claim global leadership in AI while staying silent on the ethical standards that must accompany it. If it can include economic terms in these deals, it can also include human rights terms. If it can prioritize national security, it can also prioritize child safety.
Before the next deal is signed, child protection needs to be on the table, not as an afterthought, but as a requirement. We need binding commitments to data privacy and safety, independent oversight mechanisms, and a voice for child rights organizations in the negotiation process — because children will live with the consequences of these technologies even though they were never consulted.
We cannot allow powerful tools to be exchanged between governments without also exchanging responsibility. AI may be the future but if it doesn’t protect children, it’s a future built on omission.
And we’ve already seen what that costs.
Hassan Tabikh is a human rights practitioner from Baalbek, Lebanon, with over a decade of experience in human rights, social justice, and child protection across the MENA region. He is the MENA Regional Coordinator at ECPAT International and a Public Voices Fellow on Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse with The OpEd Project.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.