Publications

The United Arab Emirates’ AI Ambitions: Key Implications for Maintaining U.S. AI Leadership, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Jan 24, 2025

The UAE is placing enormous bets on AI to diversify its economy and become the world’s next technological hub. As the United States develops its strategy for global AI leadership, the UAE presents a critical test case for engaging with technologically ambitious countries seeking to balance relations with both the United States and China—a challenge that will shape the United States’ broader approach to technological partnerships and export control policies. In late 2024, a group of U.S. technology policy and national security scholars, including the four authors of this paper, traveled to the UAE to understand the country’s AI strategy and its position amid U.S.-China competition. This paper presents the authors’ assessments about the opportunities and risks of U.S.-UAE cooperation in AI.

The AI Export Dilemma: Three Competing Visions for U.S. Strategy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dec 13, 2024

Control over the sharing of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may soon become a defining question of American foreign policy, yet it has received surprisingly little public attention. Exporting key AI technologies can help shore up U.S. competitiveness and create geopolitical leverage, but it also risks intellectual property theft, leakage to adversaries, and misuse by authoritarians. Drawing on interviews with key players in the private and public sectors of multiple countries, I outline three possible approaches for U.S. policy on AI exports: control, diffusion, and leverage. I also examine the approach the Biden administration has taken thus far, and what moves the incoming Trump administration might take to regulate AI technology sharing.

Policy or Partisanship in the United Kingdom? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit. (With Bryan Schonfeld). The Journal of Politics, Volume 83, Number 4, October 2021.

Are voters motivated by policy preferences or partisan identities? In this paper, we argue that the British Conservative Party's sudden change in Brexit policy (following the surprising result of the 2016 referendum on EU membership) offers a unique opportunity to study partisanship in the context of a natural experiment. Using an interrupted time series design, we find evidence that voters primarily care about policy: Europhilic Conservatives disaffiliated from the party, while Euroskeptics became more likely to identify with the Conservatives. These findings suggest that voters are sufficiently policy-motivated to change parties if they disagree with their party on important issues. But we find that partisan identities do play a role in the development of voter preferences in another issue area: voters who joined the Conservatives immediately after the referendum subsequently adopted more right-wing views on economic redistribution.

Coverage: Marginal Revolution, National Affairs, The Washington Post, UK in a Changing Europe, LSE British Politics and Policy

Working Papers

“Factual or Moral Persuasion in the United States? Evidence from the Papal Encyclical on Climate.” (With Bryan Schonfeld)

Coverage: America Magazine’s “Inside the Vatican” podcast