Ro Khanna Is Wrong: Trump's AI Diplomacy Is America First

The criticisms are familiar, almost rehearsed. Congressman Ro Khanna, one of the Democratic Party's reliable progressives, recently asked why President Trump would approve the construction of major AI data centers and research hubs in the United Arab Emirates, rather than planting those high-paying jobs on American soil. "What about Ohio? What about Pennsylvania?" he asked, implying that Trump had traded Rust Belt prosperity for Gulf petro-dollars. At first glance, the critique appeals to patriotic instinct. But its logic is superficial, and its conclusions are wrong.

Trump's AI strategy, particularly his deal with the UAE, is not a betrayal of "America First," but a shrewd fulfillment of it. If we seek American technological dominance, global standards set by US companies, and the marginalization of China's growing AI imperialism, this is the only play.

Let us begin where the critics do: the location of the data centers. While the Abu Dhabi complex has captured headlines, it is not a substitute for domestic investment, but a complement to it. Indeed, Amazon Web Services is investing $1 billion into new AI infrastructure in Ohio. OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, is actively scouting Pennsylvania, Texas, Oregon, and Wisconsin for sites. Plans are even underway to revive Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which could soon power data centers throughout the Mid-Atlantic. In other words, these are not either-or decisions. They are both-and. Trump is doing what any good strategist would do: establishing beachheads at home and abroad.

Khanna's objection assumes a zero-sum world in which every job exported is a job lost. But that is not the world in which technology operates. Unlike steel or soybeans, compute power is a platform industry. If the US does not build and run these platforms in the Gulf, China will. The region is already being courted by Huawei and DeepSeek. Beijing, unlike Washington under Biden, is not in the habit of browbeating its partners about where to build data centers. It simply delivers. Refusing to engage the Gulf would not force them to bring their chips to Cleveland. It would push them into China's embrace.

This is precisely what Trump understands, and what Ro Khanna either cannot or will not admit. The UAE deal is structured around a matching provision: for every AI hub built there, an equivalent, if not larger, facility must be funded in the United States. These are not crumbs thrown to the homeland to quiet political opposition. They are a structural guarantee that any expansion abroad will simultaneously build capacity here. This deal, like many in Trump’s foreign economic policy, leverages strategic alliances to anchor domestic growth.

Moreover, the operations in Abu Dhabi will not be managed by shadowy Gulf entities or multilateral consortia. The vast majority of compute will be owned and operated by American cloud companies. Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle will run the show. US standards will govern the systems, the networks, the chips, and, perhaps most importantly, the data governance protocols. American engineers will train the models. American firms will reap the profits. This is the soft power of the 21st century: not just occupying physical territory, but embedding our technological DNA across continents.

But even this structural advantage is only half the story. The UAE agreement, taken together with the Trump administration’s domestic deregulatory blitz, clears the path for the most ambitious AI infrastructure buildout in world history. Under Biden, permitting bottlenecks and energy grid constraints made it nearly impossible to scale compute in a timely fashion. Trump’s response? A radical acceleration of permitting timelines, slashing bureaucratic wait times for energy and data projects from years to 28 days. He ordered the Department of Energy to co-locate new data centers with nuclear plants and used emergency powers to fast-track the construction of power infrastructure needed to fuel the AI revolution.

This is not merely deregulation for its own sake. It is intelligent statecraft. Because compute does not run on hope or ideology. It runs on electricity. And to compete with China's ruthless scale, we must match it with speed. There is no other way.

Furthermore, Trump’s “Build, Baby, Build” vision is inseparable from his energy doctrine. The same fossil fuels progressives scorn are what make the AI buildout feasible. Coal, gas, and nuclear are not regrettable necessities but strategic assets. Trump has revived American energy not to appease industry, but to power a new industrial frontier.

Khanna’s suggestion that we can simply will high-paying jobs into Ohio by saying no to foreign partnerships reveals an ignorance of how strategic capital formation works. The UAE’s sovereign wealth and energy infrastructure offer not just money, but scale and speed. That capital is now being directed into American technologies and standards. If we had waited, we would have lost that window to China.

It is instructive to consider the counterfactual. Suppose the US rebuffed the UAE. Suppose we told them to buy OpenAI licenses and run them on Dell hardware in Dubai. What then? The Gulf States, like any rational actor, would seek alternatives. China would be happy to supply them with an off-the-shelf stack, complete with Ascend chips, Huawei routers, and DeepSeek foundational models. The US would lose not only business, but influence. Within a decade, Chinese norms and hardware could dominate AI systems from North Africa to the Indian Ocean. The world would run on Beijing’s logic, not Washington’s.

Instead, Trump has done what his critics often claim to support: he has secured international investment, protected American technological primacy, created jobs, and weakened China’s hand. All while laying the groundwork for a new digital Bretton Woods, with the US dollar and the US cloud stack as its twin pillars.

To dismiss this as a giveaway to oil-rich allies is to misunderstand both the stakes and the structure. This is not a question of whether data centers are built in Abu Dhabi or Akron. The real question is who will define the infrastructure of the 21st century. Trump’s answer is unequivocal: America will. And he is doing what is necessary to make that answer a reality.

We must think geopolitically, not provincially. A data center in Dubai, underwritten by the UAE but operated by Americans, is a forward outpost of US technological power. It is a flag planted in contested terrain. And it is already forcing our adversaries to rethink their strategy.

So yes, Congressman Khanna, the data centers are coming to Pennsylvania and Ohio. But they are also going to the UAE. Because we are not just building for ourselves. We are building the world our children will inherit. And if we do not shape it, someone else will.

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