  It is well-known that in scenarios with direct gauge mediation of
supersymmetry breaking the messenger fields significantly affect the running of
Standard Model couplings and introduce Landau poles which are difficult to
avoid. This appears to remove any possibility of a meaningful unification
prediction and is often viewed as a strong argument against direct mediation.
We propose two ways that Seiberg duality can circumvent this problem. In the
first, which we call "deflected-unification", the SUSY-breaking hidden sector
is a magnetic theory which undergoes a duality to an electric phase, with fewer
elementary degrees of freedom coupled to the MSSM. This changes the
beta-functions of the MSSM gauge couplings so as to push their Landau poles
above the unification scale. We show that this scenario is realised for
recently suggested models of gauge mediation based on a metastable SCQD-type
hidden sector directly coupled to MSSM. The second possibility, which we call
"dual-unification", begins with the observation that, if the mediating fields
fall into complete SU(5) multiplets, then the MSSM+messengers exhibits a fake
unification at unphysical values of the gauge couplings. We show that, in known
examples of electric/magnetic duals, such a fake unification in the magnetic
theory reflects a real unification in the electric theory. We therefore propose
that the Standard Model could itself be a magnetic dual of some unknown
electric theory in which the true unification takes place. This scenario
maintains the unification prediction (and unification scale) even in the
presence of Landau poles in the magnetic theory below the GUT scale. We further
note that this dual realization of grand unification can explain why Nature
appears to unify, but the proton does not decay.
