Reenvisioning the Middle East.

• Author: Gilmour, Andrew S.

The advance of U.S. interests from North Africa to Central Asia is foundering. The exhausting occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan portend strategic failure. Large swaths of an Arab world the U.S. dominated thirty years ago as it led to the expulsion of Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait and hosted an Arab-Israeli peace conference roil in various states of political fragmentation and economic ruin. A U.S. military foothold in Syria is ensnared in a mesh of regional and Russian forces. Missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia are able to disrupt global energy supplies. A U.S. military support role for Saudi Arabia's campaign in Yemen has served primarily to deepen perhaps the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.

Chinese and Russian influence is broadly ascendant, a new "Great Game" in Afghanistan risks accelerating after the U.S. withdrawal, and Al Qaeda and ISIS--despite years of unrelenting and often successful U.S. pressure--continue to plot and inspire attacks against American interests globally. Regional states--including presumed U.S. allies--increasingly act with neither fear of nor deference to Washington. An erratic multi-year effort aimed at curtailing Iranian nuclear ambitions rests on a knife's edge of failure. The massive expenditures of blood, treasure, and diplomatic capital across the wider Middle East that have produced these outcomes since the end of the Cold War amount to a debacle for U.S. strategy across a pivotal part of the globe.

This litany of failures has spurred American strategic thinkers and former policymakers to advocate a new strategy of retrenchment. A consensus has emerged that the United States has been overcommitted to a region whose internal challenges are beyond the reach of U.S. instruments of power. Essays such as "The Middle East Isn't Worth It Anymore," "The Middle East Just Doesn't Matter as Much Any Longer," and "America's Middle East Purgatory" are giving voice to an exasperated foreign policy elite eager to pivot U.S. strategy to more immediate threats from Russia and China. Similarly, a bipartisan consensus for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan had been building for several years.

Such frustration is understandable given the memory of the United States successfully securing many of its interests in the wider Middle East throughout the Cold War. When an earlier retrenching Western power, the British, passed to the United States a roiling stew of nationalism, traditional monarchies, and scattered energy interests in the wider Middle East, Washington--with the major exception of the Iranian revolution--largely met the challenge.

The United States achieved its regional objectives by engaging local elites politically and economically, marshaling diplomatic leverage, and arraying offshore naval power. Arab-Israeli wars were contained and redirected into a semi-permanent peace process, Egypt switched from the Soviet to the U.S. sphere of influence, damaging oil embargoes were overcome, and a U.S.-backed Islamic insurgency--the Mujaheddin--successfully countered the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. U.S. ground forces deployed once to the region--in Lebanon in 1958--to welcoming Lebanese on Beirut's beaches. The post-Cold War era, in contrast, is proving far less responsive to U.S. power.

Calls for retrenchment are coming with a paradoxically long list of enduring U.S. interests to protect. The incoming national security advisor in January 2021, for example, sketched the inherent challenges of retrenchment: "Downsizing the U.S. presence in the Middle East will require striking a tricky balance: reducing an outdated U.S. military footprint without creating fresh insecurity, while maintaining deterrence and influence where needed to address those key U.S. interests that remain." Other experts have been more detailed: "the U.S. has three truly vital interests in the region: limiting terrorism, protecting the flow of oil and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon." Similarly, others have asserted that,

The United States should still care about protecting freedom of navigation in the region's major maritime passages, preventing oil producers or trouble makers from suddenly turning off the flow, and containing would-bc regional hegemons and other actors hostile to Washington. In Afghanistan, the United States has pledged to maintain counterterrorism and humanitarian operations but will need a foothold in neighboring Central Asian states to achieve these post-withdrawal aims.

A new U.S. strategy that might secure this long list of vital interests has yet to be articulated. Instead, the orthodox Cold War discourse of classical realism lurks in the background with an emphasis on power, interests, and the state. A typical view is that America "still has interests (in the Middle East) to protect but America needs to be realistic, prudent, and disciplined in how it secures them." A foreign policy elite that came of age in the Cold War is reluctant to revisit basic assumptions about how the United States acts toward the wider Middle East.

This bias toward realism is understandable. It sits well with a national security establishment originally organized around the Cold War mission of containing Soviet power and winning an ideological confrontation over secular forms of governance. Realism is also compatible with foreign policy elites habituated to decades of dealing with counterpart palace elites to advance U.S. interests in the wider Middle East. These palace elites buffered the United States from direct engagement with mass movements and the labyrinthine fissures of...