The U.S. Can and Should Extricate Itself from the Middle East

Biden didn’t “devise a creative exit strategy.” He was cooking up strange new excuses for taking on a heavier burden.

Suzanne Maloney has conveniently discovered that a new war in the Middle East requires deeper U.S. involvement in the region:

What has begun, almost inexorably, is the next war—one that will be bloody, costly, and agonizingly unpredictable in its course and outcome. What has ended, for anyone who cares to admit it, is the illusion that the United States can extricate itself from a region that has dominated the American national security agenda for the past half century.

To the extent that the region has “dominated” the U.S. agenda, it is because successive administrations have chosen to support, join, and start conflicts that have had little or nothing to do with U.S. security. Contrary to the story that many people in Washington like to tell, the U.S. is not “dragged” or “pulled” or compelled in any way to be as enmeshed in the affairs of the Middle East as it is. The U.S. absolutely can extricate itself from the region, and it would not be all that costly to do so, but policymakers keep rushing to get more deeply involved when they should be looking for the exits.

The U.S. hasn’t been trying to extricate itself from the region. Maloney is simply wrong about that. Biden didn’t “devise a creative exit strategy.” He was cooking up strange new excuses for taking on a heavier burden. The latest round of fighting follows the desperate, bizarre efforts of the Biden administration to increase U.S. commitments to its regional clients, including a security guarantee for Saudi Arabia. There is no scenario where the U.S. makes a commitment like that and then gets to “downsize” its presence in the region. That effort came the heels of an expansion of the U.S. military footprint under both Trump and Biden.

The Israeli government has correctly assumed that there was nothing that it could do to the Palestinians that would cause Washington to reduce or condition its support in any way, and that has given their government free rein to move towards outright annexation of occupied territory. Now the U.S. is backing the Israeli government to the hilt as it prepares to devastate a heavily-populated civilian area. As Yousef Munayyer put it this week, “Washington is not merely abdicating official and moral responsibility but enabling mass atrocities at a time when all the red flags for genocide are up.”

The current conflict has many causes, but one of them is the reflexive, uncritical U.S. backing for Israel. Catering to a client state’s every wishes is not a recipe for stability and peace. It encourages the client to do whatever it likes on the assumption that the U.S. will bail out the client when it gets into trouble, and inevitably that leads to a crisis or conflict where the U.S. is then expected to come to the rescue. Unquestioning support leads to “reckless driving,” and that then leads to a deadly crash. That is part of the explanation for how conditions have deteriorated so badly. Now that Israeli occupation and apartheid are provoking a violent reaction, the U.S. is hurrying to throw its support behind the occupier once again.

None of this is necessary for U.S. security, and none of it is consistent with a desire to disentangle the United States from the region as much as possible. This is the “back to basics” policy that Biden has pursued for the last two years. We can see just how bankrupt the U.S. foreign policy status quo is.

Naturally, this is the time for supporters of that status quo to come out of the woodwork to tell us that the U.S. must be even more entangled in Middle Eastern affairs forever and that the idea of reducing our involvement is an “illusion.” This was the same reaction that the U.S. had after 9/11, and it was completely wrong. Our own “war on terror” was a disastrous overreaction to horrific attacks, and it has done nothing but further destabilize and immiserate every country where the U.S. has operated over the last two decades. The attacks in 2001 were a warning that the U.S. was already too deeply involved in a region it didn’t understand, but the consensus view then and later was that the U.S. could “fix” the region’s problems through the use of American power. That was deluded then, and it is insane now.

The U.S. should be extricating itself from the Middle East because its interests in that region are relatively few and not that important. It should also want to have nothing to do with aiding and abetting the crimes of its clients, whether those crimes are committed in Yemen, Gaza, the West Bank, or elsewhere. Continuing with the status quo where the U.S. arms and enables its clients to oppress and kill innocent people is wrong, and it needs to stop. The reality is that the U.S. could stop supporting these governments tomorrow and it wouldn’t make our country any less secure, but our leaders are going to make the necessary changes until they pay a political price for perpetuating these unacceptable policies.