The U.S. Chooses to Trap Itself in the Middle East

The combination of stake inflation and threat inflation keeps the U.S. stuck in a trap of its own devising.

Janan Ganesh tries to come up with an explanation for why the U.S. remains mired in the Middle East:

First, people overrate the role of choice and agency in politics. External events, not best laid plans, dictate where a country’s attention goes, even a great power’s. Once the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza began, the US had no hope of remaining aloof, at least not without losing face and therefore credibility elsewhere. There is a wing of Republicanism that talks of the world as an abacus: fewer resources devoted to Nato must mean more for the “Indo-Pacific”, and so on. Elbridge Colby, one of Trump’s defence officials, is an example. The trouble is, the abacus fights back from time to time.

Even now, the administration is said to be finishing off a national security strategy, which will prioritise the western hemisphere more than Trump ever did in his China-focused first term. Like all geopolitical cogitation about “postures” and “pivots”, it will be taken terribly seriously. But the lesson of the recent past is that one event somewhere else will intervene, just as the Ukraine war postponed the transfer of US attention to Asia. A candid president would name the strategy Man Plans, and God Laughs.

There are always unexpected or significant events that take place, but that doesn’t account for why the U.S. consistently falls back into its bad old habits in one administration after another. Given how deeply entangled the U.S. chooses to be in the Middle East, it would have been difficult to remain “aloof” when the war in Gaza began, but everything the U.S. did over the last two years was a choice to sink itself deeper into the regional morass than it already was. When something goes wrong in the Middle East, the U.S. typically rushes to involve itself in a way that it simply never does in most other parts of the world.