The U.S. Has Never Been 'Dragged' Into the Middle East

The U.S. has nothing at stake that requires this level of involvement in regional conflicts.

Hal Brands repeats a very popular lie about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East:

Every recent president gets their Middle Eastern war, whether they want it or not. Since Ronald Reagan’s time, each administration has engaged in at least one significant military conflict in the region. Even presidents who wanted nothing more than to escape the Middle East were, almost ineluctably, dragged back in. Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn.

Every time that the U.S. has involved itself in wars in the Middle East, it has done so by choice. There was no vital interest that compelled the U.S. to send troops to Lebanon or to support Iraq in its war with Iran. The U.S. then chose to intervene to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, and then it chose to keep a significant military presence in the region after the war. Clinton’s military operations in Iraq were relatively minor, but they were far from being obligatory.

The invasion of Iraq was one of the more egregious examples of an American president going out of his way to launch a new war in the region when almost all regional governments and much of the rest of the world were pleading with the U.S. not to do it. The U.S. then helped to fuel the civil war in Syria because it was trying to overthrow the government there, and the U.S. also chose to wage a new war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria when it didn’t have to. Backing the Saudi coalition in Yemen was as unnecessary and as it gets. No president has been “dragged” in to wars in the Middle East. In every case for at least the last forty-five years, the U.S. has been anything but reluctant when it chose to support, start, or join a war in the region.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has nothing at stake that requires this level of involvement in regional conflicts. The few interests that the U.S. may have are not important enough to merit the extensive military involvement of the last three decades. If the U.S. extricated itself from the region, it would not be appreciably worse off or less secure than it is today. It is much more likely that the U.S. would be in a stronger position if it rid itself of its unnecessary and costly entanglements and the many headaches that have come with them. It is also very likely that the countries of the region would be significantly better off without all the destabilizing policies of our government that have done so much damage across the region by fueling conflicts and reinforcing repressive governments.

Brands claims that “the Middle East remains far too important to be ignored, and far too unsettled to sort itself out.” As far as the U.S. is concerned, the first part is nonsense. The second part is a self-serving lie that hegemonists tell themselves to justify causing widespread suffering, displacement, and death in the name of “sorting out” the problems of other countries. No one honestly believes that the U.S. knows how to “sort out” the region’s problems in any case, and no one seriously thinks that the U.S. has been making a good faith effort to solve anything for the benefit of the people that live there. The U.S. has been and continues to be a major cause of unsettling the region. It is safe to say that the region will not know enduring peace and stability as long as the U.S. insists on meddling in its affairs as frequently and as violently as it does.

One of the chief functions of the lie that the U.S. is “dragged” back into the region is to protect our political leaders and policymakers from accountability for their disastrous policies. If pointless Middle Eastern wars are treated as inevitabilities that every president “has to” wage, that lets all of them off the hook for their serious errors of judgment that get the U.S. into these wars. In this telling, Biden didn’t go out of his way to put U.S. forces in harm’s way in the Red Sea and then escalate the conflict. He just “finds himself fighting Houthi forces,” as if he had no choice in the matter. How unlucky for Biden that he ordered a new illegal war!

Brands asks a stupid question: “Why does the US struggle so mightily to exit a region that produces so much frustration?” The answer is that the U.S. doesn’t struggle to exit the region at all. Instead, each new administration looks for new ways to maintain most of the status quo they inherited from their predecessors. Did Biden “struggle mightily” to exit the region? No, he sent more troops to help protect U.S. clients from the consequences of their own actions and he has been trying to lock the U.S. into more binding security commitments to one of the region’s worst governments. Contrary to the story that both his critics and supporters like to tell, Trump did much the same. The U.S. military footprint in the region increased under Trump.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of being a superpower is that it has more freedom of action than any other state. A superpower is never “dragged” into doing anything, and a country as secure as the U.S. can afford to even more selective about the wars that it involves itself in. The U.S. has squandered these advantages for generations because of a warped desire to dominate other parts of the world. Our political leaders are so obsessed with the U.S. having a “leadership” role that they refuse to leave these countries alone even after decades of costly failure.

U.S. policymakers and analysts used to talk about Southeast Asia in the same way that many still talk about the Middle East. They overcommitted the U.S. to that part of the world, and then they exaggerated what the U.S. had at stake to justify the overcommitment. Hawks warned about the cascading global consequences that would follow if the U.S. ended its wars and withdrew from the region that it had obsessed over for decades, and then when the belated exit finally came the effect on U.S. interests was negligible. It turned out that all the bloodshed and expense had been a colossal waste. If the U.S. ever manages to extricate itself from the Middle East, we will see the same thing. Decades from now, the lies about the Middle East being a “great strategic prize” will seem just as ridiculous and embarrassing as the old domino theory does today.