U.S. Retrenchment from the Middle East Is Long Overdue

U.S. overcommitment in the Middle East was irrational twenty years ago, it was still irrational ten years ago, and so it remains today.

Steven Cook once again boldly defends the bankrupt status quo of U.S. Middle East policy:

Looking back on the last 30 years of U.S. policy, it behooves Americans to jettison both their country’s fanciful policies to transform the Middle East and the desire, in response to the failures of those policies, to withdraw from the region. It is time not for retrenchment but rather a renewal of Washington’s purpose in the Middle East.

The core of Cook’s argument is that “the Middle East was, and remains, important to the United States.” If you accept that assumption, his position might seem like a tolerable middle path between supposed extremes of “idealism” and retrenchment, but the assumption is wrong. The reality is that the region doesn’t matter very much for U.S. interests, it hasn’t for decades, and retrenchment is long overdue. U.S. overcommitment in the Middle East was irrational twenty years ago, it was still irrational ten years ago, and so it remains today. For all the talk of “withdrawal” from the region, the U.S. remains deeply enmeshed in the region’s problems and conflicts, and it stays that way by choice rather than necessity. It’s time to make a different, wiser choice to get out.

One of the main myths that defenders of the status quo use to justify keeping things the same is the idea that the U.S. has this great stabilizing role and that retrenchment would leave chaos in its wake. Just consider the record of the last twenty-one years and ask yourself if you can honestly say that the U.S. has done more to stabilize than destabilize the region. Opinions will differ on this or that policy, but when we look at the overall picture we can see that the U.S. has acted as the arsonist in many places and then at other times it has acted as the Fahrenheit 451 fireman.

When the U.S. isn’t bombing someone to “restore deterrence,” it is backing insurgencies against a government it doesn’t like, and when it isn’t backing insurgencies it is arming despots to “deter” some other government. When the U.S. doesn’t resort to using or providing arms, it relies on economic warfare to try to strangle a target country into submission. U.S. foreign policy in the region is almost entirely destructive, and its reliance on coercive tools produces failures and backfires galore.

U.S. policies in the region have mostly served to fuel conflict and repression to the benefit of a few client states and no one else. U.S. support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen was a strategic and moral disaster, as is our government’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. To the extent that U.S. involvement in both rhose conflicts has been rationalized as “necessary” for the maintenance of these client relationships, that is more proof that those relationships are liabilities for the United States. Instead of deepening these relationships as the Biden administration wants to do, the U.S. should be disentangling itself from these clients as quickly as possible.

If the U.S. reduced or ended its military presence in the region, it would not be a panacea but it would remove one of the major causes of regional instability. It seems likely that a significantly reduced U.S. military presence would lessen regional tensions. U.S. clients are encouraged to behave more aggressively than they otherwise would because the U.S. reliably arms and protects them no matter what they do. U.S. backing for these states not only implicates our government in their crimes, but it also stokes regional rivalries and conflicts that further ensnare the U.S. Removing that backing would force the clients to be less reckless, and it might make them find a way to coexist peacefully with their rivals once they realize that they can’t count on the U.S. to bail them out.

The U.S. and the region would be much better off without our government’s “leadership” and “help.” The U.S. has intently focused its attention on the Middle East for most of my lifetime, and it is no accident that it is the one region that has been so convulsed by conflicts. Even when the U.S. hasn’t started the wars, it has often helped to prolong and intensify them by taking sides. Half a century ago, Southeast Asia was the part of the world that Washington obsessed over with disastrous results. Since the U.S. stopped meddling in their affairs and bombing their countries, Southeast Asian nations have mostly prospered. There is no guarantee that the same thing will happen in the Middle East, but there are many examples of other parts of the world that have managed to get along just fine without the bungling “leadership” of the empire.

If a doctor were as incompetent and malicious as U.S. foreign policy has been in the Middle East for the last thirty years, he would be stripped of his license and thrown in jail for causing the deaths of countless patients. I know there won’t be any accountability for the many crimes that the U.S. has committed and enabled against innocent people across the region, but the very least we can do is to stop causing more harm. Entanglement in the Middle East is obviously bad for the peoples of the region, and it has also been quite bad for the United States. If we can’t acknowledge costly failure here when it stares us in the face, where can we acknowledge it?

A truly post-American Middle East won’t be without its problems and conflicts, but at least the U.S. won’t be busily making them worse with its ill-advised and heavy-handed meddling.