The premise that the U.S. faces a series of discrete regional challenges in the Middle East, rather than a set of challenges linked by geopolitical logic and global competition, contains a teleological proposition - that there is a predictable or “normal” regional order and disorders are “bugs in the system” rather than design features in a broader competition. That view presupposes a hierarchy of power more or less accepted by all key players, with an implication that wars and political dysfunction are anomalous. In such an order, measured diplomatic efforts by Washington should suffice to bring Russia, Iran, and other peripheral or external players into a negotiated détente that serves mutual interests. This appears to have been the approach pursued by the Biden Administration from 2021 to 2023 - de-emphasizing and limiting engagement with a region that occupied much of the attention of recent administrations , while trying not to overtly antagonize any state, group, or leader.
Evidence supports a competing diagnosis: that the Middle East functions as a bitterly competitive system featuring several powers anxious to limit or eject American power, allies who have come to doubt U.S. commitment to shared interests, and a suite of conflicts and crises that defy U.S. willingness or ability to resolve. This is not a concert with a few discordant notes - it is a brawl among irreconcilable systems, interests, and worldviews. In such a system, an American approach rooted in equidistance and ambivalence assures a deteriorating position. In early 2024 the region is rife with a variety of mischief and disorder, most prominently Iran-directed violence against the interests of the U.S. and its allies across the Levant and into Iraq and the Red Sea.
The next U.S. Administration, be it Republican or Democratic, would do well to adopt what J.C. Campbell called “a bold and firm American policy” during a similar time of regional competition in the 1950s: recognize hard-power realities and the distinctions between friend and foe, while taking tangible measures to bolster the former and weaken the latter. Three factors have diminished U.S. influence in the region and must be overcome to successfully implement such policy. First, Washington has serially failed to enforce a U.S.-led security architecture, especially against challenges from Russia and Iran. Second, the U.S. electorate and policy elites show little appetite for bearing the costs of leadership in the region. Third, the rising capabilities and independence of mid-sized powers in the region, including U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, complicate the unilateral exercise of U.S. power. As in the time of Campbell, a workable solution runs through the interstices of these factors: assurance to U.S. allies and deterrence to adversaries by strengthening our friends’ abilities to defend their interests and sovereignty through economic, military, and diplomatic support.
Networked Adversaries
Washington has its blueprint for the Middle East, based on peace between Israel and the Arab states, countering the Islamic State, and broadly distributed accord and prosperity. Yet recurring conflicts and the divergence of both U.S. allies and adversaries from the designated path has prevented the blueprint from gaining any real traction on the ground. Instead, the primary driver of Mideast events from the Gulf to Gaza has been the Iranian-led network of militias and clients with revisionist ambitions spanning the region. The Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezballah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and Tehran’s confederates in Iraq have shaped an Axis of Resistance that exercises a de facto veto over American efforts to preserve the regional status quo on favorable terms. We face not a series of disparate challenges to U.S. primacy in the Mideast - but a unified and comprehensive rejection of it. Various elements of U.S. foreign policy - Arab-Israeli peace, Palestinian quiescence, the “pivot to Asia,” economic peace, and marginalization of anti-Western forces - are all targets of this Axis, and Tehran has adroitly woven local conflicts and disorders into a campaign against them. Washington seeks to avoid a “regional conflict” to preserve hopes of a “reshaped Middle East,” but for the Axis of Resistance, that’s the whole point - this is a regional war to defeat American reshaping.
Iran’s regional project has extra-regional support from Russia, which has experienced a remarkable convergence in strategic and military ties with Iran. Especially since Russia launched its war against Ukraine in February 2022, Russia-Iran military collaboration, sanctions-evasion cooperation, and pressure against U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East have significantly increased. If the U.S. and the West are fighting Russia by proxy in Ukraine, Russia and Iran are returning the favor in Iraq, Syria, the Red Sea, Lebanon and Gaza, including direct attacks on U.S. ships in the region and installations in Iraq and Syria.
The international network supporting Iran’s Axis of Resistance does not end with Russia. North Korea has provided arms to Hamas and fortification expertise to Hezballah, and, likely, Hamas as well. Somewhat less practically, Nicolas Maduro has declared Venezuela to be part of the Axis. Iran is not acting alone or aberrantly when it stokes conflicts to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power and prove its veto on stability that violates its terms; not connecting the dots between the lobes of regional disorder rewards Iran and delays effective counters to Iran’s revisionist initiatives. Countering Iran’s distributed network of violence does not require a massive unilateral military response - though aggressive ripostes may be warranted in some cases. The antidote lies in Campbell’s prescription of strengthening allies and convincing them of U.S. commitment against the Axis and its global network.
Mismanaged Alliances
There is nothing particularly surprising that competing geopolitical visions and interests clash in the Mideast, nor that an Axis of opposing powers might seek to limit American influence and frustrate its search for a low-cost modus vivendi. More perplexing is how obtuse the U.S. has been in maintaining the alliance network so central to thwarting an Axis of truly antithetical actors. Assuming common interests with one’s announced adversaries is part of the problem - the Biden/Obama wooing of Iran, accommodating Russian lifelines to Assad in Syria, and negotiating with Hezballah are three examples. This has been compounded over the past decade by policies that confuse, punish, or discourage our allies - the opposite of Campbell’s advice for managing geopolitical conflict in the region.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates lost confidence in U.S. security guarantees after tepid U.S. response to Houthi attacks in the Gulf - and their delisting as a terror organization - which followed on the heels of pointed public criticism of Saudi Arabia and other less-than-fully democratic U.S. allies during the first year of the Biden Administration. De-prioritizing and calling out allies improved neither their governance nor U.S. influence in the region. It led instead to hedging behavior, resistance to U.S. initiatives on oil production, Ukraine, and Red Sea maritime patrols, and ultimately a walk-back by the administration to restore a modicum of cooperation.
Washington has also kept NATO-member Turkey, an increasingly formidable military and diplomatic player in the Middle East, at (more than) arms’ length. Ankara has ever been and remains now a difficult partner for the U.S, due to differing priorities, prickly domestic politics, and a history of low trust relations. Congress has traditionally played a complicating role in bilateral relations, especially by blocking defense industrial cooperation. Previous U.S. Presidents have found ways to forge consensus and maintain effective cooperation with Turkey, generally by championing defense and geopolitical investments with a healthy dose of personal relationship building at the top. The Biden Administration’s initial approach to Turkey has been described as intentional neglect, and only as crises multiplied in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza did it pursue a formal (though not top-level) Strategic Mechanism to manage disputes and seek collaborative projects. While a certain degree of coordination has been achieved on regional crises - and bilateral trade continues to increase - this alliance has dramatically underperformed, with lots of hedging on both sides, and the historical recipe for bringing it up to speed has not been attempted.
The mismanagement of U.S.- Israel ties has been subtler. Yes, in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th massacres Washington offered robust military and moral support. Yet American leaders before the attack fundamentally misread Iran, Hamas, and the region in a way that invited strategic surprise - and reinforced Israel’s inclination to simply ignore the problem. Continued mixed messages on the Gaza war from the Biden Administration reveal an inability to see the dimension of regional competition and clashing regional strategies. While Iran turns up the temperature on Israel in Gaza, and on the U.S in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. has refrained from irritating Iran by embracing the budding Israel-Azerbaijan entente or defanging Iranian attacks on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, both buffers against Iranian hegemony. Turning the other cheek to Iran has not made the region safer, and is rooted in a fundamental misread of their regional intentions.
Moving Off “Meh” and Restoring Deterrence
The war in Gaza is the most prominent part - but only one part - of a broader geopolitical struggle playing out across the region. That struggle pits the U.S., its interests and its allies against an Axis of Resistance bent on a very different geopolitical order. This is not to say that each lobe of the struggle, each particular conflict, does not have local root causes of their own; each does. It is to say, rather, that strategists in Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and even Caracas have found a common thread to stitch them into a campaign to undercut U.S. power and punish U.S. allies, and are working together to do so.
Yet in dozens of places around the region - Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, Libya, and on - the U.S. has failed to produce strategies to do more than just muddle through, and at times has seemed indifferent. To paraphrase Trotsky, the U.S. may not be interested in Mideast wars, but Mideast wars are interested in the U.S. The absurdity of the Pentagon staying in Syria to chase a diminishing Islamic State threat while ignoring Iranian forces there and even seeking to partner with Assad going forward epitomizes the strategic vacuity of our current Mideast posture. It is a grand gesture of “meh” (indifference or apathy) as to the geopolitics of the region; as long as our very carefully delimited counterterror goals in the Mideast proceed, a strategic dumpster fire for our allies and the people of the region is just fine. If post-October 7th has taught us anything, it is that regional disorders are directly tied to the strategy of Tehran, its proxies, and its backers - and that we are in a poor position to respond because we have lost traction and confidence with our own allies.
We are in a network war - a network of U.S. allies against a clever and synchronized network of U.S. enemies. Refreshingly, the Biden Administration has begun responding to direct attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, as well as Houthi attacks in and around the Red Sea. For months Washington misread escalatory dynamics in this region - as it has previously in Ukraine and Afghanistan - on the flawed premise that while defending or aiding allies would exacerbate tensions, exercising restraint would invite calm. The opposite has occurred; confident of low potential costs, the revisionist Axis escalated pressure.
In an era of complex Strategic Competition, the answer in the Middle East is neither frequent nor massive unilateral military interventions. It is empowering and encouraging our network of allies to defend themselves and our shared interests in the region. The formula is not complicated: arm our allies responsibly in their areas of need, help them against their enemies, praise them in public and criticize them in private, trade more with them, lead creative diplomacy to achieve shared strategic understandings and visions. In short, implement smartly Campbell’s “bold and firm American policy.”
