Almost every U.S. presidential administration enters office vowing to do less in the Middle East. Yet almost every administration ends up more deeply engaged in that region than they were at the beginning. Why this mismatch between intentions and results?
For decades now, American strategists have longed to “rebalance” or “de-prioritize” U.S. involvement in the Middle East, to “pivot” to other places that matter more, or to disengage from the region outright. But the reality is that the Middle East is a strategically vital region that America cannot afford to abandon or allow a great power adversary to dominate—at least, not yet. For the foreseeable future, the region will be the world’s most significant energy hub, other than the United States, and it will forever contain the strategic waterways connecting Asia and the West at the heart of the global economy in which America trades. These facts make the region a precious prize for our rival powers, especially China. In recent times, the Middle East has also been an engine of instability that endangers other regions: it can spit out terrorism that threatens our American homeland, as it did on 9/11, or it can discharge millions of migrants or refugees that threaten to destabilize our European allies. These are facts we and our allies cannot ignore.
This is not to say the beleaguered American strategists who long for a “pivot” aren’t onto something; they are. But they’ve misdirected their critique. It’s not that the Middle East is a region that doesn’t matter much to American interests; it’s that the United States for some time now has had the wrong strategy for the region, and the result is American involvement that feels aimless and ineffectual.
For more than 20 years the United States has made counterterrorism, particularly against non-state actors, the organizing principle of our Middle East strategy and policy. And we have clung to that approach long after state-based threats became the overwhelming danger to our interests in the region.
For most of the post-World War II era, the United States focused on state-based threats to U.S. interests in the Middle East. President Eisenhower originated and then President Carter refined a doctrine of preventing the region’s strategic resources, waterways, and geography from falling under the domination of a power hostile to our interests. This doctrine guided our Middle Eastern stance toward both the Soviet Bloc and the Islamic Republic of Iran during the late Cold War.
In the response to 9/11, the United States discarded this doctrine. We made counterterrorism the lens through which we viewed our relationships and military posture in the region. We reevaluated our traditional alliances and our longstanding adversaries according to whether they might be on our side or not on our side in the campaign against Al Qaeda and other similar terrorist networks. In other words, we made our operational response to 9/11 the organizing principle of our national security strategy in this strategic region.
This approach might have been appropriate for a time, especially during the first years when we could not know that the Al Qaeda phenomenon was not evolving into an existential threat to the United States. Once we did know, though, we continued with a counterterrorism approach for many years, even as the kind of state-based threat the Carter Doctrine was formulated to counter emerged as the foremost problem in the region. There was Iran’s unprecedented expansion into the Arab world, with the IRGC gaining control over large swaths of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza. There was the Russian reentry to the region via Syria in 2015, for the first time since Henry Kissinger forced them out of it in 1973. And there was the Chinese infiltration of the region, especially the Gulf, using soft power means.
All three of these major state-based adversaries of the United States have expanded their power and influence in the Middle East in ways the Carter Doctrine was meant to preclude, all while we continued to organize our national security institutions and most of our regional engagement for an enduring counterterrorism campaign. The U.S. national security community even gave very serious consideration at various times to partnering with Iran, Russia, China, the Assad Regime, and (indirectly) Lebanese Hizballah or the Iraqi Shi’a terrorists as long as they were willing to operate with us against Sunni terrorist networks. U.S. national security strategists engaged in mirror imaging toward these adversaries, assuming that since Washington, DC prioritized the Sunni terrorist threat, then Iran, Russia, and the rest must be prioritizing it as well, thereby creating a basis for new, more positive relations.
This is why the U.S. national security establishment has been so slow to adapt to what is happening now in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime posing a clear danger on so many fronts. The conflict that erupted on October 7th; the Iranian proxy offensive against U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan; and the Iranian-sponsored Houthi blockade of the Red Sea--these are crises that should have been nipped in the bud long ago. And they might have been, had our national security institutions not been so single-mindedly focused on counterterrorism as the top priority in the Middle East.
The current U.S. administration, like the Obama administration before it, compounded this mistake by assuming that the major problems in the Middle East could be solved, or at least put on ice, by détente with the Iranian regime and its clients and the normalization of relations between Iran and the rest of the region. This was the thinking that underpinned the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, for example. It was an approach meant to de-escalate the state-based danger from Iran so the United States could continue, undistracted, the counterterrorism campaign against ISIS and similar groups.
The problem, of course, is that the Iranian regime and its allies have not played along. the Supreme Leader and his regime consider the United States, not Sunni terrorists or anyone else, to be the greatest threat to their interests. Partnership or even détente with America is out of the question, as far as they are concerned.
If neither counterterrorism nor détente can solve the threat of the Iranian regime, where does this leave Washington in the aftermath of October 7th? So far, the Biden administration seems engaged in another misdiagnosis of the problem. The White House appears to be in the process of making a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or mitigation of it, the organizing principle for our Middle East policy and theater strategy. They seem willing to define the warfare being waged by Iran’s Axis of Resistance in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen as spillover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for which the prescription should be not to restore deterrence against Iran, but to compel Israel to accede to Palestinian statehood.
It’s the wrong diagnosis and wrong medicine. In Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories, the Iranians and the proxies have demonstrated repeatedly that no local conflict in the Middle East can be resolved as long as Tehran can reach into the conflict zone and destabilize it. Anything the rest of us wish to build in those countries, the Iranians will burn down as it suits them as long as they are not deterred from doing so. Iran’s Axis of Resistance has derailed the Ta’if Accords, the Oslo Agreement, the Iraqi Constitutional Agreement, the Doha Agreement for Lebanon, the UN Security Council Resolution 2254 for Syria, and the Yemen peace process. Why should anyone think they won’t derail the “day after” plan for Gaza or any roadmap to Palestinian statehood as well?
What these local conflicts all require is for the Iranian regime to be compelled to leave them alone and to withdraw its destabilizing power to within its own borders. In other words, restoring deterrence against Tehran is the only real option for the United States and its allies. Doing so would require a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic pressure against Tehran that the Biden administration, for whatever reason, is deeply reluctant to apply. Five months after the October 7th invasion of Israel that Tehran paid for, and months after Iranian proxies began near-daily attacks against U.S. troops or vessels in the region, the White House is still not enforcing oil sanctions to disrupt the Iranian regime’s cash flow. Nor is it organizing Tehran’s international isolation, something that should have happened even before October 7th, once the Iranians intervened in the Ukraine War by providing Russia drones and missiles to be fired upon Ukrainian cities. What results is a strange mismatch in which the U.S. Pentagon is engaged in an intense proxy war with Tehran while the Treasury and State Department are not similarly at war with Tehran’s cash flow or its international relations.
One suspects these yawning gaps in the Biden administration’s Iran strategy result from a lingering hope within the administration to keep the door open for a return to a nuclear agreement, or some other kind of de-escalatory deal, with Tehran once the dust settles enough on the Gaza crisis. In other words, détente. But détente in the absence of deterrence is merely appeasement that has no hope of working. If the administration insists on continuing on this path without concerted pressure of all kinds on Tehran, then the coming year will be dangerous indeed. An undeterred Iranian regime will continue to grow its local proxies into monsters that are entirely capable of launching other October 7th-type aggressions, if Tehran judges no one is willing to do what it takes to stop it.
The Middle East today is a difficult problem for the United States and its allies, but not a complicated one. The remedy is rather straightforward: at least for the near term, the United States should make the deterrence of the Iranian regime the organizing principle for its policy and strategy in the Middle East. If this focus can be achieved, the answers begin to present themselves: enforce sanctions to sap Tehran’s resources; cut off Tehran’s political relations with the rest of the world; disrupt Tehran’s ability to arm its proxies (and Russia); exert military pressure not just on Arab proxies that Tehran considers expendable, but on things Tehran considers indispensable (such as IRGC vessels or assets). And don’t conduct this pressure campaign alone, but organize a coalition of our traditional “pillar” allies in the region: Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Admittedly, Washington’s relations with each of these four have become frayed in recent years, and some of them have difficult relations with one another, so the priority for U.S. diplomacy in the region should be to bring all four into as close as alignment with one another as possible.
Having neglected, for the sake of counterterrorism, the Iranian regime’s aggressive expansion and the new regional footholds of Iran’s Russian and Chinese allies, Washington must not misdirect its attention once again in the wake of the October 7th disaster. The United States should not be misguided into privileging counterterrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian question, humanitarian disaster, or any other such issue over the crisis of the Iranian regime’s aggression across the entire region.
And American strategists should resist the urge to simply walk away from the Middle East precisely when U.S. vital interests are under pressure from Iran, Russia, and China. It’s at our peril that we Americans draw a box around the Middle East and declare that geopolitics can be disregarded there simply because we are tired of the place. To be tired of the Middle East is to be tired of being a superpower.
