The U.S. Needs a New Purpose in the Middle East

This article is adapted from The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East by Steven A. Cook (Oxford University Press, 208 pp., $29.99, June 2024).

It was eight years after the U.S. withdrawal, and Iraq was deeply unstable. Mass protests raged in the streets against government dysfunction, a corrupt ruling class, and nonexistent social services. Provincial governments had few resources, and governors and small-town volunteer mayors spoke derisively of officials in Baghdad and Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, who left them with meager, if any, resources. Millions of Iraqis had to fend for themselves.

Iraq was in no position to host refugees, but Syria’s Kurds had to go somewhere. In one of those odd twists in its Middle East policy, Washington had supported a fighting force in Syria against the Islamic State that its NATO ally, Turkey, considered a terrorist organi­zation. Unsurprisingly, Ankara took great offense to the U.S. military relationship with this group: the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. So, the Turkish government marshaled its own Syrian allies and its fearsome airpower against the YPG, and, as is always the case, civilians were caught in the crossfire, forcing thousands of Syrian Kurds to flee to Iraq—a country that the United States had torn asunder because its officials believed they could harness U.S. power to remake a society into a democracy and thus ensure U.S. security.

The visit to the camp was a gut-wrenching moment during a tour that revealed, layer by layer, that many of the ideas and assumptions that functioned as pillars of Washington’s Middle East policy over the past three decades were little more than ambition-fueled delusions. After years of success in the region, U.S. foreign policy had arrived at the intersection of fantasy and failure. Because of this, there is a strong, understandable pull within the U.S. foreign-policy community—including among officials in the Biden administration—for withdrawal from the region. Yet, as President Joe Biden has learned, this is too radical a solution for the dilemmas Washington confronts in the Middle East today. Indeed, to continue to pivot away from the region would be self-defeating for the United States.

Syrian refugees wait to receive water and food at the Bardarash refugee camp in Duhok, Iraq, on Oct. 17, 2019.Byron Smith/Getty Images

Washington’s fortunes in the Middle East began to change not long after two major geopolitical triumphs: the defeat of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union later that year. Beginning with President Bill Clinton, Washington’s officials and foreign-policy community sought to transform politics and society in the Middle East. It was this overly ambitious agenda that resulted in policy failures, leading analysts, officials, journalists, and pundits to latch on to the idea of withdrawal or retrenchment from the region.

That retrenchment has already had devastating consequences—some of which could be seen at Bardarash. Syrian refugees had sought safety in the camp because of Turkish airstrikes, but that was only part of Syria’s problems. Over the previous decade, Syria had be­come one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters as its leader, Bashar al-Assad, responded to a peaceful uprising by pulverizing cities and towns in an escalating spiral of blood. Assad justified his indiscriminate violence as a war against terrorists in a cynical and deliberate link to the Washington-led global war on terrorism and its “either with us or against us” ethos.

Despite the death and destruction that Assad visited on his fellow Syrians, the United States did not act. To the Obama administration, there were no discernible U.S. interests that could be served by a military interven­tion in the Syrian uprising, though others outside of government argued otherwise. President Barack Obama’s aversion to military action was directly related to Washington’s searing failures in Iraq. No matter how different the circumstances or how many deaths could have been prevented or how the Middle East and Europe could have been spared instability due to the influx of refugees, it be­came paramount in Washington to avoid another intervention.

Syrian men carry babies as they make their way through the rubble of destroyed buildings following an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria, on Sept. 11, 2016. Ameer al-Halbi/AFP via Getty Images

Yet the underlying assumption that U.S. retrenchment would leave the region better off is flawed. Among the favored policies of those who support retrenchment today is “offshore balancing,” in which the United States would supply its partners in the Middle East the weapons and materiel to establish a stable regional order. This would allow the United States to withdraw and remain “offshore.” To its advocates, offshore balancing is an elegant response to Washington’s previous ambition in the Middle East because it aims to secure critical interests without overinvesting in the region. It’s grounded in the belief that given the right tools, regional partners can be sources of stability and security without risking the lives of U.S. military personnel and using resources that could meet geostrategic challenges in other parts of the globe.

Offshore balancing sounds compelling, but it has a number of significant shortcomings. First, it has been tried before and has failed. It is essentially a restatement of the Nixon Doctrine—a policy that expected U.S. allies to assume more responsibility for their security, which manifested in the Middle East with the Twin Pillar strategy that sought to ensure regional stability through military support for Iran and Saudi Arabia. The policy collapsed under the weight of the Iranian revolution and the siege of Mecca in 1979.

The second problem stems from different interpretations of balance. Since the 2010s, U.S. advocates for offshore balancing have not perceived a need for the United States to rebalance the region. Others, notably Washington’s Middle Eastern partners, consider the regional balance to be dangerously in favor of Iran and want the United States to be more engaged in deterring and containing Tehran’s malign influence. Who is correct? That depends on whether one sits in Chicago, Cambridge, Riyadh, Jerusalem, Manama, or Abu Dhabi. The issue of perception underscores a final problem with offshore balancing: It assumes a confluence of interests between the balancer and its regional partners. This is not always a good assumption. Since at least the invasion of Iraq, mistrust has marked Washington’s relations with its clients in the Middle East.

This distrust has real-world consequences. For example, when the Russian army rolled into Ukraine in early 2022, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers were not inclined to join the U.S. effort to punish Moscow for its invasion. Riyadh steadfastly refused Washington’s entreaties to pump more oil, which would have meant breaking with its partner, Russia, in OPEC+. The Saudi and Emirati oil ministers argued that stability of the oil market was more important than playing politics with OPEC+. This was a noticeable diplomatic swipe at Biden, who wanted to hurt the Russian war effort through low oil prices and who would have benefited from the concomitant decrease in prices at the gas pump for Americans.

When in October 2022 OPEC+ agreed on a production cut of 2 million barrels per day, U.S. policymakers and analysts accused Saudi Arabia of reneging on an unwritten agreement with the Biden administration. Mostly Democratic members of Congress took to Twitter to denounce the Saudi alignment with Russia. They proposed removing U.S. forces and withdrawing any remaining Patriot missile batteries from the kingdom. For good measure, they also called on Biden to cancel weapons contracts with Saudi Arabia’s armed forces. Saudi officials and their allies took notice and responded with their own bluster. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist, told the Financial Times, “At this moment everybody needs Gulf oil, everybody needs Saudi Arabia and the UAE onboard. … Some in Washington definitely don’t realise there is a new Gulf and we no longer take orders from Washington.”

A U.S. military convoy takes part in a joint patrol with Turkish troops on the outskirts of Tal Abyad, Syria, on Sept. 8, 2019. Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images

As a result, the watchwords for U.S. policymakers in the Middle East should be: judiciousness, discretion, balance, and efficiency. This prudential conservatism—not to be confused with conservatism in contemporary political parlance—places a premium on seeing the world as it is, safeguarding against transformational impulses, and implementing policies that do as little harm as possible to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

From prudential conservatism flows a mix of old and new interests whose hierarchy is in flux. What has been important to the United States for many years—oil and Israel—may, in time, prove not to be as central to U.S. policy for a variety of political, technological, economic, and cultural reasons. Other issues such as counterterrorism and nuclear nonproliferation will remain crucial for Washington in the region, if only because of the damage that extremists and weapons of mass destruction pose to the United States and its citizens. Washington must also address the climate crisis—not in some ambitious effort to use climate initiatives to solve conflicts but in a more modest way, by leveraging U.S. diplomacy to help a vulnerable region adapt to the worst ravages of this phenomenon. To do otherwise would risk the stability of the Middle East and regions beyond, especially Europe.

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 United States must have a vision for its role in the region that dispenses with idealist romance about remaking the world in favor of a strategy based on prudence, discretion, and a balance of resources.

From The End of Ambition. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Cook and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.