A GROWING chorus of critics, Right and Left, are calling for a greatly diminished role in the Middle East and its place in U.S. global strategy. Perhaps the most compelling was a confessional last year in the Wall Street Journal by Martin Indyk, a veteran Middle East hand and former ambassador to Israel, explaining why as the headline read, “The Middle East Isn’t Worth it Anymore.” Nearly twenty years after 9/11, the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the process, destabilizing the region. The Iraq invasion set off a cascade of turmoil and conflict in the region amid a still damaged Arab Muslim civilization, with few tangible benefits. The legacy of failure and substantially changed circumstances with regard to two longstanding core concerns—oil flows and Israel’s security—add up to greatly reduced and reconfigured U.S. interests both in the region and in U.S. global strategy.

But American national security policy seems impervious to its own failures and the big geostrategic and geo-economic changes underway. It’s running on bureaucratic inertia. The United States has up to sixty thousand combat personnel in the Greater Middle East (GME) depending on the ebb and flow of the situation and rings the region with air and naval bases. Yet by all appearances, the ongoing U.S. military presence has had almost zero impact on the deepening multilayered civil and internationalized conflicts in the region: Syria, Libya, Yemen, festering instability in Iraq, on-going tensions with Iran, nineteen years and counting in Afghanistan, state failure in Lebanon, and jihadism has hardly been extinguished. There is little acknowledgment of the limits of U.S. power, though the lack of Americans’ appetite for more conflict is obvious to key regional actors who are filling the vacuum as Donald Trump withdrew troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is a significant factor shaping strategic realignments. It is an auspicious moment for President Joe Biden, with ambitious and urgent domestic priorities, to recalibrate U.S. interests in the region.

EVEN IF it were not for twenty years of disastrously spent blood and treasure on the campaign to transform Afghanistan and Iraq, there are more fundamental reasons to rethink U.S. strategic interests. Foremost is the altered global energy supply and demand system. Since the 1973–74 oil crisis, hydrocarbons have been a core driver of U.S. policy in the Middle East—the 1980 Carter Doctrine, declaring the flow of Gulf oil a vital interest. Yet U.S. oil dependence on the region is no more. The shale revolution, which has led to the United States’ new status as the world’s top producer of oil and gas, has fundamentally altered the geopolitics of energy. The center of gravity of global hydrocarbon production has already shifted from the Persian Gulf to the Western Hemisphere. Canadian oil sands, a partially reforming Mexico, and Brazil’s ultra-deepwater reserves all point to a new post-OPEC reality. This casts the U.S. “strategic partnership” with the Saudis in a very different light.

Of course, it is still a global oil market. Seventy-five percent of Mideast oil is exported to Asia: China, Japan, South Korea, and India have a growing stake in the Middle East. A major disruption and price spike anywhere produce a price spike everywhere. But for how long? Given the dependency of the Gulf states on exporting oil and the robust strategic petroleum reserves of the United States and other International Energy Association members, the odds of a protracted disruption by military conflict are low and manageable. An example of the global resilience of the current hydrocarbon supply and demand system is the very temporary spike (measured in days) in the price of petroleum following the successful Iranian missile attacks on key Saudi production facilities during the late summer of 2019. In any case, we are at the beginning of a transition to a post-petroleum economy that will transform global geopolitics. Middle East oil is important, but not necessarily a vital interest. The body language of Trump’s non-response to the Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities points in this direction, the 1980 Carter Doctrine notwithstanding.

The accelerating electrification of ground transportation and the rise of renewable energy coupled with efficient electrical energy storage may lead to the peak of global petroleum demand by the end of this decade. A secular decline in global natural gas consumption is much further in the future. After all, it is the one hydrocarbon with a much smaller greenhouse gas footprint than petroleum or coal, and one where the United States is now a major exporter. What do U.S. interests in the Middle East look like in 2035 or 2040 (possibly sooner) when hydrocarbons may be used as much for making plastic products, fertilizer, and hydrogen as for fuel? By the late 2020s, there is the possibility that natural gas will become the feedstock for the production of hydrogen that is the energy source of a wide range of fuel cell-powered vehicles.

OF EQUAL import is the geostrategic transformation of the GME that has flowed out the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the rise and fall of the quasi-state ISIS, and the massive upheavals following the “Arab Spring” that became “Winter” with the emergence of the protracted civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and the short regional war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The still-unfolding strategic realignment of Arab Sunni states with Israel is a reflection of these failures as well as those of the United States.

First, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only no longer the center of the region’s turmoil—it has become a second-order issue. As Martin Indyk explained, “Hard as it is for me to admit it, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem is not a vital American interest. It is a vital Israeli interest.” If a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution arrived tomorrow it would likely have little impact on stability or peace in the region writ large.

This is the case not just because of forty plus years of failed diplomacy, but also new realities in a changed geostrategic landscape. A far more self-reliant Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, neutralizing two frontline states. Israel is a leading global tech innovator, has a world-class high-technology military sector, and maintains a nuclear arsenal. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are planning for a post-petroleum world and investing heavily in technology. They look to Israel as a key economic and technology partner, an under-appreciated motive behind their recent diplomatic moves. This reflects an undercurrent in the region of generational change, a mindset of shedding legacy conflicts and pursuing entrepreneurialism and a twenty-first-century knowledge economy. This is captured in the bold UAE effort to launch a satellite to orbit Mars and Saudi efforts to compete with Dubai as the regional financial hub and create NEOM, a carbon-emissions free city.

The still-unfolding UAE/Bahrain/Morocco/Sudan-Israel normalization, aka the Abraham Accords, indicates that a major if not central conflict in the GME is now the regional power struggle between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and Iran (aka Sunni-Shia proxy war), with Sunni Arab states quietly, and increasingly more visibly, working with Israel to focus to manage a common adversary: Iran. This protracted conflict has spilled over into the internationalized civil wars in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. Iran’s hiring of proxies in the latter conflict and of Hezbollah in Lebanon has produced near state collapse there. These developments have overshadowed Israeli-Palestinian issues.

The second big change flows from the consequences of the protracted Syrian Civil War, and the new roles of Turkey, behaving more as a neo-Ottoman authoritarian Islamic state than a NATO ally, and of Russia. This is seen in the heightened rivalry between Turkey, Iran, and Russia over the fate of the Assad regime. Israel is a major player as well if only in its attempt to stop Iran from entrenching its military presence in southern Syria that provides a land bridge to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s key ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

 The United States remains a marginal military player with its tiny presence in eastern Syria if only to sustain a counterterrorism campaign against the remnants of the quasi-state ISIS. Recently, tension has risen dramatically between Turkey and Russia and its quasi-ally Iran when Ankara decided to intervene in northwestern Syria with an expeditionary force to save the anti-Assad Salafist-jihadis from being defeated in Idlib Province. This intervention has frustrated Moscow and Tehran’s desire to consolidate the sovereign power of their client, the Assad regime. Ankara’s “moves of greatness” reflect the new scramble for influence flowing, in part, from a perception of U.S. retreat. It would be reassuring if U.S. officials could explain why one expansionist Islamic state with dreams of recapturing past (Persian) glories is on the U.S. most-wanted list, while the other, neo-Ottoman Turkey, having troops in twelve countries and despite disregarding and threatening U.S. interests, is an ally. A number of Arab regimes in the region view Turkey as an increasing threat. However, a series of developments—the growing Sunni-Israeli entente; Turkey’s possible overstretch and disastrous economy; and Ankara’s anticipation that a Biden administration will end the free pass for its military assertiveness that it got from Trump may portend a less ambitious Turkey and a new modus vivendi.

The third big change is the dramatic increase in tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant prompted by the massive natural gas finds off the coast of Israel and Egypt. Natural gas has become the global hydrocarbon of choice, a fact flowing from its lower green-house gas profile than petroleum and coal. Turkey is now asserting itself as a major regional power and has intervened in the Libyan civil war by siding with the Government of National Accord (GNA), aka the Tripoli/Misrata government, against the Libyan National Army (LNA), aka the Benghazi/Tobruk government. By aligning with the GNA, Turkey has been able to make undersea claims in the Eastern Mediterranean to block the construction of natural gas pipelines between Greece and the massive sources of supply that will originate off the coast of Israel, Egypt, and the Greek portion of Cyprus. Because of the corporate interests of oil giant ENI, Italy appears to have aligned itself with Turkish interests. In direct opposition to Turkey’s ambitions is the no longer unusual coalition of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Russia, and France. The latter’s alignment is prompted in part by the corporate interest of French oil giant TOTAL SE.

During the summer of 2020, this conflict escalated when Turkey intervened with proxy forces and the creative use of uncrewed combat vehicles (UCAV) to save the GNA coalition from a military knockout blow by the LNA. The latter military coalition has been strongly supported by Russian interests by using a mercenary force, the Wagner Group. Currently, both sides have paused with a tenuous cease-fire. Further military escalation is possible in Libya and/or in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the former case that might involve a military test of arms between Turkey and Egypt supported by its UAE ally. In the Eastern Mediterranean, there is the prospect of a naval clash between Turkey and Greece and its allies, France, and the UAE.

Finally, Turkey and Israel provided Azerbaijan with substantial military assistance that included unmanned combat aerial vehicles, attack drones, precision-guided short-range ballistic missiles, and conventional force training to win a short regional war with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. This has set the stage for a regional entente between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine. In the latter case, Kiev and Ankara have signed a series of military industry agreements that greatly benefit both countries’ defense establishments. Noteworthy in this regard is the completion of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline that opens up the gas resources of Azerbaijan to all of the Balkan region of Europe.

IN LIGHT of these massive changes in the strategic landscape now and on the horizon, what are the major, if not vital, U.S. interests in the GME, and what investment is needed to protect them? Countering terrorism, sustaining the free flow of commerce, and preventing domination by hegemonic forces are legitimate U.S. interests, though a one-dimensional, over-militarized policy has been of limited utility, at best, in advancing them. 

In the larger hierarchy of U.S. strategic interests, however, the focus of these interests has shifted to the Pacific, the center of gravity of the global economy, while the Middle East accounts for a mere 3.2 percent of global GDP. This strategic re-orientation was signaled by the national military strategy of the Trump administration, with its focus on an enduring great power competition with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. Furthermore, the enormous medium-term fiscal burden of dealing with the economic and financial fallout of Covid-19 will have to be mastered. Additional domestic challenges include further reform of the health care system while dealing with income inequality and racial injustice. Addressing these challenges will be critical to having a stable domestic foundation to underpin U.S. foreign policy.

The overall global approach to this revised strategy is to give first and second priority toward the geostrategic balancing of China and Russia with the GME as a tertiary interest. While some in the “restraint” camp urge the United States to simply retreat from the region, the dynamics are too complicated for a simple binary choice—in or out of the Middle East—but lend themselves to a transition to an offshore balancer approach. The challenge is how to disentangle the United States from outmoded and strategically unwise commitments while minimizing risks to stability. This is likely to involve a multi-phase, conditions-based process over a number of years.

What are the elements of U.S. national interests in the GME? First is to sustain the ongoing campaign against the Salafist-jihadis insurgent through a campaign of “targeted killing.” This includes the judicious use of our global surveillance system combined with manned and unmanned airpower equipped with precision-guided munitions, Special Forces, and most critically, in partnership with local actors with a sense of ownership. This strategy has features of the medical approach to dealing with chronic illness, such as various forms of cancer and HIV/AIDS, where the illness can be managed through various medical interventions without providing a permanent cure. In this regard, there has been continuity in the Obama/Trump administrations’ effort to minimize our footprint and economize in the use of U.S. military forces as opposed to squandering the same in protracted and large-scale counter-insurgency efforts. There appears to be broad public support for the current and relatively low-cost strategy of offensive and defensive counterterrorism against the multi-faceted movement of Salafist-jihadism that includes the still aspiring quasi-state isis and the dispersed elements of Al Qaeda. 

Second, the United States must inhibit the rise of a dominant power that might attain hegemonic control over oil and the crossroads of the Eurasian landmass. The good news is that contending forces in the GME now appear to preclude a regional hegemon for the foreseeable future. They include Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia/GCC, and Egypt. Turkey is now frustrating Russian strategic interests in Syria, Libya, and during the recent Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Further, there is the re-emergence of the Russian Federation and the emergence of China and India as significant outside great power players. To date, Russia and China have been primarily transactional players, though Moscow is intent on sustaining its military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean (Syria) and pursuing opportunities for weapons sales and access to hydrocarbons. India has a major stake in the Iranian petroleum industry and longstanding economic ties to the Gulf states, where up to one million Indians have been employed.

One wildcard is China’s burgeoning economic role in the region and whether it will continue its transactional “friends with all” posture or get sucked into regional turmoil. There is a growing tension between China’s great power ambitions—as its military base in Djibouti illustrates—and its reluctance to risk alienating economic partners. This multiplicity of contending actors suggests the difficulty of hegemonic dominance and the possibility of managing/limiting conflict based on a balance of power.

It is in the U.S. interest to use all elements of national power—diplomatic, intelligence, military, economic—to help foster a meta-static equilibrium within the region. In this regard, there is no theory of U.S. hegemonic dominance much less victory. It will be critical to use the prospect and reality of U.S. reduced commitments and presence in tandem with agile diplomatic leverage to facilitate winding down Sunni-Shia proxy wars, Turkish and Iranian expansionism, and help to broker a regional détente, one that must be owned by the players in the region. The perception of diminished U.S. interest in the region is a factor driving the ongoing strategic realignment, as evident in the UAE/Bahrain-Israeli accords. There is also an exhaustion factor that may indicate an approaching ripeness for robust diplomacy. No one expects that achieving a meta-stable much less a stable balance will be quick or easy.

The Gordian Knot may be Iran. Even weakened by UN sanctions, Covid-19, and a troubled, corrupt regime under the Mullahs, Tehran still has a formidable military. The U.S. military and local military establishments will have to adapt to the rapid diffusion of long-range, precision-guided munitions and uncrewed air and sea combat vehicles in the GME. Even under the burden of sustained economic and financial sanctions, Tehran has demonstrated the military mastery and production of stand-off precision-guided warfare—most dramatically with its use of attack drones and low-cost cruise missiles against key Saudi petroleum production facilities and the use of precision-guided ballistic missiles against a U.S. base in Iraq during the last quarter of 2019. As noted above, Turkey demonstrated its indigenous capacity to produce and employ with great military effect armed uncrewed aerial combat vehicles against mobile military targets in northeastern Syria and western Libya. Even more dramatic has been Azerbaijan’s use of a robotic air force with Turkish and Israeli assistance to gain air superiority over the Armenia armed forces during its short regional war during the fall of 2020. Other regional powers have or will have the capacity to conduct strategic bombardment campaigns with long-range precision-guided cruise and ballistic missiles. Obviously, these regional powers have and will gain access to these weapons from the United States, Russia, China, India, and several states in the European Union.

WHAT DOES an offshore balancing strategy look like? At a minimum, it suggests that the United States should reduce its forward military presence especially in the form of large airfields, ports, and prepositioned sets of equipment, ammunition, and other military supplies as well as its implied ironclad commitments in the region. To ensure the survival of its land-based forces, the United States will need to trade bases for places—rely on access arrangements with local partners and robust passive, aka hardened, shelters and active missile defenses. By the mid-2020s the United States will have the military option of deploying precision-guided medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles—or selling them to partners in the region. For example, in the Gulf States and in Jordan, the U.S. Air Force fighter bomber presence could be replaced in part by ground mobile cruise and ballistic missile launchers. In peacetime, the mobile launchers could be deployed in vacated hardened aircraft shelters to be deployed out to hidden field sites during crisis and wartime. 

With the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the United States will have the option of deploying ground-launched Tomahawk class cruise missiles. These long-range weapons can be deployed on mobile transporter erector launchers and complement any forward-deployed U.S. Navy surface and sub-surface platforms. Further, any concept of military intervention will rely heavily on the use of global reconnaissance directing the use of sea-based and long-range airpower—not unlike the current use of military power against the Salafist-jihadis.

From a global force posture and capabilities planning perspective, there are benefits that flow from the reconfiguration of the U.S. military presence in the GME. It offers an opportunity to accelerate transitioning the force structure to maximize the deployment of multi-domain robotic forces. By deploying long-range cruise and ballistic missiles on a variety of platforms, the demand signal for the forward deployment of very expensive carrier strike groups (CSGs) is drastically reduced, thereby reducing the requirement to maintain ten to eleven CSGs. Within the time perspective of the next five-year defense plan, the U.S. Navy could consider shifting resources away from the modernization of its carrier battle fleet toward higher priority next-generation weapon investments. More precisely, the very expensive Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers could be terminated at four warships with the completion of the USS Doris Miller in the early 2030s. One or two of the Nimitz-class carriers might not need to go through their very expensive mid-life nuclear refueling and modernization cycles during this decade, thereby freeing up additional U.S. Navy resources to increasingly robotize the battle fleet. During this transition period, the U.S. Navy might deploy expeditionary strike groups that rely on large deck amphibious ships optimized to conduct counterterrorism missions. These deployments would be specifically designed to provide back-up support to any permanent special forces presence that is continuing to conduct the ongoing campaign to suppress the reappearance of either ISIS or Al Qaeda.

An interesting question is the status of U.S. Army heavy forces deployed in Kuwait in active and prepositioned configurations. Given their rising vulnerability to Iranian precision missile attack, they might be withdrawn from the theater—possibly to enhance the U.S. forward presence in Eastern Europe. As already discussed, a portion of the U.S. Air Force’s land-based fighter bomber fleet could be partially withdrawn to be replaced with ground and sea-based long-range strike missiles. Furthermore, the United States will have the opportunity to develop and sell a new generation of air and missile defense capabilities especially against the likely increasing threat of large arsenals of land-attack cruise missiles. This should be part of U.S. efforts to manage equilibrium, providing leverage to reduce levels of categories of armaments—for example, balancing GCC and Iran missile capabilities and deployments.

Unlike the case for the United Kingdom in the 1960s, there is no equivalent of a strategically benign United States to pass the baton to; rather, the United States will have to further its interests through pursuing a balance of power, maneuvering an array of regional powers and the actual and potential support from a resurgent Russia, China, and possibly India on an issue-specific basis. This requires understanding the limits of both U.S. power and interests, as well as adopting a new primus inter pares mode of diplomacy with allies and partners sharing both burdens and power. In a more perfect world, Washington could hope that the European Union, if only in the form of a concert of medium-sized powers such as Germany and France, could act in a more robust fashion. This strategy would rely much less on the threat of military force and more on the instruments of state power that include diplomacy, intelligence, and economics/finance. Not to be forgotten is the prospect that the United States and Israel could take the lead in helping various GME nations to transition away from their dependence upon the buying and/or selling of petroleum to support modernizing economies. As noted above, the Saudis and GCC states have already begun positioning themselves for a post-petroleum economy with large investments in renewable energy and not least, in technology innovation.

THE FUNDAMENTAL weakness of the Trump administration’s strategy of reducing the geostrategic profile in the GME was its incoherence. The risk of a Biden administration is that it may believe that there is a path forward toward a renewed prospect of American regional primacy. What is needed is a description of the new set of U.S. priorities and rethought U.S. interests for this very dynamic and violence-ridden region of the globe. Put simply, we need a new definition of “strategic equilibrium” and not victory as a guide to an affordable and coherent approach to the GME. Below are some of the elements of this new strategy for consideration:

Suppressing the Salafist-Jihadis

The Obama/Trump administrations have successfully sustained a counterterrorism campaign against the Salafist-jihadis, most specifically the aspiring quasi-state isis. That campaign will have to continue. Several questions will have to be addressed. What should be the regional footprint of U.S. Special Forces and air power to sustain that campaign? The current presence in eastern Syria and western Iraq may now be untenable. Should Jordan become the center of gravity of this effort? What is the role of the U.S. presence in this regard given the growing GCC/Sunni-Israeli entente? Can and should they play a larger counter-terrorist role and take actions to frustrate Iran’s capacity to become dominant in Iraqi domestic politics?

Should the United States sacrifice its political and military commitments to the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds in name of saving its tenuous strategic relations with Turkey? Put simply, is the United States prepared to sustain its campaign to suppress the remnants of ISIS in Syria and Iraq at the cost of being expelled from the giant air base at Incirlik? As noted below, there are larger issues about U.S. and Turkish relations than this clash of interests.

Saving NATO from Turkey

Should the United States become much more diplomatically engaged in mediating the Eastern Mediterranean conflict between Turkey allied with Italy versus the Egypt-Israel-Saudi Arabia-UAE coalition that is allied with Russia and France? Fully exploiting Eastern Mediterranean gas might go a long way toward strengthening the U.S. argument against the Nordstream II pipeline. Certainly, the minimal objective is to help the European Union with a likely Franco-German lead to mediate a negotiated division of the undersea territory of the Eastern Mediterranean, perhaps via arbitration in the International Court of Justice at the Hague. On the other hand, Ankara may decide to play military hardball and provoke a military confrontation either with Greece and/or Egypt with its Russian ally in Libya. In that worst case, the United States in consultation with its major European allies may have to consider the grim prospect of separation if not divorce between Turkey and NATO. As noted above, a host of new financial and economic developments detrimental to Ankara may lead Erdogan to reverse course and move toward a less militarily assertive regional role. If not, to avoid this terrible choice, the United States will have become actively engaged, with both its European and GCC partners, but this does not imply a new and permanent U.S. military presence in the region. In this regard, the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the Expeditionary Sea Base USS Hershel ‘Woody’ Williams to Souda Bay on the island of Crete makes a great deal of sense. The deployment of a mobile sea base is consistent with our overall military concept of not tying forces down in large facilities. This deployment has the additional benefit of opening up a large nearby dual-purpose airfield at Heraklion as a possible alternative to Incirlik without making the investment in a massive permanent military presence. 

Dealing with Iran

The United States needs to break out of its stance of total and continuous confrontation with Iran. While acknowledging Tehran is a regional revisionist power, the United States needs to return to and build on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration, which Joe Biden has said he intends to do. The results of Iran’s efforts to recreate Persian dominion through proxy forces have been a disaster: failed states in Syria and Lebanon, political and humanitarian disaster in Yemen, popular anger at home over squandered resources. What is there to influence? Combined with its economic malaise and political fatigue, there may be an exhaustion factor that lends itself to moves toward détente. The Biden administration could pursue a “less-for-less” strategy of easing sanctions if Iran halts uranium enrichment and comes back into full compliance with the JCPOA.

Yet it is almost inevitable that Iran’s non-nuclear military power will increase over time. This is especially true if recent reports of an emerging strategic pact between Iran and China prove enduring. It remains in our interest that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. To do so is to trigger a regional proliferation scenario with the likely acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Saudis, and perhaps by Turkey and possibly Egypt. Put simply, GME oil and gas infrastructures can be rebuilt after a precision non-nuclear missile attack. That same industry will not survive the consequences of a two or multi-sided nuclear bombardment campaign.

To persuade Riyadh to forego the nuclear weapon option will require a winding down of proxy wars, curbing regional arms races, and moves toward Saudi/GCC-Iranian detente. It may require the United States to provide an extended deterrent commitment through the heavy reliance on air and naval power in the near term. Further, the United States should address the question of whether a deeper engagement by China in the GME is contrary to our strategic interests. Given that 85 percent of Gulf oil is exported to China, India, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, one alternative response to this challenge might be creative diplomacy, encouraging India as a regional counterweight, with overlapping interests with China, Japan, and other East Asians to safeguard the free flow of petroleum and natural gas at non-inflationary prices out of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

Dealing with Iraq

The U.S. approach to Iraq should be guided by our overall strategy of dealing with the possible resurrection of isis. What is our long-term relationship with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria? They remain a linchpin to our anti-Salafist-jihadi campaign. Do we remain a player in the upper region of the Persian Gulf? Do we maintain a military presence in Kuwait? What is the configuration of that presence? There are few U.S. strategic interests in Iraq beyond counter-jihadism and stability. Currently, there is a rotational brigade combat team and substantial preposition stocks to affect the rapid reinforcement of that ground force. Trump’s decision to withdraw two thousand troops may presage further retrenchment. The Iraqi Parliament has passed legislation asking the United States to leave. If Iraqi troops are not sufficiently capable after seventeen years of training, there is a serious political problem that any U.S. force posture might be irrelevant to fix. As Bush and Cheney were told in 2002, a Shia majority regime in Iraq would inevitably lead to Iranian influence.

More broadly, we should try to encourage the Iraq regime and the Kurdistan Regional Government to begin a serious effort to invest in the use of natural gas and renewables to generate electric power as transition away from the export of petroleum as the primary source of government income. 

Dealing with Israel

The rapprochement between Israel, the GCC states, and other Sunni states signals the emergence of a realignment of strategic, economic, and technological interests between Israel and the KSA/GCC to contain and counterbalance, if not prepare to go to war, with Iran. It also reflects generational change, with new Saudi and GCC leaders tired of ethnoreligious wars and interested in investing in post-oil, knowledge economies for which Israel, a global tech innovation leader, is an ideal partner. The price Israel has had to pay is to defer if not take off the table the annexation of the Jordan River Valley basin, perhaps leaving a sliver of hope for a two-state solution. Overall, Israel’s strategic circumstance has greatly improved with a fragile, struggling Iraq and Syria destroyed as viable nation-states at least in the near-term. It has now become a prospective hydrocarbon exporter due to the massive undersea natural gas finds in its territorial waters. As noted above, Israel possesses an advanced twenty-first-century high technology economy that gives it clear military superiority over its potential regional opponents. Israel’s cutting-edge tech innovation capacity is another asset attracting interest among the GCC states, particularly the UAE, preparing for post-petroleum, knowledge economies. On the other hand, it has and will have to reconcile with or adapt to its ongoing rivalry with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean while sustaining its peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE. The recent military collaboration between Turkey and Israel in support of Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia may suggest a route to that rapprochement.

These radically changed geostrategic circumstances suggest that the de facto alliance between the United States and Israel is unlikely to lead to a major change other than the fact that Tel Aviv may have even greater freedom of maneuver. In turn, the United States may decide that expending substantial political and diplomatic capital to affect a formal two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian quasi-state is no longer worth the effort. Whatever the outcome in this regard may now be in the hands of Israel and its Arab neighbors and regional partners. Put simply, the resolution of the Palestine problem is an important but not vital interest of the United States. 

Israel will continue to be an important U.S. partner. Emphasis should be on joint development of advanced technology with military applications and supporting Israeli R&D on emerging tech. Interestingly, U.S. and Israel national security collaboration may shift away from the traditional forms of warfare toward dealing with threats through cyberspace and the emergence of the next-generation threat of a pandemic. Israel will likely be an important part of emerging U.S. technology policies to forge a network of trusted economic and intelligence partners to counter China.

MORE BROADLY, a zero-based assessment of U.S. interests and policies in the GME is long overdue. The new geostrategic map of the region, the legacy of failures, and the imperatives of great power competition require a new mindset. There is a striking contrast between the new geo-economic and strategic realities reshaping the Greater Middle East landscape, and the seeming inert continuity of U.S. policy.

The core policy assumptions about energy dependence and the security of Israel have been turned on their head, shifting U.S. interests. The Saudi monarchy is now an oil competitor rather than a vital U.S. supplier, yet the seventy-five-year-old oil-for-security bargain is little changed. Israel is a dynamic, self-reliant, knowledge economy, increasingly integrated into the region, and may soon be a gas-exporter, yet the U.S.-Israel relationship remains a constant. The risks of both partners “wagging the dog” in conflicts where few vital U.S. interests are at stake are ill-considered. Two decades after 9/11, there has been a learning curve in how to manage jihadi terrorism, one area that suggests more continuity than change.

Against the backdrop of these new realities, the current predicament in the GME is largely borne of the consequences of failure: the hubris of primacy in U.S. wars of choice, failings of Iran’s religious state experiment and pursuit of regional hegemony, and not least, political and economic failures of Arab systems of governance. For the United States, the situation reflects a stunning lack of self-examination, a failure to understand the limits of power. It also underscores how counter-productive an over-militarized and under-employed diplomatic response to problems that principally require political, economic, and diplomatic solutions.

The emerging new political/strategic realignment has both positive and negative implications. The Abraham Accords have shifted the balance of forces in the Israeli and U.S. direction. However, the efforts to fill the vacuum created by U.S. retrenchment—real and perceived—has led to nineteenth-century contention for influence among Turkey, Russia, Iran, the Saudi/GCC states, and perhaps China fought with twenty-first-century weaponry. The good news is these off-setting forces render hegemony unlikely and a multipolar balance more possible. The bad news that absent a changed security environment and a movement toward a new balance of power, it could lead to a chain of nuclear proliferation—Iran-Saudi Arabia-Turkey.

Our judgment is that this all nets out with new logic and possibilities for the United States to disentangle itself from the region in a prudent manner. While difficult to measure, our estimate is that there is a growing sense of exhaustion and a rising trend of generational change reflected in the Abraham Accords. We may be now approaching a ripeness for negotiated outcomes, a proposition that requires testing. This will require agile diplomacy, applying U.S. leverage in concert with regional partners and extra-regional actors (e.g.; EU and Japan) to evolve a new balance of power. China’s and India’s reluctance to get drawn in the regional quagmire suggests possible overlapping of interests worth exploring. Achieving a new balance will, in turn, require a trajectory toward détente, of both the United States and the Sunni Arab states with Iran.

While many of the ideas outlined herein still lie at the margins of both political parties and the foreign policy elites, there is likely a strong receptivity from an American public feeling that the costs of U.S. failed wars far outweigh the benefits. They seek to prioritize addressing grave domestic problems. Polling data suggests that Americans generally favor a more participatory world in which governments, reflecting popular will, also treat their people well. But they also want other nations to share the burdens of responsibility for world order. The burdens of U.S. deficits, economic recovery from Covid-19, and war-weariness means adjusting U.S. goals to align with means—a more solvent policy. This requires Europe to step up—after all, the Middle East is in their neighborhood—but also requires Arab partners to do more than buy U.S. weaponry. 

Disentangling the United States from the GME will be a pragmatic and protracted process. A clear trajectory of the United States in the Middle East may move local actors toward détente. The United States will need to judge how the region digests each move before taking the next, with robust diplomacy seeking to leverage efforts to diminish military presence and commitments with movement toward regional détente and political-military dialogue and confidence-building measures among the regional actors. After all, our priority is building a credible and affordable deterrent capacity to deal with the two revisionist great powers, China and Russia. There is little margin for error.

Robert A. Manning is a Senior Fellow of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. He served as a senior counselor to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. Department of State Policy Planning Staff from 2004 to 2008, and on the National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Futures Group, 2008–2012.

Peter A. Wilson is an Adjunct Senior Defense analyst at the RAND Corporation and regularly conducts lectures on national security policy at the Eisenhower School, National Defense University. 

Image: Reuters.