THE ADVANCE of U.S. interests from North Africa to Central Asia is foundering. The exhausting occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan portend strategic failure. Large swaths of an Arab world the U.S. dominated thirty years ago as it led to the expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait and hosted an Arab-Israeli peace conference roil in various states of political fragmentation and economic ruin. A U.S. military foothold in Syria is ensnared in a mesh of regional and Russian forces. Missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia are able to disrupt global energy supplies. A U.S. military support role for Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen has served primarily to deepen perhaps the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.

Chinese and Russian influence is broadly ascendant, a new “Great Game” in Afghanistan risks accelerating after the U.S. withdrawal, and Al Qaeda and ISIS—despite years of unrelenting and often successful U.S. pressure—continue to plot and inspire attacks against American interests globally. Regional states—including presumed U.S. allies—increasingly act with neither fear of nor deference to Washington. An erratic multi-year effort aimed at curtailing Iranian nuclear ambitions rests on a knife’s edge of failure. The massive expenditures of blood, treasure, and diplomatic capital across the wider Middle East that have produced these outcomes since the end of the Cold War amount to a debacle for U.S. strategy across a pivotal part of the globe.

This litany of failures has spurred American strategic thinkers and former policymakers to advocate a new strategy of retrenchment. A consensus has emerged that the United States has been overcommitted to a region whose internal challenges are beyond the reach of U.S. instruments of power. Essays such as “The Middle East Isn’t Worth It Anymore,” “The Middle East Just Doesn’t Matter as Much Any Longer,” and “America’s Middle East Purgatory” are giving voice to an exasperated foreign policy elite eager to pivot U.S. strategy to more immediate threats from Russia and China. Similarly, a bipartisan consensus for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan had been building for several years.

Such frustration is understandable given the memory of the United States successfully securing many of its interests in the wider Middle East throughout the Cold War. When an earlier retrenching Western power, the British, passed to the United States a roiling stew of nationalism, traditional monarchies, and scattered energy interests in the wider Middle East, Washington—with the major exception of the Iranian revolution—largely met the challenge. 

The United States achieved its regional objectives by engaging local elites politically and economically, marshaling diplomatic leverage, and arraying offshore naval power. Arab-Israeli wars were contained and redirected into a semi-permanent peace process, Egypt switched from the Soviet to the U.S. sphere of influence, damaging oil embargoes were overcome, and a U.S.-backed Islamic insurgency—the Mujaheddin—successfully countered the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. U.S. ground forces deployed once to the region—in Lebanon in 1958—to welcoming Lebanese on Beirut’s beaches. The post-Cold War era, in contrast, is proving far less responsive to U.S. power.

Calls for retrenchment are coming with a paradoxically long list of enduring U.S. interests to protect. The incoming national security advisor in January 2021, for example, sketched the inherent challenges of retrenchment: “Downsizing the U.S. presence in the Middle East will require striking a tricky balance: reducing an outdated U.S. military footprint without creating fresh insecurity, while maintaining deterrence and influence where needed to address those key U.S. interests that remain.” Other experts have been more detailed: “the U.S. has three truly vital interests in the region: limiting terrorism, protecting the flow of oil and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Similarly, others have asserted that,

The United States should still care about protecting freedom of navigation in the region’s major maritime passages, preventing oil producers or trouble makers from suddenly turning off the flow, and containing would-be regional hegemons and other actors hostile to Washington.

In Afghanistan, the United States has pledged to maintain counterterrorism and humanitarian operations but will need a foothold in neighboring Central Asian states to achieve these post-withdrawal aims.

A new U.S. strategy that might secure this long list of vital interests has yet to be articulated. Instead, the orthodox Cold War discourse of classical realism lurks in the background with an emphasis on power, interests, and the state. A typical view is that America “still has interests (in the Middle East) to protect but America needs to be realistic, prudent, and disciplined in how it secures them.” A foreign policy elite that came of age in the Cold War is reluctant to revisit basic assumptions about how the United States acts toward the wider Middle East.

This bias toward realism is understandable. It sits well with a national security establishment originally organized around the Cold War mission of containing Soviet power and winning an ideological confrontation over secular forms of governance. Realism is also compatible with foreign policy elites habituated to decades of dealing with counterpart palace elites to advance U.S. interests in the wider Middle East. These palace elites buffered the United States from direct engagement with mass movements and the labyrinthine fissures of societies ruled by authoritarian regimes. Interests, once defined, were delegated and managed by such proxies.

The development of a new U.S. strategy predicated on “interests” decoupled from the increasingly complex and volatile contexts in which such “interests” exist, however, risks failure from the start. The continued reliance on a mostly realist and state-centered framework can mask that many states in the wider Middle East barely function and often do so with only de jure borders. Realism also skirts how religious and other sub-state actors are claiming roles in governance amid the ruins of formerly secular nationalist states. Historic memory and national myths are also increasingly part of political identities and strategic ambitions which a U.S. strategy based on realism alone can easily dismiss.

A reckoning with past U.S. assumptions is the sine qua non for the development of a new regional strategy. The scope of strategic failures over the past two decades alone suggests a re-examination of the most basic assumptions of U.S. strategy in the wider Middle East is necessary. Growing challenges to governance, changes to the regional state system, diminished U.S. energy dependence, and the disruptions of an information and communications technology revolution make retention of unexamined assumptions about state, society, governance, and U.S. regional leverage still less plausible.

A new strategy begins with an expansion of our analytic tool kit. New frameworks for understanding the inter-connected geographic space of a wider Middle East and the power of myth and historic memory to shape the strategic intent of actors are needed to inform a new U.S. strategy. Similarly, we need ways to understand the diffusion of political and cultural movements across borders, patterns of religious governance, and the interactions among Islamic and neighboring civilizations to help America define its interests and pursue them more effectively. To think beyond the state, beyond the assumption of secular governance, and beyond fixed ideas of Western modernity offers the promise of a more effective U.S. strategy.

THE PRIMACY of the state in U.S. strategic thinking has persisted since the surge in new state formation following the twentieth-century demise of empires. Despite the increasing power of substate actors and globalization’s undermining of states’ sovereignty, states still matter most to U.S. foreign policy. The threats of state actors such as China and Russia command the attention of foreign policy and national security elites and the U.S. response to global challenges from pandemics to climate change to international corporate tax structures remains state-centered. The state as the conceptual foundation of global politics and security also endures in the way U.S. national security and diplomacy are primarily organized.

This state-centered approach to U.S. strategy has had important consequences for the way the United States has conceptualized the wider Middle East. The state—controlled by palace elites—has been understood as distinct from the societies governed. As Ewan Stein has observed, the state has been “regarded self-evidently as the repository of modern Westphalian norms and society as a separate realm containing premodern identity.” In such a framework, states became the engine powering the modernization of a region, transforming “traditional” societies in conformity with the requirements of a scientific and technological revolution. The Cold War’s protagonists differed over the means to achieve such modernization, but both aimed at it with their competing regional strategies.

Such a distinction between the modernizing state and traditional society has also shaped the way history has been incorporated—or ignored—in U.S. strategic thinking about the region. A privileging of modernization over traditional society has devalued the long history of the region—including its ancient civilizations—that influences states in the modern era. An ineluctable path to modernization suggests that the history useful for U.S. strategic thinking about the Arab world, for example, reaches back only to the end of the Ottoman Empire. The rise of secular nationalism, the modern administrative state, and better trained and equipped armies during the late Ottoman Empire provide a historical narrative that accords with an assumption of state-driven modernity. The rest of history shrinks to a strategically irrelevant preamble consigned to rarefied academic pursuits. 

Religion—a foundation of pre-modern societies—has been another casualty of a modernizing, state-centered strategic approach to the wider Middle East. The pervasiveness of religious sensibility in the wider Middle East does not sit easily with Western elites who consider themselves heirs to the secular Enlightenment. Neologisms such as “Islamic activism” and “political Islam” attest to a preference to describe the revival of Islam in public spheres as a political, not a religious trend. The persistence of homo religiosus in the wider Middle East has spurred determined efforts to sideline religion such as “dethroning religion as a singular and stable interpretive and policy category” and defining sectarianism as a “political project.” Modernization theory has fallen from its apogee in the 1970s in academic circles, but it persists as a strategic framework for U.S. policymaking.

The articulation and promotion of these underlying assumptions of U.S. strategy in the wider Middle East became more explicit as the United States sensed its preeminent power in the aftermath of the Cold War and sought to ground its response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The post-Cold War zeal for expanding liberal foreign policy aims was not a moniker only of neoconservative Republicans. The George H.W. Bush administration intervened in Somalia in the name of protecting civilians and the Clinton administration acted with similar reach in Bosnia after Serb atrocities against Muslims. In the 1990s, foreign policy intellectuals argued that the spread of American values was a key component of American security. The Obama administration committed military forces in Libya in 2011 to demonstrate support for a new global norm of the “responsibility to protect” civilians from their own governments. Above all, nearly two decades of bipartisan support for U.S.-led political and social change in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that the United States has had large aims fueled by a sense of preeminent post-Cold War U.S. power and resources.

The extent of this self-referential, evangelizing American foreign policy was apparent in a draft speech I had to review several months after U.S. forces toppled Saddam in Iraq in 2003. A senior U.S. official was planning to speak of “bells of liberty” ringing in Baghdad, signaling that the United States was in Iraq bearing the freighted meaning of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell. One civilization mattered most, and it was the victorious Western civilization of the twentieth century. The politically salient history that bells in the Middle East were central to the Middle East’s Byzantine Christian civilization and banned by conquering Muslims in the seventh century—because of their ability to mobilize whole towns—mattered not.

A more successful U.S. strategy for the wider Middle East hinges on thinking in new ways about the region and about the exercise of U.S. power. States will matter but not in the way they did in the twentieth century. The United States will have significant leverage to pursue its enduring interests but nothing like the relative power it enjoyed at the end of the Cold War. Liberal ideas and institutions will continue to have global appeal—including in the wider Middle East—but they will be sifted increasingly through the authority of the region’s enduring ancient civilizations.

An overly state-centered, Americanized conception of modernization—hostile to religion and dismissive of history while exalting U.S. liberal ideas and institutions—cannot sustain a U.S. strategy to secure our enduring interests. Instead, a revival and repurposing of some of the conceptual tools of civilizational analysis—shorn of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century associations with Eurocentrism, colonialism, and Western cultural superiority—can help guide our future strategic thinking.

IN THE anthropologist E.B. Tylor’s classic late-nineteenth-century definition, “Culture or Civilization … is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” As such, civilizational analysis enables U.S. strategy to see the wider Middle East through the entirety of the region’s ideas, institutions, and history rather than just through the limited prism of increasingly fragile states and their elites. To strategize with civilizational concepts is also to transcend decades-old assumptions about state-centered Western modernization and to grasp today’s wider Middle East in its own intellectual, social, and historical context.

A new U.S. strategy so empowered must first reckon with Islam as an enduring socio-political force in the wider Middle East. Islam cannot be defined narrowly as extremism or reimagined only as another form of secular politics or as private religious observance. Some, like Algeria’s Mohammed Arkoun, have argued for an Islamic humanism to transcend both a consumerist, intellectually shallow West and Islamic religious zealotry—a civilizational divide Arkoun labels “Jihad vs. McWorld.” Others, like the Turkish writer Sezai Karakoç, argue that Islamic civilization has “a particular view of state, society, culture, and economics” that is a “cure to the crisis of the modern world.” The Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi—a follower of the influential anti-Western, post-colonial scholar Edward Said—sees a new, non-Western Middle Eastern politics in the ruins of the ill-named Arab Spring. Civilization is a key part of the vocabulary of today’s Middle East.

Civilizational concepts not only offer U.S. strategy access to politically salient ideas about religion and modernity but also to the region’s equally salient ancient history. The governments of Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, for example, are heirs to pre-Islamic civilizations that inform contemporary national identities and aspirations for regional spheres of influence. Egypt’s fading bid for leadership of the Arab world, Syria’s decade-long defense of its Eastern Mediterranean littoral, Turkey’s strategic tilt from Europe to the Middle East, and Iran’s determination to project influence into the Eastern Mediterranean all echo the underlying identities and the territorial reach of ancient antecedent empires.

Familiarity with the region’s ancient civilizational past can also reframe contemporary political challenges in geographically useful ways. Rebuilding social compacts in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, for example, will depend on binding disparate ancient communities who remain in conflict within these modern state boundaries. In Libya, the divide between Benghazi and Tripoli dates to ancient Greece and Phoenicia. The political and cultural divide between Yemen’s highlands and lowlands and Syria’s Eastern Mediterranean and upper Tigris-Euphrates areas has similar ancient roots. The geography of Iraq’s Sunni-Shia distinctions dates to the earliest days of Islam. The Kurdish presence in the north is even earlier.

The return of civilizational analysis in academic circles can help pave the way for its incorporation into a new Middle East strategy for the United States. The decoupling of civilizational analysis from the Eurocentrism of its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practitioners is also well underway and can continue in policy and intelligence circles. 

U.S. strategy can use civilizational ideas to grasp history as seriously as the region’s inhabitants do and to understand non-Western expressions of political and religious identity. American confidence in the global benefits of scientific and technological innovation, trade, international law and norms, as well as the safeguarding of the rights and freedoms of individuals can go in tandem with a respect for non-Western civilizations and the unique ways they will choose to encounter the West’s values. 

Civilizational thinking can succeed in shaping a new U.S. strategy by drawing upon and integrating the expertise of the policy and intelligence communities. As the twentieth-century French historian Fernand Braudel observed, “To define the idea of civilization requires the combined efforts of all the social sciences,” which are well represented in the national security and foreign policy establishment. Braudel belonged to a French group of thinkers who argued that history should not be primarily about the study of individual leaders, diplomacy, and war—topics that also preoccupy state-centered U.S. strategists. Instead, members of the Annales School argued that history was about long-term trends in geography, economics, and the cultural orientation of peoples (their mentalités). This data-driven and interdisciplinary historical method has already made inroads into contemporary national security thinking, notably in the series of Global Trends reports produced by the National Intelligence Council.

THE EMERGING consensus that the United States, even as it shrinks from the wider Middle East, must safeguard a range of enduring interests offers an opportunity to harness civilizational analysis for a new U.S. regional strategy. Officials at the National Security Council, the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy are among those who will be charged with this strategic task. They are likely to work in the shadow of a realist tradition infused with liberal ideals, an inflated sense of U.S. capabilities, and the presumption of the state as the driver of Western-oriented modernization. Without the separate infusions of religion, ancient history, geography, and other long-term trends that civilizational analysis offers, the effort will falter like the strategies of the past two decades.

Counterterrorism. Preventing politically-motivated violent attacks against U.S. persons and interests across the wider Middle East will continue to require identifying and mitigating specific threats. The effort will also continue to include alliances with like-minded states, opposing state sponsors, and denying sub-state actors sanctuary within state boundaries.

A civilizational analysis of Islam as a socio-political force that either constrains or enables violence against the United States will be needed to supplement this traditional U.S. strategy. Islamic scholars and political leaders from a broad spectrum of the faith will need to further demonstrate the religious impermissibility of killing innocents. A consensus within Islam that the concept of jihad should be interpreted as a nonviolent religious quest will need to spread. Advancing these notions will require a recovery of a more centralized religious leadership and authority—or at least a broad consensus—with which the United States can engage.

The fight against terrorism in the wider Middle East will also depend on what kind of Islam infuses the renewal of social compacts from Tunisia to Afghanistan. Key questions will revolve around how Islamic law can complement Western sources of law, whether republican forms of government can draw legitimacy from Islam’s sacred texts, and how individual freedoms can be understood and legitimated in an Islamic religious context.

A U.S. strategy to achieve these aims will need to grasp increasingly fragmented schools of Islamic jurisprudence, pathways of ideological exchange across state boundaries, and the competing claims to leadership of the Islamic world from Iran and Saudi Arabia. These insights can come from taking religion and history seriously within the rubric of an Islamic civilization extending from “Nile to Oxus,” in Marshall Hodgson’s enduring definition.

Deterring Regional Hegemons. The ability of the United States to prevent a power hostile to American interests from dominating the region will continue to depend on the projection of U.S. naval and air power, the breadth and depth of U.S. regional alliances, and the ability of the United States to deter Russia and China globally. This strategy will fall squarely within the posture of classical realism.

Civilizational analysis, however, strengthens and complements such a strategy with historical insights on patterns of regional state behavior. The strategic intentions of powers such as Egypt, Iran, and Turkey must be understood in the context of their imperial histories from ancient times. These histories can provide insights into the modern definition of state interests and on the motivation for state action in an increasingly fluid regional environment. Porous state boundaries and the absence of an external power or powers capable of dominating the regional state system mean historic memory and national myths now have greater room to assert themselves. Without civilizational perspectives, U.S. strategy will be less equipped to anticipate threats and seize diplomatic opportunities among regional states acting on their civilizational pasts.

The ability of a new U.S. strategy to identify the contours of the emerging regional state system and project U.S. power effectively in it also will hinge on knowledge of the region’s civilizational past. The century-old transition from a unipolar Ottoman state system to a still-emerging multipolar system follows a pattern of breakup and consolidation that has persisted from the time of Achaemenid Persia and Alexander the Great. The United States now finds itself immersed in a period of regional fragmentation with ancient precedent.

Since the breakup of imperial Rome, an underlying geographic architecture has consisted of Western Europe (and now also the United States), the southern reaches of the Mediterranean (the Arab world), the Anatolian Plateau (Turkey), and Iran. Particularly helpful for the United States will be to appreciate that Iran’s role has been oriented both westward to the Middle East and eastward toward Afghanistan and Central Asia, making Iran a strategic bridge in the wider Middle East. A U.S. strategy that perceives only the modern era’s tenuous state borders and privileges history beginning in the nineteenth century will lack the understanding newly assertive regional actors possess of the region’s persistent strategic geography.

Constraining Iranian Nuclear Ambitions. A U.S.-led strategy to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability will likely remain grounded in the international judgment that Iran’s revolutionary regime, regional ambitions, and hostility to U.S. and Western interests—including Gulf Arab allies and Israel—disqualify it from having such a capability. The recent election of a hardline conservative to Iran’s presidency is likely to confirm this longstanding U.S. strategic approach to Iran. 

A civilizational perspective can give U.S. strategy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions a broader framework than Iran’s 1979 revolution to gauge Iranian strategic aims. Iran’s pretensions to leadership of the Islamic world, for example, rest in part on the historic reality that Sasanid Persia infused Arab Islam with much of the knowledge that led to the flowering of Islamic civilization during the medieval Abbasid era. Iran’s 1979 revolutionary aims in the region rest also on centuries of Persian imperial conquests from Egypt to Afghanistan.

A civilizational perspective can also help U.S. strategy identify useful precedents for diplomatic engagement. The United States should recall that Iran’s current antipathy toward the United States and other Western powers belies more collaborative ancient precedents. In politics, for example, Persia was deeply involved in the affairs of ancient Greece after the Peloponnesian War. In another often-overlooked precedent, Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire eventually evolved into an unprecedented political and cultural exchange between Persian and Greek civilizations. Iranian negotiators will be likely to know this history and so should their U.S. counterparts.

A RECKONING with the failures of the last two decades of U.S. strategy in the wider Middle East is upon us. Thinking about civilization and not just about modernity and the state is a way for the United States to do better in this crucial and complex region. More nuanced religious ideas and a firmer grasp of the past must leaven our present thinking.

As overly confident U.S. strategists born of the Cold War era were mapping our failed strategic ambitions in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparing a thought for how Alexander the Great’s Greek cultural footprint dissolved in Afghanistan and how ancient Rome reached its eastward limit in Mesopotamia (Iraq) might have informed and tempered ambitions. A geography limited to the modern state, an idea space limited to Western-driven modernization, and a dismissal of the region’s vast and enduring past must yield to larger and more effective U.S. strategic thinking.

Andrew S. Gilmour, a retired senior CIA analyst, is author of A Middle East Primed for New Thinking: Insights and Policy Options from the Ancient World and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship.

Image: Unsplash.