There’s Never a New Middle East

This year’s op-eds and magazine features induce déjà vu. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was supposed to clear the way for a new, democratic Middle East. The 2006 Lebanon War was, in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s phrase, the “birth pangs” of a new Middle East. The Arab Spring in 2009 was its dawn. Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was said to be ushering in a new Middle East. The U.S. attacks on Iran and the fight over the Strait of Hormuz are said to be bringing yet another one into being. Per U.S. President Donald Trump, “The Middle East will be transformed, and the future of that region has never—I don’t think it’s ever looked brighter.” Foreign Affairs weighed in with an article titled “The Iran Imperative: How America and Israel Can Shape a New Middle East.” Bloody and chaotic events like the Iran war induce fantasies of comprehensive change, but reality keeps coming up short. As Sam Rayburn, House speaker in an earlier era observed: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.” Decisive change for the better—in the United States’ conception—demands an actual preponderance of U.S. military power and the ability to convert that power into enduring political arrangements. The United States has imagined itself as wielding both attributes while possessing neither. The use of force halfway around the world requires political leaders to show that the stakes are commensurate with the cost and risk. That means war aims are framed in extravagant terms that are eventually revealed as detached from quotidian reality. On the other side, adversaries have agency. They are not passive objects of U.S. power projection or a substrate onto which Washington can project its fantasies. And, ironically, the weakness and fragmentation of regional states makes it more, not less, difficult for an outside power to impose its will. When the war ends, as it eventually will, Iran will still be a poor, militarized oil exporter with two good friends—China and Russia—and a strong relationship with Iraq. In short, not terribly different than it was before the war. Iraq will look much as it does now, a state with a hybrid army trying to fend off pressure from Iran, with which it shares a long border, and from the United States, which controls its finances. Syria will look as it did the day before the United States and Israel struck Iran. It will be poor, shattered by 13 years of civil war and many more of sanctions, run by a sectarian clique, penetrated by outside powers from Turkey to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and still riven by ethnic and religious rivalries. Lebanon will still be living with the results of the 1989 Taif Accord, which ended Lebanon’s civil war by rebalancing power among its sects and calling for every militia to disarm. Under Syrian tutelage, every militia did except Hezbollah, which kept its guns as “the resistance.” This, in turn, inadvertently but predictably locked in Hezbollah’s status as an armed rival to the state and a picker of pointless fights with its far more powerful neighbor to the south. It will still be engaged in the Sisyphean task of satisfying the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without a parliament willing to decide who absorbs the banking system’s losses. Egypt, whose economy suffered badly when the Houthis were firing on ships in the Red Sea two years ago, will still be the same authoritarian state, propped up by Gulf largesse and embarked on gigantic infrastructure projects, that it was the day before the war. Jordan, necessarily careful given the mayhem on its Israeli, Syrian, and Iraqi borders, will look exactly as it did before the war. So, too, will Libya, Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan—which will all be what they were last year and the year before that. True, there is the odd beneficiary. The largely unrecognized country of Somaliland has collected strategic rent from the UAE, Israel, and the United States as a geographical counterweight to Houthi domination of the Bab el-Mandeb. But one breakaway enclave doth not a new Middle East make. What about the Arab side of the Gulf? Every state there has been pummeled by Iranian missiles and drones. Every Gulf state but Oman will see its economy shrink this year. The IMF projects contractions of 16.7 percent for Kuwait, 15.6 percent for Qatar, 11.3 percent for Bahrain, and smaller ones for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The IMF expects a sharp rebound next year, but only on the generous assumption that traffic through the strait returns to normal during 2027. Crude flows are already at prewar levels even if the process of moving it is cumbersome. Most of these states are talking about huge new pipeline or transportation projects, whether from Abqaiq to Yanbu, Habshan to Fujairah, or Basra to Baniyas, to make their export routes redundant and therefore more resilient to Iranian or Houthi attacks. Plans for such projects are nothing new for them, and most will probably never be built. All will rush to rebuild their own air defenses now that the United States has shown itself to be relatively ineffectual as a wager of wars but still an eager arms dealer, source of intelligence, and defense industrial partner. This won’t have a significant effect on their militaries, which, except for the UAE, do not have an expeditionary function, but it will improve their resilience in the face of future Iranian and Houthi attacks. How does this war end? One way is for the Trump administration to sign a concessionary cease-fire that restores normal traffic through the strait and frees the U.S. Navy to redeploy. A Democratic U.S. Congress could hasten that choice. It would not stop the war outright, since Trump would veto a war powers resolution, and Democrats would likely lack the votes to override him. A fight over funding would still make the war harder to sustain but hand Trump a win-win situation. Instead of going down as the president who lost the war he started, he could blame the loss on Democrats. The Gulf states would then fall back on their traditional, prudent, and strategy of hedging. They would strike side deals with Iran to fully open the strait while holding onto as much U.S. intelligence, technology, weaponry, and expertise as they can, even if the Fifth Fleet were no longer headquartered in Bahrain. This would look a lot like the over-the-horizon posture—whereby the United States keeps its forces just outside the region, mostly at sea and at a few access points, and relies on prepositioned equipment and basing rights to surge in a crisis instead of stationing large forces on land. This stance served a strategy of offshore balancing, which kept the United States out of a region’s day to day, intervening only when a single power threatened to dominate a region that it considers vital. The other way is that the war does not end, at least not soon. This seems to be the outcome that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prefer, and on its own terms, it is working. Bessent’s satellite imagery shows no tankers at Kharg Island, and Gulf crude, moving under U.S. escort, is leaving the region at or above prewar volumes. Why settle? Because Iran gets a vote. A strategy of economic attrition gives Tehran every reason to show that the attrition will cost Washington more than it is willing to pay. That is the purpose of the Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia, the attacks at Dhahran and Dammam, and the threats against U.S. bases. Since the midterm elections, the president has been signaling a disinclination to escalate pending the outcome of talks with Iran, while insisting that the blockade will continue. This in turn will leave the door open for Iranian attacks on shipping that could prompt the escalation Trump is seeking to avoid. A third carrier group is on its way, ensuring that he will have the combat power he needs to follow through. If the war does drag on, something will change, though not in the way that the prophets of a new Middle East intend. When the Theodore Roosevelt arrives in the Arabian Sea, three quarters of the Navy’s deployed carriers will be allocated to the war. With the arrival of the Roosevelt in the Andaman Sea, there is now no U.S. carrier in the Western Pacific. A region that absorbs this much U.S. power is changing the United States’ position in Asia. The Middle East is remaking U.S. strategy, rather than the other way around. The only other major player is Israel. For years, observers have noted the rightward drift of Israeli politics, the collapse of left-wing parties, a more militant posture toward the region, tense relations with the United States, hardening opposition to a two-state solution, and the development of a long-range strike capability meant to disable Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and, as it turned out, to kill many of its leaders. This trend was likely to end in war sooner or later; but it was Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, who pushed the button. The result has been catastrophic for Gazans and for Palestinians more generally. It drove Israeli forces across the borders of Syria and Lebanon and created the widespread impression that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lured Trump into the war. These events have accelerated the souring of American opinion about Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in ways that were anticipated a decade ago—particularly the narrowing of political support for the relationship and its transformation into partisan football—well before the current Gulf War began. This latest pointless war has demonstrated both the persistent American desire for a new Middle East and the inability to make it happen. The 2016 and 2024 U.S. elections were, in part, a referendum on U.S. interventions in the region. Trump appeared to understand that and made it part of his pitch: “I’m not going to start a war,” he declared in 2024, “I’m going to stop wars.” But restraint has never really been his lodestar, as long as others were footing the bill and he could posture as a warlord. That’s too bad for dead Iranian schoolgirls, U.S. soldiers, and families back home struggling with war-induced inflation. As for a new Middle East, let alone a better one, the experiment to run is not to test yet again whether military intervention leaves the region better off, since the answer to that is known, but whether less intervention does so. That experiment is likely to be run by the next U.S. administration, which will answer to a public that sees the Iran war as a mistake, a gratuitous return to the military adventurism that voters repudiated in 2008. Colossal debt and demand for spending on the lives of ordinary people will squeeze the defense budget. Congress, for better or worse, will be looking to the security of the Western Pacific and Europe first. The Middle East will have survived a great deal of American help. It may yet survive less of it.