The End of the American Middle East

The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.

The United States’ primary goal for three and a half decades has been to lock its disparate allies into an order built around protecting Israel while containing, at first, Iran and Iraq, and more recently Iran and its nonstate allies. Far from being a deviation from that strategy, President Donald Trump’s war took it to its logical end, seeking to remove the Iranian threat by force in one fell swoop. As American leaders did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Israel has done in its wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the architects of this war vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people. Washington’s misadventure was not an aberration so much as the ultimate expression of the inherent vice of its Middle East strategy.

At first, it may not look as though the war has had much effect on the alliances that form the American order. Facing an inconclusive war and an empowered Iran, the Gulf states may ramp up their arms purchases and their demands for renewed security guarantees, creating the illusion of continuity. But the old order is in fact giving way to something new. The 1956 Suez crisis is remembered today as the last gasp of British and French imperial power in the Middle East, but it took years to reach that inevitable end. American primacy will not disappear immediately, either, but long-building doubts about American power and purpose have passed their tipping point. The revelations of the Iran war and of the Israeli war in Gaza before it have already changed the calculations of U.S. allies and adversaries. Another round of fighting or the election of a different American president will not repair the rupture.

The years ahead promise further discord. Israel and Iran have a shared interest in keeping the Middle East in a state of lawlessness and violence, and the United States has few means of holding back either of them. Israel hopes to expand its de facto borders, including by annexing as much as possible of historic Palestine, and to impose its writ by force across vast swaths of the region. And assuming that the Iranian regime does not collapse any time soon—which it appears highly unlikely to do—an emboldened Tehran will hope to defend and expand its regional influence by bogging Washington down in the kinds of endless, borderless “gray zone” conflicts in which it has always thrived.

If the United States is finally willing to abandon its failed strategy, however, the collapse of one order could still be an opportunity to build a new and better one. The conditions, admittedly, are far from ideal. Although most of the region’s leaders and publics desperately want a respite from military strikes and economic disruption, they also deeply resent Washington for dragging them into a disaster. But discarding its policy of support for autocrats, impunity for allies, and militarized containment of enemies might enable the United States to engage with the region in a healthier way—one that eventually could yield the durable stability Washington has claimed to want all along.

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

For many decades after World War II, American ambitions in the Middle East were defined by its global competition with the Soviet Union, which gave Washington an outsize interest in regional politics but made it wary of overt military intervention. The current Middle East order, established by the George H. W. Bush administration after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in the Gulf War of 1990–91, has been defined by American primacy. Presented with a historic opportunity to secure uncontested dominance over a long-contested region, Washington made itself indispensable by setting up military bases and security arrangements to contain Iraq and Iran. Its military and political support underpinned the survival of nearly every regime in the region.

To legitimize its role as something more than predatory domination, Washington launched the Arab-Israeli peace process in hopes of integrating its Arab allies and Israel into a common security framework. The result was a region divided between an American-led bloc that included Israel, Turkey, and almost every Arab state, and an opposing, less formal bloc that included Iran, Syria under the Assad dynasty, and nonstate actors such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. This structure remained remarkably unchanged through three decades of dramatic changes in global, regional, and American politics.

In the American telling, this order has provided a degree of stability while protecting core U.S. interests such as the oil trade, Israeli security, and counterterrorism. And in many ways, that has been true. Israel has not faced a state-level threat or fought a war against a peer competitor since 1973, which perhaps led it to underestimate the challenge of attacking Iran. Arab countries have worked with Israel against their common enemies despite the lack of a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the most part, oil has flowed consistently at reasonable prices. No rival great power has seriously challenged American primacy—not even China, which has been content to sit back and take advantage of the economic opportunities made possible by the American provision of security.

For Washington, the strategic benefits accrued from this order seemed to justify the costs of the wars required to sustain it. But the price was much higher for those who live in the region. The past 35 years have seen Israel enter numerous smaller wars against its much weaker neighbors, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process completely fall apart, Hamas attack Israel on October 7, and Israel subsequently embark on the destruction of Gaza. In Iraq, the United States inflicted a dozen years of punishing sanctions, intermittent bombing, and failed regime change and counterproliferation efforts, followed by the disastrous 2003 invasion and occupation, all at tremendous human cost. Under American stewardship, catastrophic wars have shattered Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

The regional order rested on American security guarantees not only to Arab states but also, critically, to the autocrats who sat atop them. Keeping democratic aspirations at bay was as vital to this bargain as protection against Iranian military attack. For a brief moment during the 2010–11 Arab uprisings, the drive for change seemed unstoppable, but otherwise the arrangement worked. Nearly all regimes within the American alliance system held on to power; most tightened their grip in the protests’ wake. American support for neoliberal economic reforms encouraged those regimes to pursue privatization schemes that turbocharged elite corruption while impoverishing the majority of the population. And Washington’s campaign against terrorism encouraged its allies to embrace intrusive forms of surveillance and repress potential opposition in the name of security. Although the wealthy Gulf oil states and small slivers of Arab elites flourished within this system, for most people the American order meant only violence, hopelessness, and deprivation. By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other region.

Ironically, American security guarantees encouraged allies to disregard Washington’s policy interests. Most felt safe from external invasion or attack, creating a moral hazard: they could pursue their own ideological and political projects without fear of meaningful consequences. Washington’s preoccupation with its own domestic politics, inattention to the region’s nuances, and inflated fears of Chinese and Russian advances all made the United States an easy mark for manipulative local powers. As a result, it repeatedly failed over the decades to meaningfully restrain Israel or to prevent Arab allies from adopting policies that undermined stated U.S. goals. Those ostensible allies shrugged off criticism of their destructive interventions in Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Nearly all actively opposed the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, which the Obama administration hoped would help stabilize the region. And in 2017, the blockade of Qatar led by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia badly undermined the united front against Iran that Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign required.

The 2010–11 uprisings pushed Arab governments into new forms of interventionism, in part because they lost confidence in the United States’ ability and willingness to respond to what they considered to be urgent threats. Autocratic allies that already feared potential coups and popular revolts now saw them as imminent realities as they faced down challenges from Iranian-backed Shiite groups, Islamist and jihadist movements, and young liberal democratic activists. Watching the lightning-fast spread of the protests, these regimes learned that the threat at home could begin anywhere, even beyond their borders. And when they saw the overthrow of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 2011, they concluded that they could not count on the United States to save them from internal challenges. If they wanted to ensure their own survival, they would have to go out and contain the danger themselves. Their meddling repeatedly yielded devastating outcomes, however, contributing to a military coup in Egypt and several civil wars.

Ships in the Strait of Hormuz, August 2026 Reuters

The order encouraged Iran and Israel to pursue destabilizing policies, too, but each in different ways. The Iranian regime took external hostility as a given and designed its survival strategy accordingly. The government was largely unbothered by U.S. and international sanctions that immiserated the public while strengthening the regime insiders who controlled black markets. Over the decades, Iran assembled and armed a network of nonstate allies that thrived in the wreckage of American, Israeli, and Saudi wars. With its access to American and European military technology cut off, Iran invested in low-cost production, developing drones and cheap ballistic missiles that could counter its rivals’ technologically sophisticated and extremely expensive systems. Like most others in the region, Iran’s leaders were swift to crush protests, fearful that a hidden foreign hand lay behind what were in fact authentic eruptions of popular discontent.

Israel, for its part, enjoyed the most ironclad of American security guarantees. Although it is a democracy, at least for Jewish citizens, the country’s prime ministers have often fallen into a trap akin to the one ensnaring the United States’ autocratic allies. Israel’s military superiority and confidence in American support enabled its leaders to prioritize maintaining their governing coalitions and fending off domestic political threats over seriously addressing the Palestinian issue or easing regional instability. But when the October 7 attacks shattered that complacency, Israel’s response was to go all-in on military escalation. It displayed ever greater excess in its use of force across the region and entrenched its military occupation in the Gaza Strip, in the West Bank, and even in parts of Lebanon and Syria.

Part of the reason the American order lasted as long as it did was that the security bargains at its core were never truly tested. The region’s leaders complained endlessly of feeling abandoned but never behaved as if abandonment were a significant possibility. For years, interstate war was not a particularly salient threat, either. Israel bombed Gaza and Lebanon with some frequency, but no Arab state aligned with the United States was overly worried about an Israeli attack. Iran loomed larger among their concerns, but even a direct Iranian attack seemed extremely unlikely. Indirect attacks by Iranian proxies only reinforced the core belief that American military primacy was so obvious and overwhelming that Iran would not challenge it. That confidence began to waver in 2019, when the United States did not respond to an attack on Saudi oil refineries attributed to Iran, and again when Houthi drone strikes hit the UAE in 2022. The regional security architecture remained intact, but cracks were beginning to show.

At the same time, the United States was trying to institutionalize its Middle East order by brokering open military and political cooperation between its Arab allies and Israel. The goal was not new. Fostering an anti-Iranian coalition under American leadership had been an objective of every American government since 1991. Trump diverged from his predecessors, however, in pushing it forward without tying steps toward Arab-Israeli normalization to progress on the Palestinian issue. In 2020, his administration brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and, originally, Bahrain and the UAE. Morocco joined soon after, and Sudan signed an initial agreement that has not been formalized. But when the Biden administration tried to cajole Saudi Arabia into signing on, it misjudged the importance of the Palestinian cause to the Saudi public and the rising competitiveness between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. It failed to see the growing popular hostility to normalization—or to anticipate the looming catastrophe in Gaza.

ONE-TWO PUNCH

The United States’ regional order has been shaken up before, including during the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq and the popular uprisings of 2011, but it has always reconstituted itself. U.S. policymakers were as trapped by the structure they designed as were the regional powers embedded in it. Every president since Bill Clinton came to office vowing to reduce American involvement in the Middle East, and every president has found himself dragged back into the same policies and the same wars.

The dual crisis of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran may seem like just another episode in this cycle. But in truth, these events together have dealt a death blow to the American Middle East. American support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, particularly under President Joe Biden, swept away any residual moral authority the United States could claim. Trump’s debacle in Iran has shattered the illusion of American military omnipotence. Both incidents have demonstrated to Arab states their lack of meaningful influence within the regional order and the diminishing returns of American security guarantees.

American officials under Biden and Trump failed to appreciate the seismic effects of the Israeli war in Gaza. They shared a view that regional leaders’ opinions were the only ones that mattered, that those leaders had long forgotten about the Palestinians, and that they were eager for closer relations with a capable Israel and for the stronger security guarantees the United States offered as incentives. Few things better exemplified this myopia than Biden’s quixotic pursuit of brokering a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia even after the rising death toll in Gaza had rendered such cooperation politically toxic among the Arab publics that Riyadh aspired to lead.

Washington’s unceasing push for Arab cooperation with Israel created further divides. As one of the first two signatories of the Abraham Accords, the UAE continued working with Israel during the Israeli campaign in Gaza and as Israel carried out military strikes in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and even Qatar. During the war with Iran, according to The Wall Street Journal, the UAE has coordinated with Israel and the United States to launch strikes on Iranian targets. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has watched the Emirati-Israeli alignment with unease. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were already at loggerheads over Syria, with Saudi Arabia backing the post-Assad regime and the UAE sharing Israel’s hostility to it, and Yemen, where Saudi Arabia had just driven out Emirati proxies. Saudi Arabia complained that the UAE was promoting secessionist movements that undermined regional stability, and it broadly saw a partnership between Israel and the UAE as a threat to its own regional leadership. The rift greatly complicated any chance Washington may have had of lining up the region’s heavyweights behind its campaign to defeat Iran.

If the war in Gaza left the future of American regional leadership in doubt, the war with Iran was confirmation of the end of the order. Gulf leaders were furious that the United States and Israel started the war without consulting them, while knowing they opposed it, and in the middle of Omani-brokered negotiations with Iran. A war they had no say in exposed them to direct Iranian retaliation. Although American missile defense systems protected the Gulf from the worst of the barrage, enough Iranian strikes got through to do substantial harm and to disrupt the patina of stability on which the region’s social and economic model rested. Iran targeted all Gulf states, including friendlier ones such as Oman and Qatar, but focused its fire on those that had signed the Abraham Accords: Bahrain and, even more so, the UAE. Within a few weeks, Iran managed to damage, destroy, or render irrelevant large parts of the archipelago of military bases that had underwritten American primacy in the Middle East.

Gulf allies’ confidence in Washington eroded further when the U.S.-Israeli campaign proved unable to dislodge the Iranian regime. For decades, advocates of bombing Iran argued that such an attack might be messy but would ultimately remove the Iranian threat. Yet the United States and Israel, with all their military might, simply failed. On top of that, the United States sat by helplessly as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, endangering the entire Gulf economy. Once again, Gulf leaders were shocked not just by American disregard for their preferences but also by the revelation of American impotence. And their shock turned to anger when the United States bombed Iranian water storage facilities and Israel struck Iranian oil depots. Washington was gambling with its partners’ futures; had Tehran responded by striking Gulf water facilities or nuclear power sites, the resulting cycle of escalation could have ended with Gulf states’ facing economic catastrophe and enough environmental destruction to render them uninhabitable.

What the Gulf took away from all this was that American security guarantees, the heart of the regional bargain, were no longer reliable. The region had already learned in 2011 that Washington could not protect it from domestic threats. If Washington could not even be counted on to consult its allies, defeat its adversaries, or protect its partners from the fallout of its regional misadventures, then what good were its promises? The fundamental bargain the United States offered has crumbled, and it will not be easily rebuilt.

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT

It has become commonplace to refer to the Iran war as Washington’s Suez moment. There are indeed similarities between today’s catastrophe and the failed British-French-Israeli scheme to take the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, which delivered a stunning political victory to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Suez became a shorthand for the demise of the European empires and the passage from a multipolar world to the bipolar Cold War–era system. But the Suez crisis did not immediately end the British and French empires in the Middle East. France would continue its war to hold on to Algeria for another six years, and the United Kingdom remained the dominant power in the Gulf for a decade and a half, fighting insurgencies in Oman and present-day Yemen before finally withdrawing from the region in 1971. It takes time for events to play out fully.

The full effects of the U.S. disaster in Iran will similarly take time to materialize. In the short term, the American-led regional order is not going anywhere. The United States may retreat from the military bases Iran destroyed, but it will still play a major role in regional defense. Gulf states are unlikely to break from Washington right away. Fearful for their future and seeing no obvious alternatives, they may even enhance their ties—as Saudi Arabia tried to do by finalizing a long-sought nuclear agreement, only to have Trump change its terms the next day, leaving the deal in limbo. They are also unlikely to pose any military threat to Israel or move closer than necessary to Iran. The U.S. rift with Israel, although real and likely generational in scale, will not soon fracture that alliance. Arab states, too, will maintain working relations with Israel and continue to avail themselves of Israeli military and surveillance technology.

The small adjustments that regional actors begin to make may not look like much at first, either. Countries have always pursued their own agendas, including at the peak of American primacy. Even the most dependent of the United States’ allies have mastered the arts of foot-dragging, leash-slipping, and lobbying Washington. They will continue to engage in local rivalries, prioritize the survival of their regimes, and try to ensure their security. Sometimes that will mean working with Washington; sometimes it will not.

Yet what looks like short-term continuity should not be mistaken for long-term sustainability. By the time of the Suez crisis, the dissolution of the European empires was inevitable—not because of one policy fiasco, but because of the rise of nationalism and anticolonialism as well as the economic and political exhaustion of the European imperial model. The United States’ Middle East order, too, had been decaying for years as policy and political failures accumulated, culminating in the loss of shared purpose and the military impotence revealed by the latest crises.

Washington will be tempted to stand by the policies that have defined its Middle East approach for decades, leaning on its relationships with the brutal, insecure, and repressive leaders who populate the landscape it designed. If American leaders stick to the same path, they should expect the same result: a region beset by constant instability, economic and political failure, and repeated eruptions of violent conflict. These conflicts may only occasionally draw in American military forces, but the chaos will consistently demand attention and pointlessly consume resources. The forever wars will continue.

Walking past an anti-U.S. billboard in Tehran, Iran, August 2026 Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

That outcome may seem acceptable to American policymakers who have become accustomed to managing conflicts and maintaining relationships with bad actors. But Washington cannot stave off a transition to a new regional order by simply pretending that nothing has changed. Arab allies that have lost faith in the United States will increasingly exercise their autonomy. At times, that could mean pursuing diplomacy with Iran and expanding relations with China and Russia against American wishes. At others, it might mean meddling in Libya, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa or reigniting violent conflict in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Forces largely beyond American control will shape this emergent order. For one, Israel is determined to carry on with military interventionism regardless of American preferences. It continued its war with Hezbollah in defiance of the U.S.-Iranian memorandum of understanding reached in June, and it indicated no willingness to withdraw its military from southern Lebanon. Israeli officials insist that the country will maintain a troop presence in Syria as well. And with no serious domestic pressure to adopt more dovish policies, there is little standing in the way of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and its complete destruction of Gaza.

Iran, like Israel, has every incentive to pursue policies that perpetuate instability. Incessant conflict helps the regime shift blame for hard times and justify its strategy of resistance to the Iranian public. And Iran has retained the ability to stir up violence. Although the country has been badly damaged by war, the regime remains intact, and its regional power has grown. Iran has demonstrated its ability to effectively control the Strait of Hormuz and to strike American allies in the region, and setbacks to allies such as Hezbollah are unlikely to permanently end Tehran’s ability to project power through proxies. American pressure on weak governments in Iraq and Lebanon to disarm pro-Iranian militias could trigger additional conflict in which Iranian allies would hold the upper hand.

Regional alignments will drift further away from the anti-Iranian coalition that American officials envision. Instead of relying on American protection, many Gulf states could pursue side deals with Iran to keep themselves off Tehran’s target list. And instead of following Washington’s lead, regional politics will likely revolve around a deepening competition for primacy between the Emiratis and the Saudis. Before the Iran war began at the end of February, Riyadh had started to mobilize a coalition that included Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey to counter the U.S.-backed Emirati-Israeli alliance. This contest will resume after the fighting simmers down, likely destabilizing already beleaguered states, stretching across the wider region, and generating endless new crises that a distracted Washington will struggle to navigate.

Finally, most regimes will face ever greater pressures from below as the fallout of the Iran war ripples through the region’s struggling economies. It is not only countries whose infrastructure has been damaged by Iranian strikes that will feel those effects. In Egypt, for example, steep hikes in fuel and food prices and enormous losses of Suez Canal revenues as the war disrupts global shipping are compounding existing fiscal and unemployment crises. Many countries already hurt by cuts in U.S. aid may lose another critical source of external investment as the wealthy Gulf states grapple with their own economic problems. Domestic grievances and outrage over Gaza make for a potent mix, and a wave of protest comparable to the uprisings of 15 years ago could again be on the horizon.

LAST CHANCE

The violent demise of the old regional order could disrupt or even foreclose any attempt to establish a functional new one. But this moment could also be an opportunity for the United States to recast the core bargains that have produced such destructive results. Getting a new Middle East policy right requires rethinking the decision to prioritize relations with autocratic and lawless allies in the name of pragmatism. For decades, Washington assumed that it did not need to worry much about Arab public opinion because it could count on Arab rulers to crush any dissent. It similarly assumed that mouthing empty words about supporting a two-state solution, all while Israel continued its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and avoided genuine peace negotiations, would be enough to keep its Arab allies on board. That meant the United States never considered adopting policies that would command the consent, or even the support, of the peoples of the region. And it meant Washington could never seriously engage in the promotion of democracy or the defense of human rights, because its strategy depended on their absence.

The Trump administration, contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law at home and abroad, is not going to change that. It is difficult to imagine Trump, who vacillates wildly between strategies, designing a new regional order of any kind. But his successor will have a real chance to break with the status quo and craft a more coherent and more effective Middle East strategy. That starts with renouncing the use of military intervention as a first resort and ending the practice of diplomacy by airstrike. Washington’s priority should be defense, not offense. One way to make that intention clear is to forgo the restoration of damaged or destroyed U.S. military bases across the Gulf and focus instead on investments in intelligence sharing, missile defense systems for Gulf partners, and the preservation of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States must pursue stability in the Middle East through diplomacy and collective defense, not militarized containment. The Iran fiasco has thoroughly exposed the hollowness of hawkish calls for war and promises of decisive action. It is time for Washington to commit to a diplomatic process that can bring Iran into the regional security system as an invested partner. The Gulf states may be open to such an approach despite their fury over Iran’s latest attacks; after all, Saudi Arabia and Iran reached a rapprochement in 2023 after an earlier bout of Iranian aggression. The Obama administration evoked a similar vision when it was negotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and even Vice President JD Vance has spoken of a willingness to “fundamentally transform” the U.S. relationship with Iran following a new agreement. The aspiration is there, but a new administration will have to demonstrate quickly and decisively that it intends to see it through.

The reset in U.S. policy must also extend to the way Washington treats its allies. This includes Israel. Conditions are ripe for a rethinking of the U.S.-Israeli relationship: according to a Quinnipiac poll released in June, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and more than half of independents think the United States is too supportive of Israel. In mid-July, more than half the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for a bill to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. The next administration should use this momentum to put the kind of pressure on Israel that U.S. governments have long shied away from. Washington need not abandon its ally, but it should demand that Israel respect human rights within all the territories it controls, stop the creeping annexation of the West Bank, and end its destabilizing interventions in Lebanon and Syria.

More broadly, stability at the regional level requires that the United States recommit to international human rights norms, oppose secessionist movements in countries such as Syria and Yemen, deter partners’ military interventions and proxy wars in places such as Sudan and Libya, and stop urging the Iraqi and Lebanese governments to disarm the Iraqi militias and Hezbollah before they are fully prepared to do so. Stability at the domestic level requires democratic change. For the United States, that means encouraging reform, including human rights protections, and calling off the bargain that has allowed autocratic allies to get away with grievous repression. This message will not be welcome in Cairo, in Riyadh, or indeed in many other capitals. But no real transformation of the regional order will be possible without addressing the pathologies of its regimes.

New American policies would not create a stable, peaceful Middle East overnight. At first, they would win little public applause from a region that has grown accustomed to American hypocrisy and abuse. Later on, the rise of more democratically responsive governments in the region would likely cause considerable headaches as ambitious politicians competed to condemn and denounce the United States. But in the long run, a Middle East populated by regimes that are less willing to follow Washington’s lead on unpopular policies or to suppress public opposition would likely be more stable than the region of today. Washington struggles to conceive of a Middle East it does not dominate and to imagine real alternatives to the present regional order no matter how badly it has failed. But that order is ending, and this may be U.S. leaders’ last chance to change course. If they cannot, they will watch the American Middle East fade away like the European empires that came before.

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