Sean Yom, Temple University
US foreign policy during President Trump’s second term has subverted the strategy of weak and vulnerable states when contracting with the US as a hegemonic power through a logic of hierarchy. In the international system, modern hierarchies furnish stability and order to subordinate states by offering security and political guarantees, so long as they aggrandize the power and interests of the bigger patron. Those patrons wield great authority impregnated with responsibility—not to be moral actors, but to ensure their diplomatic, economic, or military paramountcy bolsters the security of client states. The smaller states accept their subordinate position in exchange for escaping from threats of predation that would otherwise exist outside the hierarchy’s protection.
Yet what happens when hegemonic powers shirk that responsibility by pursuing destructive foreign policies, which exploit subordinate states and make them less secure? US client states in the Arab world have experienced this before, as with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its enabling of Israeli wars in Lebanon and Palestine. But the Iran War stands out for unleashing systemic violence and financial uncertainty across the Gulf in ways that undermine rather than enhance their security. Such developments signify a caustic wrinkle within the international system that goes beyond traditional alliance politics. Under the Trump administration, the US is not “abandoning” its subordinate states by ending treaty arrangements, closing military bases, or downgrading diplomatic relations. But neither does it prioritize their sovereignty and protection, leaving them with the worst of all worlds: still encaged by the US hegemonic demands within hierarchical strictures, but also subject to threats and insecurity reminiscent of anarchy.
Hierarchical Authority
Since the late twentieth century, American predominance across the Middle East embodies hierarchy.[1] Generically, hierarchy refers to any sociopolitical structure that organizes political actors into ranked positions of unequal status, allowing more powerful actors to wield substantial influence over smaller ones.[2] Within the modern international system, hierarchies manifest as bargained dyadic relationships in which the dominant state (i.e., the hegemon, patron, or paramount power) exercises meaningful authority—that is, the right to make rules—over the domestic governance and foreign policy of a subordinate state (often termed the client, peripheral, or proxy side). The hegemon delivers its subordinate various goods, like economic aid, military assistance, and diplomatic status, to boost its security and stability.[3] In return, the lesser state cedes slices of its sovereignty to aggrandize the patron’s strategic interests. For instance, it may sublimate its foreign policy, host military bases, transfer natural resources, and undertake other symbolic or material policies to boost the hegemon’s prestige and power.
In the context of IR theory, what typifies hierarchy is the legitimate nature of hegemonic authority. The classic alliance literature used a different conceptual lexicon to capture how states, conceived as sovereign equals, bargained over competing interests through strategies like chain-ganging, buck-passing, and band-wagoning.[4] It assumed that most alliances were contingent, and that states prioritized relative gains given the zero-sum nature of the anarchic system. By contrast, theories of hierarchy hold that state actors, which are seldom fully sovereign and never equal, voluntarily assent to hierarchy because it generates absolute gains through positive-sum outcomes. For subordinate states, the security and stability afforded by hierarchical relationships is always superior to the banditry and uncertainty of anarchy.
In turn, such arrangements rest upon a contractual understanding. Subordinate states obey the geopolitical demands of their patron—from supporting its wars to opposing its rival powers—because that hegemon authority has legitimacy. Legitimacy does not mean ethical rightness or lawfulness, as it might within domestic politics. Neither does it mean that subordinate states obey the hegemon due to fear of coercion or compulsion. Instead, they consent to hierarchical authority, making it a routinized practice of statecraft girded by contractual expectations.[5] It is normalized through foreign relations, which make clear the permissible boundaries of state behavior. The dominant power sees the assets gained—e.g., diplomatic alliances, financial coordination, arms deals—as non-substitutable, while conversely the subordinate state finds it difficult to imagine a regional order without hierarchy. This explains why hierarchies manifest as self-enforcing equilibria built upon functional specificity.[6]
Hierarchical bargains punctuate many American engagements with its partners across the Arab world. For instance, the US compelled Morocco to normalize relations with Israel in 2020 despite the latter’s domestic resistance to the move, while the Moroccan state secured American backing for its long-claimed sovereignty over the contested Western Sahara. Likewise, the US adheres to a policy of non-interference in Bahrain’s domestic politics even in the context of democratic uprisings and mass human rights violations (as in the Arab Spring), while the Bahraini regime hosts a vital US Navy base and tethers its entire maritime doctrine to US grand strategy. Morocco and Bahrain assented to such arrangements not because non-compliance would have brought punishment, but because geopolitical exigencies from Washington were perceived as ordinary components of an authoritative contractual relationship that overall strengthened their domestic order and regional stability.
Hegemonic Shirking
Hierarchies endure when dominant powers recognize their legitimate authority carries contractual responsibility. Client governments provide diplomatic, economic, and military alignment—even if such subordination is widely unpopular with their own societies—so long as the authoritative hegemon enhances their stability and security. This does not imply that great power support is static. In Washington, for instance, the precise levels of diplomatic concessions, economic aid, and security assistance for client states fluctuate in any given year.
Nonetheless, what prevails is the top-level understanding that the great power cannot implement a chaotic foreign policy that imposes such devastating costs to subordinate states that it negates the benefit of hierarchy. This spawns insecurity reminiscent of anarchy, signifying a “shirking” of hegemonic authority. Shirking, effectively, means that hegemons desire the spoils of power without the burden of order-providing responsibility. They still expect compliance from subordinate states—but by threats of punishment, not its legitimate authority. The hierarchy hence devolves from a self-enforcing equilibrium to a relationship of extraction. Smaller, weaker states obey due to fear of penalty ratcheted by the cost of defiance.
President Trump’s foreign policy has careened in this direction, and the degree to which the US now treats subordinate states as extractive assets should be contextualized against its broader tenets. It celebrates spectacles of violent militarism (i.e., interventions in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and now Iran); disregards rules-based global order (e.g., sanctioning the International Criminal Court and withdrawing from multilateral organs like the WHO); embraces economic mercantilism (e.g., relentless tariff imposition set by isolationist compulsions); and absconds democratic values as a pillar of external relations (e.g., the dismantling of USAID). Trump’s foreign policy also dismisses the value of alliances, seeing long-term commitments as unfair constraints rather than pathways for productive engagement. This is not merely transactionalism, as hierarchies themselves transact goods and services between unequal partners. It is extractive, because it turns lesser states into sites of exploitation whereby the US demands alignment and subordination without any promise of honoring its authoritative responsibility towards their security and stability.
Hegemonic shirking has subjected many Arab states under US hierarchy to acute insecurity. The Iran War provides robust evidence for this. Waged under baffling pretenses and bereft of realistic strategies, the US-Israeli campaign against Tehran has subjected key client states anchoring US hegemony in the Arab world—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and beyond the Gulf Jordan and Iraq—to the exigencies of a conflict they did not desire. Lebanon, another subordinate state, has become yet another front, given Israel’s mass assaults that have dismembered much of it. Across the board, this regional war has accentuated the external vulnerability of all these countries. Thousands of retaliatory Iranian airstrikes have punctured the presumption of sovereign protection under the American flag, not least because a substantial portion have targeted civilian areas outside US military bases—bases that, by Iran’s justification, make these countries fair targets. For the Gulf kingdoms as well, grave economic costs have come with fiscal shocks due to hydrocarbon industry slowdowns, food inflation, lost trade, and capital flight.
The refusal of the US to insulate these states from such spillover is notable and extends well beyond the physical inability of the American military to shield the Arabian kingdoms from Iranian drone and missile attacks. For example, Washington waged open naval conflict during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s to safeguard the oil tanker traffic that sustained the Gulf states. However, Trump’s refusal to expend similar resources to wrest the Hormuz Strait from Iranian control precipitated his acceptance of the 8 March ceasefire and makes likely that these hydrocarbon-exporting kingdoms will face permanently higher production and export costs given the likelihood that the Strait’s maritime restrictions will persist.
Lebanon is another example. US patronage of a particular state faction—the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and allied political elites—in recent years has come with the demand that this governing apparatus would disarm Hizbullah. To be sure, diminishing Hizbullah has been part-and-parcel of the American position in Lebanon since the 1990s.[7] Hizbullah’s early March attacks against Israel stemmed partly from its growing isolation under the Trump-backed government, which made bold demands for disarmament. Yet the US did nothing to constrain Israel’s consequent aggression against Lebanon following those Hizbullah attacks, leaving the government and LAF in a dead zone. They are unable to comply with US pressures for Hizbullah’s pacification, but also helpless to halt Israel’s aggression conducted as punishment for such inability. That Trump declared that Lebanon lay outside the scope of the March ceasefire reified such shirking.
Before the Iran War
By putting the Gulf states in the line of fire without prior consultation over the launch of the war, the US-American war on Iran has challenged this logic of hierarchy in perhaps the most fundamental ways. Cynics may point to the Iran War as merely a singular foreign policy mistake. After all, hegemonic powers have catalyzed plenty of careless conflicts that subjected allies and partners to unexpected costs. Yet even before the Iran War erupted in late February 2026, evidence abounded that the US under Trump no longer valued its authoritative obligations to secure and protect its Arab clients from the backfire of its feckless foreign policy postures, which points to a deeper dysfunction.
Take, for instance, the September 2025 Israeli airstrike on Qatar, which was a failed attempt to assassinate Hamas officials. Prior to 2025, Qatar had not recorded a foreign military incursion since 1893, during the Ottoman period. Israel’s jarring attack marked the second time during the year that foreign aggression had violated the peninsular kingdom’s sovereignty, the first being the June 2025 Iranian missile attack. The latter controlled strike was largely performative, aimed at US forces and launched only after forewarning. Still, the sequence of these two events shattered a pillar of local geopolitical thinking—that Qatar had sealed its territory from the conflict-prone Gulf by surrendering a crucial segment of its sovereignty to Washington.
That concession came in the 1990s, when Qatar spent over $1 billion constructing Al-Udeid Air Base to house US forces as part of Washington’s expanding post-Gulf War military footprint. The facility became not only the forward headquarters for US Central Command (i.e., the logistical and control center for US regional war-making), but also the single biggest US military facility in the entire Middle East, capable of supporting an armada of aircraft and troops.[8] This went hand-in-hand with transferring most of Qatar’s defense responsibilities to the American military; by the time that Israel and Iran waged their war after the October 2023 invasion of Gaza, the US held functional control over virtually all of Qatar’s airspace and maritime territory. Other reciprocal elements of US hierarchy included large-scale Qatari arms purchases and investments (including deals benefiting the Trump family), diplomatic honors, technical cooperation, and defense agreements, such as designating Qatar as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) in 2022. Such measures elevated Qatar’s status under the ambit of American oversight.[9] Yet these had little effect in immunizing this state from violence before the Iran War, much less during it.
Jordan provides a trenchant example of economic harm due to hegemonic shirking prior to the Iran conflict. The Hashemite Kingdom’s fragile political economy has long been tethered to US foreign aid and, since the early 2000s, lucrative trade and investment flows. However, Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs of April 2025 slapped a 20 percent import tax on Jordan on basis of its modest $1.2 billion trade surplus with the US. The move contravened the 2001 US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which allowed the US to become the kingdom’s single biggest trade destination. The tariffs further came after the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which ended an enormous chunk of American foreign aid—estimated at $350 to 400 million annually—designated for civil society, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure.
These trade and aid restrictions pummeled Jordan. The Hashemite monarchy’s authoritarian stability has long required mitigating fiscal shortages compounded by a bloated public sector guided by ethnocratic politics, foreign trade imbalances, and its commitment to preserve the enormous coercive apparatus, which between the military and domestic security institutions consumes over a third of every annual budget.[10] In this context, the impact of the Liberation Day tariffs (since replaced by a blanket 10 percent tariff) and USAID dissolution has been deleterious. Jordanian estimates in spring 2025 held that the contraction of US-bound Jordanian textile and apparels—a key export sector—would eliminate up to 15,000 jobs.[11] USAID cuts rippled through civil society, public institutions, and private-sector partners, with up to 18,000 Jordanians (mainly highly skilled professionals) losing their livelihoods.[12] Such a labor market shock has occurred within an economy that already struggles with 23 percent overall unemployment, and a youth jobless rate twice that.
This economic harm is further remarkable given the historical scope of US hierarchy with Jordan. To obtain critical resources and fend off outside threats, Jordan’s monarchy has subordinated itself under American hegemony for generations, despite this estranging public opinion.[13] Such alignment produced foreign policy moves that pleased Washington but proved highly unpopular domestically, such as the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, collaboration in the War on Terror, supporting the 2003 Iraq War, and hosting the US-led interventions within Syria during the latter’s civil war. The kingdom now accommodates a swelling US military presence, which as in the Gulf kingdoms has made Jordan a target for Iranian retaliatory strikes amid the Iran War. In return for serving as the putative pro-Western “oasis of moderation” protecting Israel’s eastern flank, Jordan (which garnered MNNA status in 1996) reaped diplomatic privileges, fiscal grants, and security assistance that have become integral to its regime stability.[14] Even the 2001 FTA was inked in a context of intense American technocratic involvement within the economy, as the US shepherded Jordan towards neoliberal reforms and market-oriented growth.
Qatar and Jordan are not isolated cases. Other Arab states were similarly ensnared by US impositions or foreign policy externalities without corollary relief. For instance, in summer 2025, Washington conditioned releasing Syria from sanctions upon the Sharaa government expelling Iranian proxies, but without any guarantees of defending it from Iranian blowback. Kuwait hosts the fourth-largest contingent of US military forces in the world, but this did not prevent its citizens from landing on America’s sweeping January 2026 immigrant visa ban.
The Illiberal Origins of Shirking
Critically, hegemonic shirking in the framework of hierarchy does not mean abandonment—that is, when a dominant state terminates its contractual bargain with subordinate states by withdrawing its presence and support altogether. For great powers, the decision to abandon client states has historically resulted from foreign policy swings caused by geopolitical ruptures or domestic revolutions. Post-Soviet Russia, for instance, could no longer maintain hierarchical order over not just Central-Eastern Europe, but distant dependencies like Cuba and Ethiopia. Imperial contraction compelled the United Kingdom to withdraw from the Arabian Gulf in 1971, while Russian encroachment and regional conflicts ended French hegemony in West African states like Mali and Niger after the 2010s. Paramount powers can also vacate client states after losing wars to protect them, as in the US with South Vietnam in the early 1970s. Notably, they can abandon non-state clients under less dramatic circumstances—as in the US desertion of Iraqi Kurdish rebels in post-Gulf War Iraq and Syrian Kurdish groups since 2019, and arguably the cutoff of US funding for UNRWA that began in January 2024.
Such momentous reversals, however, do not precisely denote what is happening now. While the US has subjected its Arab client states to insecurity and transgressions, it has not abandoned them. Abandonment in Qatar, for instance, might mean the closure of Al-Udeid airbase and the demotion of diplomatic ties; in Jordan, it might mean terminating still-large foreign aid flows to Amman, including budgetary cash transfers and military aid that remain vital to Jordanian political order. Likewise, in Lebanon, it would mean essentially deserting the government and LAF, ending its security and fiscal assistance and leaving the country beholden to either Hizbullah or Israel’s military conquest.
To frame why US shirking is exceptional, consider its domestic origins. It is part-and-parcel of democratic backsliding within the American metropole. Under President Trump’s concentration of executive power and personalization of authority, foreign policymaking in Washington has been captured by a toxic circle of unorthodox loyalists from the right-wing populist wing of the Republican Party. The obliteration of bureaucratic expertise and demotion of strategic specialization has hollowed out the State Department, Department of Defense (War), intelligence community, Treasury Department, and White House.[15] The combination of cultish personalism and captive ruling party is perversely operating as it should—by holding decision-making, including foreign policy, hostage to the idiosyncratic impulses of illiberal elites with little experience in statecraft.[16] As the Iran War has shown, US foreign policy in the Middle East thus operates under spectacular unpredictability. Of its many influences—Israeli provocations, hypermasculine groupthink, even maniacal sociopathy—none include a basic understanding of grand strategy. Traditional IR terms like realism do not apply. Neither do popularized monikers like the “Donroe Doctrine,” because foreign policy doctrines require reasoned principles that link consistent application to national interests.
In this manner, US foreign policy under Trump has staggered towards a predatory ethos that discards reciprocal understandings bound by hierarchy and instead sees subordinate states as sites of extraction or assets to be extorted. Thus far in the Middle East, the Trump regime has proven content to maintain its inherited hegemonic position overseeing the region but expects subordinate counties to bear the cost of geopolitical browbeating or fickle adventurism without any compensation, presuming that they cannot seek alternative providers of regional order. Only those client states with deep economic reserves can afford to pay this higher “premium” for hierarchy. For instance, Trump imposed extraordinary financial demands upon Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar in May 2025, which their rulers satisfied through unprecedented trade, investment, and arms deals benefiting US firms and markets. Western allies faced similar extortion, as in Australia’s October 2025 deal to pay $3 billion to underwrite the US nuclear submarine industry in return for preserving the AUKUS defense agreement. While such wealthy states can entertain extractive ultimatums, this does not hold for resource-poor countries like Jordan and Lebanon, which have no margins to maneuver in the face of American predation.
In sum, hegemonic shirking has subjected subordinate states to the worst of all worlds. In Hirschman’s classic terminology, they cannot exit American hierarchy, because many US client states have no alternative provider of order. For the weakest ones like Jordan and Lebanon, unilaterally rejecting American demands would trigger the catastrophic cutoff of diplomatic, economic, and military support. However, exercising loyalty by redoubling their tight alignment with US foreign policy brings diminishing returns given Trump’s absconding of hierarchical responsibility. This exposes them to further insecurity and uncertainty reminiscent of anarchy, as the Gulf kingdoms have discovered. Above all, articulating voice through dissent has little effect, because decision-making principals within Washington have little strategic consideration for the international system. Indeed, US reversals of key foreign policy initiatives—from the Greenland crisis to the Iran War—have come not because allies and clients opposed them, but because the economic and military costs began eroding Trump’s popular base at home.
In essence, US client states must endure renewed threats and rising insecurity not despite their positionality under American hegemony, but because of it. The few that have improved their stature in Washington since 2025 have done so thanks to autocratic alignment with Trump’s right-wing populism. Witness the record-breaking investment deals and heightened diplomatic licenses now enjoyed by El Salvador under Bukele and Hungary under Orbán, for instance. Israel under Netanyahu likewise enjoys no concrete constraint in its violent crusade to subdue Middle East regional order under a militarist dominion—a new era of Pax Israelica, fortified by US sponsorship.
[1] For a related argument, see Sean Yom, “The Persistence of Hierarchy in the Gulf,” POMEPS Studies 58 (February 2026): 11-16; and the essays collected in POMEPS Studies 54 Debating US Primacy in the Middle East (February 2025).
[2] Alexander Cooley and Hendrik Spruyt, Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Ayşe Zarakol, ed., Hierarchies in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[3] David Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 51-62.
[4] Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, 2 (1990): 137-68.
[5] Lake, Hierarchy, 33-44.
[6] David Lake, Indirect Rule: The Making of US International Hierarchy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024).
[7] Aram Nerguizian, “Lebanon: Assessing US-Led Capabilities Development,” in Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges… and the Need for Change, eds. Hicham Alaoui and Robert Springborg (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2023), 93-110.
[8] Marwan Kabalan, Qatar’s Foreign Policy: Geography, Politics and Strategy since 1971 (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), 129-32.
[9] Tyler Parker, “Accepting Appreciation: Partner Perceptions and Major Non-NATO Ally Designations,” Journal of Global Security Studies 10, 2 (2025): ogae047, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogae047.
[10] Sean Yom and Pete Moore, “The Fortress State: Extreme Militarization in Jordan,” Middle East Law and Governance 16, 4 (2024): 371-386.
[11] Raad Mahmoud Al-Tal, “US Tariffs on Jordan: Economics Impact and An Important Visit,” Jordan Times, 16 April 2025, https://jordantimes.com/opinion/raad-mahmoud-al-tal/us-tariffs-jordan-economic-impact-and-important-visit.
[12] Salim Essaid, “One Year After USAID Cuts, Jordan’s Reliance on Washington Is Laid Bare,” The National (UAE), 16 January 2026, https://thenational.shorthandstories.com/us-usaid-jordan-funding/.
[13] Curtis Ryan, Jordan and the Arab Uprisings: Regime Survival and Politics Beyond the State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 175-214.
[14] Sean Yom, Jordan: Politics in an Accidental Crucible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 214-245.
[15] Donald Moynihan, “Trump, Personalism, and US Administrative Capacity,” Politics & Policy 53, 4 (2025): e70059.
[16] Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, and Joseph Wright, The Origins of Elected Strongmen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).