Peter R. Mansoor, The Ohio State University
Ever since Barack Obama won the presidency largely because of his opposition to the war in Iraq, the United States has been trying to extricate itself from intensive engagement in the Middle East. Successive administrations have argued that the United States should pivot, or rebalance, to Asia; empower Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other regional allies to contend with Iran and its proxies; and focus on more important foreign policy priorities, such as deterring China or holding NATO together as the member states deal with Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. Despite the desire to concentrate their efforts elsewhere, four administrations under three presidents have been sucked into the maelstrom of Middle Eastern politics and conflict. This was not due to bad luck or mere coincidence of events; rather, U.S. engagement in the Middle East is not a bug but a feature of the state system in the region. The sooner Washington realizes this reality, the sooner it will be able to create a more enduring policy to deal with the region.
U.S. strategy toward the Middle East deteriorated rapidly after the misguided invasion of Iraq in 2003.[1] Iran reaped by far the largest benefits of the war. Its most dangerous opponent, Saddam Hussein, was driven from power and executed, while a government amenable to Iran’s interests took power in Baghdad. Tehran no longer had to worry about a large-scale conventional conflict on its western border; instead, via the agency of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps it could spread its influence across the region.[2] Under the capable leadership of Major General Qassem Soleimani, it did just that.[3]
President Obama took advantage of the lull in hostilities created by the surge of U.S. forces to Iraq in 2007 and 2008 and the seeming goodwill generated by the Arab Spring to remove U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, when the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the previous administration expired.[4] It seemed like a good bet at the time; violence had ebbed in the wake of the surge, allowing Obama to fulfil a campaign promise to remove U.S. forces from a misguided war. Unfortunately, the president misread Iraqi politics. U.S. forces were the glue holding Iraq together; when they departed the country, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki felt emboldened to attack his political enemies, most of them Sunni Arabs.[5] Sunni Arabs, encouraged by the Arab Spring movement elsewhere in the Middle East, formed a protest movement, only to be brutally suppressed by Iraqi security forces that had been trained and equipped by the United States. Left out of power, Iraqi Sunnis gravitated once again to their defenders of last resort, this time in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.[6]
By the time ISIS forces invaded Iraq in early 2014, Iraqi Security Forces were a hollow shell, commanded by leaders loyal to al-Maliki but with little military competence. As ISIS took over much of northwest Iraq and advanced on Baghdad, panic gripped both the Iraqi government and the international community, which was horrified by the incipient genocide being perpetrated by ISIS fighters on various ethno-sectarian communities.[7] The Obama administration reengaged, forming an international coalition and committing troops – mostly Special Forces and airpower – to lead an effort to destroy the Islamic State.[8] In time (and under the next president), this effort would succeed.
The Obama administration, however, sought a more permanent solution to the tensions in the Middle East by negotiating an agreement with Iran, which was edging its way toward the creation of nuclear weapons and the missiles required to carry them to targets in the Middle East and Europe. On July 14, 2015, the administration (along with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany as well as the European Union) signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, an agreement that limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and extend the time required to create nuclear weapons.[9] But Obama never sent the agreement to the Senate for ratification, knowing it would be dead on arrival. The agreement would only last if Hillary Clinton succeeded him as president, which did not happen.
President Donald Trump came into office with a much different view of foreign policy than his predecessor. He believed that the JCPOA was a mistake, and instead enacted a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.[10] In 2018 the Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, anchoring U.S. policy in the region on forcing Iran to cease its destabilizing activities around the Middle East. The administration had some successes, in particular the destruction of the Islamic State, which largely expired with the seizure of Raqqa and Mosul in 2017.[11] But the policy of maximum pressure failed to curb Iran’s behavior in the region. Indeed, Iran’s leaders doubled down on their support for proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, leading to continuing attacks against U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East.
The Trump administration also brokered the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.[12] In return the Trump administration removed Sudan from its list of state sponsored terrorism and provided it a grant of $1.2 billion to clear its debt with the World Bank, as well as recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to postpone annexation of parts of the West Bank. U.S. policy makers viewed the accords as an alternative to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, which was seen as increasingly unlikely given the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Netanyahu administration’s firm policy against recognizing Palestinian sovereignty. The inclusion of Saudi Arabia in such an accord, which would include a formal U.S. defense treaty with the Kingdom, would be the final step.[13] The United States could outsource its Middle East policy to a new alliance of Israel and moderate Arab states, directed against their common enemy in Tehran.
The Biden administration attempted to resurrect the Iran nuclear accord, but the inconsistent nature of U.S. policy as administrations changed had soured the Iranian regime on diplomacy with the United States.[14] Negotiating a new agreement turned out to by a Sisyphean struggle, one that is now all but dead. Iran has instead focused its energies on the “Axis of Resistance,” its network of proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen that it funds, arms, trains, and occasionally directs.[15] U.S. service members have been in the line of fire on bases inside Iraq, even as they train the Iraqi Security Forces to destroy the remnants of the Islamic State, which is in Iran’s interests.
After the destruction of the Islamic State, the Middle East seemed to stabilize, allowing the United States to focus its energies elsewhere. Israel attended to its own security by “mowing the grass,” launching periodic strikes against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon in response to missile and terror attacks on Israel.[16] But the Iron Dome anti-missile and rocket system significantly lessened civilian losses, reducing the urgency of retaliatory strikes.[17] To the Biden administration, the balance of power in the region seemed stable – or at least stable enough that the United States could focus on building alliances to counter a rising China in Asia and, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, leading NATO and associated powers in countering Putin’s designs in Europe.
But Iran never relinquished its goal of dominating the Middle East by proxy. It continued to fund, arm, equip, and train tens of thousands of militia fighters in proxy groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. These groups did Iran’s bidding by attacking U.S. and Israeli targets of opportunity in Iraq, Syria, and Israel, allowing Tehran plausible deniability as to the origins of the strikes. Meanwhile, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies were fooled into thinking the situation on Israel’s borders was stable. Sure, there were attacks, but these were episodic and small-scale and were sustainable if not completely deterrable. As Israeli mowed the grass and diplomats worked to expand the Abraham accords to include the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United States could focus its energies elsewhere.
The situation changed dramatically on October 7, 2023, when Hamas operatives invaded southern Israeli, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and seizing around 240 hostages – the largest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.[18] The Netanyahu administration vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation and launched a major ground and air incursion into Gaza, killing to date around forty-five thousand Palestinians, perhaps two-thirds of them noncombatants, mostly women and children.[19] The Biden administration initially unconditionally backed Israel and provided arms and ammunition to keep the Israeli Defense Forces supplied, even as President Joe Biden warned Prime Minister Netanyahu about overreaching, as the United States had done in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.[20]
Netanyahu refused to heed the warning and has enmeshed Israel in an unwinnable war in Gaza to destroy Hamas. Even if the Israeli Defense Forces prove capable of destroying the military wing of Hamas, the group would eventually resurface as Hamas 2.0 unless Israel embarks on a long-term occupation of Gaza. Given the track record of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, which gave rise to Hezbollah, such a policy would prove to be a fool’s errand, and unlikely to be supported by the international community, without whose assistance the rebuilding of Gaza will fail.[21]
Iran emboldened its Axis of Resistance – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and various proxy militias in Iraq and Syria – to attack Israel, target U.S. servicemembers in Iraq, and strike international shipping transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.[22] In April 2024, Iran even attacked Israel directly in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an annex of the Iranian embassy in Damascus that killed eight officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The strike failed due to robust Israeli and U.S. air defense systems that shot down 99 percent of the 170 bomb-carrying drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles launched toward Israel.[23] The United States was once again pulled back into the region, leading a naval task force to keep the sea lanes through the Suez Canal open, delivering humanitarian aid to Gazans, and conducting multiple rounds of diplomacy in an attempt to broker a cease fire in Gaza – the latter two efforts meeting to date with little success. The U.S. Navy is more heavily engaged in the Middle East than it was during the Cold War, which reduces its capabilities and ability to focus on its major peer competitor – the Chinese Navy – in Asia.
The United States today finds itself in a difficult situation in the Middle East. If it remains heavily engaged in the region, it will be able to counter Iranian ambitions, but at the cost of using precious resources it prefers to focus on Asia and Europe. Despite its recent setbacks, Iran will continue to attempt to assert its will across the Shi’a Crescent and beyond. The Islamic regime in Tehran seeks to dominate the world’s second-largest oil producing region (the United States took over the first position with the fracking revolution), effectively control a broad swath of the Middle East, and threaten Israeli security. Unfortunately, the Arab states in the region lack the capabilities to counter Iran’s ambitions. On the other hand, Israel has successfully decapitated Hamas and Hezbollah and inflicted significant attrition on both organizations. But absent a long-term strategy to stabilize the region, the groups will likely recover. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, on the other hand, is a major setback for Tehran that has severed the ground line of communication between Iran and Lebanon. Nevertheless, U.S. involvement will be necessary to ensure that the new Syria does not devolve into chaos and bloodshed.
U.S. policy toward the Middle East has gone through several evolutions, none of them successful. Perhaps the best of the lot was President Bill Clinton’s dual containment of Iran and Iraq, which was fraying at the edges but kept the two most volatile regimes in the region in check.[24] President George W. Bush’s policy of democratizing the Middle East after the terror attacks of 9/11, beginning with the invasion of Iraq, failed to either democratize the region or to deter Iran.[25] President Obama’s attempt to negotiate with the Iranian regime was short circuited by the election of President Donald Trump, whose campaign of maximum pressure on Iran likewise failed to curb the Islamic regime’s focus on regional hegemony.
Because of recent setbacks to Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as the seizure of Damascus by rebel groups including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Iran’s strategic position in the Middle East has deteriorated significantly. Nevertheless, Iran still has the capability of becoming a nuclear power; its proxy forces still share power with state governments in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen; and it still embraces a de facto alliance with Russia and to a lesser extent with China, providing it major power benefactors and solid diplomatic cover in the UN Security Council.[26] It is in Russia and China’s interest to keep the United States engaged in the Middle East, for every soldier, jet fighter, and ship deployed to the region is one less available to counter their ambitions elsewhere. Iran’s major weakness is its economy, whose growth is held in check by U.S. sanctions.[27]
The United States is losing international legitimacy by backing Israel, whose campaign in Gaza has resulted in civilian losses and suffering that has exceeded by a wide margin the proportionality expected to be exercised by a warring nation in prosecuting its war aims. The one success the Biden administration had achieved is in deterring a full-scale regional war. This is a transient success, which will only be made lasting if the United States can broker an agreement to provide massive humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, end the war, rebuild Gaza, and, ultimately, provide the Palestinian people with a degree of political sovereignty that will cool their desire to attack Israel. Such a long-term agreement seems unlikely at the moment, as both the Israeli and Palestinian people have been traumatized by the war. Instead, U.S. diplomats should focus their efforts on achieving interim steps, such as creating a non-Hamas aligned governing authority for Gaza that can lead to progress on rebuilding the lives of the Palestinian people, allow time for new leaders to arise in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and calm the tensions that have prevented progress on a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
One thing, however, is clear from the last quarter century of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Las Vegas rules don’t apply: What happens in the region doesn’t stay there. U.S. commitment is essential to preventing the Iranian strategic gains, solving Israel’s security dilemma, protecting the global commons that run through the Gulf and the Red Sea, ensuring the safe flow of oil from the region to the wider global economy, and creating stability in war-torn Syria. U.S. presidents might wish to rebalance their efforts toward Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, but the dynamics of power in the Middle East ensure that they can only do so by applying resources they wish to use elsewhere.
References
[1] For a timeline of the Iraq War, see Council on Foreign Relations, “The Iraq War: 2003-2011,” https://www.cfr.org/timeline/iraq-war.
[2] For background on the Qods Force, see Council on Foreign Relations, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,” https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/irans-revolutionary-guards.
[3] For more on Qassem Soleimani, see Nasser Karimi and Jon Gambrell, “Bombings hit event for Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a shadowy figure slain in 2020 US drone strike,” AP News, January 4, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/iran-qassem-soleimani-profile-kerman-bomb-attack-57cbc9adff1914e5047c0104b311cced.
[4] For a history of the surge, see Peter R. Mansoor, Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). For more on the Arab Spring, see “Arab Spring,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Arab-Spring.
[5] For a sketch of Nouri al-Maliki, see “Nouri al-Maliki,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nouri-al-Maliki.
[6] For an overview of ISIS, see “Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS),” Counterterrorism Guide, https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/isis_fto.html.
[7] United Nations, “ISIL/Da’esh Committed Genocide of Yazidi, War Crimes against Unarmed Cadets, Military Personnel in Iraq, Investigative Team Head Tells Security Council,” May 10, 2021, https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14514.doc.htm.
[8] “Operation Inherent Resolve: Targeted Operations to Defeat ISIS,” U.S. Department of Defense, https://dod.defense.gov/OIR.
[9] U.S. Department of State, “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” https://2009-2017.state.gov/e/eb/tfs/spi/iran/jcpoa.
[10] U.S. Department of State, “Maximum Pressure Campaign on the Regime in Iran,” April 4, 2019, https://2017-2021.state.gov/maximum-pressure-campaign-on-the-regime-in-iran.
[11] Martin Chulov, “The rise and fall of the Isis ‘caliphate’,” The Guardian, March 24, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/23/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-isis-caliphate.
[12] U.S. Department of State, “The Abraham Accords,” https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords.
[13] John B. Alterman, Center for Strategic & International Studies, “Biden’s Efforts to Bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords,” September 22, 2023, https://www.csis.org/analysis/bidens-efforts-bring-saudi-arabia-abraham-accords.
[14] Danielle Pletka, “Whatever Happened to Biden’s Iran Policy?” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/26/bidens-iran-policy-nuclear-deal-jcpoa.
[15] “What is Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’?” Reuters, April 13, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-is-irans-axis-resistance-which-groups-are-involved-2024-01-29.
[16] Adam Taylor, “With strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza,” Washington Post, May 14, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/14/israel-gaza-history/.
[17] For an examination of Israel’s anti-rocket and missile defenses, see BBC, “What are Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow and Thaad missile defences?,” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20385306.
[18] “Israel-Hamas War,” Britannica, December 1, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Israel-Hamas-War; for background on Hamas, see Kali Robinson, “What is Hamas?,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 17, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas.
[19] “Israel-Gaza war in maps and charts: Live tracker,” Al Jazeera, December 1, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker.
[20] Peter Nicholas, Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee, “U.S. officials privately warn Israel to show restraint in retaliating against Hamas,” NBC News, October 13, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/us-officials-privately-warn-israel-restraint-hamas-retaliation-biden-rcna120286.
[21] For background on Hezbollah, see “What Is Hezbollah?,” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hezbollah.
[22] For a compendium of attacks in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, see “Red Sea Attacks,” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, https://acleddata.com/yemen-conflict-observatory/red-sea-attacks-dashboard; for background on the Houthis, see “Houthis,” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, https://acleddata.com/yemen-conflict-observatory/actor-profiles/houthis.
[23] C. Todd Lopez, “Israel, U.S., Partners Neutralize Iranian Airborne Attacks,” U.S. Department of Defense, April 16, 2024, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3742552/israel-us-partners-neutralize-iranian-airborne-attacks/.
[24] Richard W. Murphy, “Differentiated Containment: U.S. Policy Toward Iran and Iraq,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 1, 1997, https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/pdf/1998/09/Differentiated_Containment.pdf.
[25] “President Bush Calls for a ‘Forward Strategy of Freedom’ to Promote Democracy in the Middle East,” The White House, November 6, 2003, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-11.html.
[26] For a discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, see “Iran’s Nuclear Timetable: The Weapon Potential,” Iran Watch, September 18, 2024, https://www.iranwatch.org/our-publications/articles-reports/irans-nuclear-timetable-weapon-potential.
[27] “U.S. Sanctions on Iran,” Congressional Research Service, August 7, 2024, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12452.