The United States Should Admit It No Longer Has a Middle East Policy

If the current — and future — U.S. administration wants to battle the Islamic State, save Syria, and keep ties with Israel, it’s got to ditch the Cold War playbook.

BY STEPHEN M. WALT-JANUARY 29, 2016

Do you know what the United States should do in the Middle East? The answer to that question used to be pretty obvious, but not anymore. For most of the past half-century, U.S. leaders knew who their friends and enemies were and had a fairly clear sense of what they were trying to accomplish. No longer. Today, there is greater uncertainty about U.S. interests in the region, more reason to question the support it gives its traditional partners, and no consensus on how to deal with the dizzying array of actors and forces that are now buffeting the region.

One thing is clear: The playbook we’ve been using since the 1940s isn’t going to cut it anymore. We still seem to think the Middle East can be managed if we curry favor with local autocrats, back Israel to the hilt, constantly reiterate the need for U.S. “leadership,” and when all else fails, blow some stuff up. But this approach is manifestly not working, and principles that informed U.S. policy in the past are no longer helpful.

Things used to be so simple — and no, that’s not just nostalgia talking. During the Cold War, for example, the central elements of U.S. Middle East policy were reasonably well understood. First and foremost, the United States sought to contain and, if possible, reduce Soviet influence in the region. It also wanted to make sure Middle East oil and gas continued to flow to world markets and that Israel survived, although the dysfunctional “special relationship” that now exists did not begin to emerge until the late 1960s.

To achieve these goals, from 1945 to 1990 the United States generally acted as an “offshore balancer.” In sharp contrast to its military deployments in Europe or Asia, Washington didn’t station large ground forces in the Middle East and kept its overall military footprint low, relying instead on a variety of local allies and clients. In particular, the United States backed conservative Arab monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf; had a close relationship with Iran until the 1979 revolution; and saw Israel as a strategic asset mostly because it kept defeating the Soviet Union’s various Arab clients. Indeed, a string of defeats and rising economic problems eventually convinced Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to abandon his Soviet patron and realign with Washington. The United States also played a balance-of-power game in the Gulf: Ronald Reagan and Bush 41 tilted toward Iraq during its war with Iran, and then Bush turned against Iraq when it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

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