While
each of these efforts were understandable, and many were commendable,
the U.S. government badly misjudged how much effort they would take and
how successful they would be. The United States poured money and lives
into the region, raising expectations at home and abroad.
The
results were mixed. Deposing dictators in the Middle East didn’t create
any durable democracies, but it did help touch off several civil wars.
The Islamic State group gained and then lost territory, but it didn’t go
away. President Donald Trump captured the public mood well when he
complained that the United States’ biggest mistake was getting involved
in the Middle East, having squandered seven—and later eight—trillion dollars trying to bring peace and security to the region. Meanwhile, as a senior Asian diplomat observed several
years ago, for two decades, the United States was fighting without
winning in the Middle East, and China was winning without fighting.
And
all of America’s investment didn’t earn it much good will. The world
looks at U.S. efforts to address Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and they
wonder whether the U.S. failure to achieve most of its goals is due to
lack of will or lack of capacity. As an Arab friend put it to me this
week, the United States has proven itself simultaneously indispensable
and unreliable. The U.S. position is a far cry from what it was when the
Cold War ended and U.S. troops led a broad international coalition to
liberate Kuwait.
But the United States need not be consigned to
the role of George Foreman, exhausted and staggering after too many
rounds. Ali pointed to two things that are necessary.
The first is
having a clear sense of what it is trying to do. Not enough hard
choices have been made about what really matters, and what really
doesn’t. Our policy process tends to produce long lists of co-equal
priorities that are hard to oppose. The United States not only needs to
prioritize, but it needs to have an affirmative vision of what it is
trying to achieve, and not merely what it is trying to prevent.
The
second is being able to control the flow of the engagement, and not
merely to be reactive. As the three-time ambassador Ron Neumann pointed
out to me recently, the United States is handling its very full policy
agenda by managing problems and hoping they don’t turn to crises. It’s
an understandable instinct, but it allows U.S. adversaries to pick the
time, place and circumstances of U.S. engagements with them. Their
skillful use of “gray zone” tactics and asymmetrical tools often means
they are deriving incremental advantage while the United States is, in
Ambassador Neumann’s memorable image, like a Chinese plate-spinning acrobat, keeping everything moving and hoping nothing crashes to the ground.
While
Vladimir Putin started the Ukraine war on his terms, the Biden
administration has done well to ensure that the Russian leader controls
neither the pace nor trajectory of the war. Equally importantly, our
intelligence effort appears tightly coordinated with the diplomatic and
military ones.
The Middle East is a good place to adopt a more
integrated strategy, and the most important place to do that is with
Iran. While there is likely no durable solution to Iran’s instinct to be
a regional spoiler, the United States needs to do a better job at
presenting the Iranian government with clear choices, and to do so on
U.S. terms. That requires a U.S. willingness to impose real costs on
Iran, but also a willingness to recognize and reward better behavior,
should it emerge.
Chasing after China’s rising Middle East
presence, especially with President Xi’s expected visit next week, is a
path of madness. Even as its regional roles grow, Bejing can’t compete
with the U.S. ability to protect governments from external or internal
threats—provided that Mideast leaders see their internal challenges as
developing the human capital and management skills that they urgently
need to face the energy transition, and not acquiring as much
surveillance capacity as they can muster to repress their populations.
The U.S. government needs to shift the terms of that conversation.
In
addition, the United States needs to shrink its aperture. That means
forming genuinely close relationships with a smaller number of countries
and being willing to have more distant relationships with many. Being
close to the United States should mean more, and being distant should
mean more, too.
And finally, the United States needs to notch a
real win or two, and not remain deeply entangled in every unresolvable
problem in the region. Doing so—perhaps in Jordan, or Morocco, or
elsewhere—would require full-spectrum engagement, and not just an
enhanced security relationship.
At the end of the seventh round,
not many people would have been willing to bet on Ali. But Ali knew what
he was doing. The United States should, too.
Jon B. Alterman
holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy
and directs the Middle East program at CSIS.