Why We Will Never Stop Bombing the Middle East

If you're only willing to quit after you've won, you'll never actually quit

I’ve been struggling to write something intelligent about the current conflict in the Middle East. But honestly, trying to analyze the world today is like arguing with a Tasmanian devil.

And maybe we don’t need to analyze it. Maybe we can just be appalled and wait for it to end. The Iran War is impressively unpopular for a war that has been only going on for a few days against a much-loathed adversary. It’s tempting, therefore, to think that this might mark some kind of turning point, that we’ll finally decide that enough is enough, and walk away. Maybe Trump himself will declare victory soon and go home—but if not, the next Democratic administration will surely be far less solicitous of either Israeli interests or those of the Gulf States, and the next Republican administration might well be outright isolationist in orientation. Maybe we should skip trying to make sense of what we’re doing and predicting where it might lead, and start imagining a world where we just . . . stop.

All I can say is: I’ll believe it when I see it happen. Every administration in my lifetime has promised to reduce American involvement overseas and in the Middle East in particular. And every single one of them has instead expanded and deepened our involvement in the region. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I think that fact demands a structural explanation.

To rehash the history: Bill Clinton promised America a peace dividend, but while defense spending dropped as a percentage of the budget America’s commitments abroad increased rather than decreasing, and for the entire period of his administration America was patrolling the skies above Iraq, periodically bombing the country, and engaging an increasing tempo of anti-terror operations against al Qaeda among other groups. Nor could the Oslo process, which ended catastrophically, be described as America reducing our exposure the region; on the contrary, we were endeavoring to become the active patron to both Israel and the Palestinians, and thereby solve that intractable conflict.

George W. Bush, of course, ran for office in part on a humbler foreign policy that didn’t involve “nation-building.” We all know how that turned out.

Now, maybe in an alternate reality where 9-11 never happened the second Bush would indeed have pursued a humble foreign policy. I’m skeptical, but maybe. Regardless, Barack Obama was elected in the aftermath of public disaffection with the Iraq War, with a specific mandate to end that conflict and not fight any new dumb wars. He nonetheless foundered for eight years fighting in Afghanistan and launched a new and catastrophic war of choice in Libya. And while he dramatically reduced American involvement in Iraq, and declined to launch a regime-change war in Syria, the rise of the Islamic State compelled him nonetheless to engage militarily in both countries.

Obama did at least attempt to reduce American exposure to conflicts in the region in two key ways. First, he pursued a nuclear deal with Iran that would have significantly limited their ability to pursue nuclear weapons. Second, and arguably more important, he presided over the fracking revolution (which, to be fair, started under his predecessor) that put the United States on the path to practical energy independence. At the end of his time in office, a policy of disengagement such as Matt Yglesias advocates here was arguably a realistic option beginning to be implemented—and Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, was once again a candidate who ran on a policy of not getting involved in wars in the Middle East.

Yet to reassure the Saudis that he was not abandoning them, Obama himself felt it necessary to support their brutal intervention against the Houthis in Yemen. Trump then expanded American support for that war, which failed to dislodge the Houthis and ultimately petered out. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, meanwhile, was bitterly opposed by the Republican Party, never even submitted for ratification by the Senate, and, most important, was unpopular with the American people from the start. Trump tore up the deal almost immediately, restored sanctions on Iran, and assassinated one of their top generals. Trump jettisoned the moralism of the Bush administration, but he did not in any way moderate its belligerence. And even his peacemaking under the Abraham Accords was structured to deepen America’s explicit support for our allies in the region.

Joe Biden then came into office promising to “build back better” domestically and to exit the hopeless and by then deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan—and he did achieve the latter. Yet the withdrawal—which was optically chaotic but substantively quite effective at getting people out as the American-backed government collapsed—caused his popular support to crater, a drop from which he never recovered. More generally, Biden followed the Trump administration in deepening America’s commitments in the region. After promising to reduce American support for Saudi Arabia because of their human rights violations, Biden not only continued American support but offered explicit American security guarantees as part of an effort to expand the Abraham Accords to include the kingdom. Biden also continued a confrontational policy towards Iran. Finally, and most prominently, after the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th Biden vigorously supported Israel’s military response. His administration came to be so defined by his embrace of an Israeli war that progressives deemed genocidal in intent that some on the left were tempted to believe that Trump would be an improvement.

But Trump II, the return of America First, turns out to mean first bombing Iran’s nuclear program and then joining Israel in launching a full-scale war of choice against that country.

There are specific moves in the foregoing history that I supported at the time, some I even continue to support in retrospect, some I changed my mind about and some I always opposed. But my views were articulated from within the larger pattern. How can one explain the larger pattern though? Why do Americans keep voting against war in the Middle East, and yet wind up fighting wars in the Middle East? Three commonly-cited culprits are the purportedly malign influences of the Israel Lobby, of Gulf oil money, and of American defense contractors. I’m not going to pretend that none of those are factors. But I think there’s an essential factor missing from an analysis based entirely on foreign influence and interest-group lobbying, and I think that factor is the nature of America’s hegemonic position itself.

To put it simply, if Americans actually wanted most of all simply to get out of the Middle East, then Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran would have been popular, and so would Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. They were, after all, both instances in which America reduced its commitments in the region. But they were not popular. The former was about as popular as Trump’s war (38% support in the Pew poll cited above, versus 41% in an average of recent polls about the war on Iran), and the latter was significantly less so (27% approved of Biden’s handling of Afghanistan according to this Gallup survey from August, 2021). Why? Because what Americans want is to reduce our involvement in the region without paying any price for that reduced involvement. We want to reduce our exposure without actually reducing our position. And that is not generally a viable option.

I don’t know precisely what would happen if the United States genuinely withdrew from the region: if we declared victory and ended our war with Iran, pulled our military out of Iraq, Qatar and the UAE, canceled our security guarantees to the Gulf states, ended aid to Israel, etc. Maybe the various states in the region would figure out a balance of power between them, as Yglesias imagines—but I’m betting not. There are just too many axes of division, too many regimes without strong popular support, too many groups that are entirely unaccountable and too many powers—most notably Israel and Iran—that are outright revisionist in orientation. The ongoing conflict in the Great Lakes region of central Africa is nowhere near as bad as the Second Congo War, but there’s not a stable balance of power there either. The UAE and Saudi Arabia—both American allies, both status quo powers, and both currently being hit by Iranian missiles—have been fighting a horrific proxy war in Sudan for years that America has largely stayed out of, and they haven’t worked it out despite all those reasons for alignment. Heck, I’m not sure Europe will be able to get its act together if America really pulls out. Why should we assume the Middle East will?

So maybe Americans just shouldn’t care if Saudi Arabia goes nuclear with Pakistani help, or if a revolution brings a radical Islamist government to power in Egypt, or if Israel ultimately winds up in a full-scale shooting war with Turkey—or whatever nightmare scenario you choose to imagine. But I think Americans will care, for a host of reasons, prominent among them the simple fact that we’ve been involved there a very long time and are used to feeling implicated by events there. More generally though, we don’t so much want to quit the game as end it with a win. Rather than shrugging if things unravel, much less collapse, I think voters will blame whoever is in power. Our political leaders know that, and whenever they forget the public reminds them. In that context, the fact that all sorts of interest groups, foreign and domestic, are urging them to stay in the game easily becomes decisive.

None of this should be surprising. Empires and hegemonic powers don’t simply walk away from the table. The pattern America has been in—trying to manage regional conflict through some combination of diplomacy and force, punctuated by the occasional lurch into a “decisive battle” (like the current war) that will supposedly solve everything once and for all, but never does—is therefore likely to continue to recur, until either that pattern itself or some unrelated eventuality ushers in such a comprehensive disaster that we are simply incapable of sustaining anything remotely like our prior position.

And maybe that’s how this current war will end. Maybe we’ve set off a chain reaction that will wind up collapsing America’s position not only in the Middle East but in East Asia and Europe as well. But Americans—and anyone abroad who benefits from America’s longstanding global position—had better hope not.