Thus widespread competition for influence among a growing array of actors has ramped up. Americans’ lack of appetite for more conflict is obvious to regional actors, regardless of the United States’ military presence. At the same time, polls show most Americans believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting and that the US public is unenthusiastic about involvement in new wars in the region. Although jihadi terrorism has hardly disappeared, the threat is mostly local and manageable with only a small, residual US military presence, if that.įoreign policy elites are reluctant to acknowledge the limits of American power.
Yet, by all appearances, the US military presence has had little impact on a range of festering, multilayered civil and internationalized conflicts in, for example, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and has failed to solve lingering instability in Iraq or avert near-state failure in Lebanon. Even after the drawdown of most US military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States continues to station tens of thousands of troops in the Greater Middle East (varying with the ebb and flow of developments) and also maintains a ring of air and naval bases there. US national security policy seems impervious to its own demonstrable failures and to the vastly altered economic and geopolitical circumstances in the region. US posture and policy toward the Middle East has been largely unchanged for decades. Substantially changed regional and global circumstances, as well as shifting US strategic imperatives, require a new US strategy. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan might mark an inflection point-the beginning of a wider recognition that, twenty years after 9/11, the blood and treasure ($6.4 trillion) spent in the Greater Middle East has brought few benefits to US interests and neither peace nor stability to the region.