Three presidents have diverted resources to other regions, only for the Middle East to consume more attention than it would have had the U.S. stayed engaged.
Three presidents have diverted resources to other regions, only for the Middle East to consume more attention than it would have had the U.S. stayed engaged.
O n December 18, the Department of Defense announced the multinational Operation Prosperity Guardian, a U.S.-led, multinational force meant to restore commercial freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal against Yemen-based Houthi attacks. The operation is yet another violation of the United States’s own Middle East policy.
President Joe Biden’s administration went along with its two immediate predecessors in promising to reduce U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Facing events, he now joins the other two to violate this promise. Equally troublesome, all three administrations have saddled the Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees U.S. military presence in the region, with fewer military resources. This matches their policies and contradicts their actions.
Barack Obama’s administration ended the war in Iraq in 2011, lifted sanctions on Iran, and released frozen Iranian assets. By the president’s own admission, his administration hoped that it could do less in the Middle East by strengthening the Islamic Republic against Saudi Arabia, creating a balance of power to maintain regional peace. Only two years later, it had to redeploy the U.S. military to the region against the Islamic State.
Donald Trump’s administration believed that it could reduce the U.S.’s regional presence by exerting economic pressure on Iran. Instead, Islamic Republic aggression mounted. In response to these aggressions, the administration deployed naval forces to the region, but to no avail. Even killing Qasem Soleimani failed to effect any meaningful change in the region’s strategic landscape, as shown by the growth of the Islamic Republic’s proxies and satellites throughout the region.
President Biden’s administration also desired to reduce its Middle East presence. It bribed the Islamic Republic to buy quiet. Instead, a new war is threatening to engulf the region, with two aircraft-carrier strike groups deployed there and a new military operation announced.
The U.S. government should either stick to its policy of significantly reducing its presence in the region and accept the consequences or change its policy and act accordingly.
Reportedly, one obstacle to military action against the Houthis has been Saudi Arabian pleas. The Biden administration effectively ended the war in Yemen by cutting off military aid to Saudi Arabia and removing the Houthis from the list of foreign terrorist organizations. This ensured a Houthi victory, in an Iran–Saudi Arabia agreement which China brokered. Understandably, the Saudis worry that, if the U.S. military attacks the Houthis, the Houthis will retaliate against Saudis and Emiratis, which they have done in the past.
So, the U.S. seeks gentler means to protect commercial and naval shipping in the approaches to the Suez Canal through which 15 percent of world shipping passes. But multinational naval operations have a limited ability to safeguard shipping. Operation Earnest Will, the Ronald Reagan administration’s naval protection of Kuwaiti tankers against Iran, required several U.S. Navy attacks against Islamic Republic oil rigs. The same is true today: Escorts will not stop the Houthis; only force will.
Nor will exiting the region sate its malevolent actors or solve its conflicts. The Houthis are a symptom of the near breakdown of the political order in the region that will continue even if the Red Sea’s safety is restored. Regional actors and foreign powers will instead fix these problems. This will fundamentally accelerate the breakdown of the order before the emergence of a fundamentally new one. The United States will be granted its wish to stay out of the Middle East, including the risk of forgoing access to critical trade choke points such as the Dardanelles, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Suez Canal.
Every time the United States has faced the prospect of regional disorder and disruption of trade through these choke points, it has put aside its will to vacate the Middle East and deployed forces to the region. And rightfully so. The security of these choke points and U.S. and allied access to them is critical to U.S. security and prosperity.
The current regional order favors the United States. U.S. policy seems to be maintaining the current order without having the U.S. military enforce it. This is not an option. The only two options are enforcing the existing political order or allowing it to be remade from scratch into one that will not be favorable to U.S. interests.
The fact that three successive administrations have violated their own Middle East policies indicates that their policies are not just flawed but nonsensical. It is time for U.S. policy-makers to accept what the real world is telling them: The Middle East order favors America, and maintaining it requires the U.S. military.
Temporary deployment of forces to the region has failed as a strategy. It has often patched over problems in the short term, but those quick fixes have always required an even larger force to return to the region in the future. Since the Obama administration, when the desire to depart the region first became U.S. policy, the landscape has become increasingly hostile to order and U.S. interests. Islamic terrorism remains today as much a threat as it was in the 1990s and 2000s. It is not a priority only because there are even bigger concerns.
China enjoys a greater influence than ever, which is growing at a rapid pace. Iran’s satellites and proxies are spreading like malignant cancer, trade disruption is peaking, and two civil wars have erupted, both won by anti-U.S. parties. Hezbollah is the strongest it has ever been, and Israel is prosecuting its largest war since 1948.
Three administrations have sought to divert their resources to other regions, only for the Middle East to consume more attention than it would have had the U.S. remained engaged. We cannot wish the region away. The executive and legislative branches need a Middle East policy that advances the United States’ interests in a stable order that protects the region from the revisionist ideology that is threatening to engulf it.
Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness. Shay Khatiri is the vice president of development and a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.