“Americans cannot bear the idea of a problem without a solution. Of all peoples, they are the least able to live peacefully with something that resists resolution, whether around them or in their midst. What is known as the human condition — in the sense of submission to the inevitable and to failure — drives them to psychotherapists, or into a frantic race in search of alternatives that suggest power, such as money and breaking records in every field. Thus, the greatest danger the world may face is American helplessness.” — Romain Gary, “Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid.”
There is much discussion today about whether Iran could become America’s next quagmire, finally pushing Washington to leave the Middle East or, at the very least, maintain only a minimal presence. The term “quagmire” dates back to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the worsening of the “war on terror” policies Washington pursued in the region.
This hypothesis has now entered its third decade, resurfacing as events unfold. In this article, which concludes an extensive dossier, we seek to examine the nature of the American presence in the region: is it temporary or permanent? Does Washington remain there by choice, or is it entangled against its will?
Before answering, we must return to the moment of America’s ascendancy. One of history’s ironies is that all these crises emerged from that very moment.
The unipolar moment and the Middle East’s power vacuum
At the start of the 1990s, the stage seemed set for a performance with a single protagonist: the United States, which had all but inherited the world. Talk spread of the end of history and the idea, advanced by the thinker Francis Fukuyama, that America’s ascendancy represented the pinnacle of what human history could achieve.
Charles Krauthammer celebrated the same moment from a different perspective, one tied to the Middle East. In his article “The unipolar moment,” he argued that the post-Cold War world order was, in reality, built around a single pole: the United States, leading the industrial West.
He attributed its superiority to its status as the only state with the military, diplomatic, political and economic capabilities to play a decisive role in any conflict, anywhere it chose to intervene.
The Gulf crisis and the war to liberate Kuwait provided the first test of this power and the new world order. Krauthammer enthusiastically celebrated the success there, reinforcing the sense of American exceptionalism.
The Middle East, by contrast, offered a ready-made stage. In his book “The Explosion of the Arab Mashreq: From the Nationalization of the Suez Canal to the Invasion of Iraq,” Georges Corm describes what drew the United States into the region. The Middle East’s crisis lay in its societies’ failure to make a genuine transition to military modernity, despite repeated coups and upheavals. The region came to be treated as incapable of defining and asserting its identity or securing respect for itself and its territory, leaving a power vacuum.
This military vacuum reflected a wider lack of social, cultural and political cohesion, as well as the absence of radical economic and institutional change. Without such transformations, no contemporary society can build military power and command respect. The region consequently lacked a clear structure, cohesive societies within its borders, and recognised and respected identities.
Once the Soviet Union disappeared from the Middle East, the United States overreached in its interventions, facing scarcely any obstacles. With its occupation of Mesopotamia and Baghdad in 2003, Washington inherited the legacy of the British colonial empire that had previously controlled the region.
Krauthammer missed an irony: unconstrained power carries the seeds of its own undoing. A hegemonic state with no rival to restrain it drifts towards overexpansion, depletes its resources and provokes resistance that ultimately weakens its position as its mistakes accumulate.
The researcher Gilbert Achcar recognised this in his book “The Burning East: The Middle East in the Marxist Perspective.” He argued that Washington’s crisis lay in its failure to understand that the elimination of the communists and the historical bankruptcy of Arab nationalism had removed two channels for expressing anti-imperialist resentment, while that resentment remained intact.
It flowed once again into a resurgent channel that Washington and its allies had used against communists and nationalists for three decades: Salafi jihadism. This emerged as a rising force capable of confronting the West with the same force and fanaticism. That hatred helped drive history in the Middle East; within a decade, Washington found itself at the centre of the post-9/11 world.
The genie escapes the bottle
The post-9/11 world, or the world of the “war on terror,” created a fundamental, distorted incentive described by the Middle East policy scholar Gregory Gause III: in a region of minor powers with no potential global rivals, the superpower tends to act as a revisionist power, seeking to change the status quo.
This helps explain the two US wars against Iraq in 1990-1991 and 2003, the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the intervention in Libya in 2011 and support for regime change in other countries during the Arab Spring.
All of this arose from the arrogance of the unipolar moment, which produced costly wars and let the genie out of the bottle by antagonising a wide range of states, regimes and militias. These actors later became active, hostile and enduring forces that Washington must now contend with indefinitely.
The prolonged US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq starkly exposed the limits of American military superiority. Overwhelming force could quickly decide major battles, but it could not build a stable political order in either country. The result was a glaring gap between the scale of American power and what it achieved on the ground in the Middle East.
Archival image of US soldiers in AfghanistanIn his 2004 book “The history and politics of Orientalism: The struggle over interpreting the Middle East,” published during the Iraq War, Zachary Lockman argues that many US failures in the region stem from what some have called the “hubris of power.”
In this view, dominating others leads those in power to lose sight of reality, particularly the forces and factors that challenge them. This had already been evident in Vietnam, where US officials firmly believed that the ragged Vietnamese army, wearing sandals, could not withstand the vastly superior American military machine.
Lockman comments: “To put it bluntly, arrogant power often makes those who wield it stupid; it prevents them from accurately understanding what is happening around them, and drives them to gravely underestimate their adversaries’ determination and capabilities.”
The Vietnamese tragedy was thus repeated in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and we are now living through it in Iran.
He adds: “This particular kind of disjunction between vision and reality, and between policy and its consequences, has repeatedly characterized US involvement in the Middle East. The decades after World War II saw public and private investment in developing expertise on Middle Eastern affairs within the United States, in order to serve and entrench its political, economic and military interests and commitments in that arena of immense importance to the Cold War. But US policies repeatedly produced the opposite of what was intended, even by the standards of their declared goals.”
A few years later, the 2008 global financial crisis further eroded that superiority, raising questions about the resilience of the economic and financial order the United States had led since the end of the Cold War. Meanwhile, rising powers such as China waited in the wings as Washington exhausted itself in numerous costly wars in the Middle East.
Together, these factors raised a new question about the American presence in the region: was it a matter of choice or necessity? To test this hypothesis, American thinkers and decision-makers asked: are we here because we can stay, or because we cannot withdraw? The question became particularly apparent during President Barack Obama’s administration.
A “half” pivot to Asia
When Obama came to power, his rhetoric centred on withdrawal from the long, wearying wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This reflected a genuine conviction. Obama seriously questioned the strategic value of the US presence in the Middle East and believed the region’s importance was declining for several reasons, including reduced US dependence on oil and the sharply rising cost of American hegemony.
Weighing the costs and benefits, Obama concluded that the Middle East was resistant to reform and that US involvement only worsened its crises, leaving Washington to face more blame for the region’s suffering.
In late 2011, his administration launched what became known as the strategy of “rebalancing or pivoting toward Asia.” It sought to redirect US military, diplomatic and economic resources from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, seen as the economic and strategic centre of the 21st century.
The Obama administration took China’s rise and Asia’s growing economic weight seriously. But a Tunisian citizen’s act of setting himself on fire ignited what became known as the “Arab Spring,” exposing the fragility of a plan that looked more like wishful thinking.
As Obama toured Asia to promote his pivot, presenting it to the Australian Parliament and elsewhere, his administration found itself mired once more in Middle Eastern affairs before it had even completed its departure. Strategic security needs and pressure from traditional allies drew it back, foremost among them Saudi Arabia, which pressed Washington to engage on several fronts.
Violence was spreading across the region. Civil war had broken out in Syria, Palestinian-Israeli peace talks had collapsed, and Egypt’s political trajectory after Hosni Mubarak’s fall had led to the rise of Islamists.
Events in the Middle East unfolded so rapidly that the political researcher John Feffer mockingly described Obama’s turn towards Asia as merely a “half pivot.” Writing in 2014, he said: “If Obama thought his quick pass through the Pacific would give momentum to the much-hyped American pivot to Asia strategy, he quickly discovered that the world does not conform to his carefully laid plans.”
The Lippmann gap
That same year, the rise of ISIS destroyed what remained of the momentum behind the pivot to Asia, and the Obama administration again became deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs.
In a 2016 interview with the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, conducted as part of a review of his foreign policy, Obama discussed what Goldberg called the “Obama doctrine,” based on turning towards Asia and reducing the military presence in the Middle East. He said: “Compare that to Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems, such as grinding poverty and corruption, but is full of striving, ambitious, energetic people, all trying every day to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is stark.”
Referring to America’s excessive involvement in wars, he added: “If we’re not talking to the ambitious young people in Asia and around the world because all we’re doing is spending our time figuring out how to destroy or isolate or control the malignant, violent, nihilistic parts of humanity, then we’re missing the boat.”
Obama’s words seemed tinged with disappointment. He had hoped to steer US foreign policy towards Asia and reduce its presence in the Middle East. Perhaps that was fortunate for Asia and unfortunate for us.
Washington failed to secure the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the strategy’s economic pillar, while China continued to fill the trade vacuum through its own arrangements.
The pivot exemplified what is known as the “Lippmann gap,” a concept Samuel Huntington formulated from Walter Lippmann’s warning about an imbalance between a state’s commitments and its capabilities. When commitments exceed capabilities, that imbalance ends in disaster.
The gap between US commitments in Asia and the means available to fulfil them widened. It persisted for so long that those commitments began to lose credibility.
By April 2026, President Donald Trump had been forced to postpone his anticipated visit to China because of the demands of the war with Iran. This raised concerns in Washington, expressed in a report by Fortune magazine, at a time when the Chinese threat had become more explicit. Washington appeared to be losing focus again, sacrificing its strategic interests in Asia to renewed involvement in the Middle East.
Fifteen years after Obama’s pivot, the United States remains militarily and politically bogged down in the Middle East, while its ambitions in Asia remain on hold.
Robert Kagan, writing at the Brookings Institution, captured this complex relationship most eloquently: “We can pivot, but we can’t leave.”
The American umbrella, however full of holes
America’s continued presence in the region is also tied to its traditional allies’ limited commitment to building new political and security arrangements. The position of the Gulf states is particularly revealing, given that they have the greatest number of interests tied to the United States.
We have previously discussed historical moments when Washington abandoned its allies. These and other episodes gradually eroded the credibility of US commitments among regional allies, particularly the Gulf states. Recent wars in the Middle East have also shown that guarantees of absolute American protection are now open to debate and reassessment, after long being taken for granted without any real test.
The Gulf states began looking in earnest for new channels of mediation and security guarantees after the 2019 attack on Aramco facilities and, subsequently, the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The Saudi-Chinese rapprochement made sense in this context. It led to the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran through Chinese mediation in 2023, strengthening China’s image as a trusted mediator able to deal with rival parties simultaneously.
More importantly, these steps form part of a hedging strategy intended to build additional leverage, diversify partnerships and develop alternative regional frameworks, rather than replace the United States with China in the region.
James Jeffrey and Elizabeth Dent, researchers at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted this behaviour in their article “There is no realistic alternative: Why the Gulf remains dependent on the United States.” They argue that public visits to Beijing or Moscow and joint military exercises with Russia and China serve more as signals of leverage than declarations of loyalty. Their purpose is to remind Washington that the Gulf states have other options and will make greater use of them if the United States fails to account for their security interests.
The proxy war now under way in Yemen appears to reveal this dilemma. The “Mecca Alliance,” recently concluded between Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, has seemed little more than an agreement on paper. So far, it has been unable to turn its provisions into a military response defending Saudi interests against attacks by the Houthi Ansar Allah group. Riyadh has once again found itself asking Washington to intervene militarily by striking the Houthis to offset its battlefield losses.
For now, the options available to states such as Saudi Arabia remain limited to hedging and sending signals to the United States. As the researcher Minas Lyrisitis notes, China and Russia cannot replicate the security umbrella the US Navy provides in the Gulf. China, in particular, lacks both the naval capacity and the political will to manage the region’s security.
At its core, the Saudi strategy therefore seeks to force Washington to increase its commitment through a mutual defence treaty modelled on NATO, advanced arms deals and support for a civilian nuclear programme. These are the price of preventing Saudi Arabia from drifting further into China’s orbit.
The American presence in the region has become less effective, and its ability to protect major allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab states has declined. Yet there is still no comprehensive strategic alternative.
This decline has turned allies who once had absolute confidence in the American guarantee into pragmatic players who treat their relationship with Washington as a matter of hedging and insurance. The irony is that, in practice, their search for an alternative leads to demands for more American guarantees, deeper dependence on the same ally and attempts to prolong its stay in the region for as long as possible.
The dossier ends, but the American presence does not
Last August, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria and Iraq, made a statement that prompted widespread ridicule and criticism. He said: “All the prophets were sent to this region, the Middle East; not to the Caribbean, not to South America, not to North America, not to Australia or China.”
He added sarcastically: “If God himself could not solve its problems, and neither could the prophets, then the chances that we can solve them over the next year and a half are very slim.”
The rhetoric is revealing. It clarifies the role the US administration has defined for itself in the Middle East and appears determined to fulfil for decades to come. A quarter of a millennium after the United States was founded, American political thinking about the region has moved beyond the logic of great powers filling power vacuums. It has edged towards a missionary outlook, assigning itself responsibility for the Middle East’s crises on the basis of its own diagnosis, and almost casting an American messenger as their sole solution.
Hence the assertion that “the United States can’t — and shouldn’t — escape the Middle East.” This is the title of an article by the American researcher Hal Brands, published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2024 as part of the debate over President Joe Biden’s foreign and defence policy. Brief as it is, the phrase has two parts that warrant discussion.
The first, “can’t,” conveys the tragedy of an American presence that has brought calamities upon the United States itself and cast a shadow over its domestic politics.
The second, “shouldn’t,” conveys the view of the Middle East still held by many American politicians and thinkers. It encompasses a sense of power, responsibility and the “white man’s burden,” along with the belief that the United States must remain in the region to remain a superpower.
Brands’ article sought to rebuke the Biden administration, which entered office optimistic that it could reduce the US presence in the Middle East, withdraw from Afghanistan and focus on Asia, only to find itself fighting a limited war in the region in its final year.
Ultimately, the article’s lesson amounted to a call to widen that war. Brands writes: “Why does the United States find it so hard to pull back from a region that causes it so much frustration? From one perspective, Biden’s war is evidence of a centuries-old American interest in ensuring freedom of navigation in the world’s waterways.
It is the latest reminder that the Middle East is too important to ignore and too turbulent to manage itself. And if Americans rightly wonder why their forces fight and sometimes die to manage a troubled region, that is the burden of the hegemonic power seeking to avoid a world in which every country is left to fend for itself.”
The interests Brands describes from a conservative US Republican perspective can be expressed differently: they resemble a suicide belt that the United States fashioned during its presence in the region and strapped to itself and its allies. It cannot remove the belt, because every attempt to disengage threatens to trigger a larger crisis, while the cost of a definitive military resolution exceeds any expected gain. The United States and its allies therefore remain bound to it indefinitely.
The American military historian Andrew Bacevich offers a telling comparison in his book “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.” From the end of World War II until 1980, only a negligible number of American soldiers were killed in combat in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, coinciding with America’s ascendancy, American combat deaths have been concentrated almost entirely in this region.
The foreign policy researcher Bruce Riedel puts it more elegantly: “Washington discovered that getting in is easy, but getting out seems impossible.”
Even when successive US administrations find the political courage to propose a genuine reduction in their military presence in the Middle East, they encounter another theoretical obstacle deeply rooted in American strategic thinking: the power vacuum theory discussed earlier. The theory drove the United States into full engagement in the region, then became a source of fear constraining any attempt to leave.
In an article published by Foreign Policy magazine, retired Admiral Gary Roughead and the researcher Seth Cropsey argue that any American withdrawal would open the door to Chinese, Russian or Iranian expansion. The United States might consequently be forced to fight its way back into the region to prevent its adversaries from tightening their grip on energy resources and routes.
Ultimately, the power vacuum theory is a framework in international relations, not a scientifically proven fact. Yet firm belief in it alone is enough to paralyse any serious political decision to withdraw.
This brings us back to Ben Rhodes, an adviser to President Barack Obama, whose words Trita Parsi quotes in his book “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.” Commenting on Obama’s attempt to leave the Middle East, Rhodes said: “Avoiding entanglement in the Middle East remains easier said than done, especially for a superpower that does not acknowledge the limits of its power; its political elites are suspicious of any appearance of weakness, and its citizens are eager to intervene in every conflict on this planet.”
Rhodes’s sarcastic joke perhaps offers the best conclusion to this article and the dossier: “The American foreign policy establishment is deeply uncomfortable with merely realizing that anyone actually knows the limits of American influence. That realization is simply not written into the job description of any American foreign policy commentator or thinker.”
In Roman mythology, the god Janus has two faces: one looking forwards, the other fixed on the past. The American presence in the Middle East seems caught in the same dilemma, with one eye on departure and the other drawn by the past towards staying.