The End for America in the Middle East?

Michael Young
The Daily Star (Beirut)
12 May '10

Overstatement in the service of truth is no vice, some might say. But where is truth, or indeed overstatement, in the observation that we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of America’s 60-year domination of the Middle East, unless the Obama administration reverses its policies? Alarmingly, no one has any answers.

The notion sounds absurd. America lose the power that it has managed to retain for as long as most of us have been alive? Perhaps it is absurd. But consider this: given President Barack Obama’s lack of a coherent strategy for the region, everywhere we see deepening vulnerabilities, when not a conscious decision by Washington to downgrade its ambitions in the face of more dynamic regional actors. These actors have shortcomings of their own, but they appear to be better prepared to deal with the consequences than the United States.

And let’s add one more item to the bleak mix: Washington’s listlessness actually increases the chances that it will enter into a war with Iran, which Obama has been so understandably keen to avoid.

The Arab state system may well be caught up in a phase of terminal deterioration. Most Arab regimes are old and have lost much legitimacy by consolidating their authoritarianism while offering their younger, expanding populations little in the way of consensual social contracts, useful educational opportunities, and better living conditions. Stalemate prevails, and the onetime sway of leading Arab states has devolved to non-Arab states on the region’s periphery: Turkey, Israel and Iran.

This has had negative consequences for the United States, whose political preeminence in the region rested on the old Arab order. Longstanding American allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are weaker than ever before. At the same time, the Obama administration is in the throes of psychological retrenchment over the Middle East, the result of myriad factors, above all a sense that the US cannot financially afford the vast empire it once controlled.

Looking at American policy, what do we see today? For starters, we see an Iran actively challenging America in the region. This may look like hubris, but the Iranians see little that is worrisome. Take Iraq, which the US fought long and hard over and ultimately stabilized after the spectacular blunders of the immediate postwar years in 2003-2005. Today, Obama’s stubborn priority is to withdraw, effectively denying Washington the primary terrain needed to contain Iran, but also to exercise its power over Syria and to an extent Saudi Arabia.

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