The US Can and Should Extricate Itself from the Middle East

Suzanne Maloney has conveniently discovered that a new war in the Middle East requires deeper U.S. involvement in the region:

What has begun, almost inexorably, is the next war – one that will be bloody, costly, and agonizingly unpredictable in its course and outcome. What has ended, for anyone who cares to admit it, is the illusion that the United States can extricate itself from a region that has dominated the American national security agenda for the past half century.

To the extent that the region has “dominated” the U.S. agenda, it is because successive administrations have chosen to support, join, and start conflicts that have had little or nothing to do with U.S. security. Contrary to the story that many people in Washington like to tell, the U.S. is not “dragged” or “pulled” or compelled in any way to be as enmeshed in the affairs of the Middle East as it is. The U.S. absolutely can extricate itself from the region, and it would not be all that costly to do so, but policymakers keep rushing to get more deeply involved when they should be looking for the exits.

The U.S. hasn’t been trying to extricate itself from the region. Maloney is simply wrong about that. Biden didn’t “devise a creative exit strategy.” He was cooking up strange new excuses for taking on a heavier burden. The latest round of fighting follows the desperate, bizarre efforts of the Biden administration to increase U.S. commitments to its regional clients, including a security guarantee for Saudi Arabia. There is no scenario where the U.S. makes a commitment like that and then gets to “downsize” its presence in the region. That effort came the heels of an expansion of the U.S. military footprint under both Trump and Biden.

The Israeli government has correctly assumed that there was nothing that it could do to the Palestinians that would cause Washington to reduce or condition its support in any way, and that has given their government free rein to move towards outright annexation of occupied territory. Now the U.S. is backing the Israeli government to the hilt as it prepares to devastate a heavily-populated civilian area. As Yousef Munayyer put it this week, “Washington is not merely abdicating official and moral responsibility but enabling mass atrocities at a time when all the red flags for genocide are up.”

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.