What The U.S. Got Wrong In The Middle East — With Obama, Trump And Biden All To Blame

Updated Feb. 5, 2024 at 12:00 p.m.

–Analysis–

BERLIN — In his long career, the neoconservative U.S. official John Bolton has been called many things. He was said to be a “foreign policy hawk” who “relentlessly defended his country’s interests”. The mustachioed Republican has also been described as an “irascible hothead” and “warmonger.”

The negative descriptions are probably based on the fact that Bolton is an advocate of classic deterrence policy and prefers to use military means sooner rather than later. This applies in particular to Iran.

The Republican has been warning of Tehran’s attempt at regional hegemony for years.

At least until this weekend’s targeted strikes, President Joe Biden has been doing far too little against the Shiite regime. Indeed, the series of attacks over the past three months by the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” appear to confirm Bolton’s assessments.

“Biden’s folly”

The Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel was “de facto the opening move of the radical fundamentalists, which triggered a chain reaction of events,” as Yaakov Lappin, a political analyst for The Jerusalem Post, put it.

The chain reaction includes Houthi attacks on international shipping routes, attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah in northern Israel and drone and missile attacks on U.S. bases by Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Most recently, the “Tower 22” base in Jordan was hit by an Iranian Shahed killer drone, killing three American soldiers.

There have been at least 165 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October.

According to the Pentagon, there have been at least 165 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October. A total of 3,400 U.S. troops are stationed in both countries, supporting Kurdish, Iraqi and local Syrian forces in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).

Bolton, long in opposition, reacted sharply, “Sunday’s serious American casualties in Jordan, at the hands of an Iran-backed militia, tragically underscore Biden’s folly.”

The Republican called for a “disproportionate” retaliatory strike against Iran. “To be clear, I don’t think it should be proportionate. I think it should be disproportionate. That’s how you create deterrence in the mind of your adversary, that the cost to them of attacking our forces is so high they won’t do it again,” Bolton said.

Washington has struck back. But certainly not in the manner that Bolton would like The retaliation will no doubt be “proportionate”.

Creating a power vacuum 

The U.S. wants to avoid what many observers fear: conflict escalation. “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for,” Biden said.

In doing so, the U.S. is following a foreign policy line in the Middle East that former President Barack Obama laid the foundations for after he moved into the White House in 2009.

At the time, Obama and his staff wanted to move away from the doctrine of his predecessor, George W. Bush. His national security strategy was based on the assumption that the new international order after the end of the Cold War would have to be decisively shaped.

Obama, on the other hand, relied on more diplomacy after the disastrous consequences of the U.S. invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military intervention should ideally only take place in an emergency and then as limited as possible, the thinking went. A policy that the Trump administration also continued to pursue in broad terms.

For the U.S. think tank The Brookings Institution, the withdrawal of a dominant U.S. created “a power vacuum in the Middle East.” And several states used the resulting space to expand their spheres of influence in the region by force of arms. These included Russia, Turkey and Iran, which intervened militarily in the Syrian civil war without the fear of serious consequences from Washington. This would probably not have been so easy under George W. Bush.

Losing credibility

Step by step, Washington has damaged its role as a deterrent and its credibility with partners. For example, Obama only half-heartedly supported the Syrian rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, leaving the field to the dictator’s supporters Russia and Iran.

Yet Syria is a strategically very important country. The U.S. also did little after the Syrian regime crossed a red line set by Washington with the use of chemical warfare agents in 2013. To the disappointment of the Syrian opposition, there was no retaliatory strike that could have given the rebels a military advantage in the fight against Assad’s troops. Instead, the regime continued to ship its stocks of chemical weapons for destruction.

Six years later, Washington once again snubbed a strategic partner, namely the Kurdish self-administration and its troops in northeastern Syria. Together with the U.S. military, they had defeated the IS terrorist militia. This time, however, it was President Trump dropped an ally when he gave Turkey the green light for its third invasion of Kurdish areas in October 2019.

Three years later, it was President Biden who was accused of betraying an entire country this time. The final withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan turned into chaos in August 2021. Thousands of Afghans who had worked for the U.S. and other Western countries as well as for the national security services were left behind and at the mercy of the Taliban’s revenge. “We’ve been sold out,” was a repeated refrain in Afghanistan, echoing the peace deal that the U.S. signed with the Taliban in 2020 under Trump, which was heavily criticized.

Failed Middle East policy

“Washington should face reality: U.S. Middle East policy has failed,” writes Jon Hoffman, foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in Foreign Policy magazine. This is especially true now that the Middle East conflict over Israel and Palestine is also blowing up in Washington’s face. “Following Hamas’s brutal massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, Israel’s massive military campaign against the group has brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of annihilation and the Middle East to the edge of a broader war,” Hoffman wrote.

The Biden administration’s big mistake, Hoffman continued, was that an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement was thought to be the most important key to lasting peace in the Middle East.

Possibly a small offer of reconciliation to defuse the tense situation?

With its pogrom and Israel’s subsequent military response in Gaza, Hamas may have turned the Arab world against the West again and thus prevented the agreed rapprochement between the Saudis and Israel for the time being.

Much more serious, however, is the fact that the terrorist group is keeping the entire region in suspense via its allies in the Axis of Resistance. Washington seems determined to de-escalate the situation at all costs and prevent a conflagration. The White House is even said to have recently sent messages to Tehran with the assurance that it does not want war.

Asymmetric war

The Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, which is believed to be responsible for the deaths of the three U.S. soldiers in Jordan, issued a statement. “We announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupying forces,” it said, apparently referring to the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Syria. Is this possibly a small offer of reconciliation to defuse the tense situation?

Probably not, as the Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah is coordinating the “activities of the Islamic resistance” with other militias. According to reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), they have set up a joint operations center for this purpose. The militias, like all other members of the axis, will continue their asymmetric war — as long as Iran does not order otherwise.

It does indeed look as if Bolton, the Republican hawk, was right. The U.S. has done too little for far too long.