Must America Be in the Middle East?
24th January 2020
None of these decades-old rationales for Middle East intervention remain relevant today. The Cold War is over. China is using cash, not arms, to seduce Middle East regimes to lease out ports and facilities for its Belt and Road Initiative, an extravagant neo-imperial global project that grows ever more dubious in a strictly cost-to-benefit analysis, especially as China bogs down in a trade war with the United States and seems to be offering round-one concessions to try to end it. With a million Muslims in Chinese reeducation camps, and its clumsy diplomacy abroad, Beijing may eventually become as unpopular in Arab capitals as Moscow was during the Cold War.
I think that the question is not ‘Must America be in the Middle East?’ but rather ‘Must America linger in the Middle East?’. Our technological superiority is such that if some development in the Middle East threatens an American interest, we can just go in and blow it all to Hell, kill the people who are causing the problem and then back off — no need for ‘boots on the ground’, just a demonstration that if you cross us you wind up dead, and we don’t care what form of government rules over the rubble.