The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.

The United States’ primary goal for three and a half decades has been to lock its disparate allies into an order built around protecting Israel while containing, at first, Iran and Iraq, and more recently Iran and its nonstate allies. Far from being a deviation from that strategy, President Donald Trump’s war took it to its logical end, seeking to remove the Iranian threat by force in one fell swoop. As American leaders did before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Israel has done in its wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the architects of this war vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people. Washington’s misadventure was not an aberration so much as the ultimate expression of the inherent vice of its Middle East strategy.

At first, it may not look as though the war has had much effect on the alliances that form the American order. Facing an inconclusive war and an empowered Iran, the Gulf states may ramp up their arms purchases and their demands for renewed security guarantees, creating the illusion of continuity. But the old order is in fact giving way to something new. The 1956 Suez crisis is remembered today as the last gasp of British and French imperial power in the Middle East, but it took years to reach that inevitable end. American primacy will not disappear immediately, either, but long-building doubts about American power and purpose have passed their tipping point. The revelations of the Iran war and of the Israeli war in Gaza before it have already changed the calculations of U.S. allies and adversaries. Another round of fighting or the election of a different American president will not repair the rupture.

The years ahead promise further discord. Israel and Iran have a shared interest in keeping the Middle East in a state of lawlessness and violence, and the United States has few means of holding back either of them. Israel hopes to expand its de facto borders, including by annexing as much as possible of historic Palestine, and to impose its writ by force across vast swaths of the region. And assuming that the Iranian regime does not collapse any time soon—which it appears highly unlikely to do—an emboldened Tehran will hope to defend and expand its regional influence by bogging Washington down in the kinds of endless, borderless “gray zone” conflicts in which it has always thrived.

If the United States is finally willing to abandon its failed strategy, however, the collapse of one order could still be an opportunity to build a new and better one. The conditions, admittedly, are far from ideal. Although most of the region’s leaders and publics desperately want a respite from military strikes and economic disruption, they also deeply resent Washington for dragging them into a disaster. But discarding its policy of support for autocrats, impunity for allies, and militarized containment of enemies might enable the United States to engage with the region in a healthier way—one that eventually could yield the durable stability Washington has claimed to want all along.

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

For many decades after World War II, American ambitions in the Middle East were defined by its global competition with the Soviet Union, which gave Washington an outsize interest in regional politics but made it wary of overt military intervention. The current Middle East order, established by the George H. W. Bush administration after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in the Gulf War of 1990–91, has been defined by American primacy. Presented with a historic opportunity to secure uncontested dominance over a long-contested region, Washington made itself indispensable by setting up military bases and security arrangements to contain Iraq and Iran. Its military and political support underpinned the survival of nearly every regime in the region.

To legitimize its role as something more than predatory domination, Washington launched the Arab-Israeli peace process in hopes of integrating its Arab allies and Israel into a common security framework. The result was a region divided between an American-led bloc that included Israel, Turkey, and almost every Arab state, and an opposing, less formal bloc that included Iran, Syria under the Assad dynasty, and nonstate actors such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. This structure remained remarkably unchanged through three decades of dramatic changes in global, regional, and American politics.

In the American telling, this order has provided a degree of stability while protecting core U.S. interests such as the oil trade, Israeli security, and counterterrorism. And in many ways, that has been true. Israel has not faced a state-level threat or fought a war against a peer competitor since 1973, which perhaps led it to underestimate the challenge of attacking Iran. Arab countries have worked with Israel against their common enemies despite the lack of a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the most part, oil has flowed consistently at reasonable prices. No rival great power has seriously challenged American primacy—not even China, which has been content to sit back and take advantage of the economic opportunities made possible by the American provision of security.

For most people, the U.S. order meant only violence and deprivation.

For Washington, the strategic benefits accrued from this order seemed to justify the costs of the wars required to sustain it. But the price was much higher for those who live in the region. The past 35 years have seen Israel enter numerous smaller wars against its much weaker neighbors, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process completely fall apart, Hamas attack Israel on October 7, and Israel subsequently embark on the destruction of Gaza. In Iraq, the United States inflicted a dozen years of punishing sanctions, intermittent bombing, and failed regime change and counterproliferation efforts, followed by the disastrous 2003 invasion and occupation, all at tremendous human cost. Under American stewardship, catastrophic wars have shattered Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

The regional order rested on American security guarantees not only to Arab states but also, critically, to the autocrats who sat atop them. Keeping democratic aspirations at bay was as vital to this bargain as protection against Iranian military attack. For a brief moment during the 2010–11 Arab uprisings, the drive for change seemed unstoppable, but otherwise the arrangement worked. Nearly all regimes within the American alliance system held on to power; most tightened their grip in the protests’ wake. American support for neoliberal economic reforms encouraged those regimes to pursue privatization schemes that turbocharged elite corruption while impoverishing the majority of the population. And Washington’s campaign against terrorism encouraged its allies to embrace intrusive forms of surveillance and repress potential opposition in the name of security. Although the wealthy Gulf oil states and small slivers of Arab elites flourished within this system, for most people the American order meant only violence, hopelessness, and deprivation. By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other........

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