Michael Corleone’s famous lament in The Godfather, Part III could serve as a motto for every American president of the past three decades when it comes to the Middle East: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Bill Clinton promised to focus “like a laser beam” on the economy but would spend the end of his presidency consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. George W. Bush came to office pledging a “humble” foreign policy and ended up invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” only to be drawn into the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a military campaign against the Islamic State (or ISIS), and an all-consuming negotiation with Iran. Joe Biden tried to deprioritize the region—until Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel consumed much of Biden’s presidency. And most strikingly, Donald Trump, having campaigned against “endless wars,” has ended up gambling on a reckless war against Iran that could define his second term.

The Iran war has given new impetus to a long-standing debate about U.S. policy in the Middle East. Writing in Foreign Affairs in August, Michael Fuchs argued that the conflict—an “epic disaster”—should spur a long-overdue withdrawal. The United States, he contends, should pull all its bases and forces out of the region and “end its role as guarantor of regional order,” freeing Washington to concentrate on higher-priority objectives in Asia and Europe. It is a serious argument that will resonate with the many Americans who have watched their country spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in the region with little to show for it.

This diagnosis of U.S. overcommitment is right. But the prescription of “letting go”—and essentially leaving the region to its fate—is not. The Iran war has not demonstrated that the United States no longer has interests in the Middle East; it has demonstrated, very painfully, that it does and that the way Washington has been pursuing them for a generation is unsustainable. The lesson is not to abandon the region but to rethink an approach that has become both too costly and counterproductive. The United States should instead defend a narrower set of core interests with a smaller military footprint, more diplomacy, more alternatives, and more partners. Neither doubling down nor walking away offers a way out of the cycle that has trapped every recent president. A more pragmatic and disciplined middle course might.

Consider what critics of U.S. foreign policy in the region get right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost at least $2 trillion each, along with the lives of thousands of U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of local civilians. The wars severely tarnished the United States’ global reputation and left a generation of Americans skeptical that the country could be a force for good in the world. Twenty-five years of counterterrorism operations did significantly degrade the global terrorist threat, but they also left the region no freer and, in many places, less stable. Now the Iran war has added new consequences of U.S. hubris and military overreach: tens of billions of dollars in direct military costs, thousands killed or wounded, the diversion of military assets from other vital regions, depleted stocks of scarce munitions, strained alliances, a windfall for Russia from higher oil prices, an even more hard-line Iranian regime, and the biggest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The critics are also right that the U.S. military presence in the region, which was long considered essential for deterring war and keeping energy flowing, has in many ways become a liability. The network of large bases that Washington built after the 1991 Gulf War is now vulnerable to Iranian drones and ballistic missiles, offering Tehran targets and leverage rather than deterring it from taking military action. Forward-deployed forces, meanwhile, tempt U.S. leaders to reach for military solutions, and the need to protect those forces creates a self-defeating loop in which the threat to U.S. forces becomes a large part of the rationale for keeping them there. And critics are right that U.S. support for regional partners has been too easy to take for granted and too easily abused. Washington’s almost unconditional backing for Israel, for example, has created a moral hazard—an implicit insurance policy that encourages Israeli risk-taking and draws the United States into conflicts it did not choose and cannot control. The U.S. dependence on Gulf partners to maintain its security presence has likewise led to Washington’s muted criticism of repression and acquiescence to destabilizing interventions in places such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.

As a result, U.S. domestic politics are moving in the direction of restraint if not outright withdrawal. A large majority of Americans tell pollsters that the Iran war is not worth fighting, and voters in both parties, especially younger ones, are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. security partnership with Israel and of “forever wars” that do not seem to make the country safer or address the issues they care most about. Any strategy that ignores that skepticism is unlikely to survive the next election or to be funded by the Congress that is likely to emerge from it.

Acknowledging that U.S. policy has failed, however, is not the same as concluding that U.S. interests have vanished. Some of the most important reasons for past American engagement in the region—for example, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, heavy U.S. dependence on imported oil, threats from al-Qaeda and ISIS at their peak, and a vulnerable Israel’s need for protection against hostile Arab armies—have indeed faded. But the interests that remain are real, as the Iran war has so vividly illustrated.

Take the continued importance of energy supplies. The United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas and imports little crude from the Persian Gulf, leading many to conclude that the region’s energy no longer matters much to Americans. But the notion of U.S. “energy independence” is vastly overstated. Oil is a fungible commodity with a........

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