Foreign powers often claim to bring stability to the Middle East, but their rivalries have instead turned local wars into endless regional crises.
From the ruins of Aleppo to the streets of Sana’a, one pattern is impossible to ignore: when foreign powers intervene, conflicts rarely remain local. The United States, Russia, and Iran all insist they are protecting stability or fighting terrorism, yet their actions on the ground often deepen divides, prolong wars, and transform local struggles into regional crises.

The central question is this: do these outside powers prevent total collapse—or make conflicts worse? The answer is mixed. At times, their involvement has stopped wars from spiraling completely out of control. But far more often, their actions have poured fuel on already burning fires. In the Middle East, a crisis in one country almost always spills into another.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled Saddam Hussein but unleashed sectarian violence that crossed borders and gave rise to ISIS. Iran backed Shi’a militias, while Russia’s military intervention in Syria in 2015 kept Bashar al-Assad in power but locked the country in an endless war.
What began as local disputes—Iraq’s power struggle, Syria’s civil war, Yemen’s rebellion—quickly turned into proxy wars fought on behalf of outside powers. This shows how foreign actors rarely “fix” a conflict; instead, their moves reshape the entire region in ways........

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