See Red Sea
See Red Sea
As U.S. engagement declines, major regional powers steadily shape and set security and economic arrangements through new multilateral frameworks such as BRICS+.
UPDATE: The consequences of Washington’s diminishing influence in the Middle East have not been limited to the current conflict. As U.S. engagement in the region declined in the years leading up to October 7, major regional powers steadily increased their efforts to shape and set security arrangements. Indeed, beginning in 2019, governments across the region began to mend previously fraught relations. This unusual regional reset was driven not only by economic priorities—overcoming frictions that had previously disrupted or held back trade and growth—but also by the perception that Washington’s interest in managing Middle East conflicts was waning.
Only the Middle East Can Fix the Middle East
The Path to a Post-American Regional Order
By Dalia Dassa Kaye and Sanam Vakil (excerpt)
In the early weeks of 2024, as the catastrophic war in the Gaza Strip began to inflame the broader region, the stability of the Middle East appeared to be once again at the center of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. In the initial days after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the Biden administration moved two aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear-powered submarine to the Middle East, while a steady stream of senior U.S. officials, including President Joe Biden, began making high-profile trips to the region.
Then, as the conflict became more difficult to contain, the United States went further. In early November, in response to attacks on U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed groups, the United States conducted strikes on weapons sites in Syria used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; in early January, U.S. forces killed a senior commander of one of these groups in Baghdad. And in mid-January, after weeks of attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea by the Houthi movement, which is also supported by Iran, the United States, together with the United Kingdom, initiated a series of strikes on Houthi strongholds in Yemen.
Despite this show of force, it would be unwise to bet on the United States’ committing major diplomatic and security resources to the Middle East over the longer term. Well before Hamas’s October 7 attacks, successive U.S. administrations had signaled their intent to shift away from the region to devote more attention to a rising China. The Biden administration has also been contending with Russia’s war in Ukraine, further limiting its bandwidth for coping with the Middle East. By 2023, U.S. officials had largely given up on a revived nuclear agreement with Iran, seeking instead to reach informal de-escalation arrangements with their Iranian counterparts. At the same time, the administration was bolstering the military capacity of regional partners such as Saudi Arabia in an effort to transfer some of the security burden from Washington. Despite Biden’s early reluctance to do business with Riyadh—whose leadership U.S. intelligence believes was responsible for the 2018 killing of the Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi—the president prioritized a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. In pursuing the deal, the United States was willing to offer significant incentives to both sides while mostly ignoring the Palestinian issue.
October 7 upended this approach, underscoring the centrality of the Palestinian issue and forcing the United States into more direct military engagement. Yet remarkably, the war in Gaza has not led to significant shifts in Washington’s underlying policy orientation. The administration continues to push for Saudi normalization despite Israeli opposition to a separate state for the Palestinians, which the Saudis have made a condition of any such agreement. And U.S. officials seem unlikely to end their effort to disentangle the United States from Middle East conflicts. If anything, the war’s increasingly complicated dynamics may result in even less U.S. appetite for engagement in the region. Doubling down on commitments in the Middle East is also not likely to be a winning strategy for either American political party in a crucial election year.
Of course, the United States will continue to be involved in the Middle East. If missile strikes on U.S. forces result in American deaths or if a terrorist attack linked to the Gaza conflict kills American civilians, it could force a greater U.S. military engagement than the administration might want. But waiting for the United States to take the lead in effectively managing Gaza and delivering a lasting Middle East peace would be like waiting for Godot: current regional and global dynamics simply make it too difficult for Washington to play that dominant role. That doesn’t mean that other global powers will replace the United States. Neither European nor Chinese leaders have demonstrated much interest in or capacity for taking on the job, even as U.S. influence wanes. Given this emerging reality, regional powers—particularly Israel’s immediate Arab neighbors Egypt and Jordan, along with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which have been coordinating since the war began—urgently need to step up and define a collective way forward.
Finding common ground after Hamas’s brutal October 7 attacks and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza will be exceptionally difficult. And the longer the war continues, the greater the risk of broader fractures across the Middle East. But in the years preceding the attacks, both Arab and non-Arab states showed the potential for new forms of cooperation in what amounted to a major reset of relations across the region. Even after months of war, many of these ties have remained intact. Now, before this trend reverses, these governments must come together to build lasting mechanisms for conflict prevention and, ultimately, peace.
Most urgently, regional powers must support a meaningful political process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But they should also take decisive steps to prevent such a cataclysm from happening again. In particular, they should seek to establish new and stronger regional security arrangements that can provide stability with or without U.S. leadership. It is well past time for the Middle East to have a standing forum for regional security that establishes a permanent venue for dialogue among its own powers. Gleaning opportunity from tragedy will take hard work and a commitment at the highest political levels. But as distant as this vision may seem today, the potential exists for Middle East leaders to arrest the spiral of violence and move the region in a more positive direction.
ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE
Despite mounting frustration with the Biden administration for not taking decisive action to end the war, some Arab leaders, along with pro-interventionists in Washington, may be eager to see the United States “back” in the Middle East. The Biden administration’s swift diplomatic and military response—and its willingness to use force against Iranian-aligned groups—has suggested that the region is once more at the heart of U.S. national security concerns. In fact, in terms of military might, the United States never left: at the time of the October 7 attacks, tens of thousands of U.S. forces were already stationed in the region, and Washington continues to maintain sizable military bases in Bahrain and Qatar, as well as smaller military deployments in Syria and Iraq.
But the United States’ military and diplomatic activity since October 7 has not instilled confidence. For one thing, the administration’s effort to prevent a wider regional conflict has been decidedly mixed. At one of the most concerning flash points, Israel’s simmering conflict with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, Washington has been unable to prevent growing violence on both sides. Along with significant military and civilian casualties, tens of thousands of civilians have been forced to evacuate towns in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has thus far refused to withdraw its forces from the border in exchange for economic incentives, and Israel—which has already assassinated a top Hamas official in Beirut— has signaled that time is running out for diplomacy.
Meanwhile, the United States has struggled to contain military pressure from Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Since the start of the war, U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have faced more than 150 attacks from these groups. And despite a series of retaliatory strikes by the United States and the United Kingdom, Washington has been unable to put an end to the Houthis’ relentless missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea. Already, the Houthis have been able to cause significant disruptions to international trade, forcing major shipping companies to avoid the Suez Canal. Notably, U.S. attempts to corral a multinational maritime force to counter the threat have been unable to attract regional partners such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which remain wary of the administration’s Gaza policies.
As Washington’s military leverage diminishes, its diplomatic muscle has also weakened. Rather than showing resolve, the continual visits of senior administration officials to the region have demonstrated how little sway the United States retains—or in the case of Israel, the administration’s unwillingness to use it. During the initial months of the war, one of the administration’s few apparent accomplishments was a one-week pause in fighting in late November, which led to the release of over 100 Israeli and foreign hostages and a modest delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. But even in that case, Qatari and Egyptian mediation was crucial. Otherwise, the United States has been unwilling (at least as of this writing) to call for a cease-fire, and the administration’s public diplomacy has mostly been limited to rhetorical efforts to restrain the worst impulses of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government.
The administration has been more vocal in promoting “day after” peace ideas focused on what it calls a “revitalised” Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank and Gaza and regional support for rebuilding Gaza. But regional powers, particularly the wealthy Gulf Arab states, have made clear that they will not endorse such plans without irreversible steps toward Palestinian statehood. After U.S. officials began speaking more publicly about the need for a two-state solution as part of a larger normalization pact with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu flatly rejected the possibility and insisted that Israel must remain in full security control of Palestinian areas. But even centrist Israeli officials expressed astonishment that the United States was pressing peace initiatives while the all-out war against Hamas was continuing. Meanwhile, the administration’s backing of Israel in the fighting and its perceived lack of empathy for Palestinian suffering have created significant obstacles to attracting regional support, let alone Palestinian buy-in, for any American-led plan.
The United States will continue to be a major player in the region because of its military assets and its unparalleled relationship with Israel. But any expectation that Washington will be able to achieve a grand bargain that could definitively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is detached from the realities of today’s Middle East. In the end, major diplomatic breakthroughs are most likely to come from, and depend on, the region itself.
GOING IT ALONE, TOGETHER
The consequences of Washington’s diminishing influence in the Middle East have not been limited to the current conflict. As U.S. engagement in the region declined in the years leading up to October 7, major regional powers steadily increased their efforts to shape and set security arrangements. Indeed, beginning in 2019, governments across the region began to mend previously fraught relations. This unusual regional reset was driven not only by economic priorities—overcoming frictions that had previously disrupted or held back trade and growth—but also by the perception that Washington’s interest in managing Middle East conflicts was waning.
Take the rapprochement between the Gulf states and Iran. In 2019, the UAE began restoring bilateral ties with Iran after a three-year rupture, seeing an opportunity to directly manage relations and protect its interests from Iranian-backed groups that had been disrupting Gulf shipping and threatening Emirati tourism and trade. Abu Dhabi formally resumed diplomatic ties with Tehran in 2022, paving the way for Riyadh to follow suit. In March 2023, the longtime rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran announced that they were resuming relations in an accord brokered by China after months of back-channel talks moderated by Oman and Iraq. The United States had no part in these deals.
Meanwhile, in 2021, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE ended a three-and-a-half-year blockade of Qatar that had been motivated principally by Qatar’s backing of Muslim Brotherhood groups, its close ties with Iran and Turkey, and its activist Al Jazeera television channel. Around the same time, the UAE and Saudi Arabia reconciled with Turkey, which they had previously shunned in response to Turkish support for Qatar and for groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. (Saudi- Turkish ties had also been strained because of a Turkish judicial investigation into the murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.) By resuming ties, the Saudis and Emiratis opened the door to crucial Gulf investment in the struggling Turkish economy. And in May 2023, Arab leaders invited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League, marking the end of more than a decade of isolation during Syria’s brutal civil war.
As part of this broader reset, governments across the Middle East also began to participate in a variety of regional forums. The Baghdad Conference for Cooperation and Partnership, which met for the first time in Baghdad in 2021 and again in Amman in 2022 to discuss Iraq’s stability, convened a wide array of previous rivals—including Iran and Turkey, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and Jordan and Egypt. The East Mediterranean Gas Forum, established in 2020, brought together Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, and Jordan, along with representatives from the Palestinian Authority, in what is designed to be a regular dialogue built around gas security and decarbonization. And the so-called I2U2, a group that includes India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States, was set up in 2021 to foster cross-regional partnerships focusing on health, infrastructure, and energy.
Another aspect of this regional reset was Israel’s normalization with several Arab governments. In the 2020 Abraham Accords, Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE agreed to establish formal ties with Israel, creating opportunities for new economic relations and trade. Notably, one goal of the accords was to pave the way for new direct security relationships between Israel and the Arab world. Before the October 7 attacks, the Biden administration had high hopes that Saudi Arabia, as a leading member of the Arab world, would also join this group. Building on those accords, the March 2022 Negev Summit brought together Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the UAE, and the United States to encourage economic and security cooperation in what was intended to be a regular meeting.
Glaringly absent from the normalization deals, however, was the Palestinian issue, which was largely set aside. As a result, Jordan refused to participate in the Negev Summit, and as tensions over Israel’s settlements in the West Bank flared in early 2023, a further meeting of the group was repeatedly postponed. Now, with the devastation of Gaza, any further progress will be contingent on not just ending the war but also building a viable plan for a Palestinian state.
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