U.S. Middle East Policy Has Failed

Following Hamas’s brutal massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, Israel’s massive military campaign against the group has brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of annihilation and the Middle East to the edge of a broader war. A slew of incidents since then suggests that the conflict could escalate even further: the United States’ sinking of three Houthi vessels in response to the group’s attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea; a string of assassinations of high-level members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps conducted by Israel and the United States in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; a recent warning by Israeli war cabinet Minister Benny Gantz that “the time for a diplomatic solution is running out” regarding Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel and vice versa; and reports that the Biden administration is drawing up plans for the United States to respond militarily on multiple fronts in the region.

Amid this turmoil, Washington continues to reach for its old playbook: throwing money, weapons, and military assets at the region. The Biden administration remains adamant that pursuing an Israel-Saudi normalization deal centered on U.S. security guarantees to both countries is the key to achieving lasting peace and prosperity in the Middle East. On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken even visited Saudi Arabia, where he spoke of Riyadh’s continued interest in striking such a deal.

This approach is bound to backfire.

Washington should face reality: U.S. Middle East policy has failed. At the heart of this failure are the United States’ main regional partnerships. The two crucial U.S. partners in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are liabilities to the United States, not assets. Although the two states maintain considerable political, economic, and social differences, they both consistently undermine U.S. interests and the values that the United States claims to stand for. Washington should fundamentally reorient its approach to both countries, moving from unconditional support to arm’s-length relationships.

Israel’s war in Gaza epitomizes the violence done to stated U.S. values while also jeopardizing U.S. interests in the Middle East. The destruction wreaked by this war will take generations to fix, and Washington’s global image has been permanently tarnished by its support for such actions.

In the days immediately following the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Israel pledged to destroy Hamas while admitting that although forces were “balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.” The focus does not appear to have changed much since then as the Israeli military has undertaken what some critics of the campaign consider to be collective punishment, killing Palestinian civilians with U.S.-made weapons. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health authorities, an estimated 70 percent of Palestinians killed by Israel have been women and children. Approximately 1.9 million people—more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population—have been displaced due to the war, and more than 45 percent of Gaza’s total housing stock was destroyed or damaged by mid-November, according to United Nations calculations based on figures reported by the Hamas-controlled Gazan government.

Although Israel claims otherwise, its strategy appears to be having much less of an impact on Hamas and its capabilities. At the same time, the war may end up planting the seeds for future armed resistance through its indiscriminate killing of civilians.

The prospects of escalation into a broader regional conflict with direct U.S. involvement increase  by the day. Skirmishes between Israel and Lebanon-based militant Islamist group Hezbollah are escalating dramatically, and there have been at least 115 attacks on U.S. military personnel throughout the Middle East by Iranian proxies since Oct. 17. Israel has urged the United States to directly confront Iran over these attacks, despite it being against U.S. interests to get drawn into a broader war.

Washington appears either unable or unwilling to leverage its so-called special relationship with Israel or sway Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who often boasts of his ability to manipulate the United States. Instead, Washington has continued its blank-check approach to Israel, most recently providing more than $14 billion in military aid in a package approved in November and risking massive escalation in the process.

The other key U.S. partner in the region, Saudi Arabia, is one of the most autocratic states in the world. Riyadh commits widespread human rights abuses at home and actively supports other autocracies engaged in similar activities throughout the region.

Despite Riyadh and its allies going to great lengths to present Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a reformer leading the kingdom into the future, the young ruler has embarked on a campaign of power consolidation and centralization. Regime control over state and society has never been greater.

Saudi Arabia is a principal source of political, economic, and societal disorder across the Middle East. Riyadh is connected to nearly every conflict zone and geopolitical fault line spanning the region. The U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia epitomizes the “myth of authoritarian stability”—the notion that autocratic rulers keep the peace in the region. But the opposite is true: Rather than being the solution to the region’s issues, these actors both create and exacerbate the greatest underlying problems in the Middle East.

The most egregious example of Riyadh’s destabilizing behavior is the military intervention it spearheaded alongside the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. Since 2015, this military campaign has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and caused more than 377,000 deaths, according to U.N. estimates. The war is at a fragile standstill primarily due to Riyadh’s inability to defeat the Houthis, and after nearly nine years of ruinous fighting, the Houthis are arguably stronger than ever before. In response to the Israel-Hamas war, the group is carrying out regular attacks on commercial shipping passing through the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, adding a dangerous new flash point to the ongoing conflict.

Ultimately, unwavering U.S. support has emboldened Israel and Saudi Arabia to pursue reckless policies, knowing that the United States will come to their aid and will not hold them responsible. Common sense suggests that Washington should radically alter course. Unfortunately, that’s not what the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden seems to have in mind.

The Biden administration has centered its regional policies around efforts to broker normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel as an extension of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, which witnessed Israel formally normalize relations with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in 2020 and were later expanded to include Morocco and Sudan.

In return for normalizing relations with Israel, the Saudi crown prince has repeatedly made his demands clear: The United States must provide the kingdom with a formal security guarantee and assist in the development of Riyadh’s civilian nuclear program.

Since Oct. 7, Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. officials have repeatedly reiterated their commitment to striking this deal. Saudi-Israel normalization has been packaged together in what U.S. commentator Thomas L. Friedman referred to as a “single formula” to somehow preserve a two-state solution, balance against Iran, and counter China’s ambitions in the Middle East.

Biden has repeatedly claimed that Hamas launched its attack on Oct. 7 with the intention of derailing Saudi-Israel normalization. Numerous U.S. administration officials have since stressed their continued efforts toward brokering such an agreement.

Israeli officials have also expressed their desire to return to such a deal, with Netanyahu claiming in November that the prospects of normalization “will be even riper” after the war.

For its part, Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a balancing act, using rhetoric that is critical of Israel’s campaign in Gaza while also reiterating Riyadh’s continued interest in normalization. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recently traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with Mohammed bin Salman and continue the push for this deal.

A few months before Oct. 7, Axios reported that there were rumors that Israel was pushing for its own U.S. security guarantee as part of this Saudi normalization agreement, and that policymakers were hoping that this addition would make the deal more palatable in Washington. This outcome now seems even more likely.

In the context of normalization discussions prior to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu referred to the Palestinian issue as merely a “checkbox” while also presenting a map of what he referred to as the “new Middle East” to the United Nations in September, in which the Palestinian territories were shown as part of Israel.

In fact, Netanyahu recently reiterated to Likud party parliamentarians that he remains “the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza and [the West Bank] after the war,” and according to Israeli media, he is reportedly pressuring Washington in private to stop publicly endorsing a two-state solution. Netanyahu recently took credit for the collapse of the Oslo Accords, saying he was “proud” of preventing a two-state solution—a stated U.S. policy objective for decades—and vowing to continue ensuring no such solution could emerge.

But the war in Gaza should demonstrate that trying to sidestep the future of the Palestinian people is a foolish strategy. Nor can you separate it from the broader illiberal and unstable regional order. It remains intimately tied to the broader aspirations of the Arab masses for genuine political, economic, and social freedom—and it is something that cannot be forcibly sidelined through frameworks such as the Abraham Accords.

U.S. support for the accords and Saudi-Israel normalization framework is based on the flawed underlying assumption that the United States and its partners are capable of forcibly upholding an illiberal regional order in the Middle East without incurring considerable political, human, and economic costs in the process. Providing Israel or Saudi Arabia with a U.S. security guarantee would amount to a catastrophic miscalculation with long-term ramifications for the United States.

Washington should seize this moment to fundamentally transform its approach to its Middle East partnerships. By moving from reflexive support toward arm’s-length relationships, the United States can end its complicity in its partners’ policies while fundamentally reorienting its Middle East policy.

Of course, such a fundamental reorientation will be difficult: That policy has, for decades, been rooted in an array of misconceptions and structural barriers to change. An entrenched system of lobbying and special interests designed to preserve status quo policies represents the most immediate obstacle. Among the U.S. political elite, the perceived political costs of transforming the U.S. relationship with Israel and Saudi Arabia have long been an impediment to reform.

Coupled with this is a consensus view inside Washington’s Beltway that is often incapable of seriously considering greater detachment from the Middle East. The search for funding, professional ambition, and socialization all work to ensure that people working on the region tend to favor the broad strokes of U.S Middle East policy.

Pushing for change will be an uphill battle, but the need has never been clearer. After decades of projecting force into the region without a coherent strategy, the United States has spent trillions of dollars but failed to produce regional stability or advance U.S. interests. These interests in the region are limited, and their advancement does not require unconditional political or military support for any actor.

Washington’s unwavering devotion to its current approach to the region has produced a vicious cycle: By committing itself to the root of regional instability, the United States repeatedly finds itself having to confront challenges that are largely the product of its own presence and policies in the Middle East.

The human and material costs of Washington’s Middle East policy have been immense. What will billions more in military aid and an expansive U.S. presence in the Middle East accomplish in the years to come? History suggests that it will produce continued damage to U.S. interests and regional stability.

It is past time to change course in the Middle East. Failure to do so risks formalizing Washington’s commitment to a cycle of instability that will continue to impact the region—and undermine U.S. interests—for generations.