Ray Takeyh
The Middle East is a place that most American presidents want to avoid. Yet inevitably, they find themselves mired in its quarrels. Despite periodic calls for a pivot toward other geostrategic challenges, the perception that its core interests are at stake in the region has kept the United States from leaving. The oil depositories of the Persian Gulf remain vital to the global economy. A menacing Iran sits near the nuclear threshold. The Arab world’s political dysfunction has produced generations of militants and terrorists, a collection of whom attacked the United States in 2001, resulting in the worst mass-casualty event it had suffered on its homeland since Pearl Harbor.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, U.S. presidents have tried to solve the Middle East’s conundrums through armed invasions, diplomacy, and limited humanitarian interventions. All have failed. Some of these efforts spawned even more pernicious phenomena. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example, gave rise to a new legion of terrorists. The limited 2011 military foray into Libya resulted in chaos across a large swath of North Africa. And yet administration after administration has remained, in some way, enchanted with the idea of imposing a regional vision.
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