Michael Corleone’s famous lament in The Godfather, Part III could serve as a fitting 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 domestic economy, only to spend the twilight of his presidency consumed by the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict and efforts to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. George W. Bush came to office pledging a “humble” foreign policy devoid of nation-building, yet ended up leading the nation into the long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama boldly announced a strategic “pivot to Asia,” but found himself repeatedly dragged back by the turbulent aftermath of the Arab Spring, a massive military campaign against the Islamic State, and all-consuming negotiations with Iran.
Joe Biden likewise tried to deprioritize the region to focus on peer competitors—until Hamas’s devastating October 7, 2023, attack on Israel upended his foreign policy and consumed much of his remaining time in office. And most strikingly, Donald Trump, having campaigned aggressively against “endless wars” and foreign entanglements, ultimately gambled on a reckless military conflict with Iran that threatens to define his second term in the White House.
This latest war with Iran has injected intense new momentum into a long-standing, polarized debate over the fundamental direction of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. Writing in Foreign Affairs, analyst Michael Fuchs argued that the conflict—which he characterized as an “epic disaster”—should serve as the catalyst for a long-overdue, complete American withdrawal from the region. He contends that the United States should pull all military forces and bases out of the theater and formally end its role as the primary guarantor of regional order. This shift, according to the argument, would finally free Washington to concentrate its finite resources and strategic attention on higher-priority geopolitical objectives in Asia and Europe. It is a serious, compelling argument that resonates deeply with millions of Americans who have watched their government spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in the Middle East over the past generation, seemingly with little lasting progress to show for it.
This diagnosis of chronic U.S. overcommitment is fundamentally correct. However, the proposed prescription of simply “letting go”—effectively abandoning the region to its own unpredictable fate—is deeply flawed. The Iran war has not demonstrated that the United States no longer has vital interests in the Middle East; rather, it has demonstrated, in the most painful way possible, that those interests remain very real, and that the way Washington has pursued them for a generation is completely unsustainable.
The proper lesson to draw is not that the United States should cowardly abandon the region, but that it must urgently rethink an approach that has become simultaneously too costly and counterproductive. Instead, Washington should defend a narrower, more disciplined set of core interests backed by a smaller military footprint, more robust diplomacy, diversified energy alternatives, and genuine regional partners. Neither doubling down on the old playbook nor walking away entirely offers a realistic escape from the cycle that has trapped every recent president. A pragmatic, disciplined middle course, however, just might.
Foreign Follies
To understand why the debate has reached this fever pitch, one must consider what critics of past U.S. foreign policy in the region consistently get right. The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq carried staggering price tags of at least $2 trillion each, alongside the tragic loss of thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands of local civilians. These protracted conflicts severely tarnished America’s global reputation and left an entire generation of citizens deeply skeptical that their country could act as a positive, stabilizing force abroad.
While a quarter-century of relentless counterterrorism operations did significantly degrade the global threat posed by organized jihadist networks, they also left the broader region no freer and, in many areas, markedly less stable. Now, the war with Iran has piled on an entirely new catastrophic ledger of consequences stemming from hubris and military overreach: tens of billions of dollars in direct military expenditures, thousands of casualties, the dangerous diversion of military assets from other vital theaters, critically depleted stocks of scarce munitions, severely strained alliances, an economic windfall for Russia driven by soaring oil prices, the consolidation of an even more hard-line regime in Tehran, and the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
Critics are also entirely correct in pointing out that the sprawling U.S. military presence in the region—long heralded by defense planners as essential for deterring war and ensuring the uninterrupted flow of global energy—has increasingly transformed into a strategic liability. The vast network of large, concentrated bases that Washington established after the 1991 Gulf War has become dangerously vulnerable to modern Iranian drones and ballistic missiles, effectively offering Tehran high-value targets and asymmetrical leverage rather than deterring aggression. Furthermore, the presence of forward-deployed forces constantly tempts U.S. leaders to reach for military solutions when crises flare. The continuous requirement to protect those vulnerable troops creates a self-defeating feedback loop, where the very threat to U.S. personnel becomes the primary justification for keeping them there.
Moreover, critics rightly argue that U.S. support for regional partners has historically been too easy to take for granted and frequently abused. Washington’s almost unconditional diplomatic and military backing for Israel, for instance, has generated a severe moral hazard—functioning essentially as an implicit insurance policy that encourages Israeli risk-taking and repeatedly draws the United States into regional conflicts it did not choose and cannot fully control. Similarly, Washington’s traditional dependence on autocratic Gulf partners to maintain its regional security architecture has led to muted public criticism of internal repression and passive acquiescence to destabilizing, aggressive interventions in places such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.
Consequently, U.S. domestic politics are shifting decisively in the direction of strategic restraint, if not outright isolationist withdrawal. Overwhelming majorities of surveyed Americans express the view that the war with Iran is not worth fighting. Voters across the political spectrum, particularly younger demographics, display growing skepticism regarding the unconditional security partnership with Israel and the endless cycle of “forever wars” that fail to make the homeland safer or address the pressing domestic issues voters care about most. Any grand strategy that ignores this deep-seated public skepticism is unlikely to survive the next electoral cycle or maintain congressional funding.
The Interests Abide
Acknowledging that past U.S. policies have failed, however, is not the same as concluding that vital American interests have vanished. Some of the primary drivers behind historical American engagement in the region—such as Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, heavy U.S. dependence on imported crude, the peak operational threats of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and a vulnerable Israel’s historic need for protection against hostile, massed Arab conventional armies—have indeed faded or evolved. Yet, the remaining interests are remarkably real and enduring, as the recent war with Iran has vividly illustrated.
Take, for instance, the continued, undeniable importance of global energy supplies. While it is true that the United States has become a net exporter of oil and gas and imports relatively little crude directly from the Persian Gulf, the widespread notion of complete U.S. “energy independence” is vastly overstated. Oil remains a globally fungible commodity priced in a single integrated market. As the Iran war demonstrated dramatically, when supply is constrained anywhere on the map, American consumers pay significantly higher prices at the pump, while concurrent economic slowdowns in export-dependent Asia and Europe inevitably drag down the broader U.S. economy.
Nor is the world weaning itself off fossil fuels as rapidly as many optimists once hoped. Despite a genuine, highly welcomed boom in renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower, global consumption of oil and coal recently reached an all-time high. Fossil fuels still account for roughly 80 percent of the world’s total energy supply, down only modestly from about 85 percent in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the relentless, exponential expansion of energy-hungry artificial intelligence data centers is pushing global electricity and power demand even higher.
The Iran war served as a brutal reminder of these physical realities. As anticipated, Tehran responded to U.S. and Israeli military strikes by targeting regional energy infrastructure and effectively shutting down commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Historically, roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and nearly a fifth of its liquefied natural gas flowed through this narrow maritime chokepoint, alongside vital shipments of fertilizers, refined products, and critical industrial goods. The resulting spike in global crude prices drove U.S. retail gasoline prices up by more than 40 percent and diesel by over 70 percent, instantly fueling domestic inflation and forcing interest rates higher.
Only a combination of surprisingly sharp Chinese oil import cuts—facilitated by aggressive strategic stockpiling and a rapid pivot toward renewables—alongside emergency releases from strategic petroleum reserves and alternative Saudi and Emirati overland pipelines that bypass the strait, kept the economic damage from being catastrophic. When contemplating whether the United States still needs to care about energy flowing out of the Middle East, policymakers must remember that a mere one percent annual decline in U.S. gross domestic product triggered by an oil supply shock costs the American economy over $300 billion in lost output, while a comparable one percent hit to global output costs the world well over $1 trillion. Those are tangible consequences that directly impact every American household.
Nuclear nonproliferation represents another vital, enduring interest. Some academic scholars have argued that a nuclear-armed Iran could theoretically be deterred through traditional Cold War doctrines, and that the horizontal spread of nuclear weapons might even stabilize the region by enforcing a grim balance of power. Others suggest that simply removing the threat of U.S. military intervention would cause Iran to voluntarily abandon its nuclear ambitions, rendering the issue moot.
While either outcome remains theoretically possible, no prudent American president is likely to gamble national security on those assumptions, and for good reason. A nuclear-armed Iran would operate under the protective umbrella of its arsenal, knowing it could safely maintain or escalate its financial and military support for regional proxy militias, ramp up meddling in neighboring affairs, or intensify conflicts with Israel without fearing ultimate regime change.
Furthermore, if Iran successfully acquires the bomb, regional rivals would almost certainly follow suit. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who signed mutual defense pacts with nuclear-armed Pakistan and Turkey in recent years, has explicitly stated that if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, Saudi Arabia will feel compelled to acquire its own atomic deterrent. Similarly, Turkish officials have signaled that their country would seriously consider a parallel path. A Middle East characterized by multiple nuclear-armed rival powers would be exponentially more dangerous than the status quo, drastically escalating the baseline risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident or actual employment. The theoretical logic of total disengagement implies that Washington could calmly live with an Iranian bomb much as it manages North Korea’s arsenal, but the vast majority of Americans would likely prefer never to test that hypothesis.
The threat posed by transnational terrorism has similarly diminished from its historical peaks but has not been eradicated. Decades of relentless intelligence sharing and targeted military pressure have decimated al-Qaeda’s core leadership and stripped ISIS of its territorial “caliphate.” No foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. Consequently, Washington can and should allocate significantly fewer financial and military resources to counterterrorism than it did during the height of the global war on terror.
However, ISIS and its decentralized regional affiliates retain the operational capability to conduct mass-casualty attacks, as demonstrated by deadly 2024 assaults near Moscow and in Kerman, Iran, as well as subsequent inspired attacks in New Orleans and Australia. Moreover, the chaotic fall of the Assad regime in Syria led to the escape or release of hundreds of battle-hardened ISIS fighters from detention facilities. At a minimum, maintaining a modest counterterrorism posture and active intelligence cooperation with regional partners remains an ongoing necessity.
Finally, the United States maintains positive, constructive economic and technological interests in the region that extend far beyond simply averting security crises. The sovereign wealth funds of Gulf Cooperation Council member states hold assets valued at well over $5 trillion, including roughly $2 trillion invested directly in U.S. assets and Treasury bonds, which actively help keep American borrowing costs lower. With a combined GDP exceeding $2 trillion, GCC nations are currently investing hundreds of billions of dollars into advanced data centers constructed in partnership with major American technology firms, firmly anchoring their infrastructure in the U.S. technology ecosystem rather than China’s sphere of influence.
As these nations expand their civil nuclear energy programs and domestic infrastructure, partnering with American enterprises serves vital U.S. commercial and strategic interests. While these economic ties alone do not justify maintaining a massive, permanent U.S. military footprint or extensive security guarantees, they significantly raise the economic cost of regional instability and geopolitical realignment toward Beijing—outcomes a total U.S. exit would actively encourage.
The Limits of Letting Go
The intellectual case for complete disengagement from the Middle East rests on a series of remarkably hopeful assumptions. According to this theoretical framework, without an active U.S. military presence, the region would naturally settle into a stable internal equilibrium. Gulf Arab states would quietly learn to accommodate Tehran rather than engaging in proxy competition or open conflict. Iran, relieved of the existential threat of American intervention, would voluntarily forgo weaponization. Israel, lacking an unconditional American security backstop, would naturally adopt a more cautious diplomatic posture while remaining strong enough to deter outright invasion. Proponents assume that national self-interest would compel regional states to keep oil flowing, that no new terrorist safe havens would take root, and that no opportunistic outside power would step in to fill the vacuum.
Some of these optimistic outcomes might eventually prove true. Combined, however, they represent a massive strategic gamble based far more on theoretical hope than on historical experience. Betting that the Middle East’s future will magically prove more benign than its turbulent past—and that profound local instability would carry no spillover costs for the United States—is a dangerous proposition.
One must consider how local actors are genuinely likely to respond to a sudden, total U.S. withdrawal. Gulf Arab states that could no longer rely on American protection would not simply submit to peaceful accommodation with Tehran; instead, they would aggressively hedge their bets by deepening military ties with external powers like Pakistan, Turkey, and China, while Saudi Arabia would likely accelerate efforts to acquire an independent nuclear capability. Israel, feeling profoundly isolated and acutely exposed, might feel compelled to launch preemptive military strikes to defend itself, prompting a devastating counter-escalation from Iran and its regional network of proxies. Iran, viewing the path to an atomic bomb as entirely clear, might finally cross the nuclear threshold. Even if Washington successfully removed every soldier and base from the region, American citizens would still feel the profound economic and security shockwaves of the resulting regional arms races, fierce security competitions, and devastating conventional conflicts.
There are also strict limits to the notion that abandoning the region would automatically grant Washington greater moral leverage on human rights. While severing security assistance, arms sales, and intelligence cooperation would theoretically free the United States to publicly lecture regional governments on internal governance, it would likely diminish actual leverage by leaving former partners feeling they have nothing left to lose. Washington might achieve a comfortable psychological distance, but it would have virtually no say over the disastrous outcomes that follow.
Historical precedent also warns that sudden withdrawals frequently trigger severe unintended consequences. When U.S. forces fully withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the immediate result was not regional stability, but the explosive rise of ISIS, which rapidly seized territory spanning the size of Great Britain, murdered innocent civilians and Americans alike, and planned international terror attacks—ultimately forcing the United States to return to launch a costly multiyear air and ground campaign. If a future administration were to unilaterally dismantle the entire U.S. military posture, terminate long-term security partnerships, and expunge Middle East contingencies from Pentagon planning, it would not eliminate the underlying necessity of intervention when the next major crisis hits; it would merely hobble Washington’s strategic options when the time finally came.
Smart Engagement
The alternative to complete disengagement from the Middle East is not stubbornly clinging to the failed approaches of the past. Some defenders of the recent escalation in Iran argue that the solution is simply to summon the political resolve to “finish the job.” This hawkish line of thinking calls for forcibly reopening the Strait of Hormuz, relentlessly bombarding Iran until the clerical regime capitulates or collapses, and indefinitely maintaining sprawling U.S. bases financed by defense budgets on an unprecedented scale.
Such an approach merely repeats the foundational error underlying decades of foreign policy failures: the blind belief that overwhelming military force can permanently solve the region’s complex political problems if applied with sufficient scale. This strategy commands virtually no support among the American public or within Congress. Instead, Washington must find a sustainable middle path to protect a realistic set of core national interests at a financial and human cost the American public is willing to bear.
That pragmatic transformation begins by abandoning the persistent fantasy of reshaping the Middle East through military force. There is a fundamental operational difference between utilizing hard power to reliably deter aggression—as the United States did with measurable success for decades—and employing it to pursue unattainable utopian goals such as forced regime change, as Washington attempted in Iraq in 2003 and more recently regarding Iran.
Second, the United States must comprehensively overhaul its antiquated military posture in the region. The current footprint—consisting of more than 50,000 troops distributed across a dozen large installations—remains far heavier than the pre-1991 Gulf War baseline. The war with Iran brutally demonstrated that these massive, concentrated bases are exceptionally vulnerable to modern missile and drone strikes, frequently handing adversaries strategic leverage rather than enhancing deterrence. Rebuilding those damaged facilities in their exact traditional configuration makes little strategic sense.
Instead, Washington can drastically optimize its military posture without sacrificing operational readiness. The United States could replace vulnerable legacy installations with a dispersed network of smaller, heavily defended logistics and access facilities located further away from primary threat vectors. These sites could be hardened with underground personnel shelters, reinforced fuel and ammunition bunkers, protected by layered state-of-the-art air and missile defenses, and stocked with pre-positioned equipment to facilitate rapid reinforcement if needed. This architectural shift deprives adversaries of concentrated, high-value targets while retaining robust strike and response capabilities.
Furthermore, Washington could relocate sensitive command and coordination functions back to the United States or to safer overseas hubs in Europe and Diego Garcia, while expanding capabilities for underway naval replenishment. By leveraging access agreements in nations like Jordan and friendly Gulf states only when specifically required, the United States can project power effectively. Modern technology permits military planners to manage command operations from South Carolina, launch precision airstrikes using strategic bombers flying out of Missouri, and organize maritime blockades primarily from carrier strike groups operating safely at sea.
To successfully preserve vital interests without stumbling into open-ended wars, Washington must also return to robust diplomacy as the primary tool for blocking an Iranian nuclear weapon. Deep-seated skepticism from Tehran—intensified by the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement and subsequent military strikes—will make diplomatic engagement exceptionally difficult. However, once the current conflict subsides, a weakened, internationally isolated regime desperate to rebuild its shattered economy, avoid recurring warfare, and suppress restive domestic populations will eventually require a modus vivendi with regional neighbors and Western powers. That stability will demand verifiable, enforceable limits on its nuclear infrastructure.
Those who argue that coercive diplomacy—combining targeted sanctions, economic incentives, a unified international coalition, and a credible threat of force—is no longer viable must weigh the realistic alternatives: engaging in periodic military bombing campaigns every few years or permanently accepting a nuclear-armed Iran. The 2015 accord, whatever its structural limitations, provided a far more effective framework for monitoring and constraining Iran’s nuclear enrichment than a destructive war that left Tehran with heightened incentives, advanced technical know-how, enough enriched material for multiple weapons, and zero international inspectors on the ground. While a carbon-copy deal is unlikely in the immediate term, maintaining strategic deterrence while keeping diplomatic channels open remains an essential component of any long-term solution.
To further mitigate the catastrophic risk of future energy disruptions, Washington must work collaboratively with regional partners to reduce global vulnerability to blockades in the Strait of Hormuz. While the United States has managed to escort limited crude shipments through the strait under heavy naval protection, exporters continue to face exorbitant shipping and insurance premiums alongside high risks of attack. This high-risk model is fundamentally unsustainable.
Fortunately, alternative export routes are already expanding: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have successfully rerouted millions of barrels daily around the strait and are actively planning additional pipeline capacity, while energy firms explore supplementary overland routes. Building and protecting these alternative transit corridors involves significant capital expense, but it is vastly cheaper and safer than attempting to keep the Strait of Hormuz open solely through constant, costly military force or suffering periodic global economic shocks.
Simultaneously, the United States should accelerate efforts to reduce the structural oil intensity of its domestic economy, mirroring the aggressive transitions underway in other major nations. Following recent energy shocks, foreign powers have aggressively fast-tracked renewable infrastructure; China, for instance, has sharply curtailed its crude oil import growth while rapidly expanding renewable capacity and electric vehicle adoption. If environmental imperatives alone were insufficient to generate robust political consensus for this domestic energy transition, the economic lessons of the Iran war should provide the necessary impetus.
Even as Washington remains engaged in Middle Eastern security, it must finally terminate its unconditional diplomatic and military "blank check" to Israel. The Israeli government’s standing assumption that the United States will provide uncritical backing regardless of its unilateral actions—including escalating strikes against Iran, targeted assassinations abroad, and devastating humanitarian conditions in Gaza—carries an unacceptable risk of dragging the United States into unwanted regional conflagrations.
At a bare minimum, Washington should rigorously enforce existing domestic laws that legally tie military assistance and arms transfers to verified compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights standards. On that principled basis, the United States could continue providing weapons essential for Israeli self-defense against external aggression while avoiding direct complicity in military actions or strategic campaigns it opposes. The identical logic applies to Gulf partners whose external military interventions have stoked instability in places like Yemen and across parts of Africa. Conditionality remains most effective when the United States maintains enough constructive engagement for partners to genuinely value the relationship.
Finally, the United States should prioritize cooperation with traditional global allies rather than alienating them through unilateralism. European and Asian partners understandably declined to join a military campaign against Iran that they viewed as strategically unwise and developed without meaningful consultation. This stands in sharp, negative contrast to successful historical partnerships during the 1991 Gulf War coalition, the post-2014 campaign against ISIS, maritime security patrols in the Red Sea, and the complex multilateral diplomacy that forged the 2015 nuclear agreement.
These global allies share core strategic interests with Washington regarding energy security, nonproliferation, and counterterrorism. They possess significant economic investment power, diplomatic capital, sanction enforcement capabilities, and military assets—resources they are willing to contribute if treated as equal partners rather than sidelined bystanders. Furthermore, if the United States intends to reduce its reliance on permanent military bases inside the Middle East, it will increasingly need to leverage its robust alliance infrastructure in Europe, an objective made exceedingly difficult if Washington continually alienates its European partners.
Breaking the Cycle
Skeptics of this balanced approach will naturally question why a middle course should succeed where decades of previous presidential efforts to rebalance foreign policy ultimately faltered. It is a fair, probing inquiry, and no absolute guarantees exist. A pragmatic middle course could theoretically fail to insulate the United States from the heavy costs and risks of regional engagement, while simultaneously exposing the practical limits of strategic restraint—yielding the worst of all possible worlds.
Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons to believe a disciplined strategy can succeed. The recent war with Iran has provided a stark, painful demonstration of the hard limits of military force, the strategic vulnerability of legacy basing models, the extreme economic costs of relying on chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, and the domestic political dangers of unconditional alignment. Together, these sobering developments create a rare window of opportunity to fundamentally alter how Washington approaches the region.
Furthermore, the American public’s sharply diminishing tolerance for open-ended military entanglements in the Middle East will likely serve as a powerful political constraint, preventing future presidents from sliding back into the trap of using force to pursue unattainable goals. The upcoming 2028 election cycle will provide a vital, healthy opportunity for the nation to debate the proper path forward.
American voters are entirely justified in feeling profound frustration with the historic results of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Decades of sustained national effort and trillions of dollars have failed to deliver enduring stability, democracy, or lasting peace to the region. The latest conflict manufactured an unprecedented crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and exacerbated the very nuclear proliferation risks it was intended to eliminate.
Yet, complete disengagement, however emotionally tempting, remains an unnecessary and reckless gamble. The ultimate objective of U.S. foreign policy should not be to sever ties with the Middle East entirely, but rather to pursue vital national interests in a vastly smarter, more disciplined, and realistic manner.
