Washington should disentangle itself from the Middle East 

For months, lawmakers in DC have agonized over a $95 billion spending bill that would provide military assistance to Ukraine and Israel. The Republican House passed a bill at the start of November that would give more than $14 billion to Israel. The White House calls for the same amount. Meanwhile, faced with the catastrophe of Gaza, Biden’s reported priority for the Middle East is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into open alignment. Essentially everyone in D.C. agrees that bringing the powerful Gulf monarchies into alignment with Israel — as the Trump administration did for Israel and the UAE— is the way to go.  

But the entire premise is dreadfully, strategically wrong. Bringing Saudi Arabia and Israel’s cooperation into the light — they are already quietly, de facto in tandem — would serve to lock in a regional order that is fundamentally, catastrophically broken. 

Perhaps the most coherent explanation for a great power alliance with Israel was put to ink and paper by Ronald Storrs, one of the first British rulers in Palestine, in his 1937 memoirs. British consecration of Palestine to the Zionist state-building process, Storrs held, “blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”  

Of course, Palestine was not Britain’s to give, which has been a source of disaster in itself, but rational observers might also question another part of Storrs’s assumptions: Why exactly would any country wish to implant itself, geopolitically, amid a whole region of other, ethnically distinct countries comprising a “hostile sea”?  

This is nakedly an imperial project; thankfully we are mostly past the point where Western “strategic thinkers” argue that imperialism is a beneficial project (for anyone). 

The U.S. version of the imperial approach to the Middle East, less direct than England’s, set itself up after World War II on the assumption that oil is such a crucial strategic resource that Washington had to be primary custodian of the fathoms and fathoms of the stuff found in the Arabian Peninsula. As modern-day Middle East hand Aaron David Miller puts it in his monograph on the subject, it was Washington’s view of “the area’s oil” as “a potential source of national power” that first induced the “move … to involvement in Middle Eastern affairs.” 

Within this conception, the role played by Israel is that of a platform of final resort for direct U.S. projection of force into the region. While direct use of Israel in this way needs to be held back as the final card to play, given the regional chaos it would likely set off, Israel represents the only society in the Middle East that could reliably, unwaveringly be expected not to kick a U.S. military presence out under the pressure of national public opinion. Hints of this rationale have come out in rare reports on Washington’s “pre-positioning” or “stockpiling” of military assets in Israel. 

The elements of that strategic rationale no longer align (if one concedes that they ever did), and yet U.S. strategy in the Middle East, refusing to recognize this or pivot, appears to have entered its braindead phase. Oil is on its way out — even elite rhetoric, remarkably, agrees on this point. Even if it’s not yet true in practice, it needs to be true if we’re not going to drag ourselves into a yet more horrid and unmanageable world during this century.  

Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship that extraterritorially and extrajudicially murders sons of its soil who commit lèse-majesté against the one individual who sits on top. Few in this country will even argue against that point, these days. And while commentariat opinion may not be there yet, every relevant human rights organization — Gisha and B’Tselem, the two most impressive ones in Israel, and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the two most significant international ones — has concluded that Israel runs an apartheid system that covers the whole territory of Israel/Palestine — a reality that extirpates an independent and sovereign Palestine and dooms the conflict to continue forever.  

Elsewhere in the region, including in Sudan, in Egypt and in Syria, the entire leadership class is drenched to the bone in bloodshed and corruption. Why would anyone want Washington to help entrench this? 

To return to the kinds of “fundamental questions” that “strategic thinkers” like to pose: Why be militarily involved there at all, given such ugliness and given the dangers? Why go seeking to drown yourself in a hostile, and tragic, sea? 

Devin Kenney is an international law and international relations specialist who has worked with humanitarian and human rights organizations in the Middle East for most of the past decade.