The American Middle East Order Has Quietly Ended, Foreign Affairs Argues

Marc Lynch writes that the regional order Washington built after the 1991 Gulf War — built on unrivalled U.S. military primacy, a client network of Gulf monarchies, and a security architecture aimed squarely at containing Iran — did not survive its own war with Tehran intact. He argues that the Iran conflict was meant to cement American dominance but instead exposed how little Washington can still dictate outcomes in a region now crowded with capable, independent actors. Gulf states have hedged toward Beijing and Moscow even as they host U.S. bases; Israel acts with growing autonomy from its own patron; and Iran, battered but unbroken, remains a regional force Washington cannot simply write out of the picture. Lynch’s central claim is uncomfortable for both hawks and doves: Washington’s instinct is to treat this as a problem to be fixed by reasserting primacy, when the more honest reading is that primacy itself is gone and cannot be rebuilt by force. A Middle East with regimes less beholden to American preferences, he argues, would likely be more stable than one where Washington keeps pretending it still calls the shots.