Michael Corleone’s famous lament in The Godfather, Part III could serve as a 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 economy but would spend the end of his presidency consumed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. George W. Bush came to office pledging a “humble” foreign policy and ended up invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” only to be drawn into the aftermath of the Arab Spring, a military campaign against the Islamic State (or ISIS), and an all-consuming negotiation with Iran. Joe Biden tried to deprioritize the region—until Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel consumed much of Biden’s presidency. And most strikingly, Donald Trump, having campaigned against “endless wars,” has ended up gambling on a reckless war against Iran that could define his second term.
The Iran war has given new impetus to a long-standing debate about U.S. policy in the Middle East. Writing in Foreign Affairs in August, Michael Fuchs argued that the conflict—an “epic disaster”—should spur a long-overdue withdrawal. The United States, he contends, should pull all its bases and forces out of the region and “end its role as guarantor of regional order,” freeing Washington to concentrate on higher-priority objectives in Asia and Europe. It is a serious argument that will resonate with the many Americans who have watched their country spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in the region with little to show for it.
This diagnosis of U.S. overcommitment is right. But the prescription of “letting go”—and essentially leaving the region to its fate—is not. The Iran war has not demonstrated that the United States no longer has interests in the Middle East; it has demonstrated, very painfully, that it does and that the way Washington has been pursuing them for a generation is unsustainable. The lesson is not to abandon the region but to rethink an approach that has become both too costly and counterproductive. The United States should instead defend a narrower set of core interests with a smaller military footprint, more diplomacy, more alternatives, and more partners. Neither doubling down nor walking away offers a way out of the cycle that has trapped every recent president. A more pragmatic and disciplined middle course might.
FOREIGN FOLLIES
Consider what critics of U.S. foreign policy in the region get right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost at least $2 trillion each, along with the lives of thousands of U.S. service members and hundreds of thousands of local civilians. The wars severely tarnished the United States’ global reputation and left a generation of Americans skeptical that the country could be a force for good in the world. Twenty-five years of counterterrorism operations did significantly degrade the global terrorist threat, but they also left the region no freer and, in many places, less stable. Now the Iran war has added new consequences of U.S. hubris and military overreach: tens of billions of dollars in direct military costs, thousands killed or wounded, the diversion of military assets from other vital regions, depleted stocks of scarce munitions, strained alliances, a windfall for Russia from higher oil prices, an even more hard-line Iranian regime, and the biggest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
The critics are also right that the U.S. military presence in the region, which was long considered essential for deterring war and keeping energy flowing, has in many ways become a liability. The network of large bases that Washington built after the 1991 Gulf War is now vulnerable to Iranian drones and ballistic missiles, offering Tehran targets and leverage rather than deterring it from taking military action. Forward-deployed forces, meanwhile, tempt U.S. leaders to reach for military solutions, and the need to protect those forces creates a self-defeating loop in which the threat to U.S. forces becomes a large part of the rationale for keeping them there. And critics are right that U.S. support for regional partners has been too easy to take for granted and too easily abused. Washington’s almost unconditional backing for Israel, for example, has created a moral hazard—an implicit insurance policy that encourages Israeli risk-taking and draws the United States into conflicts it did not choose and cannot control. The U.S. dependence on Gulf partners to maintain its security presence has likewise led to Washington’s muted criticism of repression and acquiescence to destabilizing interventions in places such as Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.
As a result, U.S. domestic politics are moving in the direction of restraint if not outright withdrawal. A large majority of Americans tell pollsters that the Iran war is not worth fighting, and voters in both parties, especially younger ones, are increasingly skeptical of the U.S. security partnership with Israel and of “forever wars” that do not seem to make the country safer or address the issues they care most about. Any strategy that ignores that skepticism is unlikely to survive the next election or to be funded by the Congress that is likely to emerge from it.
THE INTERESTS ABIDE
Acknowledging that U.S. policy has failed, however, is not the same as concluding that U.S. interests have vanished. Some of the most important reasons for past American engagement in the region—for example, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, heavy U.S. dependence on imported oil, threats from al-Qaeda and ISIS at their peak, and a vulnerable Israel’s need for protection against hostile Arab armies—have indeed faded. But the interests that remain are real, as the Iran war has so vividly illustrated.
Take the continued importance of energy supplies. The United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas and imports little crude from the Persian Gulf, leading many to conclude that the region’s energy no longer matters much to Americans. But the notion of U.S. “energy independence” is vastly overstated. Oil is a fungible commodity with a single global price. As the Iran war has shown, when supplies are cut anywhere, Americans pay more at the pump, and slower growth in Asia and Europe drags down the U.S. economy, too. Nor is the world weaning itself off fossil fuels as quickly as many had hoped. Despite the real boom in renewables such as solar, wind, and hydropower, global consumption of oil and coal recently reached an all-time high, and fossil fuels still supply roughly 80 percent of the world’s energy, down only modestly from around 85 percent in the early 1990s. The relentless spread of energy-hungry data centers is pushing demand higher still.
The Iran war has been a brutal reminder of these realities. Iran predictably responded to U.S. and Israeli strikes by attacking regional energy infrastructure and closing off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade and nearly a fifth of its liquefied natural gas had flowed, along with fertilizer, refined products, and other critical goods. Oil prices spiked, leading U.S. gasoline prices to rise by more than 40 percent, and diesel by more than 70 percent, fueling inflation and pushing up interest rates. Only a combination of surprisingly sharp Chinese oil import cuts (facilitated by stockpiling and a pivot toward renewables), emergency releases from strategic petroleum reserves, and Saudi and Emirati pipelines that bypass the Strait has kept the damage from being far worse—for now. When contemplating whether the United States still needs to care about oil flowing out of the Middle East, it is worth remembering that a one percent annual decline in U.S. GDP triggered by an oil-supply shock would cost the United States over $300 billion in lost output; a one percent hit to global output would cost the world over $1 trillion. Those are consequences all Americans should care about.
The United States has positive interests in the region, not just threats to avert.
Nuclear nonproliferation is another enduring interest. Some scholars argue that a nuclear-armed Iran could be deterred, and even that the spread of nuclear weapons might stabilize the region, as it arguably did during the Cold War. Others believe that with the threat of U.S. military intervention removed or reduced, Iran would simply forgo the nuclear option, so there is little to worry about. Either outcome is possible, but no American president is likely to bet on it, and for good reason. A nuclear Iran would know it could maintain or increase its support for proxy forces and its meddling in its neighbors’ affairs, or escalate its conflict with Israel, confident that its arsenal would deter any attempt to overthrow the regime in response.
And if Iran got the bomb its regional neighbors would likely try to do so, as well. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who signed a mutual defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan in 2025 and with Turkey and Pakistan in 2026, has said that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia will also “have to get one.” Turkey’s foreign minister said earlier this year that his country would consider doing the same. A Middle East with multiple nuclear powers, many of them rivals, would be far more dangerous than it is today, with a higher risk of a nuclear accident or nuclear weapons use. The logic of U.S. disengagement from the region implies that Washington could live with an Iranian bomb, as it lives with Pakistan’s and North Korea’s, and perhaps it could. But most Americans would probably prefer never to find out.
The threat from terrorism, too, has diminished but not disappeared. Decades of intelligence work and military pressure have decimated al-Qaeda’s leadership and stripped ISIS of its territorial “caliphate.” No foreign terrorist group has carried out a mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. That means that Washington can and should devote far fewer resources to counterterrorism than it did during the “global war on terror.” But ISIS and its affiliates remain capable of mass-casualty attacks, as their 2024 assaults near Moscow and in Kerman, Iran, showed, and they continue to inspire terrorists such as the one who drove a truck into crowds on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in January 2025 and those who killed 15 people at Bondi Beach in Australia later that year. Hundreds of ISIS members escaped or were freed from Syrian prisons amid the chaos of that country’s transition following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. At least a modest counterterrorism mission, and counterterrorism cooperation with regional partners, will remain necessary.
Finally, the United States has positive interests in the region, not just threats to avert. Gulf Cooperation Council states have sovereign wealth funds worth more than $5 trillion and hold up to $2 trillion in U.S. assets, including Treasury bonds that help keep American borrowing costs down. With a combined GDP of more than $2 trillion, GCC states are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers built with U.S. firms, anchoring themselves in the American technology ecosystem rather than China’s. As they expand their civil nuclear energy and other infrastructure programs, they will likely do so together with American firms—or at least Americans should hope they do. These economic ties do not by themselves justify a large U.S. military presence or extensive security or intelligence partnerships. But they raise the cost of regional instability and of a geopolitical realignment toward Beijing that a U.S. exit could encourage.
THE LIMITS OF LETTING GO
The case for disengagement from the Middle East rests on a series of hopeful assumptions. Without the United States, the theory goes, the region would settle into its own equilibrium. Gulf states would find ways to live with Iran rather than engage in competition or violent conflict. Iran, no longer threatened, would forgo nuclear weapons. Israel, lacking an American backstop, would become more cautious but not so weak that it might be subject to attack. Regional states’ self-interest would keep oil flowing, no new terrorist safe havens would emerge, and no outside power would fill the vacuum. Some of these may prove true. But together they amount to a gamble, based more on hope than on experience that the Middle East’s future will be more benign than its past, and that instability or conflict there would not impact the United States.
Consider how the countries most affected are likely to respond to U.S. disengagement. Gulf Arab states that could no longer count on U.S. protection would not simply accommodate Tehran. They would likely hedge—deepening defense ties with Pakistan, Turkey, and China and, in Saudi Arabia’s case, potentially moving closer to a nuclear option of its own. Israel, feeling more exposed, might become more inclined to strike preventively, and without the United States involved, Iran and its regional proxies might be more tempted to strike back. Iran might also conclude that the path to a bomb—via an enrichment program in which it has invested so much money and national pride for decades—was finally clear. Even if the United States were to no longer have military bases and forces in the region, it is likely that Americans would be affected by the consequences of the resulting arms races, security competitions, and possible conflicts.
There are also limits to the notion that U.S. withdrawal from the region would give Washington more influence on issues such as human rights. Ending security ties, arms sales, and intelligence cooperation with Middle Eastern states would free up the United States to publicly pressure them on such issues, but it might also diminish U.S. influence by leaving its former partners feeling that they have nothing left to lose. Washington might feel better about keeping its distance, but it might not care for what results.
History also suggests that withdrawal from the region can lead to unintended consequences. When the United States withdrew its forces from Iraq in 2011, the result was not stability but the rise of ISIS, which seized territory in Iraq and Syria nearly the size of Great Britain, murdered Americans and many others, and plotted attacks abroad, forcing Washington to return to the region to conduct a multiyear air and ground campaign. If a future administration were to dismantle the U.S. military posture in the region, end long-standing security and intelligence partnerships, and remove Middle East scenarios from the Pentagon’s contingency planning, it would not necessarily eliminate the need for U.S. involvement when the next crisis hit, but it would limit Washington’s options when the time came.
SMART ENGAGEMENT
The alternative to disengagement from the Middle East is not clinging harder to the failed approaches of the past. Some defenders of the Iran war argue that what is needed now is the resolve to “finish the job,” as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said in July. This line of thinking calls for reopening the Strait of Hormuz by force, continuing to strike Iran until the regime capitulates or falls, and maintaining U.S. bases in the region, financed by defense budgets on the scale of the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion request. Such an approach would repeat the error at the root of so many past failures: the belief that military force can permanently solve the region’s problems if only the United States shows sufficient commitment. It also has little support among the public or in Congress. What is needed instead is a way to protect a less ambitious but more realistic set of interests at a cost that Americans are willing to bear.
That begins with abandoning the fantasy of transforming the region by force. There is a difference between using military power to deter aggression—as the United States did largely successfully for decades—and using it to pursue unrealistic goals such as regime change, as Washington attempted in Iraq in 2003 and again in Iran this year. If that lesson was not clear before, it should be now.
Second, the United States must overhaul its military posture in the region, which currently consists of more than 50,000 troops at more than a dozen large military bases—still far more than it had before the 1991 Gulf War. The Iran war has shown that these bases are so vulnerable to drones and missiles that they in some ways give Iran more leverage than they give the United States. Many were badly damaged in the first weeks of the war, and it makes little sense to spend billions of dollars rebuilding them as they were.
But the United States can fix its military posture without giving up the ability to act. Washington, for instance, could replace large, vulnerable installations with a network of smaller, more dispersed, and better-defended facilities farther from the likeliest sources of attack. It could harden those sites with underground shelters for personnel and fuel and ammunition storage, protect them with layered air and missile defenses, and pre-position equipment for rapid reinforcement—depriving Iran or any other adversaries of concentrated targets while maintaining an ability to conduct operations as needed. Washington could also consider moving some command and coordination functions to the United States or to safer overseas locations, including in Europe and Diego Garcia, and develop its capacity for replenishing naval operations at sea. And it could rely on base access agreements in countries like Jordan and the Arab Gulf states that could supplement its remaining facilities in the region during times of need. Technology has made large military facilities more vulnerable to attack, but it also allows the United States to transfer command functions from Bahrain or Qatar to South Carolina, launch airstrikes against Iran with strategic bombers from Missouri, and organize a naval blockade largely from aircraft carriers and other ships at sea.
To preserve its interests in the region without getting dragged into war, the United States should also return to diplomacy as the primary tool for preventing an Iranian bomb. Iran’s skepticism that Washington would honor any new agreement will make that difficult: Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal and then twice attacked Iran while negotiations were underway. But after the war ends, a weakened, isolated regime that wants to rebuild its economy, avoid repeated wars, and forestall domestic unrest will eventually need a modus vivendi with its neighbors and Western powers, and that will require verifiable limits on its nuclear program. Those who say it is too late for coercive diplomacy—such as sanctions and incentives, backed by a broad coalition and a credible threat of force—should consider the alternatives: bombing Iran every few years or accepting an Iranian bomb. The 2015 deal, whatever its limits, was a more effective way to constrain and monitor Iran’s nuclear program than a war that left it with a greater incentive to pursue nuclear weapons, enough highly enriched uranium for a dozen such weapons, plenty of nuclear know-how, and no inspectors on the ground. A similar deal is unlikely any time soon, which is why deterrence must be maintained, but it will have to be part of any long-term solution.
To further lessen the risk of future conflict, Washington should also work with its partners to reduce the world’s vulnerability to disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is currently managing to get significant amounts of crude oil (if not refined product) through the strait, but only by providing costly military protection to tankers that slip past Iran’s guns with their transponders off. Exporters are paying vastly elevated shipping and insurance fees and still incur a risk of attack. This is unsustainable, and the process of bypassing the strait is already underway: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have rerouted some five million barrels per day around the strait, are planning to add pipeline capacity for at least four million more, and U.S. and other energy companies are exploring other routes, including a pipeline from Iraq to Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Building and protecting those pipelines will be expensive—but far cheaper than trying to keep the strait open by force or coping with periodic shortages and price spikes.
The United States, meanwhile, should do more to reduce the oil intensity of its own economy—admittedly unlikely as long as Trump is president—as other countries are doing. Since the war began, numerous countries have fast-tracked renewable energy projects, and China has sharply cut its oil imports and surged its use of renewables, including by dramatically ramping up use of electric vehicles. If climate change has not been enough to build political support for that necessary shift, the Iran war should be.
Even as it remains engaged in the Middle East and committed to regional security, Washington must also cancel its blank check to Israel. The Israeli government’s confidence that the United States will back it no matter what it does, including launching a war against Iran, assassinating enemies in foreign capitals, and causing mass casualties and catastrophic conditions in Gaza, risks dragging the United States into wars it does not want. At a minimum, the United States should enforce existing U.S. laws that tie military assistance and arms sales to respect for human rights and humanitarian aid deliveries. On that basis, the United States could still sell weapons Israel needs to deter aggression and defend itself in case of attack but avoid complicity or involvement in conflicts or conduct it opposes. The same logic applies to Gulf partners who have fueled conflicts in Africa and Yemen. Conditionality works best when the United States remains engaged enough for its partners to care about losing it.
Finally, the United States should look to cooperate more with its global allies rather than drive them away by going it alone. European and Asian allies understandably declined to join an Iran war they thought unwise and on which they had not been consulted. This stands in sharp contrast to their roles in the 1991 Gulf War coalition, the post-2014 campaign against ISIS, the maritime coalition against the Houthis in the Red Sea in 2023–24, and the diplomacy that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. Those allies share U.S. interests in energy security, nonproliferation, and counterterrorism, and they can contribute investment, sanctions, diplomacy, arms sales, and military forces—if Washington treats them as partners rather than bystanders. Moreover, if the United States is going to rely less on permanent bases in the Middle East, it will likely have to rely more on its bases in Europe, which will not be easy to do if the United States is constantly bullying its European allies and threatening to reconsider its membership in NATO.
BREAKING THE CYCLE
Skeptics of the approach proposed here will ask why it should succeed when so many past presidents’ efforts to rebalance away from the region failed. It is a fair question, and there are no guarantees. A middle course could fail to spare the United States the costs and risks of engagement while also revealing the limits of restraint—the worst of all worlds.
But there are reasons to believe it could work. The Iran war has painfully demonstrated the limits of military force, the vulnerability of the old U.S. basing model, the cost of overreliance on the Strait of Hormuz, and the consequences of Washington’s unconditional alignment with Israel. Together these developments present an opportunity to start doing things differently, and the American public’s diminishing tolerance for another open-ended war in the Middle East will likely discipline future presidents from being pulled back in, tempted to use force to pursue unrealistic goals. The 2028 election cycle will offer a healthy opportunity to debate the right way forward.
Americans are right to be frustrated with the results of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Decades of effort and trillions of dollars have failed to bring stability, democracy, or peace to the region, and the latest war created a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz that did not exist before it began and exacerbated a nuclear proliferation risk it was designed to eliminate. But complete disengagement, tempting as it is, would be an unnecessary gamble. The U.S. goal should not be to let go of the Middle East but to pursue its interests there in a smarter and more realistic way.
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