Debating US Primacy in the Middle East
Announcing a new and rather relevant new publication at a regrettably pivotal time
Donald Trump seems pretty determined to strip away every dimension of American soft power in the Middle East, and the world. The shuttering of USAID and most foreign assistance, which is already having catastrophic effects on health, food aid, and civil society across the region, is only the beginning. The worst move, of course, is his bizarre push to empty Gaza of its people and push them into Jordan and Egypt — they obviously would never be allowed to return — and then have the US (or is it Trump personally?) take ownership of the land and develop its real state. This mishmash of open war crimes, delusional claims about what Palestinians, Arabs, and Israelis want and will accept, and utter disregard for the strategic implications would ordinarily have never gotten through interagency review but we no longer live in ordinary times.
King Abdullah of Jordan is in Washington to try and deal with the mess, torn between the existential threat posed by a massive wave of Palestinian refugees and the threat of losing American aid which is vital to regime survival. Jordan might find alternative sources of financial support from Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Qatar - but each would come with extremely significant political expectations and new dependencies that could threaten the monarchy from other directions. What an extraorindary blow to the American-created and American-led regional order if Trump managed to lose Jordan in less than a month.
It’s not just about Trump, though. The Biden administration’s unfettered support for Israel’s war on Gaza and dogged pursuit of Saudi-Israeli normalization to the exclusion of most anything else had already contributed to significant shifts in America’s place in the region — though, as my new essay explains, the nature of those changes is not as obvious as first meets the eye.
I’m delighted to announce the publication of POMEPS STUDIES 54 Debating US Primacy in the Middle East. Based on a workshop held at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University in the fall — well before Trump’s election or return to the White House — this collection of essays brings leading International Relations and Middle East scholars into a dialogue about the theoretical foundations of our thinking about primacy and hegemony, and how that’s actually played out on the ground. It seeks to reframe questions about persistent perceptions of US retrenchment, the nature and degree of US domination, the implications of global multipolarity, the applicability of different theoretical perspectives, and the real impact of American support for Israel’s devastation of Gaza. It’s an all-star cast of scholars including Richard Herrmann (my partner at Ohio State in putting the workshop together), Lina Benabdallah, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Dana El Kurd, Elham Fakhro, Greg Gause, Stacie Goddard, Pete Mansoor, Peter Moore, Daniel Nexon, Zaynab Quadri and Curtis Ryan. I’m grateful to Dorothy Noyes and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies for their support of the project and of me over the last year.
I’m really excited to share the collection at this regrettably pivotal moment in the American place in the Middle East and the world. You can download the full collection for free, and read my introductory framing essay right here:
Debating US Primacy in the Middle East
How has America’s support for Israel during its brutally destructive war on Gaza affected American primacy in the Middle East? It is possible to tell two very different stories. By one narrative, America’s policy towards Gaza has done irreparable harm to its standing in the region, stripping away all moral legitimacy and exposing its disregard for human rights and international law as well as its contempt for Palestinians and for the Arabs who identify with them. By another narrative, the United States has managed to navigate the crisis effectively and strengthened its position in the region, showing its willingness to pay costs to support its ally Israel while maintaining or even improving almost all of its core alliances in the region and revealing China’s impotence. By the first account, Gaza may herald the endgame for America’s Middle East, by the other it has opened up new opportunities to promote Arab-Israeli normalization and to prevent global rivals such as China from gaining any further foothold in the region.
These narratives map on to very different theories of international order. America’s stance on Gaza, and the broader long-running debate about emergent global multipolarity and American retrenchment from the region, open up a critically important window into the policy implications of different theories of international order. Those questions, already central to evaluations of the Biden administration’s regional policy, take on great urgency as Donald Trump returns to the White House with unclear ambitions for the region. In September 2024, POMEPS and the Mershon Center for International Studies at the Ohio State University convened a workshop with regional experts and international relations theorists to debate the nature of American primacy in the Middle East. The papers in this collection range widely over theoretical approaches and empirical examples to bring out the assumptions and implications of different perspectives. The discussions were shaped by the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza, in all of its moral and strategic dimensions, with sharp disagreements over the extent to which this represented a fundamental break with or continuity with prior trajectories.
The workshop papers engage some of the most important policy issues for America and the Middle East, but we began from questions of International Relations theory. How should we think theoretically about a regional order like the one America has built in the Middle East? What is the nature of American primacy, and how has it changed – if at all – over the last few decades? As Simon Mabon and I argue in our forthcoming book, Region-Making and Order in the Middle East, evaluating American primacy really depends on the theory of international order one adopts, and which metrics are the most relevant signals of regional standing. One core distinction is between an order based on material power (or the perception thereof) and one based on some form of normative legitimacy. A second core question is whether the international order is defined by anarchy or – as a growing literature represented in this collection by Daniel Nexon and Stacie Goddard would suggest – by hierarchy. And a third is whether the primary focus should be on states or on regimes and the broader political realm and publics within which they struggle for power and survival.
First, material power. The American Middle Eastern order was established by the end of the Cold War and America’s crushing defeat of Iraq in 1991, which established for a generation that no regional power or international rival could withstand its military predominance. That perception lasted until the American defeat – or at least long struggles – in its attempted occupation of Iraq after 2003; there is fierce disagreement today as to whether that reputation has been re-established in the intervening years. US officials frustrated by the perception of American decline or retrenchment in the region often point to the relatively stable troop levels and unchanged military basing as evidence that nothing substantial has changed once the unnatural and temporary occupation forces in Iraq went home. No other global power has the ability or the will to intervene militarily in the ways the United States can and does – a reality underscored by Chinese passivity in the face of Houthi threats to Red Sea shipping.
But perceptions matter. Arab officials were impressed by the juxtaposition between American refusal to intervene directly in Syria in 2013 and Russia’s ability to decisively intervene in support of the Assad regime in Aleppo in 2015. Perhaps none of them really believed that Russia had become more powerful than the United States, or would prefer to have Russian weapons systems over American, but the difference in outcomes made an impression. Similarly, the Trump administration’s decision to not retaliate against Iran for the 2019 drone attack on the Abqaiq oil refineries shocked Gulf leaders who had assumed that any president – not just the most hawkish in recent memory – would at least come to the defense of oil. Few doubted that the United States could defeat Iran if it came to war – but all-out war was not the world in which they pursued security and influence.
There’s another issue with material power in the Middle East. What threats, exactly, do regional powers expect the United States to be able to deter or defeat? Most Arab regimes are focused above all on the survival of their own regimes, as Gause and Ryan remind us. And those regimes have been deeply, fundamentally shaped by their embeddedness in the American security order, as Peter Moore graphically demonstrates in the case of Jordan in ways that clearly apply to the Gulf, Egypt, and other regional allies. America’s security relationships are equally economic ones, as Zaynab Quadri points out, with petrodollar recycling and arms sales creating their own incentives independently of actual security concerns. The Obama administration’s cautious embrace of revolutionary change in Egypt and elsewhere in the region in 2011 set off every possible alarm bell for these regime security obsessed leaders. Forget about external threats – if the US couldn’t, or wouldn’t, save them from popular uprisings then what exactly was the purpose of the alliance? China could appear more useful and less threatening, as Ulrichsen and Benabdallah remind us, with its offers of long-term investments without conditions or expectations around human rights or democracy.
Second, norms. Constructivist (and English School) approaches would suggest (see Goddard and Gause in this collection) that no international order can be truly hegemonic without commanding some degree of consent and legitimacy. Material power is not enough without the ability to mobilize shared purpose. What makes an international order different from just the balance of power, which is necessary for a move up the ladder of primacy from domination to hegemony, is the sense of normative rightness which binds it together. America’s Middle East is normatively justified by a discourse of moderation and order, in which the United States and its allies push for peace and stand against Iran and other resistance actors which threaten violence and stand for fundamentally different values. If the United States fails to support its allies or to live up to its stated ideals, or if it abandons the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace, this can provoke a crisis of order in which the loss of shared purpose – rather than the loss of material power – drives defection and challenges from within. American policy on Gaza could be seen as such as departure, as the generally accepted bias towards Israel turns into something darker and less acceptable to the Arab states within the alliance.
Who judges whether and when there has been a loss of normative consensus, though? What matters more, public opinion or regimes – particularly when they differ over core priorities such as Palestine. There has always been a profound gap between Arab rulers and publics on the relationship with the United States and the regional order it sustains – especially, but not exclusively, when it comes to Palestine and Israel. As Dana El Kurd points out in this collection, that gap has always been a key reason for the American preference for autocracy over democracy. It is generally understood, or at least believed, that more democratic states in the Middle East would be more responsive to anti-American and pro-Palestinian public opinion (though the example of Mohammed el-Morsi’s brief tenure as the elected president of Egypt offers food for thought, as he proved quite comfortable maintaining the Camp David peace treaty with Israel and playing Hosni Mubarak’s traditional role in brokering a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel).
What is new, it seems, is not public hostility to American policy but the degree to which we also now see a gap between Arab rulers and the United States. During the Obama years, almost every American ally – Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and more – firmly opposed almost all of his key policies, from supporting democratic transitions to refraining from direct military intervention in Syria to negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. The Biden administration found almost no takers among its regional allies for its demands that they join the Western states and the ‘rules based international order’ to support Ukraine against Russian invasion – with Saudi Arabia, in particular, actively helping Moscow on oil pricing. Arab leaders have complained virtually continuously since 2011 of their fears, and resentments, of perceived American retreat from the region almost independently of anything the US actually did. Those complaints came in part because of the utility of such complaints for extracting new resources, weapons systems, and commitments from Washington, but there can be little doubt that at least some of the resentments and fears were genuine. The real question today is whether those doubts play out differently in a multipolar era than they did when Washington enjoyed clearer primacy.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House may seem likely to continue what many see as pattern of sudden, extreme changes in American foreign policy in the Middle East. That seems unlikely at one level, as Peter Mansoor suggests in his contribution. Every president has been committed to Israel’s security, and while they have varied in their degree of interest in pushing for a Palestinian state none has come close to delivering one. Every president has been committed to protecting the Arab Gulf states and ensuring the flow of oil and has presided over a regional order based on a tacit partnership between Israel and most Arab states against Iran and other forces of “resistance.” No president, with the partial exception of Obama in 2011, has meaningfully pushed for real democratic change or prioritized human rights – at least in part because Arab public opinion has been virtually constantly fiercely hostile to the United States. And every president, since the costs of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq became clear, has attempted to avoid major new wars and to reduce America’s presence in the Middle East in order to refocus on global threats such as a rising China – and been met in response with questions from its regional allies about the strength of US commitments. Biden, rather than moving away from Trump’s signature policies of maximum pressure on Iran and Arab-Israeli normalization, instead doubled down on both.
But for all this continuity, there is a widespread perception that the global system has shifted from unipolarity to some form of multipolarity. Since 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the American leadership of the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, the United States has been in a dominant position within the region. In contrast to the Cold War years, as Richard Herrmann reminds us in his contribution to this collection, where regional powers could play Washington and Moscow off against each other, since 1991 all roads have led through Washington – at least until recently. Today, as discussed by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Elham Fakhro and Peter Salisbury, and F. Gregory Gause III in this collection, many believe that the global system is moving towards multipolarity and an erosion of American primacy. China (see Lina Benabdallah in this collection) and Russia (see Herrmann) have each in their own way challenged the exclusive American claim on regional leadership, while regional powers – particularly in the Gulf (see Fakhro and Salisbury, Curtis Ryan, and Gause) – have become more independent in their foreign policies and less willing to defer to American preferences. The Trump administration’s determination to destroy USAID and all forms of foreign aid (except for Israel and Egypt) seems likely to accelerate this decline and further hasten in a new era of multipolarity.
We are delighted to present POMEPS Studies 54: Debating American Primacy in the Middle East and hope that it helps to reframe and sharpen the critical ongoing debates about US foreign policy, global order, and the Middle East.