Middle East Strategy? What Middle East Strategy?

To Michael Doran, the administration’s many statements and actions concerning the Middle East reflect a “coherent vision.” If true—which is doubtful—it’s the wrong vision.

By Elliot Abrams, MOSAIC

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In my view, the United States will build a security system with its own military or it won’t have one at all. As with our Asian allies facing China, as with our European allies and NATO facing Russia, our alliances in the Middle East will not work if we confine ourselves to providing some weapons and some intelligence but no more.

This does not suggest that it would be wise to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight again in the Middle East; it would not. But a policy that cannot even abide the sustained presence of 2,000 soldiers on the ground in Syria will likely fail.

Doran’s essay expresses greater optimism on this score, but his previous writings suggest he might well agree that the neoconservative assessment is sounder and that its “muscular” approach is likelier to succeed; his problem is that, in today’s circumstances, he thinks that approach is off the table.

It is certainly a hard sell in today’s Democratic party. And yet, even from those quarters I don’t recall reading about massive pressure to get those 2,000 troops out of Syria. To the contrary, after Trump’s December announcement, Senator Tim Kaine called the withdrawal decision “irresponsible,” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was a “Christmas gift to Vladimir Putin.” To Representative Ted Deutsch, the administration was “yielding American leadership to powers like Russia, Iran, and Turkey to decide the future of Syria.” To Senator Jack Reed, “the removal of U.S. troops from southeast Syria will cede a land route to the Iranians that will likely be used to freely move weapons and personnel across the region.”

And so forth. Needless to say, Democrats are always happy to criticize any decision made by the president, and there is surely plenty of hypocrisy at work here. Nevertheless, these Democratic leaders obviously did not fear that party politics demanded they either defend or say nothing about a withdrawal from Syria. Trump’s decision did enjoy strong support on the far left of the Democratic party and the far right of the GOP (mainly in the person of Rand Paul), but not in the mainstream of either. As Walter Russell Mead reminded the president, “The GOP base is more hawkish than isolationist.”

Moreover, just as I did not detect powerful popular pressure to get the 2,000 American troops out of Syria, and certainly not hurriedly, I also do not detect pressure to get the 5,000 American troops out of Iraq. Nor was there a demand to cut by half the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as the president also ordered in December. Right or wrong, the Syria and Afghanistan decisions should be attributed to the president’s own views, not to voter insistence.

Besides, even if many voters do (silently) support withdrawing now, will they still feel the same way if, in a year, al-Qaeda and Islamic State succeed in regenerating themselves in Iraq and Syria and the president then says we need to reintroduce American boots on the ground? What will voters think if one of those groups manages to kill Americans in a terrorist attack?

Michael Doran is gambling that a policy of aid and comfort to our allies in the Middle East will be sufficient without any American military effort or presence to back it up. He believes this gamble is our best bet, or at least our only realistic bet. I think it won’t work. To be sure, it’s far superior to the Obama policy, as Doran well explains. But a better bet is to argue for the policy we need and to demand American political leadership that understands it and is prepared to explain it to the American people.