The Middle East after the American imperium

For three-quarters of a century, the Middle East operated inside an American frame. Washington was not the only actor, but it was the reference point — the guarantor whose fleets, bases, and diplomatic weight set the outer boundaries of what regional rivals could do to one another.

That frame is not gone, exactly. But it has thinned, and what is emerging in its place is less a new order than the return of an old condition: a genuine multipolar contest among regional powers, hedging outside powers, and a Washington that intervenes selectively rather than presides continuously.

The vacuum that isn’t empty

It has become a cliché to describe American retrenchment as leaving a “vacuum.” The metaphor is misleading. Vacuums imply nothing rushes in to fill them evenly; in practice, the space vacated by a retreating hegemon is claimed unevenly, by whichever regional actor has the most capacity and the clearest interest at that moment.

In the post-hegemonic Middle East, that has meant three simultaneous, overlapping contests rather than one successor order.

One, a Gulf contest for economic and diplomatic primacy. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent the past decade building foreign policies independent of, and at times openly at odds with, Washington’s preferences — de-escalating with Iran, hedging with China, buying arms wherever the terms are best.

This is not “anti-Americanism.” It is what realist theory would predict of any capable state once a patron’s guarantees become less certain: diversification of dependence.

Two, a struggle over Iran’s regional position, conducted less through direct state-to-state war than through proxies, sabotage, and the occasional overt strike, with the underlying question never fully resolved: does a chastened, economically squeezed Iran retrench into its borders, or does it reinvest in the deterrent architecture — nuclear latency chief among them — that a weaker conventional position makes more, not less, attractive?

Three, a reordering of Israel’s regional relationships, in which normalization with parts of the Arab world proceeds simultaneously with unresolved, arguably worsening, conflict over the Palestinian question — a contradiction that outside powers have generally preferred to manage rather than resolve, because resolution was never actually a prerequisite for the diplomatic normalization to proceed.

None of this required an American withdrawal. It required only that regional actors stop assuming Washington’s veto was permanent.

What post-hegemony does and doesn’t mean

It is worth being precise about what has not happened. The United States retains more military capacity in and around the region than any other outside power, and it has shown, repeatedly, a willingness to use it — carrier groups, airstrikes, sanctions regimes that other economies still cannot fully evade.

Post-hegemony does not mean American absence. It means the end of American presumption — the assumption, held both in Washington and in regional capitals for decades, that outcomes in the Middle East were ultimately Washington’s to arbitrate.

The realist critique of the old hegemonic project was never that American power was insufficient to the task.

It was that the task itself — stabilizing a region through permanent forward deployment, open-ended security guarantees and periodic wars of choice — generated more instability than it resolved, at a cost disproportionate to any American interest at stake.

Iraq is the textbook case; Libya and the long Syrian entanglement are footnotes to the same argument. A superpower that binds its credibility to outcomes it cannot fully control eventually finds its credibility hostage to actors — client states, insurgencies, rival powers — with far more at stake locally than Washington has globally.

The China and Russia questions, deflated

Much American commentary treats Gulf hedging toward Beijing and Moscow as evidence of a rival hegemonic project displacing the American one. This overstates both China’s appetite and Russia’s capacity.

Beijing has shown persistent interest in commercial access and energy security, and almost no interest in the security-guarantor role the United States has played — no basing structure, no defense treaties, no willingness to referee Sunni-Shia or Arab-Israeli disputes.

Russia, degraded by its war in Ukraine, retains influence through arms sales and its Syrian foothold but lacks the reserve capacity to underwrite anyone’s security in a crisis.

What both offer regional states is not a replacement patron but negotiating leverage against the incumbent one — exactly the diversification a rational middle power seeks once it doubts an existing patron’s permanence.

Uncomfortable realist conclusion

The likely trajectory is not a stable new equilibrium but a rockier, more expensive, more diplomatically improvised regional politics — with wars managed rather than prevented, deterrence relationships that shift with each crisis and outside powers, the United States included, drawn back in episodically rather than continuously.

That is not a comforting picture. But it may be the honest one, and honest pictures are a better basis for policy than the nostalgic assumption that American primacy in the Middle East was ever cost-free, or that its erosion is a crisis to be reversed rather than a condition to be managed.

The question for American policymakers is not how to restore the old frame. It is whether Washington can define a narrower set of genuine interests — nonproliferation, freedom of navigation, denying any single power exclusive control of Gulf energy flows — and pursue those without re-assuming the guarantor’s chair for everything else.

That is a harder discipline than either full withdrawal or full re-engagement. It is also, on the realist premise, the only one likely to be sustainable.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.