Name: Why America keeps getting bogged down in the Middle East | Fareed's Take
Uploaded: 2026-03-15T21:31:55.000Z
Duration: 10 min 4 s
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For around 15 years, many American leaders, including all three presidents in that period, have believed that the country was too deeply entangled in trying to reorder the societies of the Middle East.

They felt the more pressing challenges were rebuilding America's industrial base at home and confronting the rise of China.

Yet here, America is once again fighting a war to reorder a society in the greater Middle East.

And and like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, this seems unlikely to turn out quite as its proponents hoped.

To understand the present, let's look at the past.

The only country in modern history whose global reach matched that of the United States.

Britain, at the turn of the 20th century, was the world's sole superpower.

The British Empire's share of global GDP reached roughly 25% in the late 19th century, about the same as the US today.

And London was the world's financial capital.

Britain had thwarted Napoleon's bid to rule the European continent and Russia's effort to expand more into southeastern Europe.

During the Crimean War, it presided over a vast empire that spanned the globe and set the agenda for international life, much as Washington does today.

Over the course of those decades, roughly from the 1880s through the 1920s, Britain found itself responding to instability, nasty regimes and power vacuums all over Asia and Africa.

It sent troops and asserted control in places like Sudan and Somalia, Iraq and Jordan.

These missions all seemed compelling at the time, but

had the effect of keeping London distracted by an endless sea series of local crises in peripheral parts of the world, often at great cost.

The Iraqi Rebellion of 1920 required more than 100,000 British and Indian troops and tens of millions of pounds to put down at a time when the estimated total budget for education in Britain was roughly the same as the cost of that Iraqi excursion.

While British leaders passionately debated their strategy in Mesopotamia, they fundamentally neglected the real economic and technological challenge that they faced as Britain battled with tribes in the Middle east and Africa.

Across the Atlantic, the United States was quietly building the most advanced industrial economy the world had ever seen.

In Europe after World War I, a defeated Germany steadily rebuilt its industry and a highly mechanized military apparatus.

Britain, distracted by the chaotic periphery, was being systematically surpassed at its core.

The result over time was that Great Britain collapsed as the world's leading power.

America today is at least as powerful as Britain ever was, but

it is succumbing to some of the same imperial temptations it responds to genuine crises.

In the Middle east, it sees a logic that is political, military, and

moral in responding, but ultimately grand Strategy is about prioritizing finite resources.

The US does not possess infinite political capital, bandwidth, military capacity or economic resilience.

Every airstrike on Tehran, every anti drone interceptor shot over the Persian Gulf, and

every hour administration officials spend debating the nuances of of Iranian political succession is energy diverted from the true tectonic challenges defining the 21st century.

The primary indispensable role of the United States is to anchor the global system against the revisionist ambitions of Beijing and Moscow.

China is not getting bogged down in Middle Eastern quagmires.

It is relentlessly investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing science, solar and wind power, batteries and robots, the technologies that will determine the balance of global power.

Russia remains fiercely committed to disrupting the European security architecture and undermining Western democracies through hybrid political military warfare that has proved hard to detect and even harder to defeat.

But while Moscow and Beijing challenged the basic architecture of America's world order, Washington is preparing once again to spend blood and treasure policing the Middle east and trying to pick the leaders of one of its countries.

History suggests that great powers often succumb to the allure of small wars precisely because they tempt the strongest nation to use its awesome military might and offer the illusion of quick political and moral victories.

Unfortunately, these tactical successes rarely translate into strategic gains and more often serve as the first step toward long term exhaustion.

Even if the intervention in Iran succeeds, it would require that America get deeply involved in the fate of that country.

Is that ultimately where America's time and energy would be best devoted over the next decade?

Great powers do not usually fall because they are conquered by foreign armies.

They fall because they overextend themselves on the periphery while neglecting the core.

Joining me now is Karim Sajdapur, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment focusing on Iran and US Foreign policy.

And Lisa Anderson, professor of International Relations at Columbia and a former president of the American University in Cairo.

Karim, so explain to us what Iran is thinking right now, as best you can tell, because they seem to have gone for this.

This widen the war strategy, attacking a whole bunch of Arab countries, mostly in the Gulf, even places like Dubai, where a lot of Iranian money is laundered and it runs through.

Is this a kind of blow it all up strategy?

I think so fari this is a regime which came to power in 1979 by taking American diplomats hostage and they've now taken the global economy hostage.

And their game is obviously to divide American public opinion, turn American public opinion against this war by spiking the price of oil and asking Americans to ask their members of Congress and President Trump, how on earth have we gotten into another conflict in this region?

You know, these economies in the Gulf, they are spending trillions of dollars on transport and AI and other kinds of technology.

And Iran has come by with $20,000 drones and threatened their existence.

So when you look at that issue, Lisa, the way in which Iran has been attacking the Gulf states, is it a miscalculation?

Because it seems to me that what the Iranian strategy was will attack the Gulf states.

They will run to Washington and say, stop this war.

In fact, what's happened is the Gulf states have become increasingly incensed at Iran and.

And are in some way giving the United States and Israel a kind of legitimacy to wage the war.

I think that's true, at least in the short run.

I think one of the strategies for Iran is also, of course, to keep this going for a long time.

That makes it more expensive for the world, and

it makes it more expensive for all of the Gulf states as well.

So if it had been as the Trump administration and the Netanyahu.

Netanyahu government clearly thought it would be quick, then it was a miscalculation.

But over the course of time, it doesn't seem unlikely that many of these countries will start pressuring the United States to say, you know, we've had enough.

This is too hard now, because for places like Dubai, the instability is killing the entire raison debtor.

All of the promises that this was a stable, open, easy place for obviously have evaporated.

So the oil and gas producers are unhappy and the sort of business community is unhappy.

What do you think it tells us about Iran that Mujtaba Khamenei was appointed, elected.

It feels to me like this is almost like a coup by the Revolutionary Guard.

What is if A, would you agree, and B, what does it mean?

The Revolutionary Guards are the main power in Iran and they have closed ranks around the son of the supreme Leader.

And this is a regime which has gone back to original principles.

If you read the maiden speech of Mojtab Al Khamenei, there was no new ideas.

He used the word martyrdom and resistance, something which a majority of Iranian society is not interested in.

And I don't expect Farid that he is going to be a powerful leader like his father who ruled for 37 years.

You know, Lisa is one of the great scholars of North Africa and wonderful observation which a North African scholar made in the 14th century Ibn Khaldun that empires are built and destroyed over three generations.

First generation are the builders, second generation consolidate, third generation squander.

Moshebah Khamenei is a third generation leader of this Islamic Republic.

I don't expect he's going to be anything more than a transitional figure.