Founded more than a century ago in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the New York City based Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) ranks as our oldest and most mainstream foreign policy organization, generally reflecting the consensus views of our DC establishment.
In my article last week, I noted that its equally venerable flagship publication Foreign Affairs had just published a major 5,000 word article by a prominent Middle East academic named Marc Lynch, apparently deemed so important that it was placed beyond the usual paywall. The highly descriptive title was “The End of the American Middle East” and it opened with the following remarkable paragraph:
The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.
Lynch went on to argue that the failure of our war against Iran suggested that we should renounce our half-century of hostility to the Islamic Republic. Completely forgoing any future military intervention in the region, America must instead “bring Iran into the regional security system as an invested partner.” The Iranians had damaged or destroyed all our regional military bases, but rather than attempting to restore them, we should abandon our longstanding military footprint in the region.