The middle East contains around half of the entire world’s proven oil reserves. Canada and the US have less reserves than Iran alone.
I believe that if a country like Russia was able to exert control over such a large amount of the final energy supply, that would result in significant strategic risks for the US.
To be clear, i don’t really think Russia would actually invade and take over the entire middle East. I suspect they would more likely just push friendly authoritarian puppet governments.
And to be clear, having China go into the middle East in order to contest Russia’s influence would actually be good for us, compared to having Russia just take over uncontested.
This is irrational Right-wing fear-mongering (not saying you’re engaging in that, of course - just that this is where that idea comes from).
If the US pulled out of the Middle East as it looked now, Russia and China would move in (in practice, they already have - they’re just not visibly present as the US is). On the other hand, they would find themselves as mired in the power struggles of the region as the US is (and with as big a target painted on their backs), so that is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m not convinced it would be a net negative for the US.
The biggest problem with pulling out is how to do so without resulting in the rise of another ISIL and how to avoid nuclear weapons proliferation. There are almost no national security reasons for the US/NATO presence in the Middle East - that is one of the few. It looked like ISIL was going to cease being a player a year ago, but now that Trump has screwed over our allies and effectively destroyed NATO ability to operate against ISIL in Iraq with this latest incident, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them stage a serious comeback. Nuclear proliferation had been pretty well handled by Obama (or at least handled as well possible), but Trump destroyed all that good work, of course.
Trump’s appeal that NATO should take more responsibility in the Middle East surprised me, incidentally (something that they - for obvious reasons, especially given the latest unilateral actions from Trump), have zero interest in. Interesting because - despite Trump’s disdain for NATO - it indicates a dependence that shouldn’t be there.
Kennedy’s “Rise and Fall…” isn’t without its detractors/controversy, but I’m beginning to think his theory of Imperial overreach fits pretty well with the pattern the US has seen in the 2010s under both Obama and Trump (one of his points is that, as empires see a loss of influence, their military spending increases significantly as rulers try to compensate for the weakening geopolitical positioning of the empire).
I’ve always liked the coda in that book:
The task facing American statesmen over the next decades, therefore, is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to “manage” affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.
Everything Trump has done (and some of the things Obama did) are the exact opposite of this advice.
Stop invading countries, stop occupying them, reduce or eliminate on-the-ground military forces there by invitation because they are targets and, even worse, provocation. Stop assassinating people. Abandon ‘regime change’ as a foreign policy goal. Stop killing large numbers of innocent civilians as collateral damage. Stop meddling in the internal politics of non-failed states and resist the urge to intervene in substantial military fashion in the failed ones. Adopt (or revert to) an ‘honest broker’ posture vis-a-vis the Israel / Palestine problem. When we want to help someone, make the offer look like actual help: money, food, aid, technical assistance rather than bombs falling from the sky. Never act unilaterally.
It would simply be changing it back to what it was: That we support Israel and we’re for a two-state solution constituted more or less along the lines of the pre-1967 borders, in accordance with UN resolutions. The presence of US forces in e.g. Sinai as part of the Camp David accords has largely worked. The unilateral presence of US forces in places like Lebanon and Iraq has not.
The bizarre thing here is that everyone assumes that some outside power has to “take over” or “control” the region. Which in turn creates the situation where we feel we have to or “they” will. Of course, this still does not actually define a positive reason for being in the Middle East, but rather a negative, to keep “them” out. At the root of it seems to be several things. One is the fear that an important global resource will be controlled by “them.” I’m not sure this is really as big a deal as folks think, considering that the resource is most useful as a commodity and buying from the Saudis is not necessarily any better than buying from, say, the Iranians or even the Chinese. And one thing the Russians and Chinese like even more than flexing their muscles against the US is taking money from the US.
Another thing is the persistent conviction that the region itself cannot function on its own, but rather will always be a vacuum for others to fill. Maybe so, but it’s hard to say definitively as we’ve never really had a time when the region was actually left to its own devices, at least not since WWI. The region was always controlled by imperial powers, manipulated as client states, or shoehorned into the Cold War binary by outside forces. Left to its own devices, who knows what might happen (though admittedly, avoiding uncertainty might be a good reason to stay, as long as you don’t mind just admitting the imperialism).
And if left to its own devices, would a hegemon of its own appear? Maybe Iran? Maybe. Would this be a bad thing? Maybe. First, the idea that Shiite Iran could exert effective dominion over the largely Sunni rest of the region is at best dubious. Second, even a somewhat expanded Iranian sphere of control and influence might actually bring more, not less, stability to the area, and the rule of the Iranians couldn’t be much worse than the shitshow that is Saudia Arabia and the Emirates.
I don’t have an answer, nor a recommendation for whether we should stay or go–I think it’s far more complex, and I don’t think in today’s world a country like the US can ever truly leave anywhere–but I do think perhaps it is good to step back and examine our basic assumptions and see if we can recast the questions in ways that don’t already prefigure the answers.
If one power gains control over a large chunk of the overall global energy supply, then they can choose to cut their production, raising the price of that commodity, while still ultimately receiving the same amount of overall revenue.
Another issue is that in the case of Russia, having Russian state owned oil corporations take over chunks of the production, even if they continue producing it, is putting money into the pockets of a corrupt oligarchy. Feeding money into Putin’s mob isn’t ideal.
All true. My main point really is that we should be looking at questions like this one, the one the OP posed, from a global perspective as much if not more than from the very narrowly American perspective that we, as Americans, usually approach things. One interesting exercise is to just imagine what the world would be like if the USA was, I dunno, not a ubiquitous military presence and was just one of many countries, with a lot of sway in its own backyard but just one of the players on the global stage. Too often our starting point for looking at anything is so US-centric that it pushes us to view the entire globe as merely a stage on which the USA does its thing.
Considering the US has military troops in roughly 150 out 192 countries, it would be strange not to have our troops in the Middle East. Someday when the sun sets on the American empire, we’ll be out of the Middle East, but I honestly don’t see the advantage for us to leave now.
We and all the European power basically stayed out of Syria and that created a humanitarian crisis, which was on per-capita basis several times worse than the Iraq sectarian civil war. The Syrian refugee crisis lead to the rise of national parties in Europe, not mention the rise of ISIS. So as bad as the Iraq was with our involvement. I think the experiences of Syria, the half ass involvement in Libya the war in Yemen, as well as the general horrific governments in the Middle East point to an even worse outcome.
On the other hand, I’m perfectly happy to walk away from Central Asia that place is mess and I’ll let China and Russia fight over it.
That’s a gross oversimplification, and no one is saying the US would be absent from the world. Just that the world does not and should not revolve around the USA. There’s a huge difference between ignoring the world and thinking that everything revolves around us.
