In the midst of a previous Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon 18 years ago, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice opposed calls for a ceasefire and argued that the conflict was part of the necessary "birth pangs of a New Middle East." Today, US policy is being swept along by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's expanding playbook but also grasping at visions of building a new Middle East.
It should be noted at the outset that one reason outside powers keep trying to reshape the Middle East is that the region has not properly shaped itself. The region has no overarching political or security architecture that integrates its main powers: the Arab states, Turkey, Israel and Iran. With no stable regional architecture, divergent political systems and attitudes, and several ongoing conflicts, the region remains prone to ambitious interventions.
The previous round of conflict two decades ago was triggered by an extremist Islamist attack—in that case on the US on 9/11, 2001—and led the George W. Bush administration to respond with a broad and aggressive strategy to use military force to fundamentally transform the region. The vision was not only to topple the regimes of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq but ultimately of Iran and Syria as well, and create a Middle East that was dominated by and aligned with the US and potentially democratic to boot.
The current conflict was also triggered by an extremist Islamist attack—this time by Hamas on Israel—and has led the Israeli administration to develop a broad and aggressive strategy to use military force to not only defeat Hamas and reassert control over Gaza but also potentially to reshape the Middle East by first taking on Iran’s proxies, and then Iran itself. In this conflict, the US administration started off trying to contain the conflict and build multiple ceasefires, but after months of failure, the US is finding itself going along with Israel’s much more ambitious and dangerous transformative strategy.
History of meddling
The US has a long history of trying to influence or reshape the Middle East. Some have been more positive than others, and some more successful than others.
More than a century ago, under President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points, the US stood out as a power calling for the right of self-determination of peoples and providing a sharp contrast to the colonial ambitions of European powers seeking to expand their control of post-Ottoman Arab lands. After World War II, the US presided over the dismantling of British and French colonial rule in the region. A good example of that was US President Eisenhower forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from the Suez Canal and the Sinai after their joint attack of 1956.
But this anti-colonial pro-independence approach was eclipsed by the Cold War in which the US and the Soviet Union reshaped the Middle East into rival coalitions of states ranged against each other. The US used its influence to topple hostile governments in the region and put in place pliant rulers; the most famous examples of that is the US-backed overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953—an event that still reverberates in current events—and US support for coups in Syria and other Arab countries. Of course, the Soviet Union was playing the same game in its own client countries. This pattern of outside interference strengthened authoritarian and intelligence/police states in the Middle East.
In the late 1970s, the US took a new tack to countering Soviet power. It leaned on radical Islamist groups in Afghanistan to counter the Soviet invasion of 1979. After the collapse of the US-aligned Shah of Iran in 1979, it favoured the Islamist alternative represented by Ayatollah Khomeini over the coalition of leftist and communist Iranian revolutionary parties that the US feared would align post-Shah Iran staunchly with Moscow.
