By Tom Fowdy
For over 35 years, American foreign policy has been unable to distance itself from becoming a major party to conflicts in the Middle East. Since 1991 the US has participated in the Gulf War (1991-1992), the Iraq invasion (2003), the Al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq (2003-2009), the war against ISIS (2014-2017) and now, the Iran conflict (2026). This only includes direct US participation, and not the countless more occasions where it has been a behind-the-scenes player. Yet the pattern is clear, there has been roughly one major war every single decade, with Trump's latest venture arguably being the most catastrophic since the first Gulf War, given its regional scale.
Even as US intervention in the region has been accepted as an inevitable fact of life by most, the decision to actively pursue wars there is seen as increasingly immoral and politically toxic by the broader Western world. Ironically, it became a big selling point of Trump's "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) school of thought to bring an end to "forever wars" and to put the country first. Many believed he was an Anti-war candidate on the perception he would pursue the national interest and would not squander American lives and treasure meddling in the affairs of faraway lands. Hence, opposing politicians, such as Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, were scorned by him directly as being "pro-war."
Yet all this, Donald Trump suddenly decided to initiate a major conflict against Iran with global repercussions, and then unironically doubled down on his own Truth Social, saying the US actually was capable of waging "forever war" even as it has sent the global economy into chaos and betrayed his own core support. Just months ago, after all, the US had released its new National Security Strategy (NSS), saying that its primary focus was securing "the western hemisphere," yet here we are, in the Middle East again. Just how exactly did this happen? How has the US "fell for it again" and ended up locked in a region of the world that has expressed so much rhetoric in wanting to get itself out of?
First of all: The second Trump administration's policy is focused on attaining economic dominance through attaining hegemony over strategically important natural resources. For Trump, "America first" equates to unilateral economic power, to reassert the United States as the centre of the global economy. The President sees everything in the form of leverage and coercion in a transactional way, in order to procure gains so the US can "win", as he would put it, and gaining control of critical minerals and energy supplies is thus seen as essential to US security. Hence, Trump initiated a military operation to capture Nicholas Maduro and quickly subjugated Venezuela to American control, seizing its oil trade.
What the Maduro example teaches us is that while Trump rejects the idea of wars framed in the "moralistic" sense of good versus evil (in a George W. Bush kind of way), he absolutely endorses the idea of using military force to subjugate countries into giving him control of their resources and this is absolutely what he hoped would happen with Iran, another huge oil producing country hostile to the US. This, of course, answers the key question already: America's obsession with energy resources and security acts as a magnet pulling them back into the Middle East. The Maduro operation had given Trump hubris that a swift and decisive operation against Iran's leadership would see the regime topple and a pro-American appointee could rise to power and thus again deliver economic gain.
That didn't happen. For all the bombing, the Iranian regime shows no sign of collapse whatsoever and retaliated on a scale beyond anything Trump could have bargained for, causing a catastrophic regional conflict. This leads us to the next part of the argument, while the United States is frequently drawn into the Middle East for resource dominance (with Israeli lobbying also being a key factor), America also continually misunderstands the social realities of the region and this leads to miscalculations which turn small conflicts into larger ones, and subsequently sow the seeds of future ones.
For example, while Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed quickly following the Iraq invasion of 2003, the US was ignorant of the country's fragile legitimacy and sectarian divisions, and the subsequent instability from this event unleashed radicalisation which brought about the Al-Qaeda insurgency and then worse, the rise of ISIS. Likewise, the empowerment of the country's Shi'ite majority then expanded Iran's influence, as ironically, before Saddam Hussein became an enemy of the US, his role was that of an Anti-Iran bulwark which of course before that involved another war against Tehran that the US backed (1980-1988).
Essentially, each conflict the US engages in or supports, ultimately sows the seeds of another one, which then sucks them back in and creates contingencies which actively thwart long term attempts to withdraw from it. This then creates a toxic cycle which accumulates in decades' worth of wars. American decision-making is marred by miscalculations combined with the structural pulls of those very mistakes. Trump of course is attributed personal responsibility for this one (as well as Benjamin Netanyahu) given he arbitrarily thought he could bring down Iran in hours, but it nonetheless goes to show you that American "withdrawal" from the Middle East is easier said than done. Obsession over oil and Israeli lobbying will continue to vacuum Washington back in structurally in a cycle that shows no end. Trump now lives in the same vein as his predecessors he so scathingly condemned.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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