WHY AMERICA SHOULDN’T ABANDON THE MIDDLE EAST
BY MOST MEASURES JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY was a lackluster one. Americans were experiencing malaise at home and a string of apparent defeats abroad, highlighted by the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Yet these twin crises produced the Carter Doctrine, which has served the United States and its allies well ever since.
The Carter Doctrine explicitly committed the United States to defend the oil fields of the Persian Gulf against external threats. Carter’s successor, President Ronald Reagan, built on this strategy with what should be seen as a “Reagan Corollary,” which committed Washington to defending the free export of Gulf oil against threats from within the Middle East as well. Since then, both Republican and Democratic administrations have recognized that the U.S. role in protecting Gulf oil exports constitutes a critical component of the international order the United States built after 1945—an order that has made the country stronger, more secure, and more prosperous than it otherwise would have been.
Until now. In the summer of 2019, President Donald Trump tossed the United States’ alliances with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states into the flames of his own inadvertent bonfire. By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposing “maximum pressure” on Tehran economically, Trump provoked the Iranians to begin attacking the Gulf states and their oil exports. May, June, and July 2019 saw attacks on six oil tankers, the seizure of two more, rocket and missile attacks from Iraq and Yemen, and drone attacks on Saudi airports. Through it all, the United States did next to nothing in terms of a military response. Worse, Trump and his senior subordinates publicly insisted that they did not consider Iranian attacks on America’s Gulf allies to be threats to its vital interests.
In September, Iran upped the ante by conducting a mass drone and cruise missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s irreplaceable Abqaiq and Khurais petroleum processing plants. Again, Trump did nothing. And by doing so, he undercut the central premise of U.S. strategy in the Gulf. By calling into question the United States’ long-standing commitment to the security and stability of the region, Trump’s approach to Iran and the Gulf will have grave consequences. It threatens to destabilize an already volatile region and undermine the U.S. strategic position vis-à-vis Tehran. Indeed, the U.S. strike in January that killed Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, threatens simply to distract us from a larger geopolitical reality: Trump’s desertion of the Carter Doctrine is making it more likely that Tehran will achieve its greatest strategic victory since the Islamic Revolution—a victory that is still very much in the United States’ interest to deny.
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even by the standards of the Middle East. The Islamic Revolution, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Arab fury at the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Saddam Hussein’s accession to the presidency of Iraq, and the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca threw the region into chaos and spawned radical new threats. Moreover, between the civil strife that followed the shah’s fall and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s disdain for the corruption bred by Iran’s oil wealth,
