Every time the world begins to believe that the United States has finally absorbed the lessons of its past misadventures, American administrations seem to fall once more into the familiar temptation of reshaping distant regions according to their own strategic imagination.
This impulse is typically framed in a language of moral purpose and in supporting peoples in their struggle to liberate themselves from tyrannical rulers, restore democracy, and defend freedom.
Yet, these slogans, repeated with ritual certainty for decades, have steadily lost their credibility. Across the Middle East and beyond, attempts at externally engineered political transformation have yielded instability rather than order, and fragmentation rather than democratic renewal. What was once presented as a project of liberation has, in many cases, come to resemble a cycle of strategic overreach and unintended consequences.
Scholars of political realism have long warned about the dangers inherent in such ambitions. They have repeatedly cautioned that societies possess their own internal dynamics, historical, cultural, and political, that cannot be redesigned through external force or ideological projection.
Former US national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger captured this dilemma succinctly when he observed that “the Middle East has resisted every attempt at imposed order. Outsiders have repeatedly believed they could redesign the region according to their own concepts, only to discover that the region has its own logic.”
Kissinger’s observation reflects a broader insight within realist thinking – that the Middle East is not an empty canvas awaiting an external design but a complex political landscape shaped by competing nationalisms, deep historical grievances, and entrenched regional rivalries.
If Kissinger’s logic is taken seriously, then the persistent American belief that the region can be engineered from the outside appears to be fundamentally flawed. In practice, Washington’s calculations have often been filtered through a strategic bias towards advancing Israeli security priorities above all else. This imbalance has increasingly alienated other regional actors who view American initiatives not as neutral efforts to stabilise the Middle East but as projects designed primarily to reinforce Israel’s regional position.
Many states in the region now find themselves paying the price for what they perceive as Washington’s overt strategic alignment with Israeli objectives, particularly in the joint American-Israeli campaign against Iran which is widely seen by regional observers as an attempt to reshape the balance of power in accordance with Israel’s long-term strategic interests.
The American-Israeli military campaign against Iran has thus exposed the full spectrum of contradictions that define the contemporary Middle East. For more than four decades, many societies across the region have viewed the Iranian regime with deep suspicion or outright hostility.
Yet the outbreak of a large-scale war has produced a complicated reaction. Public opinion has become sharply divided between those who reject what they see as an unjustified war and one that has evolved from the stated objective of containing Iran’s nuclear programme into a broader attempt to construct a new regional order centred on Israeli dominance, and those who fear that an expanding conflict could devastate the region’s economic foundations.
Nowhere are these anxieties more pronounced than in the Gulf. Over the past three decades, the Gulf states have invested enormous resources in ambitious development strategies designed to diversify their economies, modernise infrastructure, and reduce their dependence on hydrocarbons.
A prolonged regional war threatens not only to destabilise global energy markets but also to jeopardise the fragile economic transformation these states have painstakingly pursued. The spectre of a wider conflict, one capable of draining the region’s resources and undermining investor confidence, has therefore generated deep concern about the sustainability of the Gulf’s development model.
Realist thinkers have long argued that such outcomes are almost inevitable when great powers attempt to impose political outcomes on complex regional systems. As the prominent US international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has noted, “great powers often believe they can bend distant regions to their will, but nationalism and local politics are forces far stronger than they imagine.”
His observation captures a recurring pattern in modern geopolitics: external powers consistently underestimate the resilience of local political identities and the unpredictable consequences of intervention.
CRISIS: The confusion and strategic drift produced by a US administration heavily influenced by business elites and investors have created a crisis for the United States itself before anyone else.
The absence of clearly defined objectives and the lack of a coherent strategy for managing a war that the American secretary of defence reportedly imagined would be a short campaign, ending within days through intensive airstrikes on Iranian leadership targets and nuclear and military facilities, have exposed the depth of Washington’s miscalculations.
The underlying assumption appeared to be that such a display of overwhelming force would compel the Iranian leadership to capitulate swiftly to American demands.
Instead, the absence of strategic management and the visible influence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu within the wartime decision-making process appear to have drawn the Trump administration into a trap of strategic complacency. The result has been a dangerous underestimation of the adversary and a profound misreading of the regional environment.
The consequences of this are now reverberating far beyond the battlefield. The global economy awakens each day to new aftershocks from the crisis, as tensions in the Strait of Hormuz strike at this main artery of the world economy. International trade routes have been disrupted, global aviation and travel networks have been thrown into disarray, and the world economy is absorbing losses measured in billions of dollars every day.
The convictions guiding the Trump administration, rooted in a series of strategic illusions, are now generating a profound dilemma for the United States, both domestically and internationally.
On the domestic front, the administration’s conduct has amplified waves of public anger among significant segments of American society. Its rhetoric and policies have reinforced a negative image of the United States in the eyes of many citizens, fuelled as they have been by inflammatory statements that have been widely perceived as racially charged, dismissive of other nations, and reflective of a sense of civilisational superiority.
At the same time, the economic consequences of the strategic miscalculation are beginning to be felt at home. The turbulence generated by the crisis is increasingly affecting the American economy, with the middle class bearing much of the burden as rising energy prices, market volatility, and uncertainty ripple through the economic landscape.
Internationally, the administration has undermined key pillars of international law and the rules-based order that the United States once claimed to defend. Through controversial and widely criticised interventions, whether in Venezuela or in the ongoing confrontation with Iran, Washington has set precedents that many governments view as violations of established norms of sovereignty and legality.
These policies now risk igniting a far broader global confrontation, particularly as the unfolding energy crisis begins to impact major competing economies. China and the broader Asian markets, today the central engines of global economic growth, have already begun to feel the repercussions of the instability spreading across global energy and trade networks.
The crisis now unfolding in the Middle East appears to have moved beyond the point where it can easily be contained or its damage limited. Unless the American administration awakens to the dangers of continuing down a path that risks spiralling into a prolonged and catastrophic confrontation, the consequences may endure for years.
In such a scenario, the costs will not be borne by Iran or the Gulf states alone. The United States itself may ultimately pay a far higher price than many in Washington had imagined.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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