Much of the debate has centred on the future of US policy in the Middle East: have these developments shaken America’s standing in the region and altered the nature of its relations with Middle Eastern states? Beyond the immediate media clamour, however, the future of the American role in the region has been the subject of serious academic inquiry for several years, producing a substantial body of literature.
Among the most important recent contributions to this debate is Marc Lynch’s The American Middle East: The Ruination of a Region, published in 2025. Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, examines the transformations that have gradually eroded the system of American hegemony established in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait. His central argument is that this system, far from delivering security, stability and peace, has increasingly become a source of conflict, fragmentation, instability and war.
Lynch argues that the unipolar era endowed Washington with a form of virtually unchecked hegemony. With no rival power capable of imposing meaningful constraints on its conduct in the Middle East, the United States exercised power with little fear of being held accountable for the consequences. In practice, he argues, this approach contributed to the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the civil war in Syria, the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and Washington’s unconditional alignment with Israel. American hegemony did not produce the stability it promised. Instead, it contributed to what Lynch describes as the systematic “ruination” of the region.
By “ruination,” Lynch means considerably more than physical destruction. The term encompasses the collapse of states, the erosion of the nation-state, the breakdown of institutions, protracted civil and regional wars, the spread of sectarian and communal violence, and the entrenchment of authoritarianism. To these consequences he adds the erosion of the moral foundations of the international order through the application of double standards and violations of the principles of the United Nations and international law.
For Lynch, one of the clearest signs that the American hegemonic order in the Middle East has begun to fracture is the erosion of the credibility of US deterrence and Washington’s diminishing ability to impose its preferences or shape the behaviour of regional actors, allies and adversaries alike. He examines the changing relationship between the United States and its traditional Gulf allies, highlighting the decline of their former political deference to Washington. These states no longer automatically align themselves with American positions as a matter of course. They have increasingly emerged as autonomous actors pursuing their national interests according to pragmatic and realist calculations, even when those interests diverge from US preferences. In the process, they have sought to take advantage of China’s rise and Russia’s return as an international actor.
Lynch develops this argument through an examination of the record of major US policies, from the invasion of Iraq — which he describes as the quintessential embodiment of the sin of unchecked hegemony — to Washington’s handling of countries that experienced mass popular uprisings and profound changes in their political systems. Such policies, he argues, repeatedly failed to achieve their stated objectives and frequently produced outcomes directly contrary to those anticipated and promoted by policymakers in Washington.
The result, in Lynch’s account, was that the United States fell into the corrupting trap of absolute hegemony, an argument that echoes Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” America found itself operating in a strategic environment in which no balancing power remained capable of restraining or deterring it. The Middle East consequently became a laboratory for what Lynch describes as the temptation of unipolarity — in effect, an addiction to hegemony whose costs were borne by the peoples of the region. A form of power without effective accountability emerged, enabling Washington to operate across the Middle East largely beyond the reach of international legal responsibility or meaningful political consequences.
This predicament was reinforced by the militarisation of American foreign policy and Washington’s excessive reliance on military instruments, including overseas bases and arms sales, often justified in the name of counterterrorism. The Israeli war on Gaza that began in 2023 — which Lynch regards as a natural consequence of longstanding American indifference to Palestinian rights — dealt what he sees as the final blow to what remained of the political and moral legitimacy of the US-led international order in the region. He develops this argument with particular force in a chapter entitled “The Inequality of Human Life.”
The Gaza war exposed the profound gulf between Washington’s overarching strategic objective — integrating Israel into the region’s network of relationships and constructing a regional coalition against Iran — and the reality of Arab public opinion, deeply angered by Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories and by the continued failure to resolve the Palestinian question, which has retained its central place in Arab and Muslim consciousness. The war also demonstrated that, despite its overwhelming military capabilities, Washington remains unable to impose a political process capable of resolving the region’s fundamental conflicts and establishing lasting security and stability. Its approach has increasingly been reduced to reacting to events and managing successive crises.
Lynch does not argue that the United States has withdrawn from the Middle East. His contention is more consequential: American hegemony has lost its capacity to produce stable regional orders, and US influence is undergoing a process of “structural disintegration” rather than a temporary decline or cyclical retreat. He therefore urges American policymakers to abandon the old ambitions of hegemony, acknowledge the limits of US power, and embrace a more realistic strategy based on military and political de-escalation and multilateral diplomacy rather than continuing military involvement in defence of an order that has effectively outlived its usefulness.
The case for recalibrating the American role in the Middle East becomes still more compelling, according to Lynch, because no other international power is capable of assuming the role of controlling and managing the region that the United States once sought to perform. The erosion of American hegemony, therefore, does not necessarily herald a more stable or balanced regional order. On the contrary, the Middle East may become more complex, fragmented and disorderly. An increasingly decentralised regional system is taking shape, continually reconfigured through flexible and temporary alliances, while major regional powers — Arab and non-Arab alike — compete for influence. Such a landscape increases the likelihood of political confrontation and direct or indirect military conflict, while creating additional risks for American interests in the region.
An analysis published in 2025 thus poses a question that has become considerably more urgent in 2026: is it not time for Arab governments to reconsider the future of their relationship with the United States?
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