The Middle East’s
Spurious ‘Vacuum’ Trap
As the final US Iraq mission ends, the US military presence in the Middle East is not a force for stability in the region.
For three decades, every proposal to scale back America’s military footprint in the Middle East has run into the same rhetorical metaphor: the vacuum. If Washington leaves, we are told, chaos will rush in. Iran will go on the march, jihadists will regroup, China will take over the Persian Gulf, and Russia will fill whatever space is left. This image of a naturally anarchical Middle East abhorring a strategic vacuum has done more to prolong American entanglement in the region than any argument based on actual US national interests.
With the last US troops departing from Iraq, and temporary evacuations from US military bases in the Gulf states, it is well past time to retire the metaphor. The Middle East is not an empty room waiting for a tenant. It is a crowded neighborhood of ambitious, well-armed, and mutually suspicious regional powers. They have been managing, and mismanaging, their rivalries for centuries, long before the first American carrier group arrived in the Persian Gulf and very likely long after the last one leaves.
American power more often than not upsets the region’s equilibria. The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed the one Arab state that balanced Iran and opened the door to Tehran’s influence from Baghdad to Beirut. The 2011 Libyan intervention left a failed state and a weapons bazaar across the Sahel. Two decades of counterterrorism operations produced as many insurgents as they eliminated. If the United States is supposed to act as the region’s thermostat, it has been stuck on “overheat.”
The deeper problem is moral hazard. A superpower guarantee lets local actors behave recklessly. The Saudis and Emiratis launched a ruinous war in Yemen on the assumption that Washington would supply the munitions and absorb the diplomatic costs. Israeli governments have postponed hard decisions about the Palestinians, counting on American vetoes at the UN. Iran, for its part, has built a foreign policy around resisting the “Great Satan,” a posture that loses much of its domestic and regional appeal once the superpower packs up and goes home.
Disengagement would not produce paradise. It would produce something more familiar: a regional balance of power. The main players would have to deal directly with one another instead of lobbying Washington to take their side.
We have already seen previews. When Saudi Arabia concluded, after the 2019 attacks on its Abqaiq oil facilities, that the United States would not go to war on its behalf, Riyadh did not collapse. It opened talks with Tehran, and in 2023 the two restored diplomatic relations. The Abraham Accords were driven less by American mediation than by Arab states’ cold calculation that Israel was a useful partner against Iran and a gateway to Washington’s favor. Turkey, the Gulf states, Egypt, and Israel have each been hedging, courting, and recalibrating. This is what states do when they realize the patron may not always be there.
A post-American Middle East would likely feature:
An Iran contained by its neighbors, not the Pentagon. Tehran’s regional network has been badly battered, and its economy is weak. Without an American bogeyman to rally against, it would face a coalition of Sunni Arab states, Turkey, and Israel with every incentive to check it. Balancing coalitions form fastest when nobody expects a superpower to do the work.
An Israel that is a regional power, not a client. Israel has the strongest military and economy in its neighborhood and a nuclear deterrent. It does not need American troops. What it would lose is diplomatic cover. That may be exactly what forces Israeli leaders to seek a durable arrangement with the Palestinians and the Arab world rather than relying on Washington to manage the status quo indefinitely.
Gulf states that pay for their own security. The oil monarchies can afford it. They would buy weapons from many suppliers, build defense ties with Turkey, Pakistan, and one another, and above all avoid provoking neighbors they can no longer expect America to fight.
A cautious, not conquering, China. Beijing wants Gulf oil to flow and Chinese goods to move. It has shown no desire to garrison the region or referee Sunni-Shia feuds. China may broker the occasional deal, as it did between Riyadh and Tehran, but it has watched what the Middle East did to American power and is in no hurry to repeat the lesson. Russia, which lost its Syrian client when the Assad regime collapsed, is in even less of a position to play the hegemon.
The traditional rationale for American primacy in the Gulf was oil. That rationale has been eroding for years. The United States is now a major energy producer and exporter. Oil trades on a global market, and producers need to sell as much as consumers need to buy. Whoever dominates the Gulf, whether Saudi, Iranian, or something else, will still sell its crude. No conceivable regional power shift would cut off world supply for long. Price shocks are a real risk, but strategic reserves and market diversity can manage them, not permanent military deployments.
The strongest remaining argument concerns terrorism. But a large American presence has been one of the jihadists’ most effective recruiting tools. Intelligence cooperation, border security, and occasional targeted action from offshore can handle the threat. None of this requires tens of thousands of troops or open-ended nation-building.
None of this implies a sudden, disorderly exit. A sensible policy might be called benign neglect: a steady withdrawal of forces, preservation of diplomatic and economic relationships, and a clear message to regional capitals that their security is now primarily their own responsibility. The United States could remain a trading partner, an arms supplier on a transactional basis, and an occasional honest broker. It would no longer be the region’s security guarantor, referee, and scapegoat.
History offers a reminder. When Britain withdrew from its commitments “East of Suez” in 1971, predictions of catastrophe were plentiful. However, the Gulf states, which had known only British protection until then, did not fall apart; local states adjusted, and new arrangements emerged. The same would likely happen again. The region would remain turbulent, as it has been under every imperial arrangement from the Ottomans to Pax Americana. But the turbulence would belong to the people who live there, and they would have the strongest incentives to contain it.
The real question is not what happens to the Middle East when America leaves. It is what happens to America if it never does.
About the Author: Leon Hadar
Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor with The National Interest, is a former senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a former research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has taught international relations, Middle East politics, and communication at American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Maryland, College Park. A columnist and blogger with Haaretz (Israel) and Washington correspondent for The Business Times of Singapore, he is a former United Nations bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post.
