A quarter-century after the 'war on terror' began, the American Middle East is over - Middle East Eye

Last month, a photographer in Tehran captured a passing scene that seemed unremarkable: people walking past a large anti-American billboard in the city, without so much as glancing up at it. 

The image ran alongside a lengthy essay titled “The End of the American Middle East” by Marc Lynch, a political science professor at George Washington University, in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. 

Lynch, who belongs to a critical current within the American academic establishment rather than its fringes, writes that the regional order Washington has sponsored since 1991 has fallen, and that the American-Israeli war with Iran was merely the final bullet in a body that had been bleeding for years.

The question is not whether Lynch is correct - the evidence is difficult to refute - but why it took this long for it to be stated so plainly, in a magazine long seen as a near-official reference point for the American foreign policy establishment. 

What does it mean, for the region’s peoples before their rulers, that an order presented for decades as inescapable fate is now being declared over?

The order that took shape after the 1991 Gulf War rested on two pillars that appeared contradictory, yet worked in tandem. These included dual military containment of Iran and Iraq through bases stretching from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean, and an unwritten bargain with Arab rulers, trading American security guarantees for silence over domestic repression and erasure of the Palestinian question. 

Entire generations of Arabs lived this as daily reality: military aid to rulers who were never questioned about their prisons, a “peace process” renewed every few years without ever approaching a Palestinian state, and an American shield protecting Israel from accountability at the UN Security Council. 

The arrangement never needed popular legitimacy, because it was never built to answer to anyone at home.

This absence of accountability, which for decades looked like the order’s strength, ultimately became the point of its collapse. A superpower that grants allies unconditional security guarantees exempts them from the price of their own decisions; those who know someone else will bear the consequences take greater risks.

This is what happened in Yemen, where Riyadh found in American backing cover for a war with no clear horizon for victory, sliding the country into catastrophe without a decision-maker paying a political price. 

It happened more dramatically in Gaza, where unconditional American protection became a de facto mandate for an Israeli campaign that has killed more than 73,000 people, many of them women and children. Various international bodies and experts have described it as a genocide. 

The same Washington that mobilised the world to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty simultaneously defended its ally’s right to expand settlements and raze Gaza with impunity - a double standard that deepened the fractures in the perceived legitimacy of the regional order.

That contradiction cost the American system much of its remaining moral authority in the Global South, while the elite consensus sustaining it at home began to crack, amid unprecedented student protests on American campuses and a sharp generational shift in how Americans view Israel. 

When domestic opinion inside the sponsoring state itself questions the bargain, it is no longer just a matter of image abroad, but the start of a rupture in the consensus that lets the bargain continue.

From the outset, American strategy rested on the assumption that ordinary Arab citizens’ opinions carried no real weight, so long as their rulers stayed cooperative - a deeper flaw than any calculation of immediate interest. 

When the 2011 uprisings erupted, demanding bread and dignity, Washington searched less for ways to support democratic transitions, and more for a formula to preserve the existing structure at the lowest cost - a logic that peaked with the Abraham Accords, a security bargain among ruling elites dressed up as historic peace, pushed through without ever reaching a ballot box. 

An order built on such disregard for public opinion does not need a major crisis to be shaken.

What distinguished recent years was a double shock: moral, in the collapse of whatever authority Washington claimed following its position on the Gaza holocaust, and military - more painful still for an establishment that defined its regional influence through deterrence.

Despite its devastating campaign against Hezbollah, Israel failed to secure its northern border. The Houthis imposed an effective naval blockade on Israeli-linked Red Sea shipping, withstanding months of American and British strikes - proof that a non-state actor could disrupt global trade against the most formidable military power in history. 

Iran then launched a direct missile barrage towards Israel, shattering a decades-old red line and forcing the American fleet to intervene, highlighting Israel’s dependence on costly US backing. 

In the 2026 war, Washington proved unable even to protect its Gulf allies. The very things that justified the American base network from Qatar to Bahrain - the capacity to deter, guarantee freedom of navigation, and protect allies without direct war - crumbled at once. 

The question now is no longer whether American influence will contract, but how long before that becomes undeniable to everyone.

Lynch invokes the 1956 Suez crisis, the moment Britain and France lost the capacity to impose their will on the region - though both empires needed decades before full withdrawal.

What makes the current moment different is that regional hedging began before the death certificate was written: when Riyadh and Tehran restored relations in 2023 through Chinese mediation that excluded Washington, it signalled regional powers were willing to resolve disputes through other channels. 

Since then, Gulf states have expanded partnerships with Beijing and Moscow, while some joined Brics - insurance against a day when American guarantees no longer demand exclusive loyalty.

The painful irony is that Israel and Iran, the two actors most capable of shaping a new regional order, share an interest in keeping the region on the edge of instability. 

For Israel, a persistent state of war justifies settlement expansion and postpones any reckoning over the state’s treatment of Palestinians. For Tehran, permanent tension offers a ready-made narrative to justify domestic repression - especially after the war left the regime emboldened, having shown it could close the Strait of Hormuz and strike Washington’s allies. 

Caught between them, Washington has no real tools to restrain either - even as it remains, formally, the region’s largest security guarantor.

The Gulf states, which long wagered that Washington would tip this balance in their favour, now face a painful conclusion: a power that cannot protect its partners from direct attack, nor consult them before a war that reaches them anyway, is no longer the reliable partner the 1991 arrangement was built upon.

The real costs fall not on those who designed the order, but on the peoples never consulted about its shape. Egypt is a stark example: while headlines dwell on missiles and mediation, Cairo bears the direct economic costs of a war it did not choose - fuel and food prices spiking, and Suez Canal revenue collapsing, atop an already deepening financial crisis. These daily bills deserve counting, alongside maps of influence and balances of power.

Lynch closes with a reformist appeal: abandoning military intervention as a first resort, engaging Iran diplomatically instead of isolating it, tying aid to human-rights standards, and accepting a multipolar region that Washington no longer solely defines. This is reasonable in theory, but he never clearly answers who possesses the will to carry it out. 

By his own diagnosis, the current administration is not equipped for a coherent approach of any kind, let alone one requiring real concessions on tools Washington has long treated as axiomatic to its influence. History teaches that institutions abandon entrenched habits only once the costs of continuing exceed the costs of change - which is precisely what appears to be happening now, albeit too slowly for those living through this moment to notice.

This returns us to the image of people walking past that Tehran billboard without a glance - an exact summary of what is happening more broadly. 

The old order is not collapsing in one dramatic moment for all to witness; it is fading slowly into the everyday scenery, until people wake up one morning to a wholly different reality, no longer remembering quite when it began.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.