Terrorism is inseparable from its historical, political, and societal context, a context that has both a local and a global dimension.
—AUDREY KURTH CRONIN, HOW TERRORISM ENDS
IN 2020, the situation across the greater Middle East, the region spanning Morocco in the west to Iran in the east and encompassing the northern countries of Syria and Iraq to the southern countries of Sudan and Yemen, remained as confounding as it was wretched. The inability of the United States to develop and implement a sound, consistent policy in cooperation with like-minded nations contributed to the scale and duration of the catastrophe in the region and diminished American influence there. The policies of the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations were consistent with America’s tendency to engage the region episodically and pursue short-term solutions to long-term problems.1 As the experience in Iraq demonstrated, treating symptoms rather than causes of violence perpetuates conflict and magnifies threats to national and international security. Our efforts in the Middle East should focus on ending the sectarian civil war that is at the root of the humanitarian crisis and the threats that emanate from the region. To succeed, those efforts must be executed at a cost acceptable to the American people.
If Americans are to view the Middle East other than as a mess to be avoided, our strategy must begin with an explanation of what is at stake and how sustained engagement in the region is important to citizens’ security and prosperity. As Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack observed, the region is important to Americans because problems there do not conform to the city of Las Vegas’s motto—that is, what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East.2 The failure of the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise of ISIS reached far beyond the region. From March 2011 to October 2018, the Syrian Civil War alone caused the deaths of more than 500,000 people and displaced more than a quarter of Syria’s 21 million people.3 Bashar al-Assad’s regime forcibly disappeared more than 98,000 men, women, and children and arbitrarily imprisoned more than 144,000 in Syria’s despicable prisons.4 No one knows how many civilians the Syrian regime murdered, but estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.
As violence intensified, President Barack Obama and U.S. allies in Europe disengaged from the region and decided against options that might have limited the scale and reach of crises in Libya and Syria. A multinational security force in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, for example, might have prevented the fragmentation of a potentially wealthy country that spans a wide geographic area but has a population of only less than seven million people.5 In Syria, no-fly areas and safe zones such as those established for Iraq’s Kurds in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War might have mitigated the humanitarian crisis, stemmed the flow of refugees, constrained Iranian and Russian influence, impeded the growth of ISIS and other jihadist terrorist organizations, and put pressure on the Assad regime and its sponsors to seek a political resolution of the civil war.6 Viable options to address Syria’s problems diminished over time as moderate opposition to the regime lost ground to Islamist extremists and Russia intervened to prevent Assad’s collapse in 2014, the same year that ISIS conducted its massive offensive across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, the intensifying war in Syria, large-scale sectarian violence in Iraq, chaos in Libya, and, after 2014, a civil war in Yemen created conditions ideal for the growth of ISIS and Al-Qaeda-related groups (such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Nusra Front). Just over a year after al-Baghdadi gave his sermon in Mosul, ISIS directed or inspired attacks, including the mass murder of Parisians in November, mosque bombings in Yemen, attacks on tourists in Tunisia, suicide bombings in Ankara and Beirut, the destruction of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, and the San Bernardino shooting in the United States in December. On March 22, 2016, three ISIS-directed suicide bombings struck the airport and a Metro station in Brussels, killing two civilians. Meanwhile, ISIS’s external plotting against Western targets, including the aviation sector, continued. The more than one hundred Americans who traveled to Syria to join terrorist groups, and the thousands of Europeans who did so, represented a new danger from returning fighters to the United States or to countries with visa waivers for travel to North America.7 ISIS’s reach was not limited to the physical world. The terrorist organization mastered the internet and social media to recruit and inspire attacks. It was apparent that what happened in the caliphate did not stay in the caliphate.
The argument to war-weary U.S. citizens as well as NATO and EU nations sharing the burden in the Middle East is that preventing the rise of terrorist organizations is less costly than responding after they become an inescapable threat. When the U.S. military was forced to return to the region in support of the Iraqi Army and mainly Kurdish militias in Iraq and eastern Syria, the subsequent five-year campaign to wrest control of territory the size of Britain from ISIS cost far more in lives and treasure than sustaining the effort in Iraq and mitigating the mass atrocity of the Syrian Civil War would have cost.
Another aspect of that argument is that it is wiser to address the causes of violence than continue expensive treatments of the symptoms. Syria became the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II and has generated a refugee crisis that has overburdened neighboring states of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and extended into Europe. Between 2014 and 2018, approximately 18,000 refugees who, in desperation, trusted their lives to criminal traffickers drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, over 24.3 percent of them children. By 2020, more than 1 million refugees made it to Europe’s shores or across its borders from Turkey. Syrian refugee populations reached 900,000 in Lebanon, 600,000 in Jordan, and 3.6 million in Turkey.8
Statistics, however, were numbing, and reports rarely covered real victims’ experiences. Only occasionally did people in the United States and Europe appear struck by the human cost of the crises, such as when, in September 2015, heartrending photos circulated of the body of the drowned three-year-old boy, Alan Kurdi (born Aylan Shenu), on a Turkish beach; or, in August 2016, a video of a child victim of Assad’s bombing of Aleppo, Omran Daqneesh, showed him in shock, bleeding from the face in the back of an ambulance. The refugee crisis grew worse as the war intensified. In late December 2016, counting on continued U.S. and European indifference, Russia had expanded the indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo. In what before the war had been Syria’s most populous city and cultural center, thirty thousand Syrians perished.9 The bombing campaign inflicted mass casualties on civilians, targeting hospitals and funerals. An assault by Iranian proxy Shia militias followed. On December 13, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power asked the Russians rhetorically, “Have you no shame?” But President Obama and his administration were not sufficiently moved to reverse their policy of resignation toward what they regarded as an intractable mess. In an op-ed in the New York Times, National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa Steven Simon wrote, “the truth is that it is too late for the United States to wade deeper into the Syrian conflict without risking a major war.”10 Americans’ continued view of the crisis in the Middle East was as a protracted episode of mass homicide limited to faraway places and therefore not an American problem.
Refugees generated financial and political as well as physical burdens, weakened already fragile political orders in the Middle East, and fueled political polarization and the rise of nativist sentiment across Europe. In countries hosting refugees, initial outpourings of sympathy and willingness to provide assistance gave way to vitriolic debates between those who favored continued support and others who resented the diversion of resources from their own populations. European fears rose that a large influx of Muslims could alter the social and religious character of their nations or that jihadist terrorists would infiltrate the throngs of refugees.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that crises in the Middle East do not stay there, it has proved difficult for the United States to sustain efforts, beyond billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance, that actually addressed the disease of sectarian conflict. In the summer of 2019, President Donald Trump resurrected the Obama administration assumption that the United States could disengage from the region and remain insulated from the conflicts there. As he announced the withdrawal of the small American special operations force that had been fighting alongside the People’s Protection Unit (YPG)–dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria, Trump tweeted that it was time to “get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars.” He described Syria as nothing but “sand and death.”11 While he later stated that two hundred to three hundred troops would remain to secure the oil in eastern Syria, the damage to U.S. credibility and influence compounded the damage done by the Obama administration’s withdrawal from the region.12 Potential consequences of disengagement included a return to low-level Kurdish-Turkish conflict, YPG accommodation with the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian sponsors, the return of ISIS or a new-and-improved version of it, and the extension of Iranian influence across Syria in a way that threatens Israel and perpetuates the sectarian civil war. As horrific as the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have been, disengagement made them worse.
In late 2019 and early 2020, the Assad regime and their Russian and Iranian sponsors intensified their murderous campaign against Syrian civilians in the northeastern province of Idlib. Over 900,000 people, including half a million children, battled the indiscriminate bombing and freezing-cold conditions. Like the Obama administration’s response to the destruction of Aleppo in 2016, the mass murder and forced displacement of innocents in Idlib elicited statements of condemnation but no direct action, even as the Turkish armed forces began to take casualties. The muted response to the mass atrocity in Idlib revealed that the already catastrophic conditions in the Middle East can get worse. Convincing Americans to support sustained engagement in the region should begin with leaders explaining why the Middle East is important to the American people.
Many who advocated for withdrawal from Syria argued that the Middle East was no longer important to American security and prosperity because the United States had become the world’s largest oil producer and a net energy exporter.13 But the Middle East has always been and will remain an arena for competitions that have consequences far beyond its geographic expanse. Competitions with revisionist powers, rogue regimes, and jihadist terrorists converge and interact there. Enemies and adversaries often operate in parallel, but they also cooperate when their interests align. For example, Russia and Iran aid, abet, and sustain the murderous Assad regime in Syria. Russia used the crisis in the region as a way to weaken Europe and present itself as the indispensable power broker that can ameliorate the problems that it is helping to create. Iran, too, has taken advantage of regional chaos to its strategic advantage against its foes Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Even North Korea was a participant in destabilizing the region as it contributed to Assad’s nuclear weapons program, an effort that went undetected until 2007.14
Beyond the physical threats associated with the confluence of revisionist powers, hostile states, and terrorist organizations, the Middle East, along with the historical “Khorasan” region (which comprised what is now northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and most of Afghanistan), is foundational to jihadist terrorists’ psychological and ideological strength. Their plan is to reestablish the caliphate in the Fertile Crescent that runs from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and northern Egypt. And their mission is to fight to liberate the ummah, or Muslim community, everywhere from what the jihadis see as foreign control. Moreover, world economic growth still remains dependent on the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz just as it did during the oil embargo and crisis of 1973 and the “tanker wars” of the 1980s.15
THE REFUGEE crisis and the humanitarian catastrophes in the region are connected to the trafficking of drugs and other illicit goods as well as people. Perhaps most important, the crisis is generating a large-scale, multigenerational threat from jihadist terrorism. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, that threat was more severe than it was on September 10, 2001. It was alumni of the mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s who built Al-Qaeda, declared war on the United States, and executed a series of attacks prior to 9/11. The terrorist alumni from twenty-first-century wars are orders of magnitude larger than their Afghan War alumni predecessors. ISIS was an improvement on Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as it came with a sophisticated propaganda machine, recruiting agency, organized crime network, and proto-state. ISIS attracted more than thirty thousand fighters, not only from the Middle East and the greater Arab world, but also from developed countries such as EU nations, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Within two years following its formation in the heart of the Middle East, ISIS spawned franchise organizations in states ranging from Algeria to Nigeria to Yemen to Somalia and even the Philippines.16
Twenty-first-century terrorist organizations not only have global reach; they are also pursuing technologies and destructive weapons previously associated only with nation states, including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high explosives. There is broad agreement on the worst-case scenario: a terrorist organization in possession of a nuclear device either stolen, purchased, or provided to it by a hostile state. A dirty bomb, which combines commonplace explosives with highly radioactive materials, would inflict far less damage and fewer casualties than a nuclear device, but it would be easier to obtain. Its detonation in a densely populated area would incite fear in cities across the globe. Other emerging capabilities that are readily available, such as offensive cyber and weaponized drones, are threats to aviation and people on the ground.17 The terrorist’s most powerful weapon, however, may be the computer, camera, and communications device that every one of them carries in his or her pocket. Encrypted communications improve terrorists’ ability to evade intelligence collection and coordinate their actions. Also, twenty-first-century terrorists produce and distribute slick propaganda to attract susceptible young people to their depraved cause.
AT BEST, it will take time and effort for the United States to regain influence lost due to its lack of a sustained and consistent policy in the Middle East. Adversaries have stepped in to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its traditional partners, including Israel, Turkey, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. In 2017, I found that these partners were hedging, working with U.S. adversaries to limit their exposure to another sudden change in U.S. policy. They were falling for empty promises from Russia under what might be labeled Putin’s Potemkin Peace Plan. In exchange for keeping Assad in power and guaranteeing Russian interests in a post–civil war Syria, Russia promised our partners that it would gradually attenuate Iranian influence in Syria. What Russia desperately needed in return was for Gulf States to pay for the reconstruction of the rubble-strewn Sunni Arab cities and towns that Russia, the Assad regime, and the Iranians had destroyed. Russia’s promise was a lie because Assad had become far more reliant on Iranian than on Russian support, but Israel and the Gulf States suspended disbelief because if the United States disengaged from the region, influence with Russia might become vital to preventing even greater threats from Iran.
Turkey joined with Russia and Iran in sham peace processes for Syria that undercut the legitimate UN effort to end the war there. False Russian promises and the reality that Moscow had forces in position to influence the situation is why King Salman of Saudi Arabia flew to Moscow in October 2017 and pledged to buy Russian air defense systems.18 Meanwhile, Jordan purchased more Russian military equipment, and Israel expanded high-tech partnerships with Russian companies. Between 2017 and 2019, Israel pretended to believe Putin in exchange for Russian forces turning a blind eye as the Israel Defense Forces conducted more than two hundred strikes against Iranian facilities and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran operatives in Syria.19 By playing Syria both ways, as Iran’s principal enabler and the best potential check on Iranian hegemony in the region, Russia saw its influence grow.
When I confronted our partners about the contradiction between their grave concern about growing Iranian influence in the region and behavior that aided Iran’s principal enabler, Russia, they protested. They pointed to the Obama administration’s withdrawal from the region and enablement of Iran with sanctions relief associated with the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal and professed the need to retain some influence with Russia as a way to mitigate the damage. I tried to assure them that the Trump administration had developed a long-term strategy for breaking the cycle of sectarian violence in the region that would, over time, influence an outcome consistent with not only U.S. but also their vital interests.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson summarized that strategy in a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in January 2018. First, U.S. military presence and engagement in the region was essential for deterring actions that magnified the humanitarian crisis. He recalled that, the previous April, President Trump had responded to Assad’s use of sarin nerve agent against innocent civilians with strikes that destroyed 20 percent of Assad’s air force. He then summarized the need for a long-term effort to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations that represented “continued strategic threats to the U.S.” He highlighted the need to counter the IRGC’s attempts to control routes from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean and the need to reduce Iranian influence such that it could no longer perpetuate sectarian civil wars in the region. He reassured allies and partners that the president would not repeat the 2011 mistake of premature disengagement from Iraq and pledged to “continue to remain engaged as a means to protect our own national security interest.” Finally, the United States would implement a comprehensive regional strategy for ensuring jihadist terrorists did not threaten the United States and its allies, ending the Syrian Civil War under the UN political process; checking Iranian ambitions; and ending the humanitarian crises across the region such that refugees could return to secure environments and start rebuilding their lives. He acknowledged that accomplishing those goals would take a long-term diplomatic and military effort, but assured all listening that our military mission in Syria and elsewhere in the region would remain conditions-based.20
Our partners’ skepticism frustrated me, but it turned out to be well placed. They knew that, in 2016, even as candidate Trump vowed to accelerate the defeat of ISIS, he shared the Obama administration’s sentiment that continued military engagement in the Middle East was futile and wasteful. On October 13, 2019, after a series of announcements of his intention to withdraw from Syria and reversals of that decision, Trump ordered all U.S. forces out immediately, in part to clear the way for a Turkish offensive to take control of a “safe zone” south of its border with Syria.21 Subsequent to the withdrawal, Russian forces raised flags over former U.S. bases and tens of thousands of Iranian-backed militias occupied territory that was formerly held by ISIS in eastern Syria. Turkish-supported militias poured into Northern Syria. Many committed war crimes against Kurdish civilians, including the murder of Hevrin Khalaf, a female Kurdish politician.22 The U.S. abandonment of its Kurdish YPG partners and its withdrawal from northeastern Syria validated the wary approach of our allies in the region, but the regional accommodation to the Iran-Syria-Russia axis was as unnatural as it was detestable.
The people of the region know the cause of their suffering. In September 2019, major protests broke out in the eastern Syrian province of Dayr al-Zawr as Sunni Arabs demanded the withdrawal of Iranian militias. In southern Syria, protests against the Assad regime continued, and insurgent attacks grew more frequent. In October, in Iraq, antigovernment protests directed at the Iraqi political leaders evolved into a revolt against Shia political parties and increasing Iranian influence. That same month, Lebanon had the biggest protest since its independence, where demonstrators demanding political reform and an end to corruption forced Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign. Then, in December, more than two hundred thousand protesters in Iraq raged against the Iraqi government and a foreign occupier—not the United States, but Iran—chanting, “Free, free Iraq” and “Iran get out, get out.”23 They demanded the resignation of the Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi. He resigned on November 30, 2019, but remained at the head of a caretaker government until February 2020, when Iraqi president Barham Salih appointed Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, a former minister of communication under Prime Minister Maliki, as prime minister.
At the end of 2019, as Iraqi protests intensified, Iranian proxies stepped up attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. On December 27, a rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq killed an American contractor, Nawres Waleed Hamid, and wounded several soldiers.24 Iran’s IRGC had clearly used Iraqi proxy militias under the command of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. After the United States retaliated with airstrikes on five militia outposts along the Syrian border, Iranian-backed Shia militias mobilized mass protests and an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The images of the angry mob on December 31 were reminiscent of Iranian attacks on the U.S. embassy in Tehran forty years earlier. Simultaneously, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, was coordinating broader and potentially deadly attacks on U.S. facilities in the region. On January 3, at around 1 a.m., soon after Muhandis picked up Soleimani at Baghdad Airport to coordinate their next move, a U.S. missile struck their vehicle, destroying it and its passengers. President Trump decided that the action was necessary to restore deterrence against Iran and to prevent the attacks Soleimani was planning. Although Shia protesters in Baghdad and other Shia-majority cities, such as Basra, lamented the deaths of Muhandis and Soleimani and the Iraqi parliament, with Sunni and Kurd members abstaining, passed a nonbinding resolution for U.S. forces to withdraw, Iraqis continued to call for Iran to withdraw. In early 2020, Iran did its best to increase the pressure on the United States in Iraq by mobilizing a million-man march and a resistance front that would integrate rival militias. The Iranian regime grew increasingly concerned that protests in its own country and in Lebanon and Iraq, combined with severe economic problems, represented a grave threat to the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. Iran attempted to use the Soleimani and Muhandis killings to co-opt the Iraqi protest movement and quash opposition to its subversion of the Iraqi state. That effort failed because Iraqi alignment with Iran is unnatural, and the vast majority of the Iraqi people equate Iranian influence with corruption and failing governance. In early 2020, Iraqi protesters rejected the appointment of Tawfiq Allawi as prime minister and continued to demand an end to corruption, ineffective governance, and malign Iranian influence.
But despite the growing resistance to Iran and its proxy militias, the prospects for stabilizing Iraq remained dim due to the fragmentation of Iraqi society along sectarian lines, Iran’s sustained campaign of subversion, and America’s vacillation between intervention and disengagement. In 2020, U.S. influence, not only in Iraq but also across the Middle East, had diminished due to the United States’ demonstrated inability to develop and implement a consistent, long-term policy toward that vexing region.
DEVELOPING A long-term strategy requires a big dose of strategic empathy and a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics playing out in the region. The problem in the Middle East is, at its base, a breakdown in order associated with the serial failures of colonial rule, postcolonial monarchies, Arab nationalism, socialist dictatorships, and Islamist extremism to provide effective governance and forge a common identity across diverse communities. Decades of conflict fragmented societies along ethnic, sectarian, and tribal lines and perpetuated competitions for power, resources, and survival. The resulting violence strengthens jihadist terrorists and extends Iranian influence.
The United States and its partners should identify and then strengthen groups that will contribute to enduring political settlements, break the cycle of sectarian violence, and prevent terrorists from establishing support bases. The experience in Tal Afar in 2005 and the Iraq surge are examples of how support for political accommodation among communities and the reform of security forces and local governance can isolate extremists from popular support. By contrast, the Obama administration’s efforts to fight ISIS in Syria and the Trump administration’s announcement of withdrawal from eastern Syria revealed a failure to see military efforts as a means to a political end. Contrary to the belief among some in Washington that there were no Sunni Arab partners to work with, effective support for Sunni anti-Assad opposition early in the Syrian Civil War would have been the best way to fight Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other jihadist terrorist organizations. In January 2014, five months before the Obama administration intervened against ISIS in Syria, Sunni Arab rebels dealt ISIS a devastating blow. Opposition protesters and moderate rebels launched an offensive, expelling ISIS terrorists from Idlib, the Damascus suburbs, and major parts of Aleppo Province. These Arab Sunnis who opposed Assad had suffered greatly from ISIS. The largest ISIS mass atrocity in Syria was its brutal murder of approximately one thousand members of the anti-Assad Al-Sha’itat tribe in one day in August 2014.25
But the Obama administration’s five-hundred-million-dollar “train-and-equip” program to support Arab opposition forces was disconnected from the political struggle. Assistance focused narrowly on anti-ISIS operations, even though it was Assad’s army’s and Iranian militias’ attacks on Sunni Arab communities that allowed ISIS to portray itself as a protector. Fighters receiving training and assistance had to sign a contract pledging to fight only ISIS and not to attack Syrian or Iranian forces, the people who had driven them out of their homes and killed their families and friends.26 It should have been no surprise when the program collapsed. The Obama administration’s reluctance to support forces that were also in opposition to Assad and his Iranian sponsors was due in part to the fear of spoiling negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Defining the effort in Syria, Iraq, and across the region narrowly as a military campaign against ISIS jihadist terrorists does not address the sectarian conflict that strengthens those very terrorist organizations and helps Iran extend its influence. For example, when Iran placed Lebanese Hezbollah at the vanguard of an offensive against Syrian opposition forces at Al Qusayr in 2013, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, declared that jihad in Syria against Alawites and Shiites was now obligatory, calling Alawites “worse infidels than Jews or Christians.”27
Curbing Iranian influence requires a multiprong approach and long-term commitment. One key way to limit Iranian influence is to integrate Iraq and, eventually, a post-Assad Syria and a post–civil war Yemen into the region diplomatically and economically. When Prime Minister Abadi visited the White House in March 2017, he had recently hosted Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, in Baghdad.28 In June, Abadi visited Riyadh. Those were important visits because strengthening Iraq’s majority-Shia government’s diplomatic and economic relationships with the Arab world diminishes Iran’s ability to sow division and fuel violent conflict. Peace in Iraq depends on reducing Iranian influence such that Sunni and other minorities no longer feel marginalized and beleaguered. The effort to erode Iranian influence will take far more than a few precision strikes or even the killing of Soleimani and Muhandis.
Good relations between Baghdad and Riyadh might persuade all Gulf states to build strong diplomatic relations with Iraq rather than support Sunni militias and terrorist organizations that attack the Shia-majority government. Diplomatic engagement with Arab states that have Shia majorities (such as Bahrain and Iraq) and those with significant Shia minorities (such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) should emphasize the importance of equal rights under the law, responsive governance, and the delivery of social services on a nonsectarian basis as essential to forestalling violence and building common identity across communities.
In the fall of 2019, protests in Lebanon and Iraq demonstrated that Iranian influence in pursuit of Iran’s nefarious designs for hegemony in the region was unnatural. But it also revealed the hunger people have for competent, fair governance. In Lebanon and Iraq, people were asking for representative government to meet their basic needs and allow them to build a better future for their children. The models for postcolonial governance in the Middle East failed. Therefore, the United States and other nations should support the development of representative governance consistent with the culture and traditions of the peoples of the region. That includes supporting reforms necessary to establish rule of law and improving the state’s responsiveness to the needs of all peoples, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or tribe.
Haider al-Abadi once told me that, after his time in the United Kingdom, he wanted to foster in Iraq democratic processes that permitted the anticipation and resolution of problems before they became crises. Because the Arab and North African states that experienced the Arab Spring of 2011 lacked legitimate opposition parties or civil society organizations, previously clandestine Islamist organizations (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood), criminal organizations (e.g., human trafficking and transnational organized crime networks in North Africa and the Maghreb), militias (e.g., Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq as well as Khalifa Haftar’s and various Misratan militias in Libya), terrorist organizations (e.g., ISIS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and al-Nusra Front in Syria), and foreign intelligence operators (e.g., IRGC in Syria and Iraq) were in the strongest positions after the collapse of authoritarian regimes. That is why the long-term strategy for ending the sectarian and tribal conflicts in the region begins with strengthening governance and democratic institutions and processes.
Tunisia was a success story that deserves more attention as the Al-Nahda Party there is Islamist and transitioned power peacefully to a rival party after elections. In countries such as Egypt, where an authoritarian Islamist leader replaced a nationalist dictator and then, in turn, was replaced by a general in a military coup, long-term security and stability will not be possible unless the government, which claims that it is transitioning to representative government, encourages rather than discourages the development of legitimate opposition parties and civil society organizations to participate in the political process.
Support for minority religious sects and ethnic groups across the Middle East (such as the Druze and the Baha’i) is also important to enduring peace in the region. Because minorities have often been a force for tolerance and moderation, protecting minorities and the participation of minorities in political processes, security forces, and government institutions can act as a buffer on extremism or help foster the accommodation between communities necessary to end religious and ethnic warfare. Since the 1980s, the growth of Islamist politics and parties; political instability; war; and the rise of jihadist terrorists have encouraged indigenous religious minorities of the Middle East to flee the region. ISIS’s genocidal campaign against the Yazidis and mass murder of Christians in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt victimized communities that have promoted moderation through diversity for thousands of years. Minorities such as Yazidis in Iraq, Baha’i in Iran, and Druze in Lebanon faced violence as traditions of tolerance collapsed. The United States and its allies should encourage and incentivize policies and actions that protect minorities across the region. Special attention is due to the needs of the 25 million to 35 million Kurds spread across northern Syria, eastern Anatolia, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran. Persecution of the Kurds and a growing sense of ethnic nationalism among their diverse tribes has been a source of conflict for decades. And the Kurds have been long victimized by external repression. Despite tremendous gains in Iraq, prospects for a sovereign Kurdish nation are dim due not only to opposition from the countries in which Kurds live, but also to their own tribal and ideological differences.
ADDRESSING ALL these regional issues would be much easier with the cooperation of Turkey. Our halting disengagement from the Middle East has created space for Russia and Iran to accelerate Turkey’s drift away from NATO, Europe, and the United States. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are increasingly authoritarian and anti-Western, so improved cooperation may not be possible. A strategy for the region should therefore consider how to mitigate the loss of Turkey as an ally while moving toward a transactional relationship. After a 2016 coup attempt failed to oust Erdogan, he consolidated power and drifted further away from his NATO allies. The AKP conducted massive purges of the military, judiciary, law enforcement, the media, and universities. Most of those purged were sympathetic to the pillars of Kemalism—the philosophy of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: secularism, Westernism, and nationalism.29
As Erdogan accused the United States of complicity in the coup, it became clear that Erdogan and the AKP were ideologically opposed to Kemalism. The AKP, founded by Erdogan himself in 2001, has roots in conservative Islamist ideology connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and has fostered a form of anti-Western nationalism. The Turkish government even resorted to a form of hostage taking, imprisoning on baseless charges U.S. citizen Rev. Andrew Brunson and Turkish citizens who worked for the U.S. embassy.30 Trump tried to develop a positive relationship with Erdogan, but grew frustrated over the Turkish president’s intransigence, especially with respect to Reverend Brunson. In August 2018, the Trump administration levied sanctions and doubled tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum, causing the value of the Turkish lira to plummet. Erdogan released Brunson on October 12, 2018, but it was clear that the relationship had become transactional; the alliance with Turkey seemed to be in name only.
But a smarter U.S. strategy should recognize that Turkey’s interests do not naturally align with those of Russia and Iran. Russia will not be a trustworthy partner in Erdogan’s effort to make Turkey part of an alternative world order. Decisions to import Russian arms and deepen Turkey’s dependence on Russian energy will give Moscow leverage to use against Ankara that is likely to cause resentment and revive memories of Turkey’s unhappy historical experience with Russia and Iran’s hegemonic aspirations in the region. The early 2020 Russian- and Iranian-backed offensive in Syria’s Idlib Province killed approximately sixty Turkish soldiers and drove nearly one million refugees toward the Turkish border.31
One wonders if, as Turkish soldiers died in the Russian-backed onslaught, Erdogan, or even those around him, felt at least a twinge of buyer’s remorse for those S-400s. In the near term, the United States and Europe should try to avoid a complete rending of the alliance with Turkey while developing relationships outside the AKP, including an effort to reach the Turkish people outside their state-controlled media. Diplomats might help Turkish leaders realize that their long-term interests run counter to those of Russia and Iran. Although the AKP dreams of a post-Western international order, Turkey needs the transatlantic community to overcome its formidable economic challenges. Despite Erdogan’s purges of institutions and his assault on freedom of the press and freedom of expression, elections still matter in Turkey. By 2020, the AKP had been in power for eighteen years and was struggling to maintain its hold. It lost the mayoral race in Istanbul in 2019 by an even greater margin in a revote that Erdogan ordered because he was unhappy with the initial results. Americans and Europeans should try to encourage Turkish leaders to reverse course and reestablish close relations in recognition that Turkey’s European and transatlantic relationships are vital to its overcoming the humanitarian, geopolitical, and economic challenges it faces.
JIHADIST TERRORIST organizations remain the major destabilizing force in the region, and defeating them will require new thinking and renewed efforts. Our strategies should begin with broad questions, such as what is the identity of the group and how does it fit into the constellation of other terrorist organizations? What are the organization’s goals and more specific objectives? What is its strategy? What are its strengths and its vulnerabilities? And finally, how can intelligence, law enforcement, military, financial, informational, cyber, and economic efforts be integrated and isolate the organization from sources of strength and attack vulnerabilities? The failure to ask and answer those questions sometimes leads to rushed actions that are inadequately coordinated and not clearly connected to objectives.
Terrorist organizations need to mobilize support. They become more dangerous when they acquire funds from states, from control of territory, from illicit activities, or from wealthy individuals such as Osama bin Laden. That is why integrated intelligence, law enforcement, and financial actions are important to restrict terrorist organizations’ ability to move and access their money. Strategies should ensure that short-term efforts such as intelligence, military, or law enforcement pursuit of terrorist leaders or facilitators are aligned with long-term efforts such as building local intelligence and law enforcement capabilities, supporting educational and economic reform, and expanding communications efforts to discredit terrorist organizations, especially in communities from which they recruit.
Although U.S. government agencies and multinational efforts have expanded counterterrorism cooperation dramatically since 2001, there are still opportunities for improvement. One person in the U.S. bureaucracy should be responsible for integrating intelligence with all the U.S. and international tools available for use against particular terrorist organizations. The mentality of that person and all persons engaged in the fight must be offensive, due to the unscrupulousness of the enemy and the inability to defend everywhere.
Preventing and preempting attacks at their origin is the most effective approach; terrorists under relentless pressure have to prioritize their own survival over planning and preparing for attacks or developing new, more destructive capabilities.
Despite calls to bring American troops and intelligence and law enforcement officials home from the “wars of 9/11,” working with partners overseas reduces the cost and increases the effectiveness of sustained offensive efforts to disrupt jihadist terrorists. For example, African Union troops in Somalia complement the small U.S. force there that relentlessly attacks not only Al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, Al-Shabaab, but also Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. AQAP is determined to attack Americans and U.S. interests abroad. From 2017 to 2019, U.S. operations killed two leaders of AQAP as well as the expert bomb maker involved in at least three plots to destroy U.S. airlines.32
Military operations overseas will remain important not only for attacking terrorist leadership when forces have legal authority to do so, but also for denying terrorist organizations safe havens and support bases. Control of territory, populations, and resources was important to ISIS’s psychological and physical strength. And ISIS consolidated this control through not only intimidation, but also the establishment of governance, the provision of basic services, and the preemption of internal threats by a sophisticated internal security organization, Amniyat. ISIS generated revenue through a wide range of criminal activities, including illicit trafficking (mainly of oil), theft, and extortion. Jihadist terrorism is a multigenerational threat. Recall that it was in Pakistani safe havens that the “alumni” of the resistance to Soviet occupation in Afghanistan learned the skills and were indoctrinated with the ideology that would later give rise to Al-Qaeda. The threat from ISIS alumni is orders of magnitude larger. Breaking up a would-be caliphate militarily is important for destroying the perception of its invincibility and reducing its ability to attract recruits.
There must also be an unwavering focus to prevent successor groups from emerging. In October 2019, when President Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and U.S. Army special operations forces killed ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and its spokesman Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, the group was reeling from battlefield defeats. But ISIS endured. The release of some ISIS prisoners due to the unanticipated and uncoordinated withdrawal increased the chances for ISIS’s or a successor organization’s renewal just as the release of Al-Qaeda prisoners, jailbreaks in Iraq, and Assad’s release of jihadist terrorists in Syria were foundational to the resurgence of Al-Qaeda and the rise of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.33 Isolating terrorists from sources of strength includes ensuring that committed jihadist terrorists are incarcerated under humane conditions until they are no longer a threat.
A long-term counterterrorism strategy must prioritize separating terrorists from the ideology that attracts people to their cause. In 2017 the Trump administration had high hopes for Saudi Arabia as Prince Mohammad bin Salman, also known as MBS, was named Crown Prince and began to exercise power. At thirty-one years old, MBS seemed like a reformer. He advocated for women having the right to work, drive cars, and travel without male chaperones. Even more significant were statements downplaying the importance of Wahhabism and Salafism (puritanical interpretations of Sunni Islam) and admitting to mistakes the Saudi kingdom had made in supporting radical ideologies.34 Before King Salman switched the planned succession from his nephew Prince Muhammed bin Nayef (MBN), to MBS in May 2017, President Trump made Saudi Arabia his first overseas visit. The Saudis put on a tremendous show of hospitality, playing to the new president’s ego and affinity for pageantry. But the trip was substantive as well. President Trump and King Salman oversaw the signing of an arms deal worth $110 billion at signing and $350 billion over ten years, alongside the signing of a number of agreements with American companies worth tens of billions of dollars. The two countries vowed to work with other Gulf states to dry up the funding for not only designated terrorist organizations, but also extremist organizations who brainwash young people and incite hatred of Jews, Christians, and any Muslims who do not adhere to their ideology.
Cooperation with Saudi Arabia was critical because, for nearly five decades, the kingdom had been the principal funder for mosques and schools that systematically extinguished empathy and removed obstacles to using violence against innocents. Indeed, until the group developed its own curriculum, ISIS used Saudi religious textbooks to preach intolerance and hatred of others.35 Extremist and jihadist ideology is uniquely dangerous as new generations are taught to hate and rationalize the most horrible forms of violence. In 2019, the multinational Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental group devoted to fighting money laundering and terrorist financing, found that Saudi Arabia’s efforts to combat terrorism financing were meager. During his speech at the 2017 Riyadh Summit, King Salman stated that “we have to stand united to fight the forces of extremism whatever their source.” He added that Islam was a “religion of mercy, tolerance and coexistence” and that terrorists were misinterpreting its messages. Hopes rose that Saudi Arabia would become a leader in countering rather than fomenting Islamist ideologies foundational to jihadist terrorism.
It was past time for the United States to demand more from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in the effort to isolate terrorist organizations from sources of financial and ideological support. The terrible legacy of the Iranian Revolution and the export of Wahhabi and Salafi jihadist ideology set conditions for the horrors that would follow as Iran exported its revolutionary religious zeal to Shia proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and a Shia proxy army fighting to keep Assad in power in Syria. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab States such as the UAE and Qatar, supported Sunni groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Support for the more radical elements of both sects had grown over the past four decades.36 For too long, because of the importance of Saudi Arabia to the global economy, as highlighted during the 1973 oil embargo, U.S. leaders looked the other way as the kingdom aggressively exported a puritanical version of Islam. As President Donald Trump, with First Lady Melania Trump, stood alongside King Salman and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Riyadh at the opening of a center to counter Islamist ideology and placed their hands on a glowing orb that illuminated their faces, the odd scene was meant to communicate a common commitment to combating extremist ideology. If the opening at the center really did represent “a clear declaration that Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalization” as President Trump stated in his remarks, the shift from supporting extremist ideologies to combating them could begin the most promising effort to separate jihadist terrorist organizations from sources of ideological support.37
Hopes rose, but then came disappointments that highlighted limits to the depth of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, especially the absence of common principles that bind the United States to other allies such as Canada, European countries, and Japan. To consolidate power after King Salman announced him as Crown Prince, MBS rounded up potential opponents and imprisoned many of them in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton, holding them for months. In November 2017, he detained the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, because MBS thought him too soft on Hezbollah—an illogical conclusion given that Hezbollah had assassinated the prime minister’s father, former prime minister Rafic Hariri. The French secured Hariri’s release and eventual reinstatement. Then, only a year later, in October 2018, MBS’s ruthlessness and poor judgment became impossible to ignore when the journalist and legal U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul while attempting to obtain the documents he needed to get married. It did not seem possible that the murder—Khashoggi was gruesomely dismembered with a bone saw—was carried out without MBS’s direct knowledge. Although Saudi Arabia initially tried to deny that a murder had even taken place, the evidence was overwhelming. The intelligence community unequivocally laid blame at Saudi officials’ feet and Congress denounced the killing, but President Trump failed to condemn MBS or impose any meaningful costs on the Saudi regime.38 Adding insult to injury, the kingdom fostered a cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin even as Russia continued to enable Saudi Arabia’s nemesis, Iran, in Syria. King Salman visited Moscow before the Khashoggi murder and committed to purchases of Russian weapons, including the S-400 air defense system. And after the Khashoggi murder, MBS was filmed fist-bumping Vladimir Putin at the G-20 conference in Argentina. MBS’s actions highlighted that when allies commit barbarous acts, silence does not purchase fealty.
In the Middle East, partners can be as vexing as adversaries, but sustained engagement and a willingness to sanction human rights abuses or support for extremist and terrorist organizations are foundational to a long-term strategy for the region. That is because the root cause of the Islamist contagion is a split within the world of Islam—between the intolerant, fundamentalist, and purist Salafi view of religion and the competing reformist view that Islam can and should be constantly evaluated and reinterpreted for modern times. The Muslim world will ultimately have to resolve that ideological competition. Our touchstones should be not lecturing or scolding, but rather, articulating and defending (not imposing) our own values and aligning ourselves with those whose views are most consonant with them.
SOME OF the region’s most difficult problems are likely to remain intractable, but without U.S. engagement, they could become unmanageable. One of the most frustrating problems is, of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I will touch on briefly here. America’s ability to help Israel and the Palestinians progress toward an enduring peace agreement depends on our reputation for honesty and competence, as well as our ability to galvanize regional support and move toward normalization of relations between Israel and all its neighbors. Although American support for its ally Israel has been an element of continuity in U.S. policy since Israel announced its independence in 1948, Israelis’ doubts about U.S. reliability grew based on what they perceived as a bad experience during the Obama administration. Trump administration support for Israel, such as approving the long-promised move of the embassy to Jerusalem, support for the permanent annexation of the Golan Heights (strategic terrain that was part of Syria before 1967), and the statement that Israeli West Bank settlements were legal, communicated support for Israel, but also removed incentives that might have been crucial in a future agreement. The February 2020 unveiling of a peace proposal in the White House with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in attendance was dead on arrival due to the lack of Palestinian participation in its development and the persistence of the most difficult obstacles to enduring peace, including Palestinians’ claim to right of return to land lost since 1948; the associated fate of Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and the future of East Jerusalem, with the possibility of a portion of that holy and contested city becoming the capital of a future Palestinian state. Despite the proposal’s detailed security provisions, many Israelis still fear that a peace settlement would allow security in the West Bank to devolve into the terrorist haven that exists in Gaza, which is controlled by groups committed to the destruction of what they call the “Zionist entity.”
But the February 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” proposal may, at some point, help resurrect the possibility of a two-state solution. For the concept of “two states, Israel and Palestine,” existing in peace “side by side within secure and recognized borders” to become a reality, the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority must be capable not only of agreeing to a deal, but also of enforcing it across their territories and among their people. The personalization and fragmentation of Israeli politics and the shift of political sentiment to the right, along with the growth of ultra-Orthodox populations, make Israeli approval of even the very favorable Peace to Prosperity vision problematic. And U.S. estrangement from the Palestinian Authority based on the Palestinian leadership’s perception that the United States is not a fair interlocutor makes Palestinian assent to meaningful negotiations unlikely. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority’s weakness and its vulnerability to radical spoilers such as Hamas are likely to remain insurmountable obstacles. If there is a ray of hope, it may be in efforts to galvanize real support from Arab states to lift the Palestinian populations in Jordan, the West Bank, and eventually Gaza out of poverty and convince the Palestinian people that their best hope for a secure and prosperous future lies in support for leaders who will pursue peace rather than perpetual violence. Breaking the cycle of sectarian violence in the region is connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because the terrorist organizations (and their sponsors) that are parties to the civil wars in the Middle East both inflame and draw strength from the long struggle for control of the Holy Land.
THE STRATEGY to break the cycle of violence must include multilayered efforts to pressure and impose costs on those who perpetuate wars and state weakness. America’s experience in the Middle East across the first two decades of the twenty-first century revealed lessons that might help guide its approach to the region in coming decades. It is clear that deposing tyrants in the region, whether through foreign invasion such as in Iraq in 2003 or through popular uprising such as during the “Arab Spring” in 2011, does not automatically usher in freedom and enlightened governance. It is also clear that U.S. disengagement from the region can unleash centripetal forces that generate not only more violence and human suffering in the region, but also threats that extend far beyond its geographic confines. The long-term problems of the Middle East require sustainable long-term engagement. The United States and like-minded partners should prioritize actions, initiatives, and programs that, over time, not only break the cycle of violence, but also restore hope through an evolution toward governance based on tolerance rather than hatred, representative government rather than autocracy, and a desire to join rather than reject the modern world. Although the obstacles to achieving peace and prosperity in the Middle East are daunting, there are signs of hope. Nascent reforms in Saudi Arabia and popular demands for an end to corrupt governance in Lebanon and Iraq provide new opportunities for collaboration in education, institutional development, and commerce.
Pursuing long-term opportunities, however, will require efforts to prevent ongoing crises from worsening and new ones from occurring. Supporting fragile states such as Lebanon and Jordan, which have borne the brunt of the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the Syrian Civil War, should remain a top priority. So should efforts to support governmental reform, education, and economic opportunity in Egypt, a country of 98 million people. The most important near-term effort, however, may be to counter Iran’s effort to fuel sectarian violence to keep the Arab world perpetually weak, push America out of the region, threaten Israel, and extend Iranian influence to the Mediterranean Sea.