Yes, as an amorphous, ungovernable mess. The Middle East is a bubbling soup of competing factions, religions and tribes. Woodrow Wilson was the last U.S. President to understand this. His King-Crane Commission said it best in 1919 and says it best now. Lacking our 802 years from Magna Carta to constitutional formality, the place is so inchoate that it cannot possibly manage itself.
Map the ethnicities above onto the religions below. Analyze this!
The Middle East had no Magna Carta, no Reformation, no Glorious Revolution of 1688 and no British North America Act of 1867. The so-called nations, with a few vital exceptions, like Iran and Egypt both of which predate Rome by millennia, have dissolved back into the undefinable bunch of stuff that they were when Rome collapsed. The Middle East is impossible for anyone there to describe, let alone defend, and so impossible for us as well. Little has changed—even the clothing—except oil money for some. And that is now on the decline.
Yet, for the 219 years since Napoleon landed in Egypt and tried to impose Western order on this disordered clutter, we have convinced ourselves that we can keep up his mission. We cannot.
One hundred and twenty years after Napoleon’s failed attempt, we tried again to organize the Middle East in the Treaty of Versailles. One of the dumbest ideas in in the Treaty was to impose artificial nation states on a Middle East not designed to accept them and lacking the complex democratic organizations needed to support them. Another spectacular error was carefully dividing the potentially stabilizing Kurdistan into at least four pieces and attaching them to nations with clearly unlike interests. To King-Crane this was obvious. It still is.
For a variety of reasons, Congress refused to ratify the Treaty, sending us straight into World War II, the Cold War and everything that followed. Thanks.
Even so, from Franklin Roosevelt until Obama stopped the process, the U.S. tried to impose the unratified Versailles with all its insanity on the Middle East. Why? We needed the region's oil.
To Obama, the new oil numbers told the story: we are now self-sufficient in hydrocarbons and no longer need Middle Eastern oil. Nor do we need to spend the enormous sums that it takes to hold the place in its various Versailles envelopes and keep them stable once in those envelopes.
Looking at this, Obama asked the logical question: if we don’t need Middle Eastern oil, do we have any interests in the region at all? His answer, sensibly, was “no.” So, he believed, we should stop spending our nation's wealth there. To him, if anyone has an interest in the Middle East it would be Europe which has exposed borders there and needs Middle Eastern oil. He tried to get the Euros to start looking after themselves with the Libyan crisis but the result was disastrous.
Obama went way further in cutting us free from the Middle East. If the ever-weaker Vladimir Putin wanted to enmesh Russia in that pile of human effluvia once called Syria, Obama was happy to let him do it. Putin has no way out of what used to be Syria. The human toll being laid at his door is staggering and Russia must take on all the costs of rebuilding a gigantic heap of rubble. Doing this, Putin can only be weakened, possibly terminally. All this costs us nothing. It serves our interests perfectly. (To understand why, see Publius on Managing Russia's Implosion and Putin the Small Stumbles in Syria.)
Obama understood that our foreign policy interests focus on two places far from the Middle East: North Korea and the South China Sea, free passage across which fills every home in our country. He called for a “pivot to Asia” to deal with these.
But, Congress and the media, both of which are pretty slow on the uptake, keep focusing on that unsalvageable glob, the Middle East. They have yet to wake up to the gravity of the threat to our supply lines across the Nine Dash Line. The Center of Everything (China in Chinese) has declared the NDL its sovereign territory. (For a detailed analysis, see Publius on The Nine Dash Line and You.) And they have only just understood that we are only moments from the Second Korean War. (For a detailed analysis, see Publius on What North Korea is REALLY Worried About and Xi Blows It.)
Here is what we should do in the Middle East.
Resolve to leave the Middle East now. And for good.
Before we do, cut a huge free trade deal with Iran. (To understand why, see Publius on We Need Iran.)
Make the deal so big for so many that it tips the political balance there in our favor. For a long, long time.
Make it clear to the more coherent states like Egypt and Turkey that if they too become open and democratic, they get the same deal and the accelerated growth that will result.
Let the rest deal with themselves, no matter how ugly it gets.
Revisit this in another century or two.
Update
August 23, 2017
It took Dumb Don only seven days to mess this up good. He has decided to re-up our position in the Black Hole of the Middle East, Afghanistan. Another Aukland's Folly. Penn, what did you teach this guy?