148 foreign affairs
SUZANNE MALONEY is Deputy Director of
the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings
Institution and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings
Center for Middle East Policy.
Dreams of
Westphalia
Can a Grand Bargain Solve
the Middle East’s Problems?
Suzanne Maloney
Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East
BY PATRICK MILTON, MICHAEL
AXWORTHY, AND BRENDAN
SIMMS. Oxford University Press, 2018,
176 pp.
T
he year 2019 may be remem-
bered as an inflection point for
the Middle East, when the seem-
ingly intractable violence and instability
that have beset the region finally ex-
hausted the United States’ prodigious con-
fidence in its capacity for problem solv-
ing. Fifty years ago, the United States
began to fill the void left by the British
withdrawal from the Persian Gulf and,
tentatively at first, take on the role of re-
gional peace broker. For all its flaws—
and there were many—U.S. leadership
during this period generated some his-
toric dividends, including the 1978 Camp
David accords between Israel and Egypt,
the 1991 liberation of Kuwait, and the
preservation of oil exports in times of
intense conflict.
Now, however, the presumption of a
vital U.S. interest in promoting peace and
security in the Middle East is crumbling
under the weight of changing energy
markets and the human and financial toll
of Washington’s seemingly endless wars in
the region. “Let someone else fight over
this blood-stained sand,” U.S. President
Donald Trump said in October 2019,
explaining his abrupt decision to remove
U.S. troops from northeastern Syria. The
president has long decried the $8 trillion
he says the United States has spent on
wars in the region, and he has passed the
responsibility for his much-touted
Middle East peace plan to Avi Berkow-
itz, a 31-year-old law school graduate
with no diplomatic experience.
Trump’s readiness to disengage from
the Middle East appears to resonate not
only with his base but also with a num-
ber of the Democratic candidates in the
2020 presidential campaign, who, like
him, have advocated troop reductions or
even withdrawal from the “forever wars”
in Afghanistan and Iraq. When Iran
attacked Saudi oil facilities in September
2019, Trump’s disinclination to respond
with anything other than perfunctory
sanctions met with bipartisan assent.
So long as somewhere between 60,000
and 70,000 U.S. troops remain deployed
across the wider Middle East, concerns
about a supposed American retreat from
the region are premature. Still, it is hard
to escape the sense of defeatism that now
infuses the discourse around the Middle
East more than at any time in the past
half century—not just in Washington but
also in Europe, where the fallout from
multiple vicious civil wars has hit home
in the form of millions of Afghan, Iraqi,
Syrian, and Yemeni refugees. In Iraq, a
hubristic U.S. intervention intended to
promote democracy failed catastrophically,
and with the exception of Tunisia, the