Is war making a comeback in the Middle East? What about the Pacific? One of the two things the pandemic did was weaken great powers across the board. The other was it destabilized countries and power blocs internally. The former lessens the danger of deliberate conflict; the latter increases it. The question is whether and to what extent this internal disquiet will overflow into external miscalculation.
We spent 4 years of the Trump administration listening to media warnings of a war that never came. One never knows what tomorrow brings, especially in the middle of a paradigm shift, especially under an administration using yesterday’s calculus. The intifada was once dead — then it came back to life.
The main strategic assumption that guided Obama and his advisors was that Iran was a status quo, responsible power and should be viewed as part of the solution – or “the solution” — rather than the problem in the Middle East. Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, its proxy wars and its nuclear program were unfortunate consequences of a regional power balance that put too much power in the hands of US allies – first and foremost Israel and Saudi Arabia – and too little power in Iran’s hands. To stabilize the Middle East, Obama argued, Iran needed to be empowered and US allies needed to be weakened. As then-Vice President Joe Biden put it in 2013, “Our biggest problem was our allies.”