President Donald Trump may owe his 2016 election victory to his criticism of President George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure. Yet Trump’s misjudgments about Iran have been much greater.
At least Bush defeated his Mideast opponent: the regime of Saddam Hussein. Despite Trump’s repeated assertion that Tehran had lost and should surrender, the Islamist regime blocked global oil traffic, wrecked U.S. bases, and destroyed regional energy infrastructure. Unwilling to risk potentially devastating Iranian escalation, the president was reduced to repeatedly announcing plans to destroy civilian targets across Iran, a war crime, only to retreat and claim that he was responding to Iranian pleas. It became a comedy routine that never truly entertained and got old fast.
However, the Blunderer-in-Chief’s disastrous war has at least one silver lining: It inadvertently demonstrated the case for closing U.S. bases throughout the Middle East and bringing American forces home. Disengagement is long overdue, especially for an administration supposedly committed to America First.
Washington’s continued entanglement in the ever-unstable Mideast is a Cold War relic. The U.S. generally eschewed direct military involvement in the region until the 1970s. Then came the so-called Carter Doctrine, intended to prevent Soviet domination of the region’s oil supplies, considered vital for America and its industrialized allies. However, that world disappeared long ago. International energy supplies are far more diverse, and no country is poised to monopolize the market.
Nor is Israel a good reason for America’s continuing presence. It has long been capable of defending itself from all comers and has now become a regional superpower. Disengagement would allow Washington to protect its reputation as Jerusalem seeks Mideast hegemony, brutalizing Palestinians within and other Arabs without its borders.
As for the dictatorial Persian Gulf states—where else do so many antediluvian, absolute monarchies hold so many people in bondage?—Washington should unshoulder the burden of protecting them. The Trump administration’s 2026 National Defense Strategy rightly proposed “to empower regional allies and partners to take primary responsibility for deterring and defending against Iran and its proxies.”
Critics complain that such an approach would signal “America’s unreliability as a strategic partner.” However, Washington has spent decades defending much of the known world. Surely it is time, as Americans confront the price of endless budget prodigality, for other nations to stop offloading responsibility for their security onto the U.S. Will that be easy for the Gulfdoms, which have grown accustomed to paying others to do their nations’ hard work? No, but so what? Americans have no duty to act as bodyguards for dissolute royal families that believe toil is for others. And if the only way to rally their people to the national defense is for these governments to finally put their peoples’ interests first, so much the better.
Reducing Washington’s Mideast commitments would also diminish the tripwires for war. Most U.S. military commitments of recent years had their genesis in the Middle East and nearby regions. Washington threatened war if the Soviet Union intervened in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, fought against Shia forces in the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s, aided Iraq in its brutal aggression against Iran throughout the 1980s, battled Somali militias in the early 1990s, intervened in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks, launched sustained drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen in succeeding years, backed Saudi Arabia’s war on the latter beginning in 2015, conducted naval operations against Yemen from 2023 to 2025, and launched attacks on Iran in 2025 and 2026. The U.S. also has routinely launched more limited strikes throughout the region, such as the 2020 assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani.
Reducing the habit and ease of using military force in the region would force a more serious debate in Washington over the appropriateness of intervention, especially unprovoked aggression leading to a broader war, as with Iran.
Our Middle Eastern bases have become liabilities, literal targets risking the lives of Americans and our allies. Although the Trump administration spent practically the entire Iran conflict asserting that Iran’s military had been essentially obliterated (just like the president claimed Tehran’s nuclear program had been last year), Iran did massive damage to U.S. installations, forcing the evacuation of most personnel.
According to the New York Times, Iran responded to the American-Israeli attack “by launching drones and missiles at American targets across the Middle East, hitting embassies, killing U.S. soldiers, and damaging military bases and air defense infrastructure. … The intensity of the retaliatory strikes has signaled that Iran was more prepared for the war than many in the Trump administration had anticipated, U.S. military officials say.” The Washington Post analysis is even more damning:
Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment atU.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks,fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported.
Equally shocking, concluded the Post, “The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.” Many of America’s 40,000 personnel in the region were transferred to civilian hotels throughout the Gulf and to locations as far away as Europe and the U.S., resulting in “one of the largest movements of U.S. military families out of the Middle East in years.” This withdrawal was a humiliating admission that America’s armed forces were unable to protect their facilities and personnel. So much for the president claiming a glorious and victorious campaign.
Washington’s inability to protect the Gulf nations hosting these bases, and its ostentatious prioritization of Israel’s security above their own, has had significant foreign policy consequences. Explained Dalia Ghanem, a senior visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund:
The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and the subsequent retaliations against Gulf states hosting American bases, transformed the region’s security landscape overnight. The security alerts that wail across Gulf capitals are the audible collapse of a decade of security branding. … The region is now forced to fundamentally rethink its security framework, a quiet, but total, recalibration of how states shield their territory when the “umbrella” of U.S. protection is no longer a deterrent but a magnet. The very assets meant to guarantee safety have become the coordinates for retaliation. The “neutrality paradox”—whereby physical infrastructure commitments make true political neutrality impossible—is now a trap. One cannot simply “un-host” major airbases or naval fleets overnight while under fire.
This is forcing allied governments to rethink their relationship with the U.S. These consequences should have surprised no one in the Gulf, given Israel’s pernicious political influence in America generally and the Trump administration specifically, as well as its malicious role as chief advocate of the reckless and lawless assault on Iran. Although Washington’s allies are unlikely to abandon their ties with America, they may reduce their overwhelming reliance on the U.S. for their security. Reported the Guardian: “Gulf nations will seek to add security partners as they rebuild battered economies after the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran and deal with an emboldened Tehran.” They are also likely to seek more self-reliance and distance themselves from American and Israeli hostility toward Iran.
In such a world, Washington should take the initiative and begin withdrawing its military. Even before the misbegotten assault on Iran, it was essential for America to separate itself from the radical, expansionist government in Jerusalem, which is dragging the U.S. into Mideast wars and crushing Washington’s reputation. Future administrations should also transfer control over our bases to the host nations and bring forces home. The region is no longer essential for American security and certainly not worth the cost and risk of new wars.
Trump proved unable to resist Benjamin Netanyahu’s deceitful and misleading arguments for war. Trump also held wildly unrealistic expectations about the war’s likely course, blundering at almost every point of the active hostilities and the peace negotiations. The best, and perhaps only, way to avoid a disastrous reprise is to remove the U.S. military from its needlessly exposed position in the Middle East. The Iran War, though itself a disaster, has presented a golden opportunity to do so.
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