It Could Happen Here - Debating the American Role in the Middle East

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

In this episode Dana El Kurd talks about the debate in DC on what the role of the US has been in the Middle East, and what it should be. She also talks about what’s missing from these discussions.    Sources: https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-u-s-led-middle-east-order-is-over-the-mecca-agreement-proves-it https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/end-american-middle-east-iran-marc-lynch http://foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/new-old-middle-east-gause https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/12/the-re-emergence-of-the-palestine-question-in-world-politics/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/29/us-decline-world-order-replacementSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All Zone Media. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Take It Happen here. My name is Dana Elkurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today's episode is going to be about the role of the U.S. in the Middle East, and the debate around that that's happening in D.C. and policy circles at the moment. Very smart people are debating because of the Trump administration's disastrous policies, including the war on Iran.

whether Washington's decades-long position as essentially top dog in the Middle East just died or is dying or was never quite what everybody said it was. So here it is. I'm going to give you the definitive answer on what the role of the U.S. in the Middle East is and is going to be. Okay, just kidding. Obviously, what I would want might piss a lot of people off, but I'm going to summarize for you what the debate is. So the different arguments that capture this debate can be encapsulated in the next three sentences. They were published within a few weeks of each other by three, you know, serious well-credentialed people who studied the Middle East for a living.

So the first sentence is, quote, outsiders continue to play their balance of power games within the borders of weak Arab states. Overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before. The second sentence is, quote, the American Middle East is finished. And the third sentence is, quote, it is no longer possible to talk about a U.S.-led order in the Middle East. These are all from articles published in foreign affairs or directly on the Council on Foreign Relations website by Greg Goss, Mark Lynch, and Stephen Cook.

They're all looking at the same set of facts and arriving at some opposed conclusions about whether something around the U.S. role has actually ended. I think there's a lot here that is accurate and, like, worthy of engagement, but the focus for me is a little off. Not because they're wrong about the facts. The facts are mostly right. It's because the question of, is the order over,

misses how the order function to some degree and that its functioning was predicated not just on a tolerance of repression, but the generation of authoritarianism. So these scholars and analysts do acknowledge the impact on people in the Middle East to some degree. They reference what happened in Gaza and Lebanon and other places.

But I think the scope of the American impact on the region isn't necessarily emphasized enough. Just in the last year, hundreds of Iranians have been killed in the war. The Lebanese have been displaced for like the third or fourth time. In 20 years, by a war they didn't start and they can't seem to end. And Palestinians continue to die even during a so-called ceasefire. And these are referenced sometimes in the discussion. So they do talk about that in these articles. But when policy people reference these things, they reference them as kind of casualty

figures on the way to maybe a bigger argument about primacy. And I think this captures kind of what's off about the discussion and encapsulates maybe how the American order works. As I've argued endlessly before, talking about this American order ending misses the point. For the people who actually live in the region, there was never a legitimate order there to lose in the first place. And U.S. hegemony, key to the quote-unquote liberal order that people are not talking about saving, was established on the Middle East being the way it was and sustaining American hegemony all these years. Okay, so let's start with the article by Greg Gauz,

titled The New Old Middle East and Subtitled Wars of Sound and Fury. His argument is essentially, yes, the last two years have been transformative looking. The U.S. and Israel fought an actual direct war against Iran. Iran's supreme leader of 36 years is dead. Bashar al-Assad in Syria is gone. Hezbollah has been decimated. Gaza has been flattened. These are all real, all enormous impacts. But, and this is his real point, none of it changed the underlying structure. So outside powers are still playing a balance of

power game inside weak Arab states. The Iranian-Israeli conflict is still unresolved, and the Palestinian question is still unresolved. And the U.S. is still stuck in the position it's occupied for years now, which is characterized as unable to actually order the region the way it wants, but too in mesh to leave. So his evidence is strong. You know, Iran, despite losing its senior leadership, despite watching their, you know, infrastructure get pounded, despite Israel and the U.S. going after it directly,

Iran came out the other side still standing. It's still running its, you know, quote-unquote resistance foreign policy. It's still engaged in Iraq and Lebanon through its allies and now has a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz that it's used extensively. Gauze's phrase for it is, it's still got it. And it's a good phrase. The regime that the war was supposedly going to topple is, by his account, arguably more entrenched afterward. Because it can now tell its own

public that, you know, we took a direct hit from the two most powerful militaries aligned against us, and we're still here. Now, Gauss talks about the Iranians killed. He says this. According to the human rights activist news agency, Iranian security forces killed at least 7,000 protesters during a wave of unrest in December of last year. Other organizations put the number in the tens of thousands. The fact that the regime killed that many and got away with it, essentially funded. functions as evidence for a claim about regime durability. So it's there to explain why Trump thought Iran looked weak enough to bomb. And that's the throughline of the whole kind of continuity thesis.

Gauz, of course, mentions the human cost. He does so repeatedly. I would say more than a lot of his peers in these circles. So he talks about Lebanon over, you know, 4,200 people killed, a million displaced, the West Bank. but the analytical weight of the piece sits somewhere else on whether weak states can produce durable peace and whether Iran retains regional influence

on whether the U.S. can restore a more, quote, stable region. So it's all about stability, order, primacy, these are the units of account. And this isn't a problem with this particular author. I think this is what the genre requires. Foreign Affairs as a publication is, you know, asking what should Washington do, which means its whole vocabulary is built around

a subject, the U.S. government, or occasionally Israel or Iran as fellow state actors, and everyone else becomes the terrain that that subject acts on. Palestinians, Lebanese civilians, Iranian protesters, Yemenis, they appear as like populations, undifferentiated, something that gets caused to suffer by the real actors doing the actual politics. In the end, Gauz concludes that the region, quote, looks a lot like it did before the war. I'd actually push on that a different way than he does. What he means is the balance of power hasn't shifted, the conflicts are the same conflicts. But I'd say the region also looks a lot like it did before in this other sense that the people living in it are still structurally objects of a debate about state power rather than participants in it. And that continuity is real too.

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Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adriah Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. it can be such a struggle for our quality of life, but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything, I never used to forget things.

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Listen to the NFL Report podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, now we move on to Mark Lynch's quote, the end of the American Middle East. It's also in foreign affairs. Lynch's argument is the opposite of Gaza. He says, no, something did actually end. the regional order that's existed since the first Gulf War in 1991, built by George H.W. Bush, sustained through five presidencies organized around Israeli security and the flow of oil and American hegemony, that order is dead. And the Iran war is what killed it alongside the destruction of Gaza.

And it's not because Washington lost the battle. It's because the bargain at the core of this order stopped functioning. So the bargain, you know, in Lynch's estimation was a lot of the war. with us, basically the United States saying this to other Arab and non-Arab state actors, align with us and we'll protect you. And then when Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz and bombarded the Gulf states that had both signed the Abraham Accords and didn't, so they've been attacking many of their neighbors. And the United States and Israel, quote, with all their military might, simply failed to dislodge the Iranian regime. That bargain kind of broke in front of everyone. So Gulf leaders watched that bargain break and made that assessment that it was broken.

I want to be clear about what I really appreciate in this piece because there's a lot and it's rare to see it in this venue. Lynch writes, and I'm just going to read this directly because I don't want to paraphrase it into something softer, quote, for Washington, the strategic benefits accrued from this order seemed to justify the cost of the war required to sustain it. But the price was much higher for those who live in the region. For most people, the U.S. order meant only violence hopelessness and deprivation. By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other region, end quote. So for this publication, it's a genuinely, you know, bold, radical sentence. He's naming the thing

plainly, that this wasn't a stabilizing project that had some unfortunate externalities, and that it was predicated on violence for the people who live inside it. And he goes farther than that, too. He talks about, quote, the moral hazard, built in to American security guarantees, how they let autocratic allies disregard Washington's stated interests because they knew they were untouchable, and how U.S. support for neoliberal economic reforms essentially let regimes loot their own populations under the cover of privatization, and how the war on terror gave Washington's allies a permission structure to build surveillance states. If you listen to me talked before, you know that's basically very close to the argument I've spent my career making

about U.S. backed regimes in the Arabhold, that Washington's security relationships didn't just fail to prevent repression. They were often the delivery mechanism for it. But of course, and understandably for this publication, the fix on offer is still a fix for Washington. Lynch's closing argument is that the next American president has a, quote, real chance to build something better,

renounce military intervention as a first resort, pressure Israel on settlements and annexation, stop pushing Iraq and Lebanon to disarm the militias before they're ready, recommit to international human rights norms, etc. but essentially everything on this list is the U.S. as a subject. I don't say that to be glib. A U.S. government that actually did those things would matter enormously. And domestic U.S. politics is showing a shift.

You know, it's showing that two-thirds of Democrats now think Washington is too supportive of Israel. And there was a House vote to cut military aid to them. So in this context, he's right that there's more room now than there's ever been for a shift. But again, the theory of change, it still runs entirely through whether an American administration decides to be different. It's not, for example, Palestinians get self-determination because Palestinians have built the power to demand and win it. It's that, you know, they might get relief from Washington if Washington decides it's in its interest to provide relief. It's not nothing, but it's not the same thing as like agency. Additionally, Lynch's frame as like order

versus disorder or old order versus new order reaches for the Suez analogy, for example, In 1956, the last kind of gasp of British and French imperial power. But his argument is essentially the American Empire in the Middle East is following the same arc that the European ones did, decaying kind of for structural reasons, and eventually that would recede to. Now, I'm sympathetic to this historical analogy, but I want to flag something about it, which is that it's still a story about the transition between empires or between an empire and a vacuum or between an empire and some future multipolar agreement.

it's not on its own a story of what the people of the region actually want, which, and this is the part that's, you know, available if you go looking in a lot of different types of surveys, is it's not usually, please replace American hegemony with a different hegemony. You know, it's just people in the region want very basic things. They want accountability from their own governments. They want an end to being treated as a security theater for other people's conflicts. They want actual sovereignty over the decisions that get made about their countries. in Washington or Riyadh or Tehran without them in the room. So Lynch is closer to writing about this than anyone in this genre, but again, he is focused on what Washington should do next. And I'm wondering if we should start also asking what it would take for the people living in this region to be the ones deciding. And finally, the third piece by Stephen Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations, published just this past week. I'm recording on August 21st. So it's about something that I think a lot of people,

outside the region, or those who study the region, haven't fully clocked yet, which is the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement. So here's the quick version. On August 7th, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey signed a mutual defense pact they called the Mecca Agreement. The full text hasn't been released, but reporting indicates it functions like kind of a NATO Article 5 clause, which is an attack on one, is treated as an attack on all. On paper, it obligates Saudi Arabia and Turkey to come to Pakistan's defense in a war with India or Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to back Turkey if it comes to blows with Israel over Syria or any other adversary. 48 hours after the signing ceremony, the Houthis hit a Saudi Aramco refinery.

Now, Saudi Arabia didn't invoke the pact. And Cook reads that correctly, I think, as less about whether the treaty's security guarantee is credible and more about what its existence signals, which is that Saudi Arabia, is building an alternative to relying on Washington full stop. Cook's argument is very similar to lynches that the U.S. let order is over, but he gets there kind of in a different way. For him, he's not emphasizing like the moral bankruptcy or the violence against ordinary people.

It's, you know, straightforward, realist account. After the U.S. failed to defend Saudi Arabia directly when Iran hit its oil facilities in 2019, and after kind of the whiplash of Obama signing the Iran deal and then Trump tearing it up, and all of the disasters of the Biden administration pushing the Abraham Accords, even as Gaza was being erased. After Trump's own kind of Iran war, the Saudis simply stopped believing that Washington's guarantees were reliable, and so they went and built their own. And the part I find most striking about Cook's argument is the picture he draws in the end, which is a Middle East splitting into two competing blocks. The Abraham Accords block versus the Mecca Agreement block.

So the Emirati is staying tight with Israel and the United States. And then the Saudis Turks and Pakistanis building something that explicitly competes with that. And he calls it, quote, a major change and says it's hard to overstate its significance. And honestly, structurally, I think he's right that something has shifted. But here's where maybe I would slow down a little because I think the piece has a missing question. Cook frames the whole thing as a story about whose order it's going to be. So American order giving way to kind of regional multipolarity and Riyadh and Ankara shaping the region instead of Washington.

And okay, sure, but shaping it how and for whom? The three signatories to the Mecca Agreement are, and I just want to say this plainly, all authoritarian. One is an absolute monarchy, another is a, rapidly authoritarian, an increasingly authoritarian state run by a man who jailed his last serious electoral arrival, and then a military-dominated national security state that's fought multiple wars against its own populations. So this is not a coalition of the region's public's asserting themselves against outside domination. This is three governments, each of which

has spent considerable energy over the past decade, surveilling and jailing and in some cases killing its own dissidents. They're deciding they'd rather coordinate their security agreements with each other than depend on Washington's. And that might genuinely be bad news for American hegemony. I just don't think it's automatically good news for anyone living under these three governments or anyone in the region. Multipolarity is not a synonym for liberation. Sometimes it's just another table with more authoritarian on it,

none of whom actually answer to the people they govern any more than, you know, American hegemon did. Now, Cook's piece to its credit doesn't claim otherwise. He's writing a narrow, careful analysis of this, like, security architecture shift, and he says so. But it's worth noting that, you know, quote, the U.S. led order is over and something better is emerging are two completely different claims. And only one of those three pieces that I talked about today, even gestures at the second one. And even that piece, which is lynches, gestures at mostly by asking Washington to be nicer. The music you love.

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Download the free IHard Radio app today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury comfort. in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. Twelve seats.

Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brett Coleman. And I'm Trevor Sycambe. Have you ever watched a game and wondered what really made the difference beyond the final score?

That's exactly why we created. NFL pro. Stroke got a man wide open. Touchdown! Seahawks! Every week, we use exclusive next-gen stats insights and NFL content to break down the biggest stories,

matchups, and moments from around the league. We go beyond the box score to uncover the numbers, the tendencies, and details that help explain what actually happened on the field. Fires it out in the flat to Barclay

who beats one man, spins past another, leaps over at third. And don't worry, this isn't just a show for stats experts. We use advanced analytics to help tell the story behind the game, turning the numbers into insights that every fan can understand and enjoy. So whether you're a casual fan learning more about football or a hardcore fan who can't get enough analysis, our goal is to help you see the game in a whole new way.

If you've ever wanted to know why a playwork, how a matchup was won, or what most fans missed on Sunday, NFL Pro delivers insights you simply, can't get anywhere else. Listen to NFL Pro on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The new NFL season is here, and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61.

Last year, we had Mike McDonald, Sam Darnold on the field after the game, but that was last year. If you're a football sicko like me, NFL Daily is your kind of show. It is in the name, NFL Daily, fresh content in your feed, every day all season long.

Matthew Stafford coming off his MVP season. On a dazzling darts from Matthew Stafford. Big time trades that shake up the NFL. AJ Broad is loose. And of course, those Seahawks trying to run it back and win another Lombardi trophy. The Seahawks win Super Bowl 60. They are bringing the Lombardi back to the Northwest.

If it's happening on a football field, NFL Daily, will cover it. Listen to NFL Daily on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. On this show, I'll be talking to top researchers and top clinicians, asking them your burning questions and bringing that information about women's health and midlife directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. it can be such a struggle for our quality of life,

but even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? The types of symptoms that people talk about is forgetting everything. I never used to forget things. They're concerned that, one, they have dementia, and the other one is, do I have ADHD? There is unprecedented promise with regard to cannabis and cannabinoids, to sleep better, to have less pain, to have better mood, and also to have better day-to-day life.

Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening now. Hey, what's up? I'm Tony Gonzalez. And I'm October Gonzalez. But you can call me Toby. We want you to join us on our new podcast, No Safe Words with October and Tony Gonzalez. We get real about marriage, parenthood, sex, divorce, and all the nitty-gritty stuff we all think about, but just don't say out loud. I hate that job. You're probably just going to meet with some rich guy, and he's going to whisk you away, and I'll never see you again.

Wow. Well, this is awkward. Would you say a D-less actor? D? I don't even know there's this thing as D. No, no, no. I mean, like... I can't even get on the C-list.

Like, I'm not even average. I'm not even passing. I'm failing. Listen to no safe words with October and Tony Gonzalez, part of My Culture Podcast Network. Available on the IHeart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. The NFL never stops and neither does its newest podcast.

The NFL report. hosted by me, Andrew Siciliano. It is your home for everything football. Williams, drifting, sprinting for space, in all kinds of trouble, put it up for next. We're tapping the biggest news stories, giving you expert analysis, fantasy previews, game picks, and more. We fly around every single play. We dominate every single play. Want to hear from the league's top stars ahead of the biggest matchups? We've got you covered. They're a really good football team. We've got to have all hands on deck. Join me at an All-Star cast of analysts for everything you need to know from around the league.

Get new episodes of the NFL Report Monday through Friday all season long. Listen to the NFL Report podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So here's my synthesis. God says nothing structural has changed. The game is the same game. Weak states are still weak. Iran and Israel is still locked in. The Palestinian question is still open and the U.S. is still stuck playing a role. commit to or walk away from. And Lynch says something did change. The moral and material bankruptcy

of the American security bargain has been fully exposed. And now there's a narrow window for Washington to build something less violent in its place. And then Cook says something has changed, but it's not about morality or bankruptcy. It's about credibility. American guarantees stop being trusted so regional powers built their own. And now we're watching this kind of bipolar regional order emerge that doesn't run through Washington at all. And all three, I think, have a real and important argument. I don't want to flatten that. The difference between nothing changed and the empire is ending or something more competitive is taking its place, that's not a trivial disagreement. It has real implications for what happens next in Gaza and Lebanon and in the Gulf.

But again, notice what all three arguments hold in common underneath that disagreement is they're all arguing about whether an order existed and whether it's ending. And maybe we don't emphasize enough existed for who and ending for who and according to whose clock. So I want to back up a little bit further from the three essays we just walked through. All three of them write as though the story starts with the Iran War or with Gaza's destruction or with the Mecca Agreement. So a story that begins in the last two, three years. But let me go back to December 2023, just a few weeks after October 7th, the Hamas attacks

in Israel and then the start of the war on Gaza. Back then, the working assumption in a lot of Washington rooms was that this could still be contained. I wrote a piece about that in December of 2023 for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and I called it the re-emergence of the Palestine question in world politics. The argument had three parts.

Part one was that Palestine functions for Arab publics as what I call a gateway to dissent. Not because everyone in the region is single-mindedly obsessed with Palestine at the expense of their own politics. It's because organizing around Palestine is one of the few forms of political mobilization that Arab authoritarian regimes

historically had a hard time fully criminalizing because the regimes themselves had claimed to support the cause rhetorically, even if they worked with Washington or maybe sometimes Israel behind the scenes. And there's all sorts of examples about this, like Egyptian revolutionaries in 2011 during the Arab Spring,

they pointed directly to their earlier organizing around Palestine as kind of the training ground for their work. In 2023, after October 7th, the same dynamic reappeared. There was protest that Arab governments, and several of them allied with Washington that they struggled to contain around Palestine. Because for once, you know, the people's anger and the regime's professed position were pointed in the same direction, which made it very hard to police.

Now, part two of my argument was Palestine and violence. This is the part I think is particularly useful now. I argued then that Israeli military conduct, plus very visible American acquiescence to it, was functionally handing the Palestinian cause over to the actors most willing. link to escalate around it. So Iran and its proxies, who explicitly positioned themselves as the keepers of the Palestinian cause. At the time, the Iranian officials and others used the term unifying the fields, meaning they coordinated the attacks with Hezbollah and the Houthis and the militias in Iraq and Hamas. So I cited an Arab barometer polling at that time that was already

showing growing public traction for, you know, quote unquote, the resistance. access. And I flagged that shift in how Israel was fighting itself. There was reporting at that time that was coming out of 972 mag on the use of AI targeting systems that basically were enabling, in their words, these wars of, quote, massive scale rather than precision. So my worry was that when extremist actors and militias are the only actors that are left actually representing the Palestinian caused by force, you get a zero-sum dynamic that produces exactly the kind of mass multi-front violence that becomes very hard to de-escalate. That was the argument I made in December 2023. And it's, I think, more or less a summary of what's occurred. The 26th Iran War, the Houthis re-engaging.

Iran's whole regional strategy still oriented around this kind of unifying the field logic I was describing before. Now, part three of my argument was Palestine and the World Order. I argued that Washington's simultaneous position, the kind of full-throated backing at the time for Ukrainian sovereignty against occupation paired with material and diplomatic cover for Israel's actions in Gaza was doing serious damage to the credibility of the entire liberal international order and not just to just America's regional reputation. I use this term from the literature and international relations of recognitional justice, which is the idea that a global order is legitimacy depends not just on power, but on whether it's perceived to deliver justice on longstanding

unresolved sovereignty claims. Palestine is like the textbook case of an unresolved claim that sovereignty was never granted and never addressed. And I pointed out then that Arab officials were already in December 2023 showing up in Moscow or Beijing and treating Washington's mediating role as compromised beyond repair. And I closed with a very specific historical contrast. Ronald Reagan in 1982, when Israel was attempting to destroy Lebanon, he picked up the phone and told Menachem Begin to stop bombing byruth. And the bombing stopped. So there was like real leverage applied. Now compare that to Biden's approach back in 2023, which reporters called, you know, bear hugging Netanyahu. My argument then was nothing short of abandoning this model and

treating Palestinian self-determination as a genuine sovereignty question rather than just like a security management problem was going to prevent exactly the kind of regional escalation that's consuming all of us now. Now, I'm not saying this to claim, like, how great I was to have said this. I didn't have a crystal ball. A crystal ball is not really required here. The mechanism for how this was going to function was very clear in December 2023 for anyone who was willing to look at Palestine or the cause of Arab Publix as a cause rather than just a footnote. And two years later, you know, Gregory Goss, for example, is describing Hezbollah and the Houthi is reengaging exactly along this logic that I described.

And Lynch is describing Gulf states starting to hedge towards Russia and China. And Cook is describing how Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are building this alternative security structure because the bear hug model of American reassurance stopped being credible. An Arab public sentiment now has more interest in Washington because of what's happened in the last three years. There was also this piece in foreign affairs by Amani Shemin and Michael Robbins, and they talked about survey data from Arab respondents that showed how lots of Arabs, a majority, don't think the United States upholds international law.

And single digits in these surveys pick the U.S. as an acceptable mediator for the Israeli-Kalostan conflict. And in every country surveyed, more people said China does a better job protecting freedoms and rights than the United States does. So Jamel and Robbins read that as kind of a recent collapse, something that had become lost for the United States

after October 2023. I'd go further. We know from survey data since 2011. You can look up the Arab Opinion Index, for example, that this wasn't a cliff, it's a slope. It's been a steady, years-long trajectory of Arab public's souring on the United States that predates what's happened in Gaza and the genocide

by over a decade, at least. Between 21 and 29% of respondents across these nine rounds of the Arab Opinion Index have consistently named the U.S. as the greatest threat facing Arabs second only to Israel. And the share who reject the idea that the U.S. genuinely cares about human rights climbed from 49% in 2014 to 55% in the most recent round. And finally, 76% hold a negative view of U.S. policy towards Palestine. And none of that is just a reaction to the last three years.

This double standard that the United States has upheld wasn't a failure of the liberal international order in the Middle East. It was the order. It was operating as designed, the post-World War II architecture of multilateral institutions of democratic norms and open markets and rules that supposedly apply to everybody. That's the version that the European publics and European states were sold and experienced. The Middle East, as I've argued in a variety of different pieces, was governed through a different logic from day one. It was about securing the flow of oil.

It was about guaranteeing freedom of navigation through strategic chokepoints. and propping up whichever regime would sign on to that bargain. Democratic issues were completely optional. And, of course, unconditional backing for Israeli governments regardless of conduct. There's actually a companion statistic in the piece that I wrote from the Arab barometer. 40 to 50% of respondents believe that the United Nations sides more often with Israel than with the Palestinians. And the conclusion is plain. Quote, many Arab citizens no longer see the problem as one of double standards alone.

The root causes the bankruptcy of the entire international system. So it's not just Washington. It's this whole architecture that people were told to place their faith in, the UN, the rules, the institutions, basically read by the people who were supposed to be protected by it as functionally captured. Now, an important caveat, because I don't want to leave you with the wrong takeaway here, 68% of respondents in that latest Arab opinion index still say they support democracy as is their preferred system of governments. This isn't a story about people giving up on democratic values or self-determination or accountability or rule of law. It's a story about people concluding, based on 15 years of consistent data, that the American-led vehicle claiming to deliver those values was never actually built

to deliver them in the Middle East. And then, of course, there's the Trump administration's contribution to all of this, which I've been fairly blunt about, you know, in previous episodes. Previous administrations, at least, maintained a pretense.

You know, there were the summits, and they gave lip service to the rules-based order, and they, like, performed that they cared about democracy sometimes. But stripping away this performative rhetoric doesn't just look bad, it removes a tool. As long as Washington claimed to believe in a rules-based order, Arab reformers and Democrats had something to point at. Like, there's a gap between your stated standard and the actual conduct. And so maybe we can name and shame you and like you'll change your opinions or change your policies. Once the U.S. stops even claiming that standard,

you know, that lever disappears. There's nothing left to leverage. So what's the prescription? I don't think the prescription can anymore be wait for a better administration. Maybe we need to stop centering Washington as the mechanism of repair at all. Instead, maybe we need to support international accountability mechanisms that Washington is currently trying to defund and sanction into irrelevance, like the ICC, or build multilateral efforts to uphold something like a rules-based order without waiting for the American establishment, and develop civil society strategies that don't depend on the outcome of U.S. domestic politics, because any order that eventually replace the government, is this one has to actually reckon with the injustices that this one spent decades systematically ignoring.

There's a really interesting article in The Guardian titled What Should Replace the American Led Order by Oslo Bali and Samuel Moyne. I'll put them in the show notes. And I think it's an interesting argument about how to stop mourning what they call the old order and build the foundations of a new world. But when we go back to kind of the DC policymaking space, the honest through line of all the articles I engage with today is that the system is failing. But it's been failing. It's been happening for a very long time. The debate in Washington is just finally grudgingly catching up to admitting it. And even now, it's mostly catching up on Washington's terms, asking what Washington should do about it, rather than asking, you know, who's been trying to tell it this entire time.

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