"Sick and tired of the Middle East"

That's the headline from an opinion article that makes a ton of sense to me.

With the exception of the Warsaw Pact bloc during the Cold War, since WWII, no region has taken more US attention, lives, and capital (both financial and political) as the Middle East. Leaders of both parties have banged their head against the wall working for Middle East peace, with just enough progress to give the illusion that the US is making a difference in the region.

I'd like to see a new US policy to the Middle East based on the following:

1) the Middle East isn't THAT important to the USA. The Middle East borders 3 continents (Europe, Africa, and Asia.) If the region is so important, how come the stakeholders on any one of these 3 continents aren't more active than the USA, located ~4,000 miles away from the region.

Putting this in GDP terms, the GDP of Afghanistan + Pakistan + Iraq is still less than the country of Venezuela, and I'd argue that Hugo Chavez is more of an imminent threat to the USA than anything in any of those countries. Looking more broadly, the 14 countries of the Middle East (stopping at Libya) roughy equals Italy, in GDP terms. So, if the entire Middle East disappeared, it would be about as economically significant as if Italy were to go on permanent vacation, or if China closed down for 4 months. Either way, I think we'd survive.

2) we fundamentally don't understand the Middle East region. Be it religious, tribal, political or ethnic differences, something causes America's best efforts to be unappreciated, scorned, or unaccepted.
3) if the region wishes to maintain cultures that are fundamentally either A) dictatorships or B) still stuck in the first millennium AD, we should let them. How can we believe that we can install democracy in a region - or even understand - a place where don't even have the right to drive a car?

3) there is an opportunity cost of American efforts in the Middle East. What if our diplomatic, military, and trade efforts were more balanced to include South America and Africa? Both continents are closer, larger, and higher leverage than the Middle East. Imagine if the trillion dollars spent across Iraq and Afghanistan instead were spent building connections (and the economy) of Africa and/or South America?


Unfortunately, I expect the opposite to happen. Iran's pursuit of the atomic bomb means that USA attention to the Middle East is more likely to increase than decrease in the near term.

Another voice in favor of diluting attention to the Middle East

Check the link above, where Will Tanner delivers the goods.....

“The Irrelevance of the Middle East”

"the long-term importance of the Middle East is roughly proportionate to the share of the world population for which the region accounts–less than 5 percent. The time is long overdue for policymakers and analysts alike to put the many urgent issues that confront the people of the Middle East in the context of dramatic and unprecedented global transformations in process today"

This bit of sanity is from Philip Auerswald via CATO. We could really stand to hear this more often: the Middle East doesn't really matter.

Iran, Iraq, Islamic terrorism, Arab-Israeli tension, and energy politics & economics dominate the headlines everyday, but the reality is that a cold analytical view suggests that diplomatic, development, and economic focus should lie elsewhere.

A big driver for this conclusion is that despite our (oil importers) fear that oil producing states with malintentions could cripple our economies, the sellers are just as intertwined with our fates for economic reasons, irregardless of political considerations.



I'd also use a different approach to arrive at the same conclusion: America's ability to impact the Middle East is an incredibly small part of the answer for the Middle East. Despite best intentions over the last 50 years, it would be difficult to say that our impact is anything but a tiny fraction of the effort put forth. Whether it's the half-trillion dollars spent so far in Iraq, the Marines lost in Lebanon, or the countless fruitless Arab-Israeli peace talks initiated by the US, these efforts haven't shown a good return on effort.

America likes to pursue causes over and above practical economics. For example, we've always believed in the cause of "peace in the Middle East" (nevermind that there's no single definition for what that looks like), despite the high cost experienced to date.

It is appropriate then, to wonder, how would the situation in ___________ look if it had received a quarter of the US attention and effort over the last 50 years. (Try filling in the blank with South American countries first.)

In this scenario - where ___________ takes some of the US attention devoted to the Middle East, would the Middle East be any less stable?


Perhaps, in lieu of chasing causes, we should prioritize US effort on the basis of a measurable metric: "good results per unit of US effort (whether diplomatic, financial, etc.)"

(This approach is directly in line with Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus. Lomborg and his team has prioritized many of the popular social causes by their return on effort, and suggests development efforts concentrate on economic impact. As a result (and an example), Lomborg suggests de-prioritizing global warming, among others.))

Adopting this approach would lead to some surprising realignment in US diplomacy. I suspect that US diplomatic and aid efforts in South America and Africa would have an amazing return (what would the amount spent in one month of the Iraq war buy you in Africa?), and would rise in importance relative to ongoing Middle East initiatives.


In the end, when it comes to the Middle East, I fall back on a pearl of wisdom regarding the Middle East passed along to me many years ago: "If you can understand the Middle East conflicts, somebody explained it to you wrong."