America has been trying — and failing — to get out of the Middle East ever since Barack Obama’s first term. Now, thanks to President Trump’s ill-conceived Iran war and the deal that’s poised to settle it, which was announced overnight, Washington will finally get to reduce its footprint in a region that is of secondary importance (at best) for the world’s number-one net energy exporter.

That’s the long-term implication of the news that American and Iranian negotiators have almost finalized a memorandum of understanding to be signed later this week in Switzerland. Paradoxically, it came about as a result of the very military operation long pushed by American, Israeli, and Gulf hawks — the groups, in other words, that have the most to lose from retrenchment.

Keenly aware of the American public’s fatigue with the Middle East — and of the growing, bipartisan unpopularity of the Jewish state — the hawks pressed and pressed for an operation that would dramatically weaken the Islamic Republic, maybe even overthrow it. The ambiguity of the goals, reflected in the Trump administration’s ever-shifting accounts of the war aims, was a product of this “let’s-see-what-we-can-get” approach.

But as we now know, the pro-war voices led by Benjamin Netanyahu based their analysis on a picture that underestimated the resilience of the Tehran regime, both in terms of military capacity and its popular foundations in Iranian society. This prompted some skepticism within the Trump administration — including, we now know, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio — but the President went ahead anyway.

A real regime-change operation in Iran — a nation of 90 million people, with an area nearly four times the size of Iraq — would have required a ground deployment of half a million troops. That was never going to happen, especially in a war that was unpopular from the get-go.

Almost immediately, the flawed analysis revealed itself in setbacks. Sounding surprisingly Bushian, Trump pledged to put Iran’s “destiny” back in the hands of its people. But no popular uprising materialized. Instead, getting bombed prompted an outpouring of anti-American sentiment on the streets of Tehran and other major cities. A cockamamie idea about “arming the Kurds” — a separatist effort in tension with the nationalist dreams of the exiled opposition led by Reza Pahlavi — likewise came to nothing.

With the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, assassinated, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps executed a defensive strategy that the group had gamed out going back to the Nineties. Faced with overwhelming American air superiority, the IRGC had long taught its officers that Iran’s best chance was to drag out any conflict, shift it to a maritime front, cause chaos for America’s Persian Gulf allies, and close the Strait of Hormuz. This would then inflict economic pain on Wall Street and on American consumers.

And that was it. The Iranian regime was awakened to a potency that it was formerly only latently aware of. And as a tenuous ceasefire takes hold, there is no chance of the Trump administration extracting through diplomacy and a blockade what it couldn’t win on the battlefield. While the terms of the final settlement are still unclear, it seems certain that the mullahs will extract some sort of payday, hold on to their enriched uranium, and, most importantly, hold on to their regime.

America might maintain its battered bases in the region, but no one outside of the ultra-hawkish think tanks and magazines in DC is prepared for a repeat. Thus, the United States will have come to recognize Iran in its current form as a permanent fixture of the Middle East: a state with interests and strategic imperatives that transcend ideology. That could be the beginning of the end for America’s whole reason for being in the Middle East.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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