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The other day I saw a Harvard Harris poll on the favorability of various political figures in the U.S. Only RFK Jr. (sigh), Marco Rubio, and Mark Carney had net positive approval ratings:
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While I understand that these polls all have methodological issues, I was struck by how three figures — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Benjamin Netanyahu — had net approval ratings below almost any American politician. While Mamdani’s low rating might be partially due to his leftist policies and his association with the DSA, it struck me that all three of these unpopular figures had one thing in common — they are associated with the intrusion of Middle Eastern politics into American politics. And I thought: Maybe Americans just want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.
Today¹ is September 11, the anniversary of the terror attacks 25 years ago. Though I don’t agree with the leftist line that those attacks were blowback from American involvement in the Middle East, it’s unquestionable that 9/11 inaugurated an era of heavy U.S. involvement in that area of the world — the Iraq War, the follow-up war against ISIS, the War on Terror, greater support for Israel, an increased military presence in the region, and finally the war against Iran.
I don’t believe that all of that involvement was a bad idea — in particular, as I’ll argue, the War on Terror, including the fight against ISIS, was generally successful and necessary. But overall, the era of heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been a disaster for U.S. power and prestige, and it’s time for that era to end.
This is not a recent conversion on my part; I’ve been in favor of general disengagement from the Middle East for a very long time. Five years ago, in the early days of the Noahpinion Substack, I wrote a post called “How to fix U.S. foreign policy”:
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In that post, I wrote:
[D]espite modest progress, we still remain too tied up in Middle Eastern conflicts…The U.S. will never be able to ignore the Middle East entirely, but we can remove ourselves much more than we’ve done…[W]e need to draw down engagement in the Middle East, and increase engagement in Asia.
Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, making my message far more urgent than it was at the time. Most obviously, there’s Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, which continues to waste U.S. military resources and make the U.S. look weak while failing to accomplish any significant objective. Recent polls show that a very strong majority of Americans think that the Iran War is not worth fighting.
There’s also Israel’s intensified campaign against the Palestinians. This has become the rallying cry of the American left, which has prompted a backlash and crackdown by the Tr