Trump and the New Map of the Middle East

The Middle East that the Trump Administration must now come to grips with is not the one Barack Obama envisioned leaving his successor when he took office eight years ago. Shortly after Obama entered office in 2009, the new U.S. president visited Cairo to give a landmark address to the Muslim world at large. In that speech, Obama pledged to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims.” Key to this “new beginning” was a new vision of what U.S. policy in the Middle East might look like. It proposed a softer approach to the region, promising to remove U.S. troops from Iraq, pursue rapprochement with Iran, and finally broker Arab-Israeli peace.  

However, little of that vision has come to fruition, at least not as intended. The so-called “Arab Spring” political uprisings, which swept the region in 2011, overthrew longstanding authoritarian regimes and shook the regional order. Subsequent civil wars in Syria and Yemen have taken a terrible human toll and provided a battleground for Sunni states and Shi’a Iran to wage vicious proxy wars. And finally, the shocking rise of Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria in 2014 has further weakened both countries and given the cause of violent Sunni extremism a territorial home.