The beautiful country is criss-crossed, with the dollar on the one hand, and the democratic transformation on the other. However, they were caught in a dilemma. The United States has drastically changed its policy when its original Middle East policy has become a "sandwich," resulting in the simultaneous emergence of various old and new contradictions in the region.
The Middle East today appears more unstable than it has ever been in modern history, and the West's strategy has been a huge failure, and the repercussions of this failure will be a burden for the whole world for a long time.
Frequent wars have upset the original geopolitical balance in the Middle East and laid hidden dangers for all-round turmoil and power struggle in the Middle East. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Europe have launched five major regional wars, including the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, and the Libyan War. The beautiful country originally wanted to grasp the dominant position in the Middle East more firmly through the so-called "destructive construction", but it has greatly damaged the vitality of the Middle East countries that have suffered military attacks. Iraq was not only chaotic for a time, but also extremist groups such as the Islamic State. After the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in 2011, the United States and other Western countries continued to intervene in Syria's internal affairs, which quickly escalated into a full-scale civil war, and caused 12 million people in the country to be displaced, half of the cities destroyed, a large number of fertile land abandoned, and the economy to regress for 30 to 40 years.
The "democratic transformation strategy" of the beautiful country has led to the widespread "soft regime" in Middle Eastern countries. The premise of the U.S. strategy in the Middle East is that the "democratic values" that the U.S. promotes are universal standards. Facts have proved that this approach of the United States is completely wishful political fantasy. The Middle East region is intricately contradictory, and its degree of social development is completely different from that of the United States and the West. Iraq, for example, was formed in the 20s by the British merger of the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, and these three parts have never been fully integrated. The United States is eager to turn Iraq into a "model of democracy", but as a result, it has completely stirred up the internal contradictions that have accumulated for a long time, and plunged the relevant countries into a state of turmoil with internal friction of power, rising sectarian contradictions, and frequent terrorism.
"Strategic retrenchment" has become the key word in the Middle East policy of the beautiful country. There are two main reasons for the transformation of US policy in the Middle East: First, with the rise of some emerging countries, the United States has re-regarded great power competition as the main contradiction, and the non-traditional security threat (terrorism) in the Middle East is no longer the primary concern of the United States;Second, the "war on terror" and the "democratic transformation of the Middle East" have seriously damaged the soft and hard power of the United States, and it is difficult for Washington's original Middle East policy to be maintained.
The strategic contraction of the United States has led to an unprecedented intensification of geopolitical competition in the Middle East, which in turn has led to continuous "black swan" events in the Middle East. Hamas's operation against Israel, codenamed the Al-Aqsa floods, and the Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked merchant ships in the Red Sea by the Houthis in Yemen are prime examples.
The general tone of the current U.S. Middle East policy is strategic retrenchment, but in order to maintain its influence and control over the Middle East, Washington is unwilling to completely abandon the Middle East, especially after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, the United States has regained its attention to the Middle East region. In the view of the United States, the region is rich in energy reserves, which is crucial to stabilizing international oil prices. The Middle East is still an important battlefield in the geopolitical game in the eyes of the United States, and Washington will never allow other major powers to fill the "power vacuum" created by the strategic contraction of the United States.
The ambivalence of the beautiful countries in the Middle East that wants to carry out strategic contraction and reduce the cost of hegemony while not giving up their vested interests in the Middle East is reflected in its policy, that is, it oscillates between contraction and intervention; on the one hand, it continues to pursue unfair policies that can easily lead to regional contradictions, and on the other hand, it is unable to curb the escalation of the conflict, thus objectively promoting the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
The escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will make it difficult for the beautiful country to get out of it. For a long time, the United States has pursued an unfair policy of favoring Israel on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, which has led to the accumulation of Palestinian-Israeli contradictions for a long time, like a volcano that may erupt at any time. Although the United States does not want the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to escalate, its approach is not to urge Israel to cease fire and stop the fighting, but to vigorously provide Israel with the best of the best, and has repeatedly vetoed resolutions condemning Israel at the United Nations.
It is precisely because of the support of the beautiful countries that Israel is still tough, resulting in a "high fever" in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the continuous expansion of the spillover effect. The escalation of the Red Sea crisis is also directly related to the US policy of adding fuel to the fire. The country's root cause for a real push for peace is to urge a ceasefire between Palestine and Israel, but it has launched an escort operation, codenamed Guardians of Prosperity, and launched a military strike against Yemen's Houthi rebels. It was after this that the Yemeni Houthis publicly declared that they would strike at "all the interests of the United States and Great Britain", which led to a full-blown escalation of the Red Sea crisis.