How the United States Can Escape the Middle East's Proxy Wars

Alex Stark co-authored a blog post on how the U.S. can escape the Middle East's proxy wars for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

This discussion suggests that Trump’s impulse to end U.S. commitments in Syria might be right, but his timing and execution were awful. Carrying forward Obama’s risk-aversion logic, Trump knows that a credible threat to cut off aid is the most effective way to prevent free-riding on the U.S.’ largesse. America, Trump insists, doesn’t owe the Kurds anything. But in precipitously withdrawing, the U.S. induced a scramble of sponsor-proxy realignment that only increases regional instability. Indeed, that’s just what has happened. Turkey is mobilizing locally raised Arab and Turkmen militias (including former U.S. protégés) as it overruns Kurdish positions—even as the U.S. tries belatedly to restrain them. PYD leaders have returned to Damascus for support. Assad’s forces are re-entering the northeast—and while Iran does not necessarily look favorably on Turkish gains in Syria, these gains by Assad, in turn, help to solidify Iran’s vaunted “land bridge” to the Mediterranean and its proxy Hezbollah. An undetermined number of Islamic State detainees have escaped in the melee. Israel, the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, and other U.S. regional allies recognize that the disavowal of Syrian Kurds could prefigure their own abandonment and seem to be making alternative arrangements. Most troubling, though, is that nearly concurrent with the Syria withdrawal the U.S. has deployed additional troops to Saudi Arabia following the Kingdom’s abject defense failures last month. The U.S. isn’t exiting the Middle East quagmire as much as wading to another bank.

Complex proxy wars such as Syria’s defy common approaches for resolving civil wars. The challenge of making credible commitments, which scholars identify as the key to ending civil wars, affects domestic belligerents and their international patrons alike. Peace in proxy wars must be approached through what scholars Erin Jenne and Milos Popovich call “nested security” arrangements, reflecting grand regional bargains in which opposing sponsors take mutual steps to withdraw and de-escalate conflicts from the outside in. Syria, Libya, or Yemen are not separate wars, but theaters in a regional conflagration where the U.S., along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, UAE, Turkey, and others, contend via domestic proxies and direct troop deployments.