The U.S. Reset in the Middle East Is Working | Opinion

Two years ago, the U.S. completed its last evacuation flight from Afghanistan, as the hardline Taliban were toppling—in real time—what was left of the country's house-of-cards government and military. In spite of the media's chaos narrative, it was about as orderly an exit as could be expected given the impossible circumstances. The Biden administration persisted in its task over the loud howls of a thousand Forever War enthusiasts and proved, at last, that U.S. national security does not require the open-ended garrisoning of multiple countries in the Middle East and Central Asia.

It may be hard to imagine today, but in 2008 the United States was mired in two grueling wars in the region, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with tens of thousands of troops on the ground, burning billions of dollars a day in a fruitless quest to remake two societies we barely understood. These unpopular, counterproductive wars of choice were spawned by the George W. Bush administration's almost providential belief that only democratization could prevent new waves of terrorism. Instead, when the final soldiers were cleared out of Kabul, the flight manifests included men and women who hadn't even been born on 9/11.

The unheralded story of U.S. foreign policy today is that the destructive myths about our mission civilisatrice in the region and the indispensability of American military firepower to regional stability have been comprehensively put to bed. Former President Barack Obama started the great Middle East reset by withdrawing from Iraq and refusing to be drawn too deeply into the Syrian civil war. Despite his obvious fascination with Saudi tyrants and his cavalier openness to provoking an Iran war, former President Donald Trump largely stayed the course. And President Biden, once a lonely voice opposing the troop surge in Afghanistan as Obama's vice president, finished the job.

The foreign policy establishment, 20 years deep into these failed nation-building projects and incapable of honestly appraising them, flipped out. "I think history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States," intoned NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel. Dismissing problems with the two-decade fiasco as "primarily matters of execution," Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in the flagship Blob journal Foreign Affairs that it didn't "invalidate the basic model of military intervention that begins with the application of massive force" against terrorists.

These sentiments were wrong when they were written and have aged even more poorly. The past two years have proven conclusively that an ostentatious American military presence in the Middle East is not only unnecessary but actively detrimental to the people and countries in the region. Since the U.S. began drawing down its military footprint, multiple new peace agreements have been signed between Israel and other regional states. Bitter rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia have taken the first steps toward a future of peace and co-existence rather than one of endless meddling and instigation. Iraq is better off today than it was a decade ago, and civil wars in Yemen and Syria are closer to conclusions than seemed possible just a few years ago. There have been no major terrorist acts or even foiled plots against the U.S.

It is true that Afghanistan has been abandoned to the Taliban. Life has unquestionably gotten worse for women, believers in small-d democracy and those who resist the new government's religious zealotry. But as journalist Fazelminallah Qazizai told NPR earlier this month, there has been an unexpected upside: "The good changes I could see is no more bombardment, no more drone strike. Peace and security is established." And it may be that giving Afghanistan an extended break from endless conflict will be better in the long run for the country's would-be reformers than another decade of fruitless, U.S.-led fighting.

But the rapidity of the pro-American government's collapse despite ample lead time was incontrovertible evidence that the whole enterprise was smoke and mirrors, despite its good intentions. And the ugliness inherent in watching a cherished project implode seemingly overnight forced the United States to accept that there are limits to what can be achieved with the blunt application of military force. Our violent delights did, in the end, have violent ends.

The Biden administration continues to prove that U.S. global leadership need not boil down to constant war, and that what scholars call "offshore balancing" is just as effective as lighting trillions of dollars on fire with direct interventions. Seventy percent of Americans supported withdrawing from Afghanistan at the time, and last year, for the first time, 50 percent of Americans told Gallup that the decision to invade Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 was a mistake from the get-go. American voters and their political leadership are finally on the same page about the U.S. role in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Afghanistan conflict has cost American taxpayers over $2.3 trillion and counting, to say nothing of the more than 243,000 people who have been killed as a direct result of the fighting and the millions wounded. The total cost of the post-9/11 wars will ultimately exceed $6 trillion with no discernible return on that staggering investment. That anyone could possibly gaze upon this landscape of hubris and failure and conclude that it worked, or that changing course was a mistake is beyond all comprehension.

While critics continue Monday morning quarterbacking and their ceaseless recriminations, there's no going back to the heavy-handed, interventionist Middle East policies of the War on Terror. That, at long last, is a mission accomplished.

David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.