President Joe Biden’s administration is preparing to draw U.S. military forces out of the Middle East as part of a strategic reorientation toward threats from China fraught with political risk.
“More of everything is not a strategy,” State Department Counsellor Derek Chollet told the Center for New American Security. “We can do more than any other country in the world, particularly militarily. But that doesn’t mean that we live in a world without limits. We also have limits in what we can do, and the challenge we have is how do we strike that right balance.”
Chollet’s remarks amounted to an exercise in expectations management. He endorsed a new report that identified three core U.S. national security interests in the Middle East — counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and the maintenance of major shipping lanes. A proper emphasis on those objectives could free up military assets to counter China, at risk of alarming Middle East allies and aggravating the political injuries sustained during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The view of this administration is that military force is not the sole means by which the U.S. is going to be able to achieve its objectives,” Chollet said. “And given the challenges we face all around the world, and the finite resources we have, that our goal is to right-size that military presence, do so in a way that we have enough capability in a theater that we’re able to protect our interests and achieve our overall aims.”
CENTCOM DIDN’T DOCUMENT BRAIN INJURIES PROPERLY FOLLOWING 2020 IRAQ MISSILE ATTACK: WATCHDOG
Chollet spoke as if the extent of the military withdrawal from the Middle East would not be too substantial, in an apparent effort to preempt any anxious outcry from regional allies.
“If our military numbers may change a bit here and there, our diplomatic engagement, our political engagement, our economic engagement — if anything, it’s only intensifying,” he insisted. “We’re intent to be more engaged, in more places, in more ways over the next three years than we have ever been before — even if perhaps the military posture is adjusted slightly.”
One of the authors of the report put it a little more bluntly. “The United States needs to incur risk in some areas,” CNAS Defense Program fellow Becca Wasser said. “The United States as a global power has all of these responsibilities but can’t necessarily be everywhere and anywhere at every single time … We posit that the Middle East is actually an area where the United States should accept some risk.”
That statement reflects the habit of mind that Chollet believes governed the foreign policy choices of an unlikely trio of presidents — Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama — which he described in a book published the week after Biden’s inauguration. Chollet credits all three with working to develop a sustainable military approach to the Middle East — “even if it meant, perhaps, reducing posture here and there, militarily,” he said — at the risk of domestic backlash.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“They spoke openly about the fact that the U.S. couldn’t do everything and got criticized for being weak, as a result,” he said of those prior presidents. “All were criticized, at various points for exercising a degree of restraint, particularly in the Middle East, and in many ways, they all suffered politically for it.”
