The New Middle East | Robert Wright & Annelle Sheline
0:00 Teaser
1:06 Annelle’s Middle East bona fides
2:55 The state of play in Iran
8:14 A deepening fissure between Gulf Arab states
22:05 Explaining the Trump-Biden continuity on Middle East policy
26:45 Will the Middle East realign away from America?
34:46 Turkey and the moral hazard of US aid to Israel
40:00 Can Iran mend ties with the Gulf states?
47:40 Heading to Overtime
Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.
China Rising
Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.
This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.
Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.
After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:
Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.
There's more at the link.
Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:
Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
Suckered again.
Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones, Iran Resisted a Powerful Attacker. Taiwan Can Too. NYTimes, Apr. 19, 2026.
As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran grinds to an uncertain conclusion, observers have been quick to label it a win for China. The war has damaged American prestige around the world and angered countries and their populations whose economies face inflation and disrupted supply chains. But a closer look at Iran’s methods in resisting the United States reveals uncomfortable lessons for China as it weighs whether to follow through on its threats to take Taiwan.
Iran prevented the far more powerful United States from winning a war that, on paper, it should have walked away with. Iran weathered decapitation strikes and continued to counterattack, despite heavy bombing and inferior weapons. Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is particularly instructive. Its navy had only dilapidated surface ships, a small number of diesel-powered submarines, and numerous small, fast-attack speedboats. Iran’s air force had no advanced attack aircraft and no true bombers.
What Iran did have, however, was a large stockpile of drones and missiles — including anti-ship cruise missiles — capable of striking vessels in the strait and hitting military and commercial targets across the Middle East. Iran also decentralized its command and control network and dispersed and concealed its weapons in multiple locations to make it difficult for the United States and Israel to find and destroy all of them.
Later:
Survival requires more than hardware. Iran weathered massive strikes against its political and military leaders by quickly replacing them and by decentralizing military command and control. It maximized deception and concealment, stored weapons in underground bunkers to increase survivability and relied on mobile systems that could be quickly rolled out, launched and rolled back into bunkers.
Taiwan needs to prepare similar moves to survive the potential disruption of its command networks and to be ready to fight in the face of decapitation strikes, space and counterspace attacks and offensive cyberoperations. Doing this will require plans for succession, decentralized command and control, deception and survivability.
There's more at the link.
Steven Erlanger, A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility, NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.
Historical analogies are never exact. But with the tenuous cease-fire deal in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, some are asking whether this is a “Suez” moment for the United States, marking the waning of American power and credibility in the world.
The Suez crisis took place in October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt to force open the Suez Canal. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an election days away, ordered them to stop. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain resigned. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt became a hero of anti-colonialism.
Suez became shorthand for the moment that Britain, exhausted from World War II, gave way as a global power to the United States.
There are differences from that time. The Suez Canal is man-made and wholly in Egyptian territory, unlike the international waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. There is no other global power capable of replacing America in the region, let alone ordering President Trump around.
But the two-week cease-fire leaves the Islamic Republic in place and still in command of the future of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran’s nuclear stockpile and ballistic missile program unresolved. After Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory, however hollow, it is difficult to imagine a resumption of full-scale war. [...]
The impact of a diminished United States is strongest in Europe, which has relied on NATO and the American security guarantee implicit in membership, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But Europeans drew a distinction between faith in America and faith in Mr. Trump. The former remains because it is vital for European security.
Still, Mr. Trump’s policies are inevitably producing a response that will outlast him. The rest of the world is trying to organize itself and derisk from an America that treats its allies as enemies and its traditional enemies, like Russia and China, as friends. [...]
China, which gets so much of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, pushed Iran to agree to the cease-fire, and it is expected to participate in keeping the strait open and guaranteeing safe passage for others.
Much depends on how the war ends, cautioned Mr. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
If the cease-fire leads to a deal that imposes significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to cause trouble, he said, that would be much better in the longer run than a frozen conflict or one that “just burns on month after month,” with all the accompanying impact on the energy market and American allies.
There's more at the link.
I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.
But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.
Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.
President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.
From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.
But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.
One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.
Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.
Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?
There's more at the link.
Jeff Sommer, The Oil Shocks of the ’70s Changed the World. Will the Iran War Do the Same? NYTimes, Mar. 28, 2026.
In January 1974, my dad lent me his old gas-guzzling Ford LTD to haul my clothing and books to college in Ithaca, N.Y. A couple of weeks later, when I tried to drive back home to Long Island, I realized that I couldn’t buy enough gas for the 250-mile trip.
The 1973-74 Arab oil embargo was well underway. The price of oil had nearly quadrupled; there were lines at gas stations, and drivers were allowed to queue up only on alternate days. I had picked the wrong day for my trip. No gas for me. So much for freedom of the road.
That was the first of the world’s big oil shocks. By the time of the second one in 1978-79, set off by the Iranian revolution, I was a reporter in New Jersey and it seemed I was constantly interviewing angry motorists stuck in interminable lines. Gas shortages and soaring inflation were just other aspects of life in the United States.
The gas lines ended as the crises ebbed, but it took two recessions, engineered by the formidable Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, to bring inflation under control.
What’s less well understood about that period is that the oil shocks reshaped the world’s financial markets. Money flowed around the globe in new ways — and cemented the status of the dollar as the world’s core currency.
We are experiencing what could end up as the third great oil shock.
Then we get more history and analysis, to end with this:
“Duration is the key question,” he told me. “If this goes on for a long time, it’s a big deal. If the war stopped right now, we might not need to talk about it next year.”
Not every conflict in the Middle East necessarily changes global finance in profound ways. The United States fought two Gulf wars — one that started in the early 1990s, the other a decade later. The first was short. The second one, the U.S.-led war with Iraq, stretched from 2003 to 2011, caused scores of thousands of deaths and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The second war was a big one, but in retrospect, it preserved the status quo in energy markets more than it transformed them.
In every Gulf conflict since the Iranian revolution, U.S. strategists have worried that Iran might one day disrupt the global flow of energy by closing a geographical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz. For the first time, despite the pounding it has received from enormous U.S. and Israeli bombardments, Iran has demonstrated that it can close the strait. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas usually flows through it.
Whether this desperate achievement alters geopolitics substantially may not be known for years.
Michelle Goldberg, Republicans Know This War Is Going Badly, NYTimes, Mar. 27, 2026.
The article begins:
It is not just Democrats in Congress who fear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran is going sideways. After a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday, Republican lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee appeared shaken.
“We will not sacrifice American lives for the same failed foreign policies,” said Nancy Mace, warning about the possibility of American troops in Iran. The committee chair, Mike Rogers, complained that members aren’t getting nearly enough information about war plans. Troop movements, he said, should be “thoughtful and deliberate.” The implication was that they might not be.
And it ends:
Never before, however, has America arrived at the threshold of a quagmire so quickly, with so much advance warning about the precise errors it was making. We have spent much of the past decade — in no small part due to Trump’s election — reckoning with the cost of the Iraq war to global stability and American cohesion. For the first time I can remember, both major parties have significant, influential antiwar contingents. Trump ran for president, however mendaciously, as the peace candidate, claiming that Kamala Harris would lead America into World War III.
And yet here we are, lurching toward a new version of a familiar catastrophe, suffering from some national form of neurotic repetition compulsion. “This is like the horrible, lame-dad cover band version of the worst of American foreign policy,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy.
Someday, perhaps, when we’re picking up the pieces from yet another ill-conceived war, Republicans will explain that behind the scenes, they opposed it. One of the biggest problems in Congress, said Crow, is the gap between what people say privately and their willingness to demonstrate “the strength of their convictions” in public. “I’m always trying to close that gap with folks, and I always remind people that it’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said. He may be right, but the sooner the better.
This sentence caught me: “We have spent much of the past decade [...] reckoning with the cost of the Iraq war to global stability and American cohesion.” That feels right to me, but I would like to see it spelled out, especially that last bit, the cost to American cohesion.
Here's the story: 'Iran War - The Movie': On social media platforms near you, playing now. Watch viral video!
Is the Iran war now turning into internet satire? A viral AI movie trailer for "IRAN WAR: The Movie" is mocking global leaders, nuclear fears and war rhetoric as memes take over timelines. Why is this video blowing up? All you need to know.
'Iran War' movie trailer breaking the internet on day 26 of US-Israel-Iran war
As ballistic missiles dominate the physical skies, there's a different kind of "strike" being carried out over the digital world. As the Iran war enters its fourth week, and war fatigue sets in, the internet, as always, is responding the only way it knows how. With memes. With satire. With increasingly sharp, almost ruthless humour. What started as scattered jokes has now turned into a full-blown stream of content. Posts, videos, and AI edits are all taking aim at the three warring nations US, Israel, and Iran, each one trying to outdo the last. The latest one to make the internet ROFL is a 136-second AI-generated "movie trailer" style video titled "IRAN WAR: The Movie", which has racked up nearly 400,000 views in hours, and has turned the high-stakes tension of the March 2026 conflict into a Hollywood parody. All you need to know.
There's more at the link, including shots from the video.
Here's the clip: Iran War – Movie Trailer.
The game has changed.
From the moment the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the nightmare scenario for the global economy that most people talked about was the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the most important choke point for oil on the planet.
But a different and more disturbing nightmare began to unfold with direct attacks on the backbone of the Persian Gulf region’s energy production: the prospect of millions of dollars’ worth of long-term damage to facilities that supply a critical portion of the world’s natural gas.
Now, instead of wondering if the war would last for days or weeks, officials and economists are speculating about effects that could last for months and years.
“We have moved from stopping transit, which is a temporary measure, to attacking infrastructure, which has long-term effects,” said David Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and Energy Department official.
This new phase of the war began Wednesday, when Iran carried out a retaliatory missile strike on Ras Laffan, Qatar’s vast energy complex. That target produces roughly a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas, a transportable fuel used to heat homes, cook food, power factories and generate electricity throughout Asia and Europe. [...]
The attacks showed that despite Iran’s relative weaknesses, the country is exerting enormous leverage over the global economy. By using small-scale, low-cost weapons to counter highly sophisticated and expensive missile systems, Mr. Goldwyn said, the Iranians “have demonstrated a long-term threat to be able to attack infrastructure throughout the Gulf.” [...]
Analysts at the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie have already warned that $200 a barrel is not outside the realm of possibility in 2026, up from about $73 before the war.
“I couldn’t fathom we would not start seeing economies fall into a recession with energy prices at that point,” Mr. Miller said. [...]
Though oil tends to grab headlines, the supply of natural gas in many ways is at the heart of the economic fallout from the intensified fighting in the Gulf this past week.
The facilities for processing liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., are far less numerous than oil plants. Qatar’s, the world’s biggest, has not been operating for weeks, and is damaged. That also affects the price and availability of critical materials like fertilizer and helium, a byproduct of natural gas that is used to make semiconductor chips. [...]
Yet after years being whipsawed by a global pandemic, supply chain breakdowns and painful inflation, governments are limited — by depleted budgets and daunting debt loads — in their ability to respond to another crisis.
There's more at the link.
Amanda Taub, How Good Intentions Helped Pave Trump’s Road to Iran, NYTimes, March 7, 20226.
If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social in January as protesters flooded the streets of Iran in the largest anti-government demonstrations in the country’s history. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
As it turned out, Iran did kill thousands of protesters. But the United States was not as ready as it claimed. It was not until Feb. 28 that the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran’s government.
That's how Taub begins her article. She then goes on to list Trump's shifting justifications for the war before circling back to humanitarian concern:
Few believe that Mr. Trump is driven by a concern for human rights. He has also made clear his lack of interest in international law. And the war has already been catastrophic for many Iranian civilians, including dozens killed at an elementary school in an apparent U.S. missile strike on a nearby naval base. Yet the invocation of humanitarianism to help justify the war taps into — whether the president intends it or not — a powerful argument that has reshaped the global order since the end of the Cold War.
Under international law, force is permitted only in self-defense against an armed attack, or with authorization from the U.N. Security Council. There is no right to invade another country to protect civilians, even if their own government is the one harming them. That can often lead to governments or armed militias getting away with massacring protesters, torturing prisoners, committing ethnic cleansing or other atrocities. These rules of international law and the institutions that apply them have long been a source of anger.
The doctrine known as the “Responsibility to Protect,” often abbreviated as R2P by foreign-policy wonks, sought to change that. It emerged out of an era of liberal triumphalism, when the United States, its allies and some international institutions started to believe that sometimes, might could be a force for right — perhaps even if that meant violating international law.
But the effort to carve out a humanitarian exception, experts say, has left a weak spot in legal norms around the use of force — one that can now be exploited by leaders seeking to justify invasions of other sovereign states.
Nor is Trump the only leader to invoke "humanitarian logic" to justify war. Putin did so for Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea and 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s more effective to pick up a tool that already exists than to create a new one,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a professor at University College London and the author of “Hypocrisy and Human Rights: Resisting Accountability for Mass Atrocities.”
“There’s an academic conception of zombie norms, which are norms of international law that get sort of hollowed out, but still hang around with rhetorical relevance, even though they don’t seem to really constrain anyone’s behavior,” Professor Cronin-Furman said.
The fact that Responsibility to Protect once had considerable legitimacy, she said, means that Mr. Trump, or Mr. Putin, can still draw on it now.
The rest of the article goes on to discuss the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and how Putin and Trump have been able to exploit it for their own somewhat different ends and further harm is likely to follow.
International law is a funny thing. With no real means of enforcement, it’s essentially a set of reciprocal expectations. It only works if states believe others will follow the rules, too. Anything that departs from those expectations weakens that system. [...]
Another tragedy of the current situation is that civilians remain in urgent need of protection from mass violence — and solutions to that problem seem more remote than ever.
There's more at the link.