America in the Middle East: Dim the Lights

The United States' strategic position in the greater Middle East is disintegrating. The repercussions of the Arab Spring have undercut the tacit alliance among Washington, Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and Jerusalem with auxiliary members in Yemen and Tunisia among other peripheral states. Mubarak is gone while his former military cohorts sap the revolution's zeal through symbolic acts that include untying the bonds to Israel while cultivating an alliance with Turkey. Both pillars of the regional sub-system are animated by a deepening anti-American feeling that is spreading across the Islamic world. In Ankara, moreover, the Erdogan government now has its own calculated view of a diplomatic field that no longer has the United States as its hub. The House of Saud is so badly rattled that it is turning on Washington as the cause of its new-found sense of vulnerability. Iraq's sectarian Shi'ite leadership spurns the idea of a special relationship with us while incrementally building structures of cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran will not bend the knee in response our relentless campaigning of shunning and sanctioning it -- leaving Washington with the bleak choice of war or an indefinite period of containment -- in the absence of any readiness to speak seriously with its leaders about the terms of a modus vivendi.

Farther afield, Afghanistan is an endless slog with the vain hope of turning that ill-starred land into a Western-oriented, pro-American country fading like the swirls of smoke from a lost pipe dream. Pakistan is now pronounced our enemy, condemned routinely by our belligerent leaders as the source of all that stymies us both places. Levels of anti-Americanism are so high as to leave those with favorable views of America within a statistical margin of error that reaches to 00.0. The country's political elite is unifying around the hard position of giving a blunt 'no' in response to bellicose demands from Washington that it do our bidding. Everywhere we look, never has America's standing been so weak, its authority so low, its credibility in such tatters, and its judgment so suspect.

Little of this registers in official Washington, or in the ante-chambers of power that is unofficial Washington. We continue to bluster and fume, we issue ukase, make declarations, scold and instruct, cast our failures as incidents in the mythic pageant of illusory triumphs from Baghdad to Kandahar to Somalia. The echo chamber keeps reality at bay. Each of these myriad failures has its own saga of hubris, incompetence, willful ignorance and flawed thinking. Iraq stands out only for the brazen deceit and mindlessness that were its hallmark from the inception.

Predictably, these tragic consequences were little noted nor will they be long remembered among a political class whose insularity from the realities of the world is surpassed only by their insularity from the realities of their own nation.

The chapel light is dim. The script is small. The preacher is blind. The congregants are deaf. And shouts ricochet off the unhearing walls.