Fixing America’s Failed Middle East Strategy, With Jason Campbell

For over a decade, US presidents have sought to deemphasize the Middle East and turn America’s strategic focus to other, ostensibly more important global priorities. Such thinking, however, underestimated the Middle East’s volatility and undervalued its close connection to key American national interests. Given this intermittent attention paid to the region, the United States time and again found itself confronted with Middle East conflicts and events it never anticipated and for which it was ill-prepared.

MEI Senior Fellow Jason Campbell’s policy essay in the latest issue of The Middle East Journal dissects the failures of America’s Middle East strategy and offers a way forward. He explains why constructive engagement with Middle Eastern partners bolsters, rather than detracts, from competition with near-peer rivals in other parts of the world. Reestablishing a true regional security framework in the wake of the 2026 Iran conflict can help the US buffer post-war geo-economic shocks and provide it with a forward stance from which to engage in global great-power competition.

Speakers

Dr. Jason Campbell is Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where he focuses on international security, geopolitics, and foreign policy. Prior to joining MEI, he was a senior policy researcher at RAND, where his work concentrated on strategic competition, the resourcing of US combatant commands, the evaluation of security cooperation programs, and the future of irregular warfare.

Dr. Ariel I. Ahram (Moderator) is the Editor of MEI’s Middle East Journal and a professor at the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs in Arlington, VA. He is the author of War and Conflict in the Middle East and North Africa (Polity, 2020), Break All the Borders (Oxford, 2019), and Proxy Warriors (Stanford, 2011).