by Barbara A. Leaf
The Year 1996 — the Calm between the Storms
When I cast my mind back, 1996 looms in my memory as a year defined around the world largely in terms that today sound quaint, distant, almost archaic. With the dissolution of the Soviet empire five years earlier and with it the Cold War’s bipolarity, and China still making little mark on global affairs, the world was briefly unipolar. The US stood astride the globe as the preeminent, singular power – in military, economic, and diplomatic terms, and with a sweeping cultural and soft power influence dominant around the world. American diplomats, development experts, and soldiers were everywhere, empowered as they had been since the end of WWII by a profound sense of mission abroad and deeply engaged presidents, Democrats and Republicans.
The year 1996 stood at the half-way point between the end of a world divided in two by Moscow and Washington, and a world transformed by the US reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Nowhere did that American response fall more heavily than on the Middle East, dealt a devastating impact by the rapidly widening impact of the US decision to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. The repercussions of that misadventure live on today in an Iraq that continues to struggle to achieve sovereignty over its affairs, sovereignty that has been compromised internally and externally by militias created by Iran and Tehran’s predatory pressures at every level of the state.
And What a Difference Three Decades Make
For the Middle East, the past three decades have witnessed a shift from largely and deceptively calm waters to the turbulence of successive wars and civil conflict – often both in a single country (Iraq, Iran). A region of autocratic regimes emerging in 1996 from a half century of pressures to align on one side or the other of the Cold War divide plunged into more than two decades of myriad wars and civil conflicts that raged across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Algeria, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya, and Egypt, and whose effects were felt in every state in the region.
Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Constant Factors of Instability
Two factors – Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – have been the consistent generators of regional conflict and terrorism across this arc of three decades. The Clinton administration had settled on a dual containment policy towards Iran and Iraq, steadily building up US forces across the Gulf to prevent either country from dominating or threatening the flow of energy to the globe. Chiefly viewing Tehran’s threats through the prism of its export of revolutionary ideology, its efforts to undermine close US partners in the Gulf, and its support for Palestinian terrorist groups and Hezballah, Washington’s approach hardened in 1996 with the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, suspected but not proven for some time to have a link to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, passed in 1996, inaugurated the new approach of widening US sanctions, including secondary sanctions for the first time, to use structured economic pressure alongside military buildup to contain Iran. The nuclear issue had not yet risen as the preeminent threat through which Washington would frame Iran’s threat to US national security. Direct military confrontation was also a still-distant feature of the relationship.
In 1996, the region saw the beginning of the turmoil that was to beset the Oslo process, a political opening that had appeared for a bitterly brief few years to augur the end of the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Rabin’s assassination in 1995 instead pointed the way to a long period of terrorism, a second Intifadah, Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon and the West Bank, the IDF’s withdrawal under pressure from Gaza, followed by the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Episodic mediation efforts by the US ended in 2014, and with them the effective unraveling of Oslo over the last 10 years. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza have left stark uncertainty over the prospects for a peace process of any kind, least of all one shouldered by Washington. The Trump administration appears ill-prepared to take such work on, with none of the follow-on work of Trump’s 20-point plan ending the Gaza war in 2025 appearing viable.
Today, these two constant factors stand as more dangerous impediments to regional stability and security than ever. And they are intertwined. Tehran’s structural weaponization of the Palestinian cause through its “Axis of Resistance” has been politically boosted by the Netanyahu government’s military operations and occupation of territory in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Israel’s attack on Hamas in Doha in 2025 and its apparent quest to accomplish de facto annexation of the West Bank, in part through the actions of violent Israeli settlers, has reinforced the conviction in the region that Israel is replacing Iran as the regional hegemon to be feared and resisted. Following the catastrophe of Gaza – and notwithstanding Iran’s own culpability for deepening regional instability and insecurity — the policies of the Netanyahu government have largely destroyed for the period ahead any prospect of wider Arab-Israeli normalization.
Non-State Actors Proliferate — and Go Global
Non-state actors – nothing new for a region wracked by terrorism in the previous decades – achieved a stunning set of capabilities over the past three decades to threaten or eclipse the state (Hezballah, Ansar Allah, Iraqi militias), and to act as seedbeds for global networks (Al Qaeda, ISIS). The advent of drone technology, AI in the hands of individuals and non-state actors around the globe, has upended the notion of the state monopolizing the means of violence.
The Eclipse of the Traditional Arab Capitals of Influence, the Rise of the Gulf
In a period that witnessed the definitive eclipse of the three traditional capitals of Arab influence—Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad—a new center of economic power and dynamism—the Gulf – began its inexorable rise and three other capitals—Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Riyadh—have claimed the mantel of regional and global powerbrokers. Still more dramatic is the shift in the fortunes of the Levant, the most unstable and conflict-ridden sub-region of the Middle East. While the trajectory is still fragile, Lebanon and Syria for the first time in more than four decades have the opportunity for a durable political transition that could have a vast and widening positive impact in the region. The Gulf states are now directly shaping the prospects for Syria’s successful transition and will continue to step in with stabilizing investments and political support where Iran’s influence and proxies are weakening (Iraq, Lebanon).
Only One Great Power Now Astride the Region
Ironically, while the world of 2026 is assuredly multipolar and the future perhaps permanently so, the US remains the singular power in the Middle East, notwithstanding Washington’s flawed record of the past three decades and its profoundly ill-considered war against Iran in 2026. While the Gulf states universally urged the US not to proceed militarily against Iran and have borne the brunt of Iranian reprisals, the six remain ever-more dependent on an external great power to assist against an ever-more aggressive Iran. Only the US has the military capability and political will to offer such support. Russia is a much-diminished power in the region, embroiled in Ukraine and with a now well-established record of failing to support its allies (Saddam, Qaddhafi, Assad, Tehran) against US military action. Beijing is nowhere to be seen in security terms and is negligibly engaged in diplomacy, even where its “strategic partners” (Riyadh and UAE, Tehran) are in direct conflict.
The question that will continue to bedevil the states of the region is whether and on what terms the Trump administration will be able to bring the war with Iran conclusively to an end. There is a dawning realization that President Trump’s erratic approach to the region—regardless of cost to long-standing, close US partners—is almost certain to continue. The onus is on the states of the Middle East, above all the Gulf, to use their combined and individual influence with Trump and key figures in his administration to obtain de minimus security arrangements in concluding the war with Iran.
A Very Mixed US Record, Retreat and Structural Weakness
The US has a very mixed policy record in the region. Two episodes of regime change (Iraq, Libya) arguably brought about disasters for those countries and poor returns for US interests. US efforts to foster Israeli-Palestinian peace stumbled after the early successes of Oslo met a sustained period of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and petered out after 2014. Likewise, the US has been unable to find a lasting solution for the violent non-relationship that characterizes the dynamic between Washington and Tehran, or a durable way of contending with Iran’s myriad threats to regional security and stability. What distinguishes the current period of US policymaking, in sharp contrast to previous administrations, is the degree to which the Trump administration has dismantled its own national security apparatus, the policy-making process, and is now relying on a small coterie of envoys and an equally small set of advisors to carry out policies driven in no small part by President Trump’s “gut instincts.”
Successes of US policymaking in the past three decades relate principally to the hard power side of the ledger – providing security assistance, defense cooperation and training, and intelligence and diplomatic support to countries across the region struggling to cope with rising tides of terrorist groups in the wake of September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. This assistance crystallized in the successful 2014-2018 US-led and -created international coalition to defeat ISIS; it destroyed ISIS’ hold over Iraqi and Syrian territory, thereby substantially weakening its global presence. The US successfully negotiated a long-term containment of Iran’s nuclear program with intrusive IAEA oversight in 2015. The first normalization agreements between Arab states and Israel in 25 years came about through US mediation in 2020. The US negotiated the first boundary (maritime) between Israel and Lebanon in 2023. The US successfully brokered the end of the Gaza war and has set the conditions for Syria’s successful transition by removing all sanctions, endorsing the post-Assad government, enjoining regional states to invest in and support Syria, and appointing a hands-on empowered envoy to coordinate efforts and provide counsel to the Syrian leadership.
Failures of US policy principally relate to the fallout in Iraq and across the region of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, a decision built on wholly false assumptions about the ease with which Iraq would transition to democratic self-governance and compounded by an operation vastly under resourced to deal with the ensuing security vacuum and civil/sectarian conflict. Likewise, the US intervened in Libya at the height of civil conflict, leading to Qaddhafi’s death, collapse of his regime, an enormous vacuum, and ensuing civil war; the country remains without a unified government 15 years on. The US failed to provide a consistent policy across administrations to counter the creeping and now accelerating de facto Israeli annexation of the West Bank. The failure to prevent – or ensure accountability for—Israel’s reckless prosecution of war in Gaza after Oct 7, 2023, will stand as both a moral failure and one with profound repercussions for finding a viable pathway for Israeli-Palestinian peace, a Palestinian state, and wider Arab-Israeli normalization. Above all, the failure to settle on a consistent course with Iran, including direct engagement, is now made incalculably worse by Trump’s decision to embark on regime change in Tehran via air power and missile strikes.
And What Could the US Do to Help Build a Better Future for the Region?
The Trump administration has profoundly hobbled its ability to pursue strategic aims across the region by the quixotic course of dismantling in less than a year the core tools of global influence used by every administration since WWII—perhaps most disastrously, eviscerating a robust national security cadre of intelligence, diplomatic, and development professionals. The Trump administration is thus left with coercive tools—military and economic (sanctions) —that are costly and blunt, but with little in the way of positive influence; it rejects out of hand multilateral diplomacy. In the case of the war against Iran, the limits of the 20th century tools of military power on the 21st century battlefield have been starkly laid bare. An economically weak, politically isolated military power of middling range has used drone technology and horizontal escalation to offset the military overmatch of the US and Israel.
The US is also saddled with a growing belief around the world that it is in full, voluntary retreat from its global roles—deterring aggression of great states against smaller ones, ensuring freedom of navigation and global maritime commerce, and building and leading ad hoc coalitions to confront regional and global threats.
The next administration(s) will above all need to reconstruct for the American public—which has twice elected by narrow margins a president overseeing this destruction and retreat—a consensus view on what the US global role properly should be. It will then follow how Washington might best define and pursue its national security interests in a region that has long both bedeviled and drawn in US presidents and policymakers.
Ambassador Barbara Leaf served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs from 2022-2025, overseeing 21 diplomatic posts, $7.5 billion in foreign assistance, and policies and programs from Morocco to Yemen. Appointed in January 2021 as senior director for the Middle East and North Africa and special assistant to President Biden, Ambassador Leaf left the Washington Institute for Near East Policy where she had directed the Arab Politics Program from 2018-2021. She served as the US ambassador to the UAE from 2014-2018. She previously served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Arabian Peninsula and as deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq. Awarded the Distinguished Honor Award by Secretary Blinken, Ambassador Leaf received numerous Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards during her career. After retiring from the Foreign Service, Ambassador Leaf joined Arnold and Porter, where she serves in the storied law firm as a senior international policy advisor. She is also a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.