No. of Recommendations: 11
Luckily, many in the world - and especially the younger generation in America are starting to disagree.
Why would that be lucky? Regardless of whether they agree or disagree, geopolitical realities remain real.
The U.S. is affected by the larger world, and we care about what happens in it. To use a trivial example, we (ostensibly) don't want China to "take over the world" - basically seizing unipolar hegemony over the global economy. If we don't want that to happen, then we (and others) need to take actions to check Chinese efforts to expand their sphere of influence, both economic and military, to our exclusion. If you want to win the race, or even just do well, you need to compete.
We have real interests in the Middle East. How we prioritize those interests compared to competing goals is the subject of a lot of fierce debate and discussion. But the fact that what happens in the Middle East affects a lot of things in the world is not.
One of our only allies in the region: I wonder why that is.
Do you really not know? It's not hard to understand why, if you know a little history.
It's not entirely wrong to trace it back to WWI, the French and British, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the fustercluck that followed. The whole area was run by the Ottoman Empire at the time, Britain and France were fighting the Central Powers that the Ottomans belonged to. The Brits and French secretly agreed how they were going to carve up the Ottoman territories if they won. But in order to win they needed a lot of help from the people who actually lived in the Middle East (modern-day Syrians and Jordanians and Saudis and the Jewish population in the region and in other countries) to rebel against the Ottomans. So they ended up making a whole host of contradictory promises to everyone and everybody. So when the secret deal got revealed and all the contradictory promises went unfulfilled, and basically everybody in the region ended up hating Britain and France.
So when the Cold War started after WWII, nearly all the countries in the region ended up gravitating to the Soviet bloc, in opposition to the NATO/Western alliance. That was due in part to the historical distrust of the Entente powers from the fiasco of WWI and the League of Nations era, in part to Soviet positioning itself as an anti-colonial/anti-western power, in part due to Western support for the partition of the Mandate into Israel and an Arab state, and especially in part due to the Soviets very actively supplying the region with military arms. The U.S., France, and Britain had all agreed not to sell many weapons to any of the warring factions in the area to keep the Arab-Israeli conflict tamped down - but then the Soviets swooped in in 1955 and sold Egypt a literal sh!t-ton of weapons. Egypt (under Nasser) vaulted to primacy in the region, closely aligned with the Soviets - and his prominence as the leader of the pan-Arab movement and general inclinations towards the Soviet side of the global conflict broad the rest of the powers with them. They consolidated around opposition to the West and Israel, and allied with the Soviet Bloc.
And that's why we encountered a region with almost no allies in the Cold War era. We eventually walked away from the Tripartite Declaration and became a major source of military support for Israel (along with France), the Soviets started to shift their focus in the region after all the Arab nations lost the 1967 war so badly, over the ensuing decades Egypt and Saudi drifted a little more towards the west in response (but never enough to become firm allies of the U.S.), etc. But it mostly traces back to that.
