The Ever-Widening War

Why the U.S. Can Never Seem to Leave the Middle East

Wars rarely remain where they begin.

A missile crosses a border. A ship is attacked in a distant sea. A government retaliates. An ally provides weapons. Another ally provides intelligence. A third country decides that it can no longer afford to remain neutral.

And somewhere along the way, almost imperceptibly, a war that once had boundaries no longer does.

That is the danger Dr. Gary Kellner sees in the Middle East today.

The conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran is no longer simply about Iran.

The Houthis in Yemen have threatened shipping through the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia, which tried to keep its distance from the fighting, is being pulled toward it. Pakistan and Turkey have become increasingly important pieces of the regional security equation. Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states are watching events that can reach their borders, economies and populations almost overnight.

Russia is involved. China is involved. Ukraine has an interest in what happens. Europe certainly does.

And suddenly a war centered on Iran begins to look less like an isolated conflict than a collection of overlapping conflicts.

History has a word of warning for moments like this.

Be careful.

Because countries do not always decide to fight enormous wars.

Sometimes enormous wars are assembled one decision at a time.

The Middle East Has a Way of Keeping You

Americans have spent much of the last quarter century learning a brutal lesson about the Middle East:

It is considerably easier to enter than to leave.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan. Two years later, American forces invaded Iraq.

The original military victories were astonishingly fast.

The wars were not.

George W. Bush left office with American forces still fighting in both countries.

Barack Obama had campaigned as an opponent of the Iraq War. Yet the Obama administration found that withdrawing American forces was considerably more complicated than campaigning against their presence. Donald Trump promised to end America’s “endless wars.” Joe Biden finally completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

And then the world watched Kabul.

Afghans crowded the airport as the Taliban took the capital. Desperate people ran beside departing aircraft. Families who had worked with Americans feared being abandoned. An Islamic State suicide bombing at Abbey Gate killed 13 American service members and scores of Afghans.

Whatever one’s politics, the images were terrible.

For Americans of a certain generation, they summoned another departure.

Saigon. April 1975. Helicopters. A rooftop.

People desperate to get out before a country collapsed around them.

The circumstances of Vietnam and Afghanistan were profoundly different. History does not repeat itself that neatly. But national memory does not work through footnotes. It works through pictures.

And America had now seen two sets of them.

That is why today’s expanding Middle Eastern conflict deserves attention beyond the question of whether any particular strike succeeds.

The larger question is more dangerous:

What happens next?

George H.W. Bush Knew the Difference Between Winning a Battle and Building a Coalition

There is an instructive comparison sitting only 36 years in the past.

On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait.

President George H.W. Bush faced an obvious military question: Could the United States drive Saddam’s forces out?

Almost certainly.

But Bush understood that military capability was not the only question. Could he persuade the world that it should?

That took considerably longer.

Bush and Secretary of State James Baker began constructing one of the most remarkable diplomatic coalitions of the postwar era.

They worked the telephones. They traveled. They negotiated. They persuaded governments that did not particularly trust one another to support the same objective.

The Soviet Union, then in its final years, cooperated diplomatically with the United States. Arab governments joined a military coalition led by Washington. Saudi Arabia allowed hundreds of thousands of foreign troops onto Saudi soil. Egypt and Syria contributed forces.

The United Nations Security Council passed a series of resolutions condemning Iraq’s invasion and ultimately authorizing force if Saddam refused to withdraw.

None of this was easy.

Diplomacy seldom is.

As Kellner puts it, members of Bush’s diplomatic team probably wanted to bang their heads against a wall so that it would hurt less.

But Bush persisted. And there was something else about him that matters today.

George H.W. Bush distrusted rhetorical excess.

He had been a congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, director of the CIA and vice president before becoming president. He knew that words spoken by presidents can become commitments. So he usually left himself room to maneuver.

By January 1991, when Operation Desert Storm began, the United States was not simply attacking Iraq. It was leading a coalition of more than 30 countries.

The ground campaign lasted roughly 100 hours. Kuwait was liberated.

And then Bush did something presidents are often criticized for doing:

He stopped.

American forces did not march to Baghdad. Saddam Hussein remained in power. At the time, some considered that a failure of nerve.

Twelve years later, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam, occupied the country and discovered exactly what George H.W. Bush had feared.

Destroying a government is easier than determining what replaces it.

The elder Bush understood something his son would learn painfully:

The end of the battle is not necessarily the end of the war.

Russia Has Been Here Before

There is another player in today’s crisis whose presence should surprise absolutely no student of history.

Russia.

Russian involvement in the Middle East did not begin with Vladimir Putin. It did not begin with the Soviet Union. It did not even begin in the twentieth century.

For centuries, Russian rulers looked south toward the Ottoman Empire, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the holy places of Christianity.

And one of the strangest examples began in Jerusalem.

A Fight Over a Church Helped Start the Crimean War

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands in Jerusalem’s Old City on the site traditionally associated with the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

For centuries, control of Christianity’s holy places generated disputes among Christian communities themselves. Greek Orthodox. Roman Catholic. Armenian Apostolic. Coptic. Syriac. Ethiopian.

The Ottoman authorities developed elaborate arrangements governing who could control which portions of sacred sites and when. The arrangements were imperfect. But they kept people from killing one another.

Usually.

By the early 1850s, a dispute over Christian privileges in the Holy Land became entangled with something much larger.

France, under Napoleon III, claimed a special role protecting Catholic interests. Russia, under Tsar Nicholas I, claimed a similar role toward Orthodox Christians. The argument over holy places became a proxy for a geopolitical struggle over the declining Ottoman Empire. Russia wanted influence. France wanted influence. Britain feared Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean.

The Ottomans were trying to survive.

In 1853, Russian forces occupied the Ottoman-controlled Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

War followed.

Britain and France eventually entered on the Ottoman side.

Much of the fighting took place hundreds of miles from Jerusalem, on the Crimean Peninsula. The Crimean War killed hundreds of thousands through combat and, even more brutally, disease. It also became one of the first wars experienced by the public through modern journalism, telegraph dispatches and photography.

Florence Nightingale became famous because of it.

The Charge of the Light Brigade entered British legend because of it.

And beneath it was an enduring pattern: A local dispute became attached to great-power rivalry. Then the great-power rivalry overwhelmed the original dispute.

That pattern is worth remembering.

Because the most dangerous question in an expanding conflict is not simply who is fighting. It is who has decided that somebody else’s war now affects their interests.

Then Came the Balkans

Half a century later, Europe was playing with the same matches.

The Ottoman Empire had been retreating from southeastern Europe throughout the nineteenth century. In the territory it left behind were Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, Albanians, Bosnians and others with competing national ambitions.

Austria-Hungary wanted stability. Russia wanted influence among the Slavic and Orthodox populations of the Balkans. Serbia wanted expansion. The Ottoman Empire wanted to hold what remained.

The result was combustible.

In October 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro attacked the Ottoman Empire in what became the First Balkan War.

The Ottomans lost most of their remaining European territory.

Then the victors fought among themselves.

In June 1913, Bulgaria attacked Serbia and Greece. Romania joined against Bulgaria. So did the Ottoman Empire.

That became the Second Balkan War.

By the summer of 1913, the borders had changed.

The resentments had not.

Russia supported Serbia. Austria-Hungary increasingly viewed Serbia as an existential threat. Germany stood behind Austria-Hungary. France was allied with Russia. Britain was moving closer to France and Russia. The lines were being drawn.

Nobody had yet called it a world war.

Then came June 28, 1914.

Sarajevo

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, arrived in Sarajevo with his wife, Sophie. A group of young Bosnian Serb nationalists intended to kill him.

One assassin threw a bomb. It missed.

Franz Ferdinand continued with his visit.

Later that day, through an almost absurd sequence of circumstances, his driver took a wrong turn. The car slowed. And standing nearby was 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of the conspirators.

Princip fired two shots. Franz Ferdinand was hit. Sophie was hit. Both died.

Two people. Two bullets.

Then Europe began moving.

Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia. Germany promised Austria-Hungary support. Russia mobilized in defense of Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Germany declared war on France. German troops entered neutral Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany.

Within weeks, a murder in Sarajevo had become a European war.

Eventually soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Japan and the United States would be drawn into the conflict.

The historian Christopher Clark later gave his celebrated account of the crisis a haunting title:

The Sleepwalkers.

It captures something important.

Europe’s leaders were not gathered around a table in 1914 saying, “Let us create a catastrophe that will kill millions of people and destroy several empires.”

They made decisions. One after another. Each decision seemed connected to the previous one. Mobilize. Issue an ultimatum. Support the ally. Protect credibility. Respond to mobilization. Honor the treaty. Defend the border.  And eventually the machinery developed a momentum of its own.

That is what makes 1914 frightening.

Not that everyone wanted war.

They got one anyway.

The Drone Changes the Battlefield

There is one enormous difference between 1914 and today.

Technology moves faster.

Ukraine has demonstrated that with extraordinary clarity since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Relatively inexpensive drones can destroy equipment costing millions of dollars. They can conduct reconnaissance. They can attack logistics. They can strike deep behind front lines. They can hunt ships. They can force armies to disperse. They can transform the battlefield faster than military doctrine can adjust.

Ukraine did not invent drone warfare. But necessity has made Ukrainians extraordinary innovators in it.

And the lessons are spreading.

Every military in the world is watching. So are militias. So are insurgent organizations. So are governments without the money to build an American-style air force.

This matters enormously in the Middle East.

For decades, American military superiority depended in significant measure upon enormously expensive systems: aircraft carriers, advanced fighters, precision-guided weapons, satellites, integrated air defenses.

But the economics of warfare are changing. A cheap weapon does not have to be more sophisticated than an expensive defensive system. It merely has to force the expensive system to respond.

Send enough drones. Send enough missiles. Make the defender spend. Make the insurer nervous. Make the shipping company change course. Make the oil market react.

Sometimes disruption itself is the weapon.

Which brings us to a strip of water that has shaped world politics for more than a century and a half.

The Suez Canal

The Suez Canal opened in 1869.

It changed the geography of empire.

Ships traveling between Europe and Asia no longer needed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa. The Mediterranean was connected directly to the Red Sea. Britain understood immediately what that meant for India. So did France. So eventually did everyone else.

Today, Suez remains one of the great arteries of global commerce.

And arteries do not have to be destroyed to cause a crisis. They merely have to become unreliable. We learned that accidentally in March 2021 when the enormous container ship Ever Given became lodged sideways in the canal. For six days, one ship disrupted global commerce.

That was an accident.

Imagine deliberate disruption.

Then look south.

Ships leaving Suez travel down the Red Sea toward the Bab el-Mandeb—the narrow passage between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

That name translates roughly as

Gate of Tears.

It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate name at the moment.

The Houthis demonstrated after the Gaza war began in 2023 how vulnerable commercial shipping could become to missiles and drones launched from Yemen. Shipping companies rerouted vessels around Africa. Insurance costs increased. Travel times increased. Costs increased.

The effects traveled far beyond the Middle East.

That is the thing about chokepoints. Their geography is local.

Their consequences are global.

Saudi Arabia Cannot Simply Look Away

Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to escape precisely this kind of regional trap.

The Saudis fought a costly war against the Houthis in Yemen beginning in 2015. It did not produce the decisive victory Riyadh hoped for. Saudi leaders subsequently pursued de-escalation. They restored diplomatic relations with Iran in a 2023 agreement brokered by China.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had larger ambitions.

He wanted investment. Tourism. Technology. Development.

Vision 2030.

He wanted the world talking about futuristic cities, sports, entertainment and Saudi economic transformation—not another generation of Middle Eastern warfare.

But geography has a vote. Saudi Arabia sits beside the Red Sea. It borders Yemen.

Its oil infrastructure has already been attacked. Its economy depends upon stable trade routes. Its security cannot be separated from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states or the waterways surrounding them.

A country can choose neutrality. It cannot choose a different map.

That may be the central Saudi dilemma today.

And it is one reason the emerging Saudi relationships with Pakistan, Turkey and other Muslim-majority states deserve such close attention.

Riyadh is increasingly asking a question that would once have been answered automatically in Washington:

What can we do for ourselves?

That question could reshape the region long after the present war ends.

And Then There Is China

China’s interests are different.

Beijing does not need the Middle East to resemble China. It needs the Middle East to function.

China buys enormous quantities of energy from the region. Its trade moves through the waterways connecting Asia, the Red Sea, Suez and Europe.

Instability threatens those interests. But instability can also create opportunities.

For decades, the United States was the indispensable external power in the Middle East. It protected shipping lanes. Armed allies. Brokered negotiations. Maintained bases. Deterred enemies. And paid enormous financial and political costs for doing so.

China has been attempting something subtler.

Economic influence without assuming the entire American security burden. Diplomacy without occupation. Trade without becoming the region’s policeman.

The 2023 Saudi-Iran diplomatic agreement was therefore more than a diplomatic curiosity.

China had helped broker an agreement between two of the Middle East’s most important rivals. That would once have been Washington’s stage.

Now the stage is crowded.

The Alliances Begin to Overlap

This is where the situation becomes dangerous.

Russia needs Iran. Iran needs Russia. China has interests in Iran and throughout the Gulf. Ukraine wants to weaken Russia wherever Russian power operates. Turkey is a NATO member but pursues its own regional ambitions. Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia has money, strategic geography and enormous influence in the Muslim world. Israel views Iranian power as an existential security problem.

The United States remains committed to Israel while simultaneously trying to prevent a regional conflagration.

Europe fears Russian expansion and another wave of instability from the Middle East. Egypt cannot ignore Suez. Jordan cannot ignore what happens around it.

And every government is making decisions based not simply upon today’s war, but upon what it believes tomorrow’s alignment will look like.

This is how conflicts widen. Not necessarily because somebody has a master plan.

Because everybody has a contingency plan.

And the contingency plans begin colliding.

The Most Dangerous Sentence in Foreign Policy

There is a sentence governments tell themselves before wars expand:

We can control this.

We will strike only this target. We will respond proportionally. We will send weapons but not troops. We will defend our ally but avoid direct confrontation. We will escalate in order to de-escalate. We will demonstrate resolve. We will restore deterrence.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works right up until it doesn’t.

The leaders of Europe in 1914 were not idiots. They had diplomats. They had intelligence services. They had military staffs. They had telegraphs. They had ambassadors talking to one another constantly. And they still lost control.

That does not mean the Middle East today is destined to become 1914.

Historical analogy becomes dangerous when it turns into prophecy.

Sometimes the warning is simply structural:

The more countries involved in a conflict, the more opportunities there are for somebody to make a mistake.

Thinking Is Not Weakness

George H.W. Bush understood that assembling a coalition before fighting Saddam Hussein was not weakness. It was part of the war plan. He understood that diplomacy was not what happened instead of power. Diplomacy multiplied power.

And he understood something else.

Knowing when to stop is part of knowing how to win.

There will be American elections. There will be arguments over who is strong and who is weak. There will be campaign commercials. There will be accusations of appeasement.

That is democracy.

But there is something voters should demand from anyone asking to exercise American power:

Thought.

Not isolation. Not pacifism.

Thought.

George H.W. Bush understood that assembling a coalition before fighting Saddam Hussein was not weakness. It was part of the war plan.  He understood that diplomacy was not what happened instead of power.

And he understood something else

Knowing When to Stop

George H.W. Bush understood knowing when to stop is part of knowing how to win.

After Iraqi forces were driven from Kuwait in 1991, Bush had an opportunity to send American troops toward Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

He did not.

Years later, he explained the logic. Occupying Iraq would have transformed a limited mission—liberating Kuwait—into something vastly larger. The United States would have become responsible for Iraq itself: its government, its rival ethnic and religious communities, its borders, its security and whatever came after Saddam.

In 2003, his son made the other choice. Saddam fell within weeks.

The consequences lasted for years.

There is a peculiar temptation that accompanies overwhelming military power. Once a nation discovers that it can do something, the argument subtly shifts from whether it should do it to why it shouldn’t.

Bombing can destroy a facility. It cannot guarantee what the enemy does tomorrow. Killing a leader can remove a threat. It can also create a martyr, a successor or a power vacuum. Destroying a government can end a regime. It cannot manufacture the government that follows.

And winning today’s battle cannot tell you where tomorrow’s war will be fought.

That is the question hanging over the Middle East now.

Not simply:

Can the United States and Israel hit Iran?

Of course they can.

The more important question is:

Then what?

The Three Words That Start Long Wars

There are two words that have appeared at the beginning of an astonishing number of military disasters:

It’ll be quick.

Europe believed something like that in 1914. Soldiers went to war expecting to be home within months. Instead they dug trenches. Those trenches eventually stretched hundreds of miles from the North Sea to Switzerland. Young men who had marched through European capitals to cheering crowds found themselves living underground in mud, rats, lice and artillery fire.

At Verdun in 1916, France and Germany fought for most of a year. At the Somme, the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties on the first day. Poison gas drifted across battlefields. Machine guns cut down infantry formations built for another century. Artillery erased villages.

By the time the fighting stopped on November 11, 1918, four empires had collapsed: German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman.

The political map of Europe and the Middle East had been torn apart. And the peace that followed helped plant the seeds of another world war.

Nobody standing in Sarajevo on the morning of June 28, 1914, could have imagined all of that.

That is precisely the point.

Wars Create Their Own Logic

Once wars grow large enough, they begin creating reasons for their own continuation.

A country suffers casualties and decides those lives cannot have been lost for nothing. An ally is attacked and another country must demonstrate credibility. A government fears that failing to retaliate will invite another attack. An enemy interprets restraint as weakness. A weapons shipment requires protection. Protection requires personnel. Personnel require bases. Bases require air defenses. Air defenses become targets. Targets require retaliation.

And somewhere in that progression, the original reason for entering the conflict becomes almost secondary. The war has acquired its own logic.

That is what Americans should remember from Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq.

And it is what Europe should remember from 1914.

This does not mean military force is never necessary.

There are aggressors who cannot be negotiated out of aggression. There are attacks that must be answered. There are allies whose survival genuinely matters to American interests. There are moments when refusing to act carries consequences every bit as terrible as acting.

But precisely because war can sometimes be necessary, the decision to widen one should be made with extraordinary care.

War is not a television program.

The people making the first decision do not get to write the final episode.

The Gate of Tears

There is something almost unbearably appropriate about that narrow passage at the southern end of the Red Sea. Bab el-Mandeb. The Gate of Tears.

For centuries, ships have passed through it carrying spices, textiles, oil, soldiers, pilgrims, slaves, weapons and dreams of empire. Today container ships and tankers pass through the same waters.

North of them lies the Red Sea. Beyond it, Suez. Beyond Suez, the Mediterranean and Europe. To the east lies Yemen. Across the water, Africa.

And surrounding all of it are countries whose histories have collided for thousands of years.

You could hardly design a more vivid illustration of how interconnected the modern world has become.

A drone launched from Yemen can alter the route of a ship carrying goods from Asia to Europe. An Iranian decision can affect gasoline prices in America. A Russian weapons shipment can affect calculations in Israel. A Ukrainian innovation can appear on another battlefield thousands of miles away. A Saudi decision can affect Pakistan. A Pakistani decision matters because Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons. A Turkish decision matters because Turkey belongs to NATO. An Egyptian decision matters because Egypt controls Suez.

And an American decision matters almost everywhere.

That is power.

It is also burden.

Nobody Knows Where This Ends

There is a natural desire, particularly in frightening moments, for somebody to tell us what happens next.

History cannot.

History is very good at explaining the catastrophe after it happens.

It is less obliging beforehand.

The people living through July 1914 did not have arrows. They had headlines. Rumors. Diplomatic cables. Military assessments. Political pressure. Fear. Pride.

And incomplete information.

So do we.

That should produce something rarely rewarded in modern politics:

Humility.

Nobody knows exactly how far the present conflict will spread. Nobody knows whether today’s alliances will hold. Nobody knows whether an attack that appears successful this morning will produce retaliation next week. Nobody knows whether Russia will deepen its involvement, whether China will decide its interests require greater intervention, whether Saudi Arabia will be able to maintain the balance it has been trying to construct, or whether another actor not yet at the center of the story will suddenly enter it.

And nobody knows which incident—perhaps one that initially seems small—could change everything.

Uncertainty is not an argument for paralysis.

It is an argument for care.

Send Thinkers to Washington

Americans will vote in the midterm elections.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives will be contested, along with roughly one-third of the Senate.

There will be plenty to argue about.

Republicans and Democrats will disagree over the president. They will disagree over most everything. That is what elections are for. But perhaps there is one qualification we ought to demand regardless of party.

Send people to Washington who think.

People who understand that conversation is not capitulation. People who know that diplomacy can be maddening, repetitive, frustrating, and painfully slow—and still be infinitely cheaper than discovering afterward that a war could have been prevented. Send people who understand history not as a collection of quotations to deploy against their opponents, but as evidence of how human beings behave when frightened, angry, ambitious, and armed.

Send people who know that America’s military power is extraordinary precisely because it should not be used casually.

And send people capable of saying three of the most difficult words in politics:

I don’t know.

Because nobody does.

Not completely.

The Ever-Widening War

Perhaps this conflict will narrow.

Perhaps negotiations will succeed where military pressure has not.

Perhaps Saudi Arabia and the emerging regional relationships around it will become stabilizing forces rather than additional lines of confrontation. Perhaps Russia and China will decide that escalation threatens more than it offers. Perhaps the governments involved will discover an exit.

History contains those stories too.

The Cuban Missile Crisis did not end in nuclear war. Egypt and Israel went from repeated wars to a peace treaty.

Enemies negotiate. Wars end. Human beings occasionally surprise history.

But, as Dr. Kellner reminds us, they usually do so because somebody, somewhere, decides that avoiding catastrophe matters more than winning the next argument.

The danger is believing there will always be time for that decision later.

An assassination. An ultimatum. A mobilization. An alliance. A declaration. Another declaration. Another country. Another army.

Another grave.

That is how an ever-widening war grows.

So, watch the Red Sea. Watch Suez. Watch Saudi Arabia. Watch Pakistan and Turkey. Watch Russia. Watch China. Watch Ukraine. Watch Iran. Watch Israel.

And above all, watch Washington.

Because history’s most frightening wars do not always begin when somebody decides to start one.

Sometimes they begin when too many people become convinced that they can safely take

one more step.