For two decades, the Middle East has haunted American strategy. Every administration arrives promising focus elsewhere, then gets pulled back by the region’s gravity: war, energy chokepoints, terror threats, and the politics of allies and adversaries that never sit still.
So, when the new U.S. National Security Strategy declared that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over,” it landed like a headline trying to be a turning point.
The real question is whether it is one.
We spoke with Colonel (ret.) Frank Sobchak, an associate professor at the US Navan War College, regarding the implications of Washington’s new posture. Sobchak joined us in a personal capacity. The views he shares in this interview are his own and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the U.S. Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any entity of the U.S. government.
He made a point that’s easy to miss in the daily churn of talking points and cable news instincts. If you want to understand where U.S. foreign policy is going, look first at the executive branch’s strategy, not the 3,000-page legislative artifact everyone fights over.
“In the creation of U.S. foreign policy,” he told us, “the executive branch is really the driving force.” Congress matters, he added, but primarily through “oversight,” “funding,” and the ability to “ban or… require the government to do certain things.” Strategy, in other words, is written in the White House’s language. Congress either funds, restricts, or impedes it.
He then examined the document’s structure. In the National Security Strategy, the Middle East appears fourth, behind the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Europe. “I think there is value in recognizing that the Middle East is fourth in that list,” Sobchak said. The ranking may not be explicitly numerical, but the ordering communicates a reality: Washington wants the Middle East to cease to be the organizing center of American foreign policy.
That doesn’t mean disengagement. It means demotion.
The demotion is not merely bureaucratic. It is ideological.
In the interview, Sobchak read passages from the National Security Strategy “NSS” that mark a departure from the moralizing posture that defined the post-9/11 era, especially during the Bush years.
One sentence is a signal flare: “The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they all are while working together on areas of common interest.”
That is not the language of conversion. It’s the language of management.
Sobchak argued that a more realist approach shapes the strategy. “I think realism is a very dominant ideological component of the national security strategy in this case,” he said. Translation: Washington is trying to deal with the Middle East as it is, not as American policymakers wish it would become.
Then he read the line that practically buries the Bush-era posture in a single paragraph.
“Doing so will require dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations, especially the Gulf monarchies, into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government,” the NSS states. It adds: “We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically without trying to impose it from without.”
If you’re listening closely, the strategy is not simply reprioritizing. It’s admitting something Washington rarely admits on paper: that the lecture circuit didn’t work, and in some cases, it made U.S. interests harder to secure.
That shift is significant for the region because it alters the power dynamics. It signals that Washington seeks partnerships without continually picking fights over identity, governance, and political culture. For Arab capitals that spent years navigating American pressure campaigns wrapped in democracy language, this is not a small change. It is an acknowledgment that sovereignty and “traditions and historic forms of government” are not bugs in the system. They are the system.
However, respect in strategy is rarely pure. It is usually instrumental.
Sobchak was clear that the Middle East remains significant inside the NSS, just not as a totalizing obsession. He outlined what he considers the three principal areas in which the region remains substantial.
Freedom of navigation
The NSS explicitly links U.S. interests to maintaining the Strait of Hormuz’s openness and the Red Sea’s navigability. These are not symbolic. They are economic arteries. “It’s tied in with the economic strength of the United States,” Sobchak said, and with the logic that these are “vital, global, economic sea lanes of communication.”
Blocking terror threats to the homeland
Not in the abstract, not as a forever-war excuse, but as a direct homeland security frame. The priority is preventing terrorist groups from presenting a threat “to U.S. interests and to the homeland,” as he paraphrased it.
Israel’s security
Sobchak described Israel as the third explicit pillar of the NSS’s framing of U.S. interests in the region.
This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, because it exposes the asymmetry that many Arab observers already believe exists. When we asked about the National Defense Authorization Act’s extraordinary support for Israel’s missile defense, including language intended to close gaps created by foreign arms embargoes, Sobchak pointed to the homeland-first logic running through the administration’s strategy.
The U.S. wants missile defense cooperation with Israel, he argued, partly because Israel’s layered systems are relevant to Washington’s own ambitions. “The U.S. goal is to establish a Golden Dome system of missile defense for the homeland,” he said. If protecting the homeland is “central,” then collaborating with Israel on missile defense is not just alliance maintenance. It is capability building. So, the Middle East may no longer be central, but the U.S. will still employ multiple instruments of power. “All elements of U.S. national power are involved,” he said, not just military force, but “diplomatic, economic, informational.”
That is the doctrine in plain terms: Washington seeks to avoid being trapped by the Middle East, without pretending it can ignore it.
For Arab capitals, the question now is whether this new language of respect becomes a real practice, or just a cleaner script for the same old leverage.
Joe Kawly
Joe Kawly is a veteran global affairs journalist with over two decades of frontline reporting across Washington, D.C. and the Middle East. A CNN Journalism Fellow and Georgetown University graduate, his work focuses on U.S. foreign policy, Arab world politics, and diplomacy. With deep regional insight and narrative clarity, Joe focuses on making complex global dynamics clear, human, and relevant.
