In a wide-ranging interview by Alan Johnson, Michael Doran criticizes the failures of U.S. grand strategy since the end of the cold war, expounds upon his essay from the beginning of this year on the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, and discusses Washington’s complex relations with Turkey and the Syrian Kurds. Doran also addresses the situation of Israel in historical perspective, comparing two competing American approaches to peacemaking that date back at least to the Eisenhower administration:

The U.S. understood Israel’s defeat of Egypt in 1967 as a victory for the West against the Soviet Union. A different understanding [of the Israeli-Arab conflict] developed under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, part of a more realistic understanding of Israeli power as an asset to the U.S., able to put pressure on Soviet proxies such as Egypt. The U.S. then made clear that while it could act as a mediator between Egypt and Israel, the price of American mediation was for Egypt to disengage itself from the Soviet sphere of influence. The Sinai disengagement agreements of 1973 and 1974 are the first successes you can attribute to that strategy.

Using Israeli power as an adjunct of U.S. power was Henry Kissinger’s strategy and it was successful. But here is the thing—it was the Carter administration that then reaped the biggest benefit of Kissinger’s strategy in the form of the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace agreement: the greatest U.S. diplomatic achievement in the Middle East. . . . The Carter administration, not understanding the basis of its own achievement, returned to the older notion that Israel was a liability not an asset to U.S. interests.

Although the Carter conception of [peacemaking] was pie in the sky, devoid of an understanding of how the world works, it returned in a big way in the 1990s. We once again came to believe that if only the U.S. would pressure Israel enough, the region’s bad guys would melt away.

Arguing that Washington should seek to repair its relations with Turkey’s anti-Semitic and Hamas-supporting president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Doran acknowledges Jerusalem’s concerns about such a policy while seeking to put them in perspective:

[A]ny threat to Israel from Erdogan pales in comparison to the threat posed by Iran, which has spread militias with precision-strike capabilities around the region; that is a strategic threat. Erdogan is a threat, sure, but he is separated from Israel by Syria, and his primary concern is the Kurdish question, not aiming rockets and missiles at the Jewish state. I think that the true level of threat posed by Erdogan is minuscule in comparison to the threat posed by Iran. . . . It is similar to the kind of threat that Israel faced historically, in, say, the 1980s and 1990s from Saudi Arabia. It was a problem for Israel, but a manageable problem.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”