With U.S. policy to the region “in tatters,” Russell Berman and Charles Hill offer ten guidelines for the Trump administration. Among them:
As a region, the broad Middle East remains vital to U.S. national interest. Because of its importance, Washington cannot disengage from it. It is not an irrelevant space that can be abandoned to our adversaries or to the chaos of state failure. . . .
Iran and Russia, powers adversarial to the U.S., perceive an interest in cooperating strategically with each other militarily, politically, and economically. China has begun to probe the region for opportunities serving its interests. The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) has de facto become an Iranian expeditionary force for invading strategic Arab spaces, countering many decades of U.S. support for Arab states. . . . Iran and Russia are pursuing strategies to diminish and eliminate U.S. influence in the Middle East. Because of vital interests in the region, U.S. strategy must be designed to roll back Iranian and Russian ambitions. This implies the imperative of opposing Iranian client ambitions in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. . . .
Iran is a de-facto caliphate without declaring itself to be such. It is both a recognized legitimate state in the established international state system and a dedicated religious-ideological enemy of the established world order; it continues to play successfully on one side or the other as best suits its interests on any given issue. The U.S. government has not appeared to be aware of this double game, or has simply accepted it. Iran is not a polity of moderates and hard-liners; it is a revolutionary theocracy which controls and makes use of governmental and diplomatic functions in order to appear to a deceived outside world as a legitimate regime. . . .
U.S. strategy should [also] limit Russian power by preventing the stabilization of the Assad regime as a Russian client state. The Syrian state should, however, be enabled to survive within its formal borders. This requires some negotiated understandings on the need for autonomous regions, so that the several distinctive communities within Syria may be able to coexist in semi-independence. It is necessary to avoid the perpetual chaos and warfare that would follow any evaporation of Syrian statehood. Ultimately, Assad will have to hand over power to a newly designed constitutional polity. Rather than stand by the side, the U.S. has to play a defining role in this process.
Read more on Defining Ideas: http://www.hoover.org/research/ten-proposals-middle-east-new-us-administration