Middle East Strategy? What Middle East Strategy?

In his new essay in Mosaic, Michael Doran, whose writings about the Middle East are invaluable, has tried to explain . . . everything. That is: to document the damage done by President Barack Obama in destroying traditional U.S. alliances in the Middle East; to demonstrate why cozying up to enemies and treating allies with contempt is dangerous; to alert us that the Obama “echo chamber” is still hard at work advancing the former president’s agenda; to analyze how a rupture in relations with the Saudis would be a foolish move; and to register the peril contained in the moral preenings of too many American journalists and politicians.

And then Doran sets himself the really difficult task: to make sense of, and to defend, the policies in the region now being implemented by the Trump administration.

I know how hard this is to do because I’ve tried it myself. Last November, I wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the president “has reasserted that the U.S. knows who its friends are and who they are not, a simple, old-fashioned, yet absolutely indispensable stance for a world power.” In his recounting of the many ways in which President Obama’s deviations from that stance harmed our national-security interests, Doran shows in detail exactly why the distinction between friends and adversaries is so critical for us and our allies.