Nation Building is Back!

Israel is breaking the Middle East, and the US is lining up to rebuild it.

When the Biden administration decided to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, many people saw a watershed moment. After two decades of war, American leaders had finally concluded that there was no hope of transforming the Greater Middle East using military force. “We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,” President Joe Biden said in a speech announcing the withdrawal. “It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

This humility proved short-lived. Over the past year, the US has found itself drawn into a nation-building fervor once more, this time of a more vicarious sort. Since Hamas killed nearly 1200 people on October 7, 2023, the US has embraced Israel’s efforts to remake its neighborhood through force. A White House that once recognized the impossibility of reshaping Afghan society now demands comprehensive regime change in Gaza. Policymakers who supported withdrawing most US troops from the Middle East now argue that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon offers a “massive opportunity” to remake the country’s political system and rebuild its military. As an anonymous US diplomat told the Economist, “it’s like 2003 all over again.”

This return to utopian thinking was in many ways to be expected. While the war on terror has faded from American TV screens, its operations have persisted in countries from Yemen to Iraq and Syria. Its legal underpinnings remain unchanged; when the Biden administration bombed Iran-aligned militias in Syria and Iraq earlier this year, US officials justified the attack using the same authorization for the use of military force that Congress passed in the days after 9/11. Hamas and Hezbollah are sanctioned under the same laws that proscribe interactions with Al Qaeda and ISIS. If so much of the 2003 policy framework remains, is it any wonder that the 2003 mindset has stuck around too?

Contributing to the regime-change revival has been the framing of October 7 as “Israel’s 9/11.” It’s a characterization that has resonated with most US policymakers, and it has led to 9/11-style rhetoric. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it back in July, the Gaza war is a conflict “between barbarism and civilization” and “a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”

Washington has embraced this zero-sum framing since the early days of the war. A week after the October 7 attacks, Joe Biden compared Hamas’s attack to the Holocaust. “The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing,” he said. “We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.” Biden also argued that “taking out” Hamas and Hezbollah would be a “necessary requirement” in the conflict to come.