USS Porter launches Tomahawk cruise missiles at Shayrat airbase in the Mediterranean Sea. Picture by MCS 3rd Class Ford Williams/Zuma Press/PA Images. All rights reserved. This article explores why realist views alone cannot explain the complexity of insecurity in the Middle East and why internal and regional conflicts in the Middle East, since 2003, look endless. What are the alternatives to advocating a single international relations theory to explain different regions with different socio-cultural, political, historical, economic, and security specificities? The Middle East’s particularities can prove the United States wrong in addressing the region’s problems by adopting hard-power policies, at least so far, as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
The end of the Cold War coincided with the shift from inter-state conflict to intra-state conflicts. Since then the world has witnessed more conflicts within states than between states. Realists who hold a power-centric or state-centric understanding of world affairs fail to predict and explain intra-state issues. Washington continues to deal with the complex regional insecurity in the Middle East from a narrowly defined, realist/military-centric, security approach. And yet again, it is failing to give the right messages, rather, it keeps sending ‘strong messages’. The question remains to be answered whether a multi-layered ongoing security issue in the Middle East can be fixed by such realist/militaristic approach.
There are at least six interlinked divisive reasons why the United States cannot win its wars in the Middle East and why its resort to bombing is not going to resolve the problem. These are: social issues, societal issues, national issues, political issues, regional issues, and international issues. The interplay between such divisions creates extremely complex and unpredictable security problems, which requires a comprehensive and collective approach. While these might not be specific to the Middle East, the existence of all of them in one place is. let us briefly delve into these divisions one by one.
