As someone who frequently writes and speaks about the Middle East, I wasn’t expecting to get a flurry of questions about Ukraine in recent weeks. But I did.
Friends and colleagues from various Middle Eastern allies are all mystified, even alarmed, by the clamor to end U.S. aid to Ukraine. Because their concerns speak to larger potential costs for the U.S., and given our bad history of making far-reaching decisions for narrow reasons without recognizing long-term costs, they are important to recognize as further liabilities linked to reversing course on Ukraine.
While they often resent it, Middle Easterners fully understand that Europe is America’s most important relationship. Diplomatically, economically and militarily, the transatlantic partnership is the foundation of America’s felicitous post-World War II history. NATO is the central pillar of that structure, and America is supporting Ukraine, in part, as a forward defense of NATO. From Israel to the Emirates, from Cairo to Kuwait, they understand that.
They also understand that American support for Ukraine not only defends Europe against Russian neo-imperialism, but is also a manifestation of the civilizational ties between the U.S. and Europe — particularly in its defense of human rights and self-determination. These are pieces that the Arab states know are missing from their own relationship with the U.S., and that the Israelis have and cherish.
What’s more, the most sophisticated Middle Eastern leaders and observers recognize that American support for Ukraine is extremely cost-effective in promoting U.S. interests. They can see how much damage the Russian military is suffering without a single American soldier even being bruised.
Moreover, because many of them are the beneficiaries of the same practices, they all know that most American aid to Ukraine really benefits the U.S. economy and the U.S. defense-industrial base.
In short, most of the money committed to Ukraine is being spent here to buy weapons from American industry, either to send to Kyiv or to replace older hand-me-down weapons we send to Kyiv with better, more modern versions. It’s a system we have been using for our Middle Eastern allies for decades. This is how they have used their own petrodollars to support our economy as a thank-you for our security umbrella.
Finally, they understand that tying down Russia in Ukraine makes it harder for Russia to make trouble for the U.S. elsewhere, including in the Middle East. The repeated humiliation of Russian armies — perhaps the last real tool of diplomacy Moscow had left after the fall of the Soviet Union — is beneficial to all.
Many Middle Eastern states that had been flirting with the idea of buying Russian weapons or even developing a more strategic relationship with Moscow, either as an alternative to Washington or merely to pressure us, have since changed their minds after Russia’s failures in Ukraine. Although some have started to sniff around Beijing instead, others have decided to reinvigorate their relations with Washington.
America’s support for Ukraine has reminded our Middle Eastern allies just how valuable their ties to the U.S. are. That, in turn, has been a contributing element to a spate of positive recent developments in the Middle East like the new U.S.-Bahrain security agreement and the moves toward Saudi-Israeli normalization.
Consequently, given all of these benefits, what they find perplexing and frightening is the idea that the U.S. would just walk away from Ukraine.
For our Middle Eastern allies, it would doubtless be seen as another sign of America’s disengagement from the world — something they have experienced most acutely since 2009, and which terrifies them and threatens to upend the geostrategic balance of the region. In their view it makes no sense strategically (or economically) for the U.S. to abandon Ukraine. On that basis, they would undoubtedly conclude that such a U.S. decision is more evidence that Americans are determined to pretend the outside world does not exist, and that no rational argument will sway us to continue helping them.
It would doubtless push them to find new great-power protectors, with China as the obvious candidate. It would make them less interested in American considerations and therefore make it even harder for the U.S. to secure its interests in the region. And it would enable and embolden America’s regional adversaries, especially Iran, to forge ahead in the belief that a U.S. unwilling to stop Russia in Ukraine is unlikely to stop them in the Middle East.
Many who oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine probably oppose the American role in the Middle East even more. But even for them, it is worth pondering how much worse our position vis-à-vis the world’s greatest oil-producing region would be if we ignored Putin’s naked act of aggression in Europe, especially when backing the Ukrainians is so cost-effective and so manifestly in our self-interest.
Kenneth M. Pollack is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a former NSC director for Persian Gulf Affairs and a former CIA Persian Gulf analyst.