TEHRAN — Marc Lynch has written an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The End of the American Middle East”. Its very first paragraph opens with a sentence that, only a few years ago, would have been almost impossible to imagine appearing in that magazine.

The paragraph reads: “The American Middle East is finished. The regional order that has prevailed since 1991 has been one of the many casualties of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence. The inability of the United States to protect its (Persian) Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region. And Israel’s increasingly threatening posture and abandonment of any pretense of interest in reaching an accommodation with the Palestinians have ended Washington’s decades-long mission of bringing its Arab allies and Israel together into an enduring security partnership.”

His meaning is clear. 

The war with Iran did not mark the beginning of this ending. It was the moment when the rot in the structure could no longer be concealed; it burst through the surface. The United States and Israel failed to overthrow the Iranian government. Washington failed to shield its Persian Gulf allies from the costs of a war they did not want to enter, and it failed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. In Lynch’s account, the basic bargain no longer works: America provided security; in return, the region remained inside an American order.

So far, I have no serious quarrel with him. Lynch has at least arranged the story properly. The problem begins when he tries to climb out of the ruins.

He sees decline, but he still cannot look at the world and at human beings except through the eyes of the emperor. In his diagnosis, the United States is a power that has lost part of its ability to impose its will, especially far beyond its borders. But the moment Lynch begins prescribing remedies, America suddenly becomes the same power that can decide what order should replace the old one, who should enter it, how far Israel should retreat, what place Iran should occupy, and how democratic Arab governments ought to become.

It is the same America in which leaders decide, not people. When Lynch speaks of democracy inside the United States, democracy is mainly a good thing that Trump has insulted. He gives the public almost no place in determining policy. He does not waste time on the people. He advises the rulers.

For Lynch, the next president merely has to be sensible. “The Trump administration, contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law at home and abroad, is not going to change that. It is difficult to imagine Trump, who vacillates wildly between strategies, designing a new regional order of any kind. But his successor will have a real chance to break with the status quo and craft a more coherent and more effective Middle East strategy. That starts with renouncing the use of military intervention as a first resort and ending the practice of diplomacy by airstrike. Washington’s priority should be defense, not offense. One way to make that intention clear is to forgo the restoration of damaged or destroyed U.S. military bases across the Persian Gulf and focus instead on investments in intelligence sharing, missile defense systems for Persian Gulf partners, and the preservation of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.” His successor should also bring Iran into a regional security system, restrain Israel, care about human rights, distance Washington from autocratic governments, and finally learn that West Asia cannot be administered with bases and missiles alone.

This president receives his agency from himself, not from the Americans who elect him and send him to Washington with an order of their own.

The part of this prescription concerning West Asia looks humane at first. The problem becomes visible when we notice that the text is still unmistakably the prescription of a master.

Imagine a slaveholder whose plantation can no longer be managed. The plantation slaves, whom his father personally kidnapped from Africa, have revolted. The cost of guarding them has risen, part of the crop has been lost, and the last time he raised the whip, the slaves were no longer frightened. Suddenly the master announces that moral reflection has persuaded him that the plantation slaves ought to be free. Then he goes home to think about more humane treatment of the plantation slaves while whipping his domestic slaves.

And he has still forgotten something: the plantation slaves took his whip and broke it into pieces. He no longer has a whip.

Lynch is standing at roughly this point. He translates compelled retreat into moral choice. He says America should no longer dominate the region and arranges the argument as though reflection had persuaded him that domination was ethically wrong, rather than acknowledging that America may simply be losing the capacity to dominate as it once did.

Yet his own article supplies evidence for the second possibility. Persian Gulf confidence in American security guarantees has broken down. Enormous American and Israeli military power failed to impose the intended political result. America could not keep Hormuz open. Regional actors are already acquiring greater autonomy.

America has begun to resemble the country in an old military joke: it held an exercise against a hypothetical enemy and suffered a crushing defeat.

Lynch even invokes Suez. British and French power did not disappear the morning after 1956. Britain remained in the Persian Gulf for years and France continued fighting in Algeria. But, as Lynch himself explains, by then larger structural forces had made the dissolution of the European imperial order inevitable. He also acknowledges that the American regional order had already been decaying for years before the latest war exposed its military impotence.

He is slowly approaching the possibility that the issue is not that the emperor—or the slaveholder—has finally discovered that whipping people is ugly. The plantation slaves may simply have taken away the whip and smashed it.

That is not a minor distinction. If the first interpretation is right, America remains the principal locus of agency and can decide how to retreat. If the second is right, much of the future will no longer be designed in Washington. In the most optimistic interpretation, bordering on naivety, America will be one actor in that future: an actor carrying the memory of extraordinary power, not an architect spreading a blueprint across the table and assigning everyone else a place.

The larger contradiction comes elsewhere.

Lynch is one of the scholars who has spent years emphasizing the importance of Arab public opinion. And in this article he explicitly attacks Washington for imagining that Arab rulers could stand in for Arab societies. “For decades, Washington assumed that it did not need to worry much about Arab public opinion because it could count on Arab rulers to crush any dissent. It similarly assumed that mouthing empty words about supporting a two-state solution, all while Israel continued its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands and avoided genuine peace negotiations, would be enough to keep its Arab allies on board. That meant the United States never considered adopting policies that would command the consent, or even the support, of the peoples of the region. And it meant Washington could never seriously engage in the promotion of democracy or the defense of human rights, because its strategy depended on their absence.” Earlier he says that officials under both Biden and Trump assumed that only regional leaders’ opinions mattered, underestimated the continued importance of Palestine, and ignored the political toxicity of normalization among Arab publics.

He is right. Washington imagined that it could bring governments along and ignore society. The genocide in Gaza showed how wrong that assumption was.

But when the subject becomes Americans, the people suddenly leave the stage.

Lynch’s next American president more or less descends from the sky into the White House. We are not told who voted for him, what promises elected him, what image of American greatness he created, what expectations he must satisfy, or what he must do to preserve the political coalition that put him there.

This omission is particularly strange in a scholar who has spent much of his professional life writing about public spheres and public opinion.

The next president must first win an election. And if American decline has become more visible by then, there will probably be two basic stories available to explain it.

The first says that the world has changed, America’s relative power has declined, and part of its former position cannot be rebuilt.

The second is much simpler: America is still the same mighty America. Trump was merely incompetent.

Anyone who runs on the first story practically guarantees his own defeat. The second has considerable electoral power, even for a Democrat.

That second story is a gift from heaven. It does not ask Americans to lower their expectations. It does not tell them the age of supremacy is over. It does not ask them to accept a more ordinary place in the world. It promises to recover stolen greatness. Failure is attributed not to structure but to the bad man who came before. The promise is beautifully simple: I know how to use the power he squandered.

The trouble begins when such a candidate wins.

He cannot then turn around and tell the electorate: I was wrong; America really is weaker. He needs evidence, quickly, that his argument was true. He must demonstrate that the age of weakness has ended. Electoral pressure to prove competence merges with strategic pressure to prevent decline from becoming permanent.

Then every new failure can produce escalation instead of reconsideration.

If economic pressure fails, apply more. If military threats fail, make them more credible. If an attack fails, it must have been too limited. If allies refuse obedience, raise the price of disobedience. Foreign policy enters the familiar logic of the gambler: the previous loss is not a reason to stop. It is the reason to increase the next bet.

That is why the years after Trump may be more dangerous than the Trump years themselves. Not because the next president will necessarily be more insane, but because he may be more disciplined, command a more competent administration, possess fresh legitimacy, and pursue the delusional restoration of American power not through personal eruptions but through a coherent multiyear program.

Lynch barely examines this possibility. He expects Trump’s successor to see the failure of the old policy and draw the sensible conclusion. But there is no law saying defeat produces wisdom. Defeat can produce a desire for revenge.

More importantly, even if the next president personally understands Lynch’s argument, there is no reason to assume he can sell it. A politician elected to restore American greatness cannot announce six months later that America should now become a wiser, more restrained and more ordinary country. We lost the empire, but we became better people is not much of an electoral slogan.

And here the problem becomes larger than Trump.

What Lynch still treats largely as a collection of failed policies may be part of structural decline: diminishing relative economic power, rising costs of coercion, alternative financial and commercial routes, greater autonomy among allies, growing military capacities among adversaries and, above all, learning by others.

Power is not simply having more aircraft. Power is the ability to change somebody else’s behavior at a tolerable cost. When the other side learns how to raise the cost of coercion, the same arsenal produces less power.

Under those conditions, the choice may no longer be between a mad emperor and a wise emperor.

The age of the emperor itself may be ending.

Lynch approaches that conclusion and, just before seeing it, covers his eyes with his hands and turns back. Near the end of the article, he writes: “Washington struggles to conceive of a Middle East it does not dominate.” It is an extraordinarily precise diagnosis—perhaps precise enough to include its author.

Lynch can imagine a West Asia in which America dominates less, behaves more humanely, bombs less and negotiates more. He still has difficulty imagining one in which America simply no longer possesses the authority to determine the regional order.

That is the difference between restraint and incapacity.

And if the latter is what is happening, America’s real problem in the next decade is not how to become a wise emperor again. It is whether, before an attempt to restore empire burns through what remains of its power, it can understand that it is no longer the emperor.