THERE is an old saying, often attributed to the British Empire: nations rarely lose their empires in battle. More often, they lose them because they become convinced that they cannot live without them.
For forty-five years, Washington has treated the Middle East as if the fate of the American republic depended on the deserts of Mesopotamia, the waters of the Persian Gulf and the narrow strait between Oman and Iran. But empires do not operate in abstractions. They operate in places.
They operate in the predawn silence of Basra’s docks, where fishermen untangle their nets beneath rusting cranes. In Baghdad’s crowded markets, where shopkeepers who have survived sanctions, invasions and militias lift their shutters each morning and wonder whether the electricity will last the day. In Bandar Abbas, where families scan the horizon for ships that carry not only cargo, but livelihoods. And, less visibly, in Singapore’s shipping lanes and Kuala Lumpur’s petrol stations, where the costs of Washington’s addiction turn up months later as an inflation print.
To strategists in Washington, these are theatres of operation. To the people who live in them, and to the economies wired to them, they are simply home, or simply the market.
The war with Iran in 2026 was not an aberration. It was the culmination of a doctrine born in fear and sustained by inertia. Fighting began on Feb 28, when American and Israeli aircraft struck Iranian military and nuclear targets; Iran retaliated against US bases and Gulf shipping and closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply normally passes. By the time a ceasefire took hold roughly five weeks later, at least 15 US service members were dead and 543 wounded. Monitors inside Iran had documented 1,701 civilian deaths, including some 175 people killed in a single strike on an elementary school, and millions who had been displaced.
The economic shock, though, did not respect the region’s borders. Roughly 80% of the oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz is bound for Asia, and it was Asian economies, not American ones, that absorbed the sharpest blow. Brent crude rose by around 65% within a month of the closure. Singapore’s Straits Times Index fell 2.5%; South Korea’s Kospi, a market whose economy sources roughly 85% of its crude through the strait, fell 3.1%; Tokyo’s Nikkei dropped 3.2%. The World Bank and the Dallas Fed both estimated the disruption cut annualized global growth by close to three percentage points, driven overwhelmingly by higher energy import bills and inflation in exactly the emerging markets — Southeast Asia included — that had no vote in the decision to go to war. This is the part of the Carter Doctrine’s ledger that Washington rarely tallies: a security architecture sold as protection for the global economy has become, in practice, a recurring tax levied on economies thousands of miles from the Gulf, with no say in how the bill is set.
America does not have a Middle East problem.
America has a Middle East addiction.
That addiction began in earnest in January 1980, when [then] president Jimmy Carter declared that any attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf would be regarded as an assault on America’s vital interests and would be met with military force. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. The Shah had fallen in Iran. The world depended on Middle Eastern oil. Washington feared that chaos in the Gulf could cripple the global economy.
At the time, the logic was understandable.
But doctrines, like empires, often outlive the circumstances that created them.
The Soviet Union disappeared more than three decades ago. The United States has become one of the world’s largest energy producers. Renewable energy is expanding. Yet tens of thousands of American troops remain stationed across Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, guarding a geopolitical order that increasingly resembles a relic of another age — one whose bill now arrives, with interest, in markets that had nothing to do with writing it.
History offers uncomfortable lessons about great powers that mistake military presence for strategic wisdom.
The British learned it at Suez in 1956. Britain and France believed they could still dictate the future of the Middle East through military power, only to discover that the age of imperial policing had ended. The Soviets learned it in Afghanistan, where an invasion intended to secure influence instead accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. America learned the same lesson in Vietnam, yet somehow convinced itself that Baghdad and Kabul would be different.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a mission to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and spread democracy. Instead, it unleashed sectarian violence, strengthened Iran’s regional influence and created the conditions from which ISIS would eventually emerge.
Afghanistan followed a similar script. What began as a campaign to destroy al-Qaeda became a twenty-year nation-building project that collapsed in a matter of days. Trillions of dollars disappeared into deserts and mountains, only for the Taliban to return to power almost exactly where they had started.
The human cost is almost impossible to comprehend.
Researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project estimate that America’s post-9/11 wars cost roughly eight trillion dollars. More than 940,000 people died directly from violence, over 432,000 of them civilians. An additional 3.6 to 3.8 million died indirectly, from the collapse of healthcare systems, infrastructure and social order the wars left behind. Nearly thirty-eight million people were displaced.
But statistics have a way of draining tragedy of its humanity.
Thirty-eight million displaced sounds like an entry in a spreadsheet until one imagines what displacement really means: a Syrian father carrying his daughter across a border in the middle of the night; an Iraqi grandmother leaving behind the home her family built generations earlier; an Afghan child who has never known a year without war.
Empires count wars in budgets and deployments.
Ordinary people count them in funerals, empty chairs and memories of streets that no longer exist.
The Middle East is no more stable than it was in 1980. Iraq remains fractured. Syria lies in ruins. Libya is divided. Yemen is broken. Lebanon survives in a state of perpetual crisis. Iran, too, now joins the list of countries scarred by yet another war whose underlying political disputes remain unresolved.
Travel from Beirut to Baghdad and you can still see the ghosts of every intervention: bullet holes in concrete walls, abandoned apartment blocks and men drinking tea beneath portraits of leaders long dead. There is a peculiar exhaustion hanging over much of the region — not the exhaustion of defeat, but of having spent generations trapped between empires, revolutions and ideologies that promised salvation and delivered only another cycle of violence.
Washington’s answer to every setback has been the same: another base, another deployment, another intervention.
It is the geopolitical equivalent of doubling one’s bet after every loss.
Part Two follows tomorrow.
Abbi Kanthasamy is a Canadian entrepreneur, photographer and writer.