EASTORA REPORT | Tom Barrack says the United States is not leaving the Middle East. What Washington is leaving behind, he argues, is the idea that it should carry the region’s security burden indefinitely.
Speaking at the Global Security Forum in Doha, the U.S. ambassador to Türkiye said the old model of outside powers acting as guarantors of Middle Eastern security had run its course.
“The Ottoman Empire was a security guarantor; it left. The Brits came in; they were the security guarantor; they left. We’re here. We’re not leaving,” Barrack said. “We’re just saying we’re not going to own it anymore.”
That distinction is at the center of the Trump administration’s evolving approach to the region. Washington still maintains troops, alliances and major military capabilities across the Middle East, but Barrack says governments there increasingly need to build their own arrangements rather than assume the United States will solve every crisis.
“The U.S. can’t solve everything,” he said.
Barrack pointed to Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan engaging Iran while keeping close ties with Washington as evidence that a new regional order is already beginning to take shape.
Iran is part of that shift as well. Qatar, Pakistan and other U.S. partners are carrying messages and trying to keep diplomacy alive, while Gulf governments are being encouraged to decide for themselves what kind of relationship they want with Tehran.
Barrack’s argument is not that America disappears from the Middle East. It is that Washington becomes one player among several rather than the power expected to underwrite the entire system.
For decades, the region asked what the United States would do next.
Barrack says the next question increasingly belongs to the region itself.