Washington, DC, August 18, 2026 --  

America has squandered its military power in the Persian Gulf for the last 25 years. Will it finally get out, and if so where to?

As the Cold War drew to a close in the early 1990s, a black swan event triggered a major strategic shift. In August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied its southern neighbor of Kuwait, gambling that nobody would dare stop him. His gamble failed spectacularly, triggering America's first major war in the Middle East.

The next year would see America furiously build an enormous military footprint in the Persian Gulf starting from nothing. U.S. military bases popped up first in Saudi Arabia, and after that war ended, troops were stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, largely to deter Iraq and enforce no-fly zones established after the war. And after the al Qaeda terrorist attacks in September 2001, America doubled down on its military presence in the area, establishing more bases in Jordan before the Iraqi invasion and inside Iraq itself afterward. After the dust settled at the end of the occupation, the U.S. still retained about 40,000 military personnel in the Persian Gulf.¹

By the early 2010s this concentration of American forces no longer made sense. The Iraqi invasion was widely perceived as a strategic mistake. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid on Pakistan in 2011, eliminating the justification for military presence.

President Obama promised a pivot to Asia in 2011, noting that America's real strategic interest was to counter a rising China in East Asia. The first Trump administration played lip service to this policy starting in 2017, but it was never a priority And while many hoped President Biden's election would result in concrete action on an Asia pivot, that didn't happen. After Russia invaded Ukraine at the beginning of his presidency, America's strategic focus returned to Europe for the next four years while its giant bass in the Middle East stayed put out of sheer momentum.

Those bases have now proven themselves worse than worthless in Trump's disasterous war on Iran. They have served as big juicy targets for short-range Iranian missiles and drones. Nearly 15 years after Obama proposed drawing down bases in the Middle East, military leaders are finally on board for purely tactical reasons. Pentagon planners are reportedly discussing closing and shrinking bases after the Iran War ends.²

While this is great news, and possibly the only decent news to come out of Trump's Iran misadventure, it doesn't mean that a much overdue pivot to Asia is on the table. Trump has enraged America's East Asian allies first by waffling about defending Taiwan against China and then yesterday by ordering a downsizing of joint military exercises with South Korea as a favor to his old pal North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.³ Add to this the redirection of the only American aircraft carrier currently in East Asia, the USS George Washington, to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln near Iran⁴, and China's military leaders must be brimming with glee.

Unfortunately, the best America can hope for is that Trump will find a face-saving way to declare victory and walk away from Iran, allowing the Pentagon to pull back from bases that are no longer needed. This will probably leave Iran in a position to make good on long-delayed plans to build a nuclear bomb. But given the Trump administration's unwillingness to commit ground troops and its failure to topple Iran's Islamo-fascist regime, that is probably a foregone conclusion, anyway.

As for America's allies in East Asia, there is little good news in the near term. The best they can hope for is to muddle through with unchecked Chinese aggression for the next two and a half years, and pray for an American president with even a modicum of competence and strategic vision.

Notes:

1. Washington Post, Pentagon Weighing Smaller U.S. Military Presence in Gulf Once Iran War Ends, August 18, 2026

2. Ibid.

3. NPR, Trump Orders Pentagon to Scale Back Joint Exercises With South Korea, August 17, 2026

4. Associated Press, US Pulls Last Aircraft Carrier in Asia as Trump Focuses on Iran and the Western Hemisphere, August 15, 2026