An Extremely Simple Idea for Managing the Middle East

One sometimes wonders, in a quiet moment, how a great power might expand its reach without the endless expense, blowback, and political headache of planting its own boots on distant soil.

Suppose you noticed a scrappy, capable little nation in a rough neighborhood — resourceful people, a patch of desert, and a knack for improvising under pressure. How might you gently encourage them into becoming a long-term partner who advances your interests as if they were simply advancing their own?

You wouldn’t occupy them, of course. That’s crude, costly, and old-fashioned. No — the elegant move would be to strengthen them on their own terms, but in ways that align almost perfectly with yours. Start by selling them your best weapons — top-tier fighters, precision munitions, missile defenses. Train their pilots and technicians to your standards so everything plugs and plays cleanly with your own forces. Make the systems interoperable, the doctrines compatible, the upgrades dependent on your supply chain.

Over time, they come to see your success as bound up with theirs. They patrol the same threats that worry you. They test your systems in real combat and send the lessons back. They project power in the very region you care about, but without requiring you to station large numbers of your own troops there. And because they are fighting for their own survival, they do it with a ferocity, creativity, and local knowledge you could never quite reproduce with American forces in somebody else’s backyard.

Best of all, you arrange things so they buy a good deal of the hardware themselves — perhaps with some generous financing to get the ball rolling — which makes the whole thing look less like patronage and more like smart business. They become a force multiplier: your technology, their blood and soil, shared enemies, and no need for permanent American bases.

Really, someone should suggest exactly this sort of arrangement to our foreign-policy wonks. It would be a masterstroke — a huge bargain that makes America safer, extends American reach, and keeps American troops out of harm’s way. One can only hope the bright minds in Washington are imaginative enough to think of it.