Mohammed Soliman does not like the phrase “Middle East.” It is, he has argued for several years now, a cartographic relic, a term coined by an American naval strategist in 1902 to describe the sea lanes between Suez and Singapore, and it has outlived its usefulness. In its place, Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a director at McLarty Associates, and the author of the 2026 book West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East — has proposed something more architectural: “West Asia,” a trans-regional system running from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, understood not as a theatre to be pacified but as the western hinge of America’s contest with China in Eurasia. He calls it “Asia-minus-China,” and its central claim is blunt: no American commitment in this region is worth making unless it additionally strengthens the country’s position against Beijing over the future of the Pacific.
Business and policy readers picked his book up almost immediately. Soliman makes the book accessible to both longtime Middle East observers and new readers seeking to understand the current war and its impact on the world and on American power. The book has drawn receptions in Rome, Tokyo, Athens, and Washington, reflecting its timing, its importance, and the standing of its author. But timing cuts both ways, and this is the part of the story that’s hard to separate from the argument itself.
When his book went to press in early 2026, that was a contrarian argument. As a realist, and most importantly an Asianist, he wants Washington to frame its global commitments around the Asia-Pacific and the contest with China, a school of thought viewed as overly hawkish and insensitive to other theatres and their needs. Weeks later, on February 28, it stopped being academic. A joint US-Israeli operation killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, along with several senior officials, in what was billed as a decapitation strike. Iran did not collapse. It reconstituted, naming Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as his successor within days, and the war that followed — missile exchanges, two closures of the Strait of Hormuz, strikes on the Arabian Gulf states — has run for months with no clear end in sight. Soliman’s warnings about what such a war would cost the United States, and what it would do to the China contest he considers the only contest that matters, have been, by most accounts, borne out.
Denys Kolesnyk, president of the MENA Research Center, had the pleasure of speaking with him about what comes next.
You warned, before this war started, that a major Middle East war would drain American power worse than Iraq did and put the China competition at risk. That’s now happened. What should Washington actually do to cut its losses?
I don’t think there’s much value in softening this: many of us who study this region think it was a strategic mistake, and potentially a costly defeat dressed up as a limited operation. Years’ worth of interceptor and munition stockpiles have been drawn down in weeks. Assets and attention that belonged in the Indo-Pacific have been pulled into West Asia
instead. And the war has demonstrated the limits of American power more than it’s demonstrated its reach. Iran survived a decapitation strike against its own supreme leader; it still holds Hormuz as leverage, and it now has more options for cooperating with China than it did before any of this started. Add in exposed Gulf partners and the global economic disturbance from oil price spikes and shipping disruption, and you have a war that costs more the longer it drags on in this “no war, no peace” limbo we’re currently in.
To cut losses, Washington needs to make a decisive turn back toward offshore balancing and order-building, away from deeper entanglement or any lingering fantasy of regime change inside Iran. Our objective is to contain Iran. That was the objective yesterday, and it remains the objective after the war. Concretely: sooner or later we need a negotiated off-ramp. The Pakistanis are a useful channel here; continue to use it. Protect the Gulf infrastructure that is indispensable to the global economy. Accelerate munitions replenishment and Indo-Pacific repositioning in parallel, not after. And double down on the techno-economic relationships with Gulf partners, so that this region starts strengthening the China contest again instead of draining it. Every additional month of open-ended attrition is a gift to Beijing: time, operational data, and openings we’re creating for free.
Before the war, you argued the Gulf could function as a solid economic engine at the center of your West Asia concept. Now that Iranian missiles have hit Dubai and the Strait of Hormuz has closed twice, is a project like IMEC still viable?
The broader reframing of the Gulf as a rising economic and technological hub integrating with India, Europe, and the broader Indo-Pacific through trade, capital, energy, and infrastructure has held up. Gulf states have absorbed direct strikes, including on Dubai, Doha, Manama, and on critical energy and AI infrastructure, and they’ve absorbed repeated Hormuz disruptions, and they are still pressing on diversification. The “Compute, not Crude” shift hasn’t reversed. If anything, the war has made the case for it more urgent, not less.
I wouldn’t call IMEC dead, but I’d stop treating it as the only pathway for regional connectivity. Keep an eye on the Saudi-Syria-Turkey and Saudi-Egypt-Med connectivity routes. These are all emerging as real, practical solutions to the Hormuz crisis. The lesson of this war is that you need multi-path connectivity. The Gulf economic agency has proven considerably more resilient, and these states are adapting in real time, not waiting for the collapse.
You were right saying that betting on the Islamic Republic’s collapse was wishful thinking. Khamenei is dead, but his son now holds his title, and Iran is rebuilding its nuclear sites. What’s your assessment of the evolution of situation in Iran in the context of a prolonged conflict?
Betting on collapse was always wishful thinking, and I said so before the war made the point for me. What we’ve actually seen is succession under fire. The transition to Mojtaba Khamenei, with the IRGC playing a heavy hand in it and a regime that has shown real institutional resilience notwithstanding losing its senior leadership, absorbing missile and drone attrition, and operating under serious economic pressure. Iran has used Hormuz as leverage, targeted Gulf infrastructure and retained enough capability throughout to keep imposing costs on everyone around it. There are credible reports of efforts to rebuild nuclear infrastructure through relocating centrifuges to harder, deeper sites and a reasonable case that Mojtaba may be less constrained than his father was on the question of nuclear weaponisation.
What I’d expect going forward is a harder, more decentralised, more IRGC-run Iran, more tightly bound to China and Russia for reconstruction, technology, and diplomatic cover; continued gray-zone pressure and missile signaling; and even higher nuclear threshold risk, because weaponisation starts to look like a survival necessity rather than the strategic option it was before the war.
Total collapse or regime change is low-probability for the near future, and nothing about this war has changed that. What it has done is entrench a revisionist actor that the West Asia order needs to contain and deter. The objective of eliminating Tehran sounds like an unrealistic goal or one that would come with a massive cost for the region, American power, and the global economy. And I don’t believe we in America think we can manage that cost.
Your proposed West Asian security coalition assumed Arab states would integrate air defences with the US and Israel. Now that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait have been dragged into direct combat, are they more likely to deepen that alignment? More broadly speaking, how do you see the evolution of the US-Gulf states cooperation after the conflict?
Combat exposure has done more for practical integration in a few months than years of proposals and joint communiqués managed to do. Gulf states have intercepted large volumes of Iranian missiles and drones, coordinated and operated inside CENTCOM frameworks amidst the real pressure of active war. A shared, immediate threat produced de facto air and missile defence cooperation and burden-sharing that abstract alliance-building never quite achieved, even though there’s real and justified frustration in Gulf capitals about how little they were consulted before being pulled into this.
I think the US-Gulf relationship is heading toward deeper techno-security and economic ties rather than pure security dependence. We’ve seen major progress on the Saudi nuclear program and the US-Saudi nuclear deal. Of course, there’s a lot of debate around the question of Saudi enrichment, but nevertheless, the deal itself is a milestone for US-Saudi relations, and one that wouldn’t have been achieved without the war in Iran and its effects.
Similarly, the designation of the UAE as an A5 nation will accelerate the buildup of AI infrastructure within the UAE at the gigawatt level, a huge shift in UAE-US relations, driven largely by the war in Iran, which accelerated this compute alignment.
This is the lattice-work I’ve written about in my book: flexible, interest-based tiers organised around air defence and maritime security, fitting the reality on the ground better than anything resembling a rigid, NATO-style alliance would. The war has reinforced the value that both sides see in integrated defences, even as Gulf states assert greater agency than before. Pakistan’s new security role in the Arabian Gulf is part of that same story.
Can the order you’re proposing ever really be stable while Iran sits outside it, or does a lasting postwar settlement have to bring Tehran inside the system?
My architecture was never built around including a hostile Iran as a core member, and I don’t think this war changes that. It’s built around containing revisionist powers through balanced coalitions: Gulf-Asian networks and American offshore balancing holding the structure together. Exclusion is workable as long as those coalitions deliver credible deterrence, real maritime security, and economic alternatives that limit the extent of the disruption Iran can actually cause in the Arabian Gulf. Full inclusion, without a fundamental change in Iranian behaviour on the nuclear issue and an end to its proxies’ hostilities, would hollow out whatever coherence the order has.
That said, I don’t think permanent exclusion without adequate containment is a stable equilibrium either. That’s a recipe for perpetual low-level war, which is close to what we have right now. A durable postwar settlement probably needs some managed relationship with Tehran short of full admission to the West Asia coalitions themselves. Stability doesn’t come from stretching the system to absorb an unreformed Iran. The practical path is robust external balancing paired with selective, interest-based diplomacy with Tehran, not maximalist inclusion and not maximalist exclusion either.
In your book you build the case for “Asia-minus-China” as the organising frame for a new regional order — the Gulf states, Korea, Japan, and the Mediterranean partners, all judged by whether they reinforce or dilute the Indo-Pacific position. Five months into this war, has that architecture held, or has the fighting exposed how thin it actually was?
Both, and I’d resist the temptation to pick one. What’s held: the shared-threat logic. The Gulf states and Egypt have moved closer under fire than they did under any prior summitry. What’s been exposed: the assumption that Washington could hold this together passively without paying continuous attention and continuous cost. I never argued that offshore balancing meant disengagement. I argued it meant not re-litigating Iraq. But the war has shown that even a “lattice-work” of interest-based coalitions needs an active hand on the tiller, or the vacuum gets filled. And it is being filled. Pakistan has grown an indispensable mediating channel in a way nobody modelled eighteen months ago, and China has used exactly that channel to expand its foreign influence while the US is consumed. That’s the vacuum-filling dynamic I warned about, just faster and with a different intermediary than I expected.
Concretely, to lock the coalition in rather than let it erode: accelerate the tech and capital tracks with the Gulf now, while goodwill from shared air-defence experience is at its highest; get Japan and Korea to stop treating this as a distant energy story and start treating it as an Indo-Pacific story, because the shipping and energy disruption is already their problem; and use whatever off-ramp emerges — Pakistan-brokered or otherwise — to freeze the war on terms that don’t require Washington to keep bidding up its own pledge to prove seriousness.
Let’s widen the lens. What’s your read on Europe’s strategic trajectory after this much attritional warfare in Ukraine — does a frozen or prolonged war there accelerate European decline relative to the wider Eurasian balance, or can Europe still be a real pillar of the system you’re describing?
I’ll give you the pessimistic read first, because honestly I think it’s the more accurate one right now. You’ve had years of attritional fighting in Ukraine, and it’s exposed exactly the shortfalls that matter most in a systemic contest — artillery and interceptor production that never kept pace, energy dependencies with Russia that took years to unwind, and a political division inside Europe that makes fast, unified decisions hard even when the stakes are, you know, existential. A continent that consumes resources and attention without generating real hard-power capacity isn’t a pillar of West Asian security. It’s a drain with good intentions attached.
Now, the optimistic case exists, and I’m not going to wave it away. Defense spending is trending up in Germany, in Poland, across a good chunk of Europe. There’s a more serious conversation about the European pillar within NATO than there used to be. But I’ve been hearing versions of this optimism for close to a decade now, and the gap between the rhetoric and what’s actually coming off the production lines hasn’t closed much.
Where I do think Europe has a real, durable role is inside the West Asia system. Not as its own independent pole, but inside this one. And honestly, that’s already happening. The Mediterranean European powers are working hand in hand with the West Asia system: France, Greece, and Italy are all in it, and I’d want to see a much more active British role alongside them. These are important players, and they need to be brought into an architecture that actually uses them. That’s real, that’s additive; I don’t want to undersell it.
But it’s still Europe as a contributor to somebody else’s architecture, not Europe as a primary balancer against Russia or China in its own right. And the Iran war has made that gap worse, honestly, just by proving again how finite American bandwidth actually is. Every hour spent on West Asia is an hour not spent reassuring or provisioning Europe. Every hour spent on Europe is an hour not spent on the Indo-Pacific. Europe’s now competing with two other theatres for the same shrinking pool of attention, and it’s not obviously winning that fight.
You’ve written about the operational fusion between the Ukraine and Iran theatres. Talk us through how real that fusion is, and whether it changes the logic of offshore balancing.
It’s real enough that I don’t think you can analyse either war in isolation anymore, which is itself the finding. Iranian Shahed drones were combat-tested and iterated over Ukrainian cities for two years before variants of that same design showed up over Gulf targets. That’s a direct technology transfer with a body count on both ends. Russia has provided Iran with satellite imagery of American basing in exchange for drone production technologies Moscow then mass-produces domestically. Sanctions-evasion networks such as shadow fleets, front companies, and dual-use procurement chains are increasingly serving both theatres simultaneously rather than operating as separate operations. And now you have Ukrainian long-range strikes reaching into Russia-Iran logistics nodes around the Caspian, which is the clearest sign yet that the two militaries treat this as one connected rear area, not two.
Call it a joint war ecosystem rather than parallel wars. For American planners, the consequence is unforgiving: every interceptor, every standoff munition, every ISR asset is being drawn down against two attritional fronts at once, and the reserves that are supposed to be there for a Taiwan contingency are the same reserves being spent in the Gulf and funnelled, indirectly, to Ukraine.
Does it validate offshore balancing or complicate it? Honestly, both. It validates the underlying instinct that you cannot afford large, open-ended ground commitments in either theatre precisely because our adversaries have figured out how to make you pay in two places for the price of one war. But it complicates the assumption that offshore balancing is cheap. Offshore balancing was never meant to mean “no cost.” It was meant to mean “avoid the worst cost,” which was nation-building. This fusion shows there’s a serious cost even in the version you’re supposed to be able to afford.
Munitions stockpiles, diverted naval assets, a credibility hit with Gulf partners who feel they weren’t consulted — where is American power actually headed right now? Managed decline, correctable overstretch, or something more permanent?
Correctable overstretch, but with a shrinking window. I want to be precise about that distinction because I think a lot of the discourse collapses it into fatalism, and fatalism is its own kind of strategic error.
What’s undeniable: years’ worth of interceptor and standoff-weapon stockpiles have been drawn down in months. Naval and air assets that should be postured toward the Indo-Pacific have been diverted to the Iran war. The “exquisite platform” model of a small number of extremely expensive, extremely capable systems has shown real vulnerability to cheap, massed drone and missile salvos, which is a problem that doesn’t go away when this particular war ends, because the adversaries who’ll use that lesson next aren’t just Iran. And Gulf allies who felt they were dragged into direct combat with limited consultation are reconsidering how much they trust Washington’s planning process, which is a credibility cost that compounds.
None of that is irreversible on its own. What would make it irreversible is a continued “no war, no peace” situation, not enough to force a resolution, just enough to keep bleeding stockpiles and attention indefinitely. That is the actual danger, more than any single battlefield reversal. China is the strategic beneficiary of exactly that equilibrium: it costs Beijing nothing, and it costs Washington a percentage of its readiness every month it continues.
If I had to name the single highest-leverage choice for the next twelve to eighteen months, it’s this: end or freeze the active combat operations on terms that don’t require a decisive military victory to justify, and use the freed capacity for two things simultaneously: rebuilding the industrial base for munitions production at a wartime tempo and re-posturing toward the Indo-Pacific before the next crisis there arrives on a worse timeline than this one did.
Zoom all the way out. If Washington is going to remain the offshore balancer of West Asia while keeping the China contest primary, what should the actual hierarchy of American objectives look like through the rest of this decade?
I’d put it in four tiers, and I think the discipline of ranking them, rather than treating everything as equally urgent, is the whole point of having a grand strategy at all.
Primary, non-negotiable: deny Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. Force posture, the Japan-Australia-Philippines alliance architecture, the technology and industrial competition. Everything else on this list exists to protect bandwidth for this one.
Secondary but actually load-bearing, not a distraction from the primary: stabilise West Asia through offshore balancing, lattice-work security coalitions built around air and missile defence and maritime chokepoint protection, and techno-economic partnership with the Gulf states, explicitly without an open-ended war with Iran. And the lesson of the war is not “abandon this tier,” it’s “don’t let this tier metastasise into the first tier’s resource pool.”
Supporting, not primary: manage Europe as a contributor to the wider system, encourage the rearmament trend, use the Mediterranean role productively, rather than treating Europe as an independent pole requiring the same category of commitment as the Indo-Pacific or West Asia.
Deliberately deprioritised: open-ended regime-change projects, nation-building, and any theatre or commitment whose main effect is to keep consuming munitions and attention that the first tier actually needs.
The single most consequential near-term decision is sequencing: freeze the Iran attrition on terms that preserve the Gulf’s economic power, redirect the freed resources into American industrial recovery and our posture in the Indo-Pacific, and do it before the next war forces the sequencing on worse terms than those available today. Everything I’ve argued for the better part of two years comes down to that one piece of discipline.
