{"id":4492,"date":"2026-08-06T15:07:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T15:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4492"},"modified":"2026-08-06T15:07:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T15:07:56","slug":"liabilities-exposed-as-allies-flee-declining-and-fickle-usa-war-historian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4492","title":{"rendered":"Liabilities exposed as allies flee ‘declining and fickle USA’: war historian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As President Donald Trump\u2019s war with Iran creeps into its sixth month, it\u2019s become clear not only that the United States has lost and Iran has been empowered, but that \u201cthe American Age in the Persian Gulf is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Republican Senate enablers can\u2019t stop coddling Trump \u2014 and it will backfire<\/a><\/p>\n

This is according to distinguished war historian and security scholar Phillips P. O\u2019Brien<\/u>, who wrote on Thursday how since the end of World War II, “the USA has become the dominant outside security player in the region. It overthrew governments, it made massive military sales \u2026 it established military bases and it also fought shorter wars (First Gulf War) and decades-long wars (War on Terror\/Afghanistan) to impose its influence. The USA even had one of its most important, if less well-known, foreign policy doctrines aimed precisely at the region: the Carter Doctrine. Announced in the State of the Union address in 1980, the Carter Doctrine made it American policy to resist any other power interfering with trade into and out of the Persian Gulf and stated that the USA would use military force to keep the Gulf open.\u201d<\/p>\n

With all this in mind, writes O\u2019Brien, \u201cIt is ironic, then, that the USA, in using military force, caused another power to close the Gulf and led to the demise of its own doctrine. For the states of the region, this is also a transformational development that will (or at least should) lead to massive changes in their security architecture. For many decades \u2026 they based their security on making vast and expensive purchases of military equipment from the USA, housing US military forces, and acting as US allies. That entire paradigm is gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to O\u2019Brien, a key factor in this shift has involved the fact that, as reported earlier this week<\/u>, the U.S. has burned through nearly all of its long-range precision missiles over the course of the war. As a result, \u201cthe USA cannot protect its forces against Iranian strike, as cheap and less advanced as that strike is compared to American capabilities. The upshot of this weakness (and indicative of why the U.S. is running out of anti-air systems) is that the USA is already pulling its forces out of the Persian Gulf \u2014 in some cases precipitously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Staggering cost of \u2018Trump-class\u2019 battleships revealed<\/a><\/p>\n

He cites a new Wall Street Journal story on how this new dynamic is impacting Kuwait. As O\u2019Brien explains, \u201cThe U.S. has made Kuwait a major base for its influence in the region since the First Gulf War in 1991, but the results of Trump\u2019s War (if you remember the first mass casualty hit by the Iranians was on a U.S. facility in Kuwait) has caused the U.S. to pull many of its forces out of the country already. Trying to sugarcoat the pull, the WSJ says the USA is \u2018rethinking\u2019 its defensive posture in the region, but the truth is that it has been forced to pull out precipitously because it cannot protect its forces and it is struggling to protect the Kuwaitis. This recent report comes after months of reports of withdrawals from other facilities \u2014 leaving many U.S. bases in the Gulf supposedly empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now states in the region see that the U.S. can protect neither its own troops nor the Gulf states, and it\u2019s making them realize that American partnership may actually be a \u201cstrategic liability.\u201d Because of all this, writes O\u2019Brien, \u201cThe entire security architecture that was constructed by the states in the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East will have to be entirely remade. There are signs that they already know that. The US is showing its weakness so dramatically and in adding to that its unreliability and fickleness, is compelling the states to think more regionally.\u201d He notes examples like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which are beginning to reconsider their U.S. relations.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to be honest about what we have seen here,\u201d O\u2019Brien concludes. \u201cThe U.S. is already running out of weapons, it is already pulling forces back, it is already discrediting itself. The states in the region are only acting rationally in looking at a very different future, one that relies as little as possible on the whims of a declining and fickle USA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more \u2018Crisis\u2019: White House can\u2019t get story straight as \u2018leakers\u2019 face Trump\u2019s wrath<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As President Donald Trump\u2019s war with Iran creeps into its sixth month, it\u2019s become clear not only that the United States has lost and Iran has been empowered, but that \u201cthe American Age in the Persian Gulf is over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLiabilities exposed as allies flee 'declining and fickle USA': war historian - Next Address America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextaddressamerica.com\/?p=4492\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Liabilities exposed as allies flee 'declining and fickle USA': war historian - 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