In his March 6 op-ed “Israel Can’t Substitute for the U.S. in the Middle East,” Reuel Marc Gerecht implies that President Trump’s intention to stabilize the Middle East by relying more on allies won’t work. Only the direct application of American military power, he argues, can check the “revisionist entente” of China, Russia and Iran.
Mr. Gerecht forgets that America won the Cold War in the Middle East precisely in the manner that Mr. Trump proposes. The U.S. became the dominant power in the region during the 1956 Suez Crisis, when President Eisenhower halted the attack by Britain, France and Israel on Egypt, which had aligned with Moscow. The era of massive American military deployments began only in 1990, in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.