Why Arab Allies Fail: Middle East Free-Rider Problem

On 26 August, US presidential envoy Tom Barrack visited Lebanon for the fourth time in three months. Barrack’s trip was the latest in a series of visits made by US officials, who have spent nine months trying to get the Lebanese government to fulfil the terms of an American-mediated Israeli–Lebanese ceasefire agreement. Despite the ceasefire’s 27 January deadline and a 22-day extension, the Lebanese government has still not removed the Hezbollah militia from southern Lebanon and disarmed it.

US efforts in Lebanon highlight a decades-old problem for American administrations: the United States lacks resilient and responsible Arab allies and partners in the Middle East. They fail to enhance their own security and protect their interests, and this inaction and fecklessness makes the pursuit of US policy goals a perennial challenge. The United States may be wealthy and powerful but it cannot do everything from 7,000 miles away.

As a result, we should be pessimistic about the prospect of increased stability and constructive change in the Middle East over the coming months and years. There is currently much talk of shifting regional power dynamics, windows of opportunity, and the further degradation and isolation of Iran and its allies, but these developments are unlikely to fully mature. Although the Trump administration has welcomed the defeats suffered by Iran and its allies to date, it will not invest the considerable US resources needed to continue this work. Responsibility will therefore fall in the lap of America’s regional allies and partners—Egypt, the UAE, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—and it is a burden they are unwilling and unable to accept. They are afflicted with free-rider syndrome and conflicting interests that magnify their weaknesses and general ineffectiveness.

Which is a pity, because the regional war begun by Hamas on 7 October 2023 has left Iran and its allies reeling. Israel has smashed most of the leadership and fighting forces of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. In December, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Iran’s decades-old ally, fled to Moscow. The Iran-supported Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq have been deterred from attacking for well over a year. In October 2024, Israel destroyed Iran’s air-defence systems, then in June of this year, it assassinated much of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership and, with the assistance of the United States, degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

The Iranian axis of resistance was the fountainhead of a revolutionary and absolutist ideology that wreaked havoc on Arab societies for decades, exacerbating sectarian divides, bankrupting economies, disrupting governance, monopolising the issue of Palestine, displacing millions, and killing hundreds of thousands of Arabs. But Israeli and American attacks and bombardments are only temporary solutions to the problem of Iranian aggression, and outsiders cannot manage the security and stability of the Middle East better than its residents.

Regional problems ultimately require regional participation and solutions. The onus is on Lebanon, not America, to disarm Hezbollah, and Yemenis must figure out how to bring the Houthis to heel with the help of Yemen’s regional allies. America’s Arab friends need to remain vigilant, become proactive, and learn to coordinate effectively if they are to build on the developments of the last year or so, because the Iranian regime and its allies are not finished yet. Opportunities for them to regroup and rearm persist and will be exploited as they arise.

Houthi piracy in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab, and the Gulf of Aden is presently ravaging the Egyptian economy. Neutral commercial vessels are being targeted or commandeered. These acts of piracy have redirected fifty percent of maritime traffic away from the Suez Canal, a dramatic reduction in traffic that has cost Egypt more than US$8 billion in lost revenue to date. The Egyptian economy is already in dire straits, and it is now haemorrhaging money at an unsustainable rate. However, the Egyptian government is not doing anything to stop this disruption, even though it receives billions of dollars in US military aid and training every year.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, Hezbollah and its weapons have inflicted great suffering on the Lebanese. The Shi’ite militia initiated two unprovoked wars with Israel (in 2006 and 2023–24) without the consent of the Lebanese government or its people. In 2008, Hezbollah turned its guns on other Lebanese, and its intervention in the Syrian Civil War precipitated a series of suicide bombings in the environs of Beirut. These wars and the attendant violence resulted in an incapacitated political system, thousands of casualties, tens of thousands of displaced, and billions of dollars in damage to a state that has not fully recovered from its own fifteen-year civil war and is now in the throes of a historic economic collapse.