West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, by Mohammad Soliman. Polity Books, 272 pages.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy laid out its vision for a new U.S. role in the Middle East based on a pragmatic scaling back from the ideological misadventures of prior years. Instead of attempting to reshape the countries of the Middle East through violence and money, the strategy advocated an orderly withdrawal from a region that has sapped tremendous American attention and resources since the First Gulf War. 

With the U.S. in theory departing for the Asia-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, local U.S. allies—particularly in Israel and the Gulf Arab states—would now “lead in managing regional stability, logistics, and the financial costs of reconstruction,” in a region where Washington would no longer call all the shots, the document argued. However, the drawdown in military bases in the region necessary for a new policy wasn’t enacted, and indeed Trump has launched a major war with Iran.

But while the U.S. continues to grapple with its own strategic posture, a more dramatic shift may be taking place in the region outside of public attention. That shift is the dissolution of the Middle East itself as a distinct political entity, in favor of an economic and political merger with increasingly powerful Indian Ocean countries, giving birth to a new order better termed as “West Asia.”

West Asia is both the thesis and title of a new book by Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. The book, West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, gives a lay of the land in the region after the end of the Arab Spring and two years after the start of the war in Gaza. New security alignments and economic developments are rapidly reshaping affairs—including the growing involvement of countries like India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, China and others who were not previously considered major factors in its politics. Meanwhile, the cultural presence of other Asian countries is increasingly felt in major regional cities like Doha and Riyadh where a new cosmopolitanism is in process of being born.

The book is aimed at policymakers in the region and in Washington. Soliman is a foreign policy realist who attempts to lay out a pragmatic path for Americans seeking to maintain their economic and political interests in a region that still hosts vital trade routes and energy resources. 

At its core, the book lays out a vision of a soft-landing for the American empire, aiming to avoid the painful collapse that previous imperial regimes in the region had suffered by strategically offloading responsibilities to coalitions of trusted partners.

“The United States, through strategic coalitions, can maintain significant influence over global affairs—even as the global balance of power tilts toward Asia and China. Moreover, the U.S. must avoid the pitfalls that led to the British Empire’s decline—chief among them, overreaching without sustainable support,” Soliman argues. “The British Empire, at its zenith, was stretched thin, unable to maintain control over its vast territories. The U.S. can learn from this by backing interlinked regional orders—structures where its influence remains strong but sustainable, and where America is not the sole bearer of the costs behind maintaining these systems.”

The term “Middle East” was itself coined in the early twentieth century by American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan used it to describe a strategically vital zone stretching between South Asia and the Levant that was anchored in the Persian Gulf. At the time, the area almost entirely correlated to territory ruled by the British Empire. 

With the British long gone and their American descendants hoping for a managed exit, the region—which has been in need of a rebrand—is returning to the more fluid political, cultural, and economic boundaries that once tied it closely to South Asia, East Africa, and the Mediterranean. The new West Asian zone includes the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Jordan, Syria, India, Israel, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt, among others. 

All these states have economic, political, and security relationships that are increasingly interconnected. Several of them are also in the early phases of an economic renaissance, with new trade corridors, industrial zones, and technology hubs rapidly developing. This newfound economic dynamism has drawn the attention of Chinese, Indian, and European investors who have proven undaunted by the security challenges that the region still faces.

The U.S. has invested the most in the Middle East over the past three decades of any outside country. But its return on that investment has proven dubious. Soliman lays out a strategy for U.S. policymakers to maintain a light foothold in a redefined region that allows them to enjoy economic benefits and shape some political trends, while still pivoting the bulk of its attention to more important interests in the Asia-Pacific and in its own hemisphere. 

The key to this pivot is the creation of new regional coalitions, where the U.S. can work on the sidelines to help coordinate the activities of other states that would themselves do the heavy lifting tackling security and political challenges in West Asia. Models for this can already be seen in limited coalitions that have worked together to fight the Islamic State, handle refugee flows, and tackle systemic problems like climate change and narcotics trafficking. 

As the scope of the region grows and its peripheries widen, the U.S. would still play a vital role as an outside party that can help shape events in its own interest, while declining the heavy-handed and unpopular role of enforcer that it has taken on in the past few decades. “The United States can position itself as an offshore balancer by working through a constellation of allies and partners,” Soliman argues.

In Soliman’s prognosis, the West Asian region is likely to be characterized by two competing blocs: an “Indo-Islamic” group consisting of predominantly Muslim countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and potentially Iran, contrasted with an “Indo-Abrahamic” one including a motley combination of Israel, India, and the Gulf Arab states. These two blocs—not quite alliances, not quite enemies—will be incentivized to build integrated economic and security cooperation amongst themselves. 

Soliman’s thesis appears to be rapidly coming to fruition. The Iraq Development Road project and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), as well as defense deals between India and Israel, and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, respectively, offer a hint of where the trends in the new West Asia are headed.

A new division of labor in the region would certainly be favorable to U.S. interests. But given current political realities, there are questions about whether it can be achieved.

Decades ago, political scientist Samuel Huntington drew a world map articulating multiple competing "civilizational" blocs. That map, which saw the world divided largely on religious grounds, was widely mocked by liberals during the triumphant days at the end of the Cold War. But over the past two decades, Huntington’s thesis has come to appear increasingly realistic. The implications of his argument do not point to the seamless integration of a new West Asian political and economic regime. 

Blocs of cohesive countries like the European Union and ASEAN are united by cultural affinities, common security challenges, and, above all, a sense of shared destiny. In West Asia, fierce divisions continue to persist along both religious and ethnic lines. Several major Huntingtonian civilizational fault lines still run through the region; the only thing holding them together at present is the presence of the U.S. as a neighborhood gendarme.

Even more pressingly, the West Asian region still lacks what Huntington called an “anchor state.” Such a state is one whose size and influence renders it the undisputed leader of the pack and gives it the authority to resolve conflicts among members.

The lack of an anchor state—similar to the role that Russia historically played in the Orthodox Christian world, or which the United States plays today for the West—means that countries of comparable size and power are strongly incentivized to continue fighting each other for hegemony and undermining the position of their neighbors. Rather than cultural essentialism or religious obscurantism, this structural condition is why Huntington saw the Middle East as so prone to conflict. 

There is no reason to believe that factor has dissipated, even as the region evolves into a new version of itself.

Even the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy suggests that the U.S. may have to stay in the region to maintain the legally-mandated Qualitative Military Edge of the state of Israel. Soliman correctly argues that Israeli national security in a post-American region can only be guaranteed by forming a close partnership with surrounding Arab states. Yet the cost of entry to such a partnership is a settlement to the Palestinian issue in accordance with international law and the implementation of a two-state solution.

Israeli leaders have all but stated that they will never do that, whereas Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have stated that no normalization is feasible without such a move. That means that its conflict with its neighbors will continue on indefinitely in some form or another, and require the permanent American patronage that has now become a default assumption of the Israeli political system.

With the exception of the United Arab Emirates, whose elites enjoy close personal ties with their Israeli counterparts which recent disclosures suggest were originally encouraged by Jeffrey Epstein, there is little rush these days to lock into defense coalitions with Israel among regional states. Their populations, meanwhile, embittered by the destruction of the Gaza Strip and ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank are unlikely to be rushing into economic deals soon with their Israeli counterparts. 

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All this suggests that unlike the states of Europe, which agree on most of the big cultural and political questions, the partnerships in this region of West Asia seem likely to remain suspicious and arms-length. The IMEC corridor may already have proven to be the first fatality of the post-October 7 world as the prospect of Palestinian statehood and Saudi normalization with Israel continues receding to a distant horizon. 

As such, the new West Asia, even if it will be richer and more interesting in many ways than the former Middle East, is likely to remain a highly contentious and unstable place—with or without the involvement of Washington. The workable defense coalitions that have been built in the region—including cooperation between Arab states and Israel to defend Tel Aviv against Iranian ballistic missiles—have continued to rely on the U.S. military as an indispensable organizer and it is not yet clear which country is capable of stepping up as an “anchor state” to fill the gap.

Soliman’s book is based on extensive research and a keen eye to both political and cultural trends in a rapidly evolving region. For U.S. policymakers and citizens who have been burned by decades of ideological crusades in the region that have produced much bloodshed and waste, his realistic prescriptions for how to navigate a new West Asian landscape are welcome, as is his focus on how to use U.S. foreign policy to serve the interests of the American middle class.The region’s transformation, including the emergence of a new West Asia, is no longer theoretical, and it demands a U.S. strategy grounded in restraint, realism, and the interests of the American people.