So far, the Biden administration has earned a B for its Middle East regional policy. It has continued some aspects of the last administration’s policy, and changed others, notably to seek return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).  

But the seismic impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine requires the United States to reconsider its role not just in Europe, but in that perennial graveyard of foreign policy, the Middle East. While the bar for success in the region is low, the Biden team has made no irretrievable mistakes, responded well to its one crisis (the 2021 Hamas-Israel outbreak), and embraced Trump’s biggest success (the Abraham Accords). It has withdrawn troops where it should have, from Afghanistan, however messy the execution, and kept them where needed: Iraq, Syria and in the Gulf States.   

To be sure, the administration has had good luck. There have been no major outbreaks in fighting beyond the Hamas-Israel exchanges, and changes in government (Israel) and in leader policies (Turkey) have been supportive of US priorities. Nevertheless, luck lasts but briefly in the Levant, and the administration should increase not so much resources, but focus, on the region in light of Ukraine. Following are the five realities that should shape such an effort. 

First, the global order and the security it provides are indivisible.   Ukraine has brought home what should have been, but long was not, accepted wisdom in Washington and elsewhere: the United States and its partners are running a hugely successful collective security-based global order that underpins the rules-based international system including its financial, trade and values aspects. It is exactly that system which Moscow is challenging openly, and which has furnished the US with the tools to counter that challenge. But that system, by the nature of collective security, is universal and indivisible. The US and Europe need not just Poland, Germany and Japan to deal with Ukraine, but also Middle Eastern states — to replace boycotted oil and natural gas, to vote the right way in the UN, to implement sanctions, or in the case of Turkey, to support Ukraine militarily. But security is a two-way street. Regional partners need American and European backing in the face of the threats in their neighborhood.