WorldGulf
US is ending its oil-for-security bargain but not leaving the Gulf, says Tom Barrack
Speaking in Doha, the US envoy said Washington no longer wants to control the region and admitted past regime changes 'seem to have been a mistake'.
Key points
- Tom Barrack told a Doha forum that 'The US no longer wants to own' the Middle East.
- He said the US had been involved in 23 regime changes in the wider region.
- Iran's seven-day proposal to reopen Hormuz still awaits a US reply.
The United States is moving away from its decades-old bargain of security for oil with the Gulf, but it is not pulling out of the region, US envoy Tom Barrack said on Tuesday.
“The US no longer wants to own,” Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, told the Global Security Forum in Doha. “The bargain is not to control, but to not leave. We’re not leaving.”
He said regional governments were drawing their own conclusions. “Everybody is saying: OK, I can’t rely on America to solve all my problems,” he said.
Barrack was unusually frank about the record of US intervention, saying Washington had been involved in 23 regime changes across the wider Middle East. “Every time we try and intervene, change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake,” he said.
Luciano Zaccara, a political analyst, called Barrack “probably” the most realistic of President Donald Trump’s allies, and said the envoy had implicitly conceded that regime change in Iran, a stated aim of the war, was unlikely to succeed.
The remarks came with the Strait of Hormuz still shut. Before the US-Israeli war on Iran, about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passed through it. Iran’s seven-day proposal to reopen the strait and resume nuclear talks, in return for the US lifting its naval blockade and easing sanctions, remains on the table without a US response.
The Gulf is also dealing with Yemen’s Houthis, whose strikes on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport this month killed at least 14 people and wounded hundreds.