Martin Indyk Got Us Knee-Deep Into the Middle East—and Then Tried To Get Us Out
The late U.S. diplomat helped form America’s policies towards Iran, Iraq, and Israel. By the end of his life, he'd had enough.
The first and only time I met Ambassador Martin Indyk was in February 2020, at the offices of The National Interest, a magazine I worked for after graduating college. Indyk was there to give a talk related to his recent Wall Street Journal article, "The Middle East Isn't Worth It Anymore." Unlike many who believe that U.S. interventionism in the region has been destructive and wasteful, Indyk argued that Washington has basically gotten what it wanted—and could now leave the region alone.
Indyk would know. The former White House official and diplomat, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 73, was one of the architects of U.S. policy in the Middle East in the 1990s, when Washington was first starting to flex its dominance over the region. Indyk's most (in)famous contribution was announcing the "dual containment" policy, which committed the U.S. to a virtually endless struggle against Iran and Iraq at the same time. Later in life, he became a skeptic of continuing those commitments.
Last year, Indyk called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel, which he had previously fought to secure throughout his career.
"Those who actually believe the Middle East doesn't matter anymore thought that I had become a defector to the isolationism crowd," Indyk joked at The National Interest event, in his distinctive Australian accent. But the U.S. did have legitimate reasons to intervene in the region, Indyk insisted: "The first three were oil, oil, and oil. The fourth was Israel." It was only because those interests were secure that Americans could back off. The global energy market had moved away from a reliance on Persian Gulf oil, he noted, and "Israel today is quite capable of standing on its own two feet."
His tone shifted yet again over the final few months of his life. Indyk's last public statements were a series of social media posts bemoaning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership of the country and failure to appreciate U.S. support. "Wake up Israel! Your government is leading you into ever greater isolation and ruin," Indyk wrote on May 22. The policy pillars that Indyk had helped erect had not only outlived their usefulness; it seems they had begun to collapse in on themselves.
It was Israel that got Indyk interested in the Middle East in the first place. Born in Britain and raised in Australia, he was studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem when he witnessed the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 break out. Indyk briefly served in the Australian intelligence services as a specialist on the Middle East, then moved to the United States in 1982 to work at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He helped found the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, another pro-Israel think tank.
In 1991, before announcing his candidacy for president, Bill Clinton sat down for a briefing with Indyk, who promised that they could secure four peace agreements: an Israeli-Palestinian treaty, an Israeli-Jordanian treaty, an Israeli-Lebanese treaty, and an Israeli-Syrian treaty. Clinton liked what he heard. Indyk was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1993—and joined Clinton's National Security Council a week later. Clinton later appointed Indyk to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel and assistant secretary of state.
Those were the optimistic first days of the Arab-Israeli peace process, which soured soon enough. Although Israel and Jordan did normalize relations, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations dragged on. (Diplomacy with Lebanon and Syria did not even come close to fruition.) At the end of the Clinton administration, in 2000, a breakdown in talks exploded into brutal Israeli-Palestinian violence. Clinton and his envoy Dennis Ross blamed the Palestinian leadership. Other officials such as Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller put some of the blame on Israeli intransigence and Clinton's tendency to "act as Israel's lawyer," in Miller's words.
The Clinton era also hardened the U.S. conflicts with Iran and Iraq. The two countries had gone to war with each other in the 1980s, and former president Ronald Reagan backed Iraq to prevent an Iranian victory. Then, in 1991, Iraq invaded U.S. partners Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, leading the U.S. military to smash the Iraqi army. The Clinton administration decided that it could and should play permanent policeman in the region. Indyk announced this "dual containment" policy in a 1993 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"The current Iraqi and Iranian regimes are both hostile to American interests in the region. Accordingly, we do not accept the argument that we should continue the old balance of power game, building up one to balance the other," Indyk said. "As long as we are able to maintain our military presence in the region," he declared, the U.S. would use that presence "to counter both the Iraqi and Iranian regimes."
Indyk's speech contained the seeds of an even more aggressive policy. The Clinton administration would provide "stronger backing for the Iraqi National Congress as a democratic alternative to the Saddam Hussein regime," Indyk announced. Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, later helped feed President George W. Bush's delusions that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as liberators, and provided much of the false intelligence on "weapons of mass destruction" that justified the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Meanwhile, the containment of Iran was supposed to work hand-in-hand with Arab-Israeli normalization. "Our strategy was to, on one hand, use the engine of peacemaking to transform the region and on the other hand contain the [Iranians] through sanctions and isolation. The more we succeeded in making peace, the more isolated [Iran] would become," Indyk later said, according to the 2007 book Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi. Indyk had not foreseen that Iran would "outsmart us by taking on the peace process," supporting hardline Palestinian factions like Hamas to undermine any Arab-Israeli alliance, he told Parsi.
After Clinton left office, Indyk spent the remainder of his career in the academic and think tank world, only returning to government for a few months in 2013 and 2014 to serve as President Barack Obama's envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. By then, Indyk had become known as a skeptic of the Israeli position and a dove on the Iranian issue.
Shortly before Indyk stepped down in 2014, he anonymously complained that "the primary sabotage" for peace talks "came from the settlements. The Palestinians don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when, at the same time, it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state." (Israeli media unmasked him as the anonymous source.) After stepping down, Indyk publicly reiterated that Palestinians who have "grown up under Israeli occupation" have no reason to hope "that the Israelis will ever grant them their rights."
In 2015, he testified to Congress in favor of Obama's proposed grand bargain over Iran's nuclear program. "The agreement buys a breathing space of at least ten years," Indyk said, although he also called for "a robust effort to promote a regional security strategy that takes advantage of the respite to begin to rebuild a more stable order." He proposed providing more military support to Israel and friendly Arab states, and bringing those countries under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella."
After President Donald Trump took office, Indyk testified again, urging Trump to stick to Obama's deal. (Trump famously did not take that advice.) "Nothing is easy about countering Iran in the conflict-ridden Middle East, but everything becomes easier if we do not have an Iranian nuclear threat to contend with at the same time," Indyk said. "Negotiations are not a concession to Iran, nor a sign of weakness, as long as they are backed by sanctions and the other elements of the strategy, and as long as they are fully coordinated with our regional allies," he added.
Perhaps it wasn't Indyk who changed. American and Israeli politics have both grown far more hawkish since the Clinton era. Indyk always wanted to use U.S. leverage over Iran to pressure it into making concessions; the hawks in Trump's inner circle want to use that leverage for a full-on regime change campaign. The Israeli government of the 1990s agreed with Indyk that Palestinian self-rule was vital to Israel's security; the Israeli parliament this month voted overwhelmingly to declare Palestinian self-rule an "existential danger." Indyk, a hawk in his time, now seems like a dove by comparison.
Yet his own role in creating these monsters can't be ignored. In the 1990s, the United States could have made peace with Iran and Iraq from a position of strength. Dual containment led to decades of war and tension, squandering Washington's advantage and making peace much harder to achieve. And the Clinton-era vision for an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran became Netanyahu's strategy for stepping over the Palestinian question.
In other words, Indyk wanted the U.S. to build its power in the Middle East until a satisfactory point, and then consolidate its gains. Those who followed Indyk, however, saw no reason to stop pushing ahead. As long as the U.S. was "winning," prudence and restraint seemed like a cowardly half-measure. It took the catastrophe of October 2023 and everything that followed to remind American leaders that their power had limits. Some still don't want to admit it.
The story of Indyk's life is the story of the U.S. relationship to the Middle East. The people who ran U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s were suddenly thrust into the position of absolute overlords, and the Middle East felt like putty in their hands. By the time the unintended consequences of their overconfidence became clear, it was too late to stop those consequences from unfolding. The world that Indyk created will outlive him—despite his best efforts.
