I suppose it is understandable that humans are essentially conservative creatures.  The bare fact of entropy puts all life in a perpetual struggle to keep its energy levels up. The velocity of change in the past several centuries has probably amplified our cellular-level anxieties in that regard.  When change happens, we have to adjust. Adjusting is hard.  We don't like change. 

There are lots of reasons to want to change, of course; in particular, considering how we sometimes find almost unbearable the disjunction between reality and our beliefs about reality, the cost of change is sometimes less than the effort expended in telling ourselves we don't need to change.  But even in those situations, I suspect a basic fact remains true: we don't change, we don't learn, we don't adjust, until we need to do so.  Change is always a last resort.

I'm thinking about this this morning as I'm doing a few home errands long-deferred, but also because I just read this article about US policy towards Saudi Arabia. It looks like the Democrats are suggesting a really large change in US policy on that front.  Now the article, by Bruce Reidel, a very smart analyst of the middle east, argues that the root cause is the ruling Crown Prince:

The vehement and unprecedented despairing remarks about our oldest partner in the Middle East suggests an existential crisis in the relationship may be only around a year away if the Democrats win the White House. The relationship has had ups and downs over the decades, including the strains of the oil embargo and the role of Saudi citizens in the 9/11 attacks. But those strains involved policy issues; this time, the root cause is a personality — namely the crown prince. His dangerous and erratic behavior are the issue.

I just don't buy that.  I think the issues are far more structural.  The murder of Kashoggi may be the precipitating event, but it is not the underlying cause.  In fact there are multiple underlying causes.  And they are larger than Saudi Arabia.  Let me explain why.

This is personal to me, of course, because I grew up in Saudi Arabia, in the oil-rich Eastern Province, when the alliance between the Saudis, the US, and Israel was at its most potent.  It was the early years of the Iranian Revolution, and the waning years of the Cold War, when Iran, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the USSR-Syria alliance caused the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to act not so much in tripartite concert, but in two parallel pas de deux with each exquisitely coordinated with the other, but neither acknowledging the existence of the other.  Against the threats of Iran and the Soviet Union, all the parties to this ballet had a serious interest in aligning their efforts.

All of this changed starting in the 1990s.  That decade saw the end of the Soviet occupation and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan; the collapse of Soviet communism; the 1991 Gulf War; demographic changes in Israel, coupled with the multiple intifadas there; the increased alliance between Wahabism and the house of al-Saud; and the rise of an urban middle-class in Iran.  Afghanistan became a factory of anti-western terrorism; Syria lost its main supporter, and became, for a time, a possible true neutral, and then became embroiled in a civil war; Iran began its struggles between urban middle class and rural populations (somewhat mimicing the US blue state vs red state divide); Israel became a much more brutal, much more illiberal state (in some ways prefiguring Hungary and Poland's recent anti-liberal turn); and Saudi Arabia became one of the main instigators of anti-American ideology, and generators of geopolitical instability, in the Islamic world.  While all this was going on, the US got involved in an endless counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan (which is not so much a war as involving yourself in a whole way of life in which low-intensity warfare has become endemic) and invaded and tried (lamely, disastrously) to rebuild Iraq. The "Arab Spring" amplified and complicated each of these realities in multiple ways.

Each of those statements is contestable, but I would defend each one.  And in sum, what they amount to is a situation in which the pillars of US geopolitical stability for the Middle East have really been undermined.  And like a human being, US hegemony had a eukayrotic conservativism at its heart: it likes stability.  As the nineteenth century British PM Lord Salisbury famously said, "Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible."

So why is US policy changing?  Well, it is changing reluctantly, and belatedly, and I think irreversably. US interests have changed; their one time allies have changed, too. On the US side, the souring of the US population on further involvement in the middle east after Afghanistan and Iraq (just look at our reluctance on Libya and Syria) is a big sign.  And you cannot deny the power of the Netanyahu regime's brutality and frank US partisanship in souring US Democrats on support of Israel, as this article among many others makes clear.

But another fact about the new geopolitical reality that I've not yet mentioned, and a CRUCIAL one, is the surprising liberation of the United States from middle eastern energy supplies, and the growing attachment of China to the middle east.  There are lots of articles about that; here's one interesting one from 2012 that seems fairly prophetic to me. After it describes the US's growing energy independence, it wonders what might happen when the US realizes it doesn't need to be in the middle east: 

The biggest losers would be the Arab oil states grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council, most of which are monarchies kept in power by a combination oil dollars and American military power.  Despite their oil revenues, none of these countries except Saudi Arabia has the wherewithal to defend itself against military pressure from Iran if America leaves the stage -- or for that matter from Iraq, which has repeatedly laid claim to oil fields in Kuwait and other nearby states.  The vacuum created by an American departure would force nations like Bahrain and Qatar to seek new military protectors, either by submitting to the influence of bigger regional powers or by reaching out to China.

The second category of losers would be the economies of East Asia, which the International Energy Agency says will be the main consumers of Persian Gulf oil in the years ahead.  China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are heavily dependent on the flow of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and yet do little to assure that flow is not disrupted by local tensions.  If America pulls out of the Gulf, the nations of East Asia will either have to play a bigger military role in the Middle East, or find other sources of oil.  America might have sufficient new-found reserves of fossil fuel to supply Japan and South Korea in an emergency, but concern about access to Persian Gulf oil would undoubtedly exacerbate tensions over who owns contested oil reserves in the South China Sea and elsewhere.

Israel too would likely be a big loser.  Washington spends billions of dollars each year subsidizing the security of the Jewish state.  The reason that isn't controversial even though Americans usually want to cut foreign aid ahead of every other type of federal spending is because it is hard to separate securing Israel from securing Middle East oil.  The same U.S. military forces and programs that help protect Israel from Iranian missiles and Islamist terror groups also protect Arab oil-producing states.  But if America's role in securing the oil were to wane, it would be harder to ignore the cost of defending Israel, and that might force Jerusalem to become more self-sufficient.

We haven't realized it yet, perhaps, but what fracking has done to US geopolitics is huge.   The environmental challenges of fracking are large and still not fully understood.  But, coupled with other factors, its geopolitical impact may be vaster still.

What does all this have to do with being at war with Eurasia?  As readers of Orwell know, he used that phrase to talk about the way that populations could be convinced that the geopolitical conditions in which they exist are more or less perpetual and natural and inevitable. One thing that people in the US need to realize is that the current configuration of US power in the middle east only goes back to the 1970s, and President Carter's development of the Rapid Deployment Force in response to the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  The US's geopolitical footprint has stayed large in the region since then. But it was never "normal".  There is no "normal." And now conditions are changing again.  No one in 1967 could have imagined that South-East Asia could become a backwater of US interests, but by 1977 that's certainly what it was. (And what it has remained.)  I would not be at all surprised if something similar happens in the middle east in the next several decades.

Gradually, and then suddenly.