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America seems to be stuck in the Middle East.
It has no easy way out of its war with Iran.
Yet the conflict, however it ends, will in fact mark something quite different.
The moment when America pulls back from the region, in the sense that it finally relinquishes its hegemony there.
For the first time since the great powers dismembered the Ottoman Empire a century ago,
the Middle East's overarching order will no longer be imposed from afar.
Will that herald an orgy of score settling and violence, or a new beginning?
Since the First World War,
the birthplace of the world's three great monotheistic religions has suffered misery heaped upon misery.
Arabs, who had fought alongside the war's victors, felt betrayed when Britain took control of Iraq,
Jordan and Palestine, and France helped itself to Lebanon and Syria.
Nationalist leaders, including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt,
later fell under the spell of ruinous Soviet-inspired economic policies.
The staggering abuse of human rights by dictators such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad
in Syria was matched only by the violent fanaticism of the jihadists nourished by their sadistic rule.
After three wars, countless covert operations and seemingly endless rounds of diplomacy,