© REUTERS/ Ammar Awad
The US strategic agenda for the region could be clearly understood in a simple five point plan, University of Pittsburgh Professor of International Affairs Michael Brenner said on Tuesday.
Successive US presidents shared their determination to gain and hold "Permanent bases in Iraq and Kurdish Syria, [exercise] obedience to Israeli and Saudi strategic designs [and] topple the IRI [Islamic Republic of Iran]," Brenner said.
This overall strategy and the continuing US-led coalition against Daesh (outlawed in Russia) now had the additional aim of driving Russian influence out of the region too, Brenner observed.
"It's not very complicated: the same as it was in 2003. Establish American dominance — political as well as military — throughout the greater Middle East," he explained.
Despite its claim to be fighting Islamist extremism throughout the Middle East, the United States continued to maintain supportive ties to groups including spin- offshoots of al-Qaeda, Brenner pointed out.
Middle East analyst and political commentator Dan Lazare told Sputnik that, the underlying pattern of US continued expansion of power and influence remain clear.
"No one knows what [US President Donald] Trump is up to in the Middle East, least of all Trump himself. But he is clearly adopting a more aggressive policy vis-a-vis Syria, Iraq, and Yemen," Lazare said.
However, Lazare observed that Trump's policies were making conflicts in the region worse rather than reducing or ending them.
"The trouble with aggression of this sort, though, is that it's self-reinforcing. The more troops he puts in, the more you'll want to up the ante in the hopes of eking out some sort of victory in the end. Yet US tactics are so fundamentally flawed that victory is always elusive," Lazare explained.
Far from destroying al-Qaeda and the Islamic Sate Trump's policies in Syria were helping them, Lazare insisted.
"By repeatedly violating Syrian sovereignty, he is undermining the only social force capable of defeating them. So he winds up fostering the social conditions in which such groups thrive," he said.
Trump's policies were therefore also backfiring in his support of Saudi Arabia and the Sanaa government in Yemen, Lazare continued.
"By backing the Saudi assault, he [Trump] is contributing to a policy of social pulverization that fosters civil war," Lazare explained.
In Syria, Yemen and Libya US policy had been to destroy centralized government without providing anything to replace and this approach had failed repeatedly, Lazare recalled.
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