Respect vs. humiliation: What pushes Trump to leave the Mideast
Donald Trump is not the first president to entertain the notion of getting the United States out of the Middle East.
That would be Barack Obama.
President Obama’s dream of leaving behind a region that has bedeviled the U.S. for a half century may have been couched in loftier terms of policy and strategy. But in the end both presidents came to more or less the same conclusion: The Middle East costs the U.S. more in blood and treasure than it’s worth.
“There is a consistency of this desire to get the United States out of the region between the two administrations,” says Ken Pollack, a former CIA Middle East analyst and National Security Council official who is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
