Article from John Koenig: “‘Restraint’ in Action: America and the Eastern Mediterranean”

“A year can seem like a long time, especially if it is 2022. It is easy to forget that one of the Biden administration’s first foreign policy crisis was in the Eastern Mediterranean: the return of violence to the Israel–Palestine conflict in May 2021. Some saw in it a pattern indicating how President Biden and his team would approach international challenges—with detachment bordering on diffidence and a desire to conserve resources and avoid commitments. For me, having spent most of two decades as a US diplomat in the Eastern Mediterranean, the episode merely conformed to the pattern of gradual American disengagement from a region that was once vital to US interests.”