If at first you don’t succeed, make more problems for yourself. That seems to be the mantra in Washington when it comes to the Middle East. Every few years, a U.S. president asks Americans to go along with a small military commitment in the region—or starts one without asking the public. Almost inevitably, it causes bigger problems than promised.

Friends turn into enemies. The chaos allows bad actors to grow, or creates new factions with a reason to resent America. The political goalposts shift; the U.S. government discovers that a problem it didn’t care about before is actually a “vital interest.” And time after time, politicians promise that all these problems can go away with just one more decisive strike against the real cause of conflict in the region. No forever war is ever advertised that way from the beginning.

President Donald Trump is speedrunning this whole problem. Just a month ago, he was promising the end of “nation building” and grandiose “neocon” schemes. Now, he’s directly entered the Israeli-Iranian war by bombing Iran. While Vice President J.D. Vance tried to claim that “we’re not at war with Iran” and the attack would be a one-off incident, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump himself have both hinted that the U.S. will escalate to regime change if Iran does not surrender. Here’s how we got to this point—and some of the times we’ve seen this movie before.

Building the Modern Saudi Kingdom

The roots of America’s military presence in the modern Middle East are in the informal U.S.-Saudi alliance created during World War II. An American oil consortium had begun operating in the kingdom soon after its unification in the 1930s, so the Roosevelt administration built an airbase in Saudi Arabia to protect the oilfields and added the Saudi government to the lend-lease program for wartime allies.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously met King Abdulaziz Al Saud on the USS Quincy in February 1945, promising U.S. help in building a modern Saudi army in exchange for continued American access to Saudi oil. That seemingly innocuous trade was the end of the British Empire’s dominance in the region, and the beginning of a long U.S. entanglement instead.

How it went wrong: Created an unwritten, entangling alliance for decades to come.

Strangling Iranian Democracy

The U.S.-Saudi deal inspired Iran to try to renegotiate its arrangement with Britain in 1951, whose state-owned oil company had a concession for Iranian oil fields. The issue wasn’t just resources. The Iranian parliament, led by the charismatic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was trying to limit the power of the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh nationalized the oil fields, provoking a British blockade, while also clashing with the shah over domestic policy.

Mossadegh trusted the United States as a neutral mediator, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. The Eisenhower administration suspected that Mossadegh was too close to communists, and the CIA supported a coup d’etat by destabilizing the country. In August 1953, after months of protests subsidized by the U.S. and the U.K., monarchist generals in contact with the CIA surrounded Mossadegh’s house with tanks, bringing the shah back to near-absolute power.

Instead of allowing Britain to regain its dominance over Iran, the Eisenhower administration forced Iran to accept an American-led oil consortium. And the CIA helped train the shah’s fearsome new secret police, the SAVAK. When the shah finally fell in 1979, young revolutionaries took revenge by raiding the U.S. embassy, which they called a “den of spies,” and holding everyone inside hostage for more than a year. That began a 46-year conflict that continues to this day.

How it went wrong: Caused a nation that  trusted America to have an anti-American revolution.

Cleaning Up Britain’s Mess in Egypt

The Iranian crisis was one of the events that prompted Egypt to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956, which was under the control of an Anglo-French consortium. The British Empire was rapidly slipping away, and London felt it couldn’t afford another loss. Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a plan with the leaders of France and Israel to wrestle back control of the canal. Israel invaded Egypt, and then Britain and France sent their troops to the canal as “peacekeepers,” pretending to be shocked by the violence.

U.S. intelligence caught wind of the plot before it even began. Unlike in Iran, the Eisenhower administration didn’t side with Britain over Egypt. President Dwight D. Eisenhower thought that a colonial land grab was reckless for the Western position, especially after the Soviet Union threatened to join the war on Egypt’s side. The United States, working through the United Nations, pressured the three invaders to withdraw.

Two years later, the Lebanese government invited the U.S. military to help maintain order in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, during a political crisis. The American troops stayed for three months, and Lebanese politicians worked out a compromise among themselves. But America’s days as an impartial arbiter would soon end.

How it went wrong: The exception that proves the rule. Diplomacy and neutrality were a path not taken for America.

Betraying the Kurds For the First Time (But Not the Last)

In the mid-1970s, Iran and Israel were backing a rebellion by the Kurdish minority against the government of Iraq, their mutual rival. Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani was hopeful about American help; he gave President Richard Nixon a tiger skin and declared he was ready for Kurdistan to “become the 51st state.” But the Nixon administration cynically instructed the CIA to simply “continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country,” referring to Iraq.

In 1975, the shah made a surprise agreement with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In exchange for more territory in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian government abruptly pulled the rug out from under the Kurdish rebellion, cutting off all support while the Iraqi army advanced.

The Nixon administration was ruthless towards its defeated Kurdish proxies: National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger infamously quipped that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work” and that the United States can “promise [Kurds] anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

After reading a leaked report about the betrayal, however, a U.S. diplomat in Tehran pushed to get Kurds asylum in America. Many settled in Nashville, Tennessee. The 1975 crackdown would not be the last time Kurds experienced Kissinger’s dictum. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush egged on uprisings against the Iraqi government only to watch as the rebels were crushed. In 2019, Trump promised to mediate between Syrian Kurds and Turkey, only to green-light a Turkish invasion after the Syrian Kurdish forces dismantled their fortifications.

How it went wrong: Raised and then crushed the hopes of an otherwise pro-American people.

Throwing Fuel Onto the Persian Gulf Fire

Soon after the Iranian monarchy fell in 1979, Iraq invaded Iran. The United States switched from using Iran as a weapon against Iraq to using Iraq as a weapon against Iran. The Reagan administration gave diplomatic cover, financial aid, covert weapons shipments, and intelligence support to the Iraqi government. It even helped whitewash the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians.

When Iran and Iraq began attacking each other’s oil exports, the U.S. Navy stepped in to defend Iraqi shipping. In May 1987, the Iraqi military mistook the USS Stark for an Iranian tanker, attacking it and killing 37 American sailors. And in July 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian passenger plane for a fighter jet, shooting it down and killing 290 civilians.

While protecting Iraq, the Reagan administration maintained a backchannel to Iran. The covert diplomacy started with an offer to sell weapons to Iran via Israel in exchange for freeing American hostages held by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. This later grew into a much larger scheme, known as Iran-Contra, to use the secret arms sales to fund Nicaraguan guerrillas against the will of Congress.

America’s double-dealing helped prolong the war until 1988. “It’s a pity they both can’t lose,” Kissinger famously said.

How it went wrong: Worsened Iran’s distrust of America and empowered Iraq to threaten its other neighbors.

‘Giving to the USSR Its Vietnam War’

The same year as the Iranian revolution, Afghanistan was undergoing its own turmoil. A communist government had taken power in April 1978 and was coming apart at the seams. The Soviet Union actually considered Afghan communist leader Hafizullah Amin an unhinged, unpredictable liability, so in December 1979, the Red Army marched into Afghanistan to kill Amin and install a more pliant government. (America is not the only country to suffer imperial hubris.)

The U.S. government saw “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,” in the words of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Operation Cyclone, the effort to back mujahideen (holy warriors) against communism in Afghanistan, became the largest CIA operation in history. Billions of dollars flowed to the

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