The Middle East: a summary " Military primacy, and the routine use of deadly military force, remains the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Middle East. The 2015 nuclear non-proliferation accord with Iran represents a rare yet fleeting bright moment for diplomacy in a region where wars—in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—and the mass displacement of peoples continue unchecked. The United States has done much to precipitate the violence through its unjustifiable and destructive 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today the Obama administration abets the devastation from the air and by arming, directly or indirectly, its weak and embattled client governments. These include Iraq, the Saudi-backed forces seeking to regain control of a barely functioning Yemeni state, a shifting cast of Islamic militants fighting the Assad regime in Syria, and the Kurdish forces fighting the most infamous of the insurgencies, the Islamic State. A host of other outsiders including Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel,