The Legitimacy Deficit: Western Security Policy and Its Fracturing of Global Order

Conflict & Security 2025-2026 High School Essay Contest Winner

This article looks at the transformation of Western security engagement in the Middle East across three distinct eras—Cold War containment, post-9/11 counterterrorism, and present-day multipolar fractures. It argues that the West’s instrumentalization of democracy as a selective tool has permanently fractured the credibility on which its security partnerships depend and concludes with a policy-driven framework for rebuilding legitimate engagement for regional stability.

Introduction

In March 2023, foreign officials from Saudi Arabia and Iran met in Beijing and signed a new agreement, brokered by China, to restore diplomatic ties severed seven years earlier. The Middle East, which American frameworks had long viewed as a sphere of influence, had produced its most consequential diplomatic development yet and done so without the United States’ involvement. While the meeting produced no fanfare, it carried a heavy verdict on decades of Western engagement: the traditional U.S.-led regional order was in danger.

To understand how Washington arrived at this position and why Western influence has contracted so sharply in the Middle East it once dominated, it is necessary to analyze the distinct eras—the Cold War containment, post-9/11 counterterrorism, and present-day—that built the West’s policy architecture for the Middle East, each inheriting and amplifying the same foundational flaw—the conflation of strategic cooperation with political legitimacy. Western security policy has repeatedly treated elite cooperation as an adequate substitute for political legitimacy and, in doing so, has built a regional order whose apparent stability has concealed structural weakness. 

The Cold War Blueprint 

During the Cold War, cooperative governments became a sufficient substitute for legitimacy when they supported American interests in the Middle East. While this distinction seemed peripheral compared to the urgency of Washington’s primary goal of preventing Soviet penetration into the Gulf and the Levant, its consequences have been anything but. 

In Iran, the United States supported the 1953 coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, installing Reza Shah Pahlavi’s authoritarian monarchy in his place. Public opposition from rich and poor grew with years of protest and culminated in a revolution in 1979 that created the state the U.S. is at war with as of February 2026. By facilitating the coup through “Operation Ajax,” they established the pattern in which strategic interest undermined political legitimacy and long-term security interests. 

The U.S. repeated this pattern in Egypt. Throughout the late 1970’s, Washington sent a billion dollars annually in military assistance to Cairo in exchange for their honoring a peace treaty with Israel. However, while these payments bought regional stability, they also paid for the police and security forces that kept Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in power for thirty years, despite evidence of fraudulent elections and crackdowns on political opposition. Washington got the peace treaty it wanted, but it also became the financial backer of a dictatorship.

 Then, in Saudi Arabia, American arms, security guarantees, and diplomatic protections flowed to the country in exchange for management of oil production and as a counterweight to regional radicalism. Again, Washington failed to ask whether a hereditary monarchy with no elections and little tolerance for dissent reflected the will of the Saudi people, or whether the stability under US-led order was quietly generating the radicalism the partnership was supposed to guard against. Ultimately, the contradictions in Washington’s regional order surfaced with brutal clarity when fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals. 

Across each arrangement, U.S. foreign policy and security structures asked whether governments survived and cooperated in favor of U.S. interests—regardless of political legitimacy or domestic capacity. Every dollar of security assistance only deepened Washington’s structural investment in elite survival, making political reform incompatible with the sustained maintenance of partnerships. From the Shah to the Saudi monarchy, security interests came at the expense of democracy.

Post-9/11 Counterterrorism

Despite the legitimacy deficit, the model continued in the post-Cold War period. After the anti-communism rationale dissolved, Washington substituted new objectives, such as nonproliferation, energy security, and counterterrorism. NATO formed, becoming the institutional legitimizing framework for America’s broader agenda. Even when the stated mission reportedly changed from propping up friendly strongmen to building a functioning democracy from scratch, American foreign policies maintained the same underlying exploitative architecture.

Afghanistan represents this architecture clearly. After September 2001, NATO deployed to Afghanistan, believing that military presence would drive political reconstruction. After 20 years of fighting, the Taliban recovered power within weeks after the U.S. withdrew in 2021, demonstrating that military presence alone was insufficient to build lasting foundations. The U.S. campaign had been designed to suppress security threats rather than to cultivate the governance conditions that prevented threats. Without a politically legitimate government, the Taliban easily retook Afghanistan, and the U.S. architecture crumbled. Therefore, rather than eliminating security threats and ensuring the safety of the region, Western foreign policy facilitated the security threat’s easy return to power. The underlying logic had been embedded in the Cold War architecture; it handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban and created opportunities for the return of Middle Eastern authoritarianism. 

Additionally, the 2011 Arab Spring highlighted the same fragility of the Cold War architecture. Across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen, populations revolted against the authoritarian partners Washington had sustained for decades, revealing that the stability purchased was merely surface compliance. Western security partnerships suppressed legitimate political life so thoroughly that no democratic alternatives existed when the moment demanded them. For example, NATO’s air campaign dismantled Qaddafi’s government in Libya within months. However, the following decade produced militia groups and increased weapons flow into the Sahel that aided military coups in Mali and Niger. ISIS seized a foothold within four years of NATO’s intervention in the absence of a legitimate government. Western governments and systems never considered building legitimacy because doing so would have required acknowledging that removing a regime was not enough. To date, no Western power is willing to consider what would replace a military campaign and prevent radicalization from occurring again; that would go against decades of a foreign policy architecture built on opposing principles. 

Present Day: Democracy as an Instrument 

After 9/11, the strategy for the Middle East recentered around democracy promotion, aiming to prevent radicalization that would become terrorism and other security threats. This promise’s credibility failed to survive the 2006 Palestinian elections. The United States had pressed Palestinians toward the ballot, but when Hamas won, Washington refused to recognize the result, imposing an economic embargo and coordinating the isolation of Gaza instead. Although the U.S. outwardly promoted democratic transition, it balked at the first signs of popular rule. It was not democracy that the U.S. sought but strategic partnerships that bolstered its interests and control, permanently delegitimizing democratic aspiration itself and reinforcing its association in Arab political culture with imposition rather than with a valuable commitment.  

The Obama administration only confirmed this pattern. In 2012, Egypt held its first free presidential election since Mubarak’s fall, and Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi won it fairly, an outcome the U.S.’s democracy promotion agenda was supposed to produce. However, when the Egyptian military removed President Morsi in 2013 in a military coup led by General el-Sisi, Washington acquiesced and restored security assistance to the military government that same year. The Obama administration treated the new regime exactly as it had Mubarak’s—as a partner worth funding regardless of how it had come to power or how it planned to rule. Egypt was proof of the rule that has held steady across seventy years of American foreign policy: whatever human rights standards or democratic conditions Washington claims to apply to its aid and support, those standards disappear when the recipient is judged strategically valuable.

The same spring, the Saudi army entered Bahrain to help crush the Pearl Roundabout uprising, using military equipment the United States had supplied. Again, the Obama administration was publicly voicing support for Arab democratic aspirations, but no diplomatic consequences of any kind were imposed on Riyadh (the capital of Saudi Arabia). Taken together, these decisions communicated to governments across the Middle East that strategic alignment offered protection from Western democratic pressures, and to their populations organizing around democratic aspirations that when proved inconvenient, their efforts would be overridden. That message has proved far more durable than the democratic doctrine itself and has insulated the region’s authoritarian governments against the reforms that might have produced genuine stability. 

The Gaza War accelerated these foundational problems. As the United States continued arms transfers to Israel and repeatedly blocked UN Security Council resolutions for ceasefires, governments across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia confronted the gap between Washington’s invocations and its conduct globally. More than 50 countries supported South Africa’s genocide case before the International Court of Justice, and the Court ruled in January 2024 that the allegations were serious enough to proceed. The level of international support signaled how many governments had grown frustrated with U.S. promises. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, three of Washington’s oldest security partners in the region, responded to that same frustration by joining the BRICS framework in 2024, reflecting a broader diversification strategy in the Middle East away from Western-led institutions they no longer fully trusted.

Toward a Legitimate Security Architecture 

Recovering Western credibility in the Middle East requires accepting a conclusion that decades of policy have resisted: security cannot be purchased through partnerships that substitute elite compliance for political legitimacy. The evidence has accumulated since 1979, when the Shah’s Iran, Washington’s most carefully cultivated regional partner, collapsed under the weight of the political exclusion it was funded to enforce, and the pattern has repeated with sufficient regularity to constitute a structural issue. 

Thus, three specific reforms follow. First, governance benchmarks applied to American assistance must hold universally and without exception. The several billion in annual military aid to Israel must be subject to the same human rights conditions applied to other aid recipients, with consistent consequences for violations rather than strategic exemptions granted to valued partners. If the State Department’s human rights bureau documents a violation, the specific weapons-system implications should be suspended immediately, as the existing Leahy Law already requires for every other country receiving American arms, rather than waived through political “strategic” exemptions. 

Second, NATO must invest in multilateral legitimacy with the same political will it has devoted to military capacity, though it is worth being honest about how hard this actually is. Genuine UN Security Council reform—the reform that limits veto powers of China and Russia—is close to impossible, as no permanent member has ever had an incentive to surrender such leverage. Thus, a more realistic path runs through pressure, such as reviving the General Assembly’s existing power to demand that any Security Council veto be publicly explained and voted on, alongside funding middle power coalitions, such as the Arab League’s and African Union’s, security capacity as equal partners and defending ICC jurisdiction consistently. 

Third, Western governments must address the political economies generating instability as a core priority. Following the Marshall Plan’s precedent, stability is not produced by military guarantees but by economic investment in human development, literacy, and access to healthcare. Gulf infrastructure deals and energy partnerships have long optimized for GDP growth whilst leaving ordinary citizens no better off and allowing radicalization and uprisings to form.

The Beijing deal exposed the insecurity and fragility that the West’s contradictory policies had produced, accumulated across a long history of choosing transactional relationships over the political investments that might have made them unnecessary, until the countries on the receiving end eventually found ways around them. Thus, reducing insecurity demands reckoning with the distance between the orders Western security claims to support and the ones that have consistently been delivered, with the Middle East serving as a warning of the cost of continuing to ignore it. 

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Bryce Noh is a senior at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose, California, intending to study international relations in college, specifically security studies and counterterrorism. He currently interns at the Cornell International Affairs Review student journal, alongside International Policy Digest, and reports on major current events and their implications for global security. Besides school, he likes to participate in mock trials, having competed at national and world championships, and sail with his dad.