That doesn’t sound like a tenable option, particularly when there’s real opportunity for these nations to have actual normalized relationships and be a counterbalance to Iran and China in the region.

A major world shipping lane goes through there, and of course, the area is also resource rich. I don’t foresee the US abdicating their stance as the guarantor of free trade; it would be geopolitically dangerous (and clueless) to do so.

What’s more, the author doesn’t address that the current foreign policy - up until recently, and may again still - worked pretty well for the west. Oil flowed and ships sailed. Incursions primarily stayed within the region. A perfectly ideal solution? Of course not, but utopias are exceptionally rare throughout history.

And yes, the headline is clickbait. It infers that the multi-decade US strategy is wrong, but then mentions in multiple instances, that the strategy hasn’t yet had a chance to play out due to foreign actors. Shouldn’t we fully test the experiment first before doing a 180 and snubbing our allies in the region?