| Sumario: | Unlike the United States, China is still reliant on the Middle East for energy, importing nearly half of its oil from the region.[12] The Middle East also provides critical sea and land links for China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). After decades of wars in the Middle East, growing great power competition, and changing priorities at home, there is much uncertainty about America's place in the world today. Continued crises, often related to Iran, and longstanding commitments to regional partners - combined with bureaucratic inertia and the interests of major defense contractors - could keep the United States tethered to the region for the foreseeable future, even if a growing number of policymakers in Washington would no longer like to be there.[1] Is the United States really leaving the Middle East? Regional states have also increased their own diplomatic and military activism to fill the perceived absence of an assertive US role.[3] A post-American Middle East, however, is not a Middle East without America.
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