[pictureofabear]

This is not new. None of the Arab countries have ever fully aligned with the US. They routinely host Russia and China and buy their hardware. They will continue to host the US and buy its hardware as well.

A fundamental misunderstanding of the West is that these countries will, with time, align philosophically against the West's enemies. They are concerned with preservation of their regimes and their ways of life. They recognize that they have no foundational shared story with the West (religious or otherwise), and that without such shared origins and culture, Western people will not fight to save Arabs when resources get tight. So what do they do? Hedge their alliances so that they always have someone to turn to.

[hylaride]

The big difference is that there's now alternative peers to the US (economically and militarily) that didn't exist before. The Soviet Union was economically stagnant by the late 1960s and China and India were in self-imposed isolation to varying degrees. There was no other unified entity anywhere near as big and powerful.

While Russia is a paper tiger and it's military kit (mostly) second rate, China and India both now have a very large market for energy as well as a developing defence sector making modern kit (especially China).

Now we have the United States essentially throwing a hissy fit against everybody for every (perceived or real) "unfair" trade relationship now that they may actually need to compete again (while turning its back on it's one major superpower, the fact that it is/was a magnet for immigrants).

I do agree that the west, and especially America, can suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of other country's origins, culture, and governments. This is especially true of right-leaning political leaders who think everybody wants to be like the United States (which made those in the Bush Administration think Iraq would welcome them and misreading Saddam's vague statements about WMDs being more about derring Iran). "The west" has had a 2-300 year run at the top and that's made us complacent, I think.

(On a side note, it still remains to be seen how well China will fare in the medium to long term - centralization of power usually ends up meaning little problems fester into larger ones far more than more open societies where criticism can mean earlier awareness to deal with them...)

[alephnerd]

> None of the Arab countries have ever fully aligned with the US

That's patently false. The Gulf States have been aligned with the US for almost 90 years now.

The US's intervention in Iraq to protect Kuwait in 1991, to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2004 (the way Kim Jong Un is lampooned in American media is how Saddam is still lampooned in Saudi media [0]), our backing of Saudi-aligned Hariri in Lebanon, and various other foreign policy interventions and alignments in Western Asia were aligned with the Gulf States and vice versa.

The difference is,

1. Obama and later Biden decided to cut off American support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen

2. Trump was "convinced" by Rex Tillerson to stop Saudi and the UAE from invading Qatar and hoisting the Thani family with a construction crane.

This convinced all the Gulf States that US foreign policy can no longer be trusted, and they need to be like Qatar and build their own alliances with regional powers.

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/masameer/videos/%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81-...

[apercu]

OP did write "fully aligned".

The US is increasingly turning in to a religious state. Most of the Middle East are people who are part of a religion fundamentally in conflict with the religiosity of America and vice versa.

Ridiculous to me as I don't subscribe to any of this, but oh well.

[rayiner]

More fundamentally, the people in those places strongly oppose the U.S. regardless of the alliances of their government. They’re religious and hate the U.S. for supporting Israel. They hate the U.S. interventions in middle eastern affairs. They often have strong sympathies towards socialism and hate the U.S. opposition to socialism.

[rayiner]

The Pakistan-U.S. alliance was always bizarre to me. The whole subcontinent was always in the Soviet sphere of influence. And across the Arab world and south Asia, Islam is tightly linked to socialism.