WASHINGTON, December 16. /TASS/. The US administration seeks to reframe Washington's role in recent events in the Middle East as a success, The Washington Post (WP) reported.

The White House is capitalizing on the change of power in Syria to defend its often-criticized policy in the Middle East, arguing that "President Joe Biden’s staunch support" of Israel and "his approach to the region" played an important role in the recent developments in Syria, the WP stated.

Against this backdrop, more and more US Democrats view Biden's Middle East strategy as a "significant foreign policy failure," including his handling of Israel's war in Gaza and the humanitarian disaster in the enclave, the newspaper highlighted.

Middle East experts interviewed by the WP agreed that the US administration is "assigns too much credit" for events, which were largely driven by the actions of regional players. "To me, in several places, it [the US role in Middle East politics] is kind of exaggerated, and it certainly [Washington] misses the boat on one part of the Middle East, which is the horrific humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked on Middle East issues in the Clinton administration. "That is a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions, and the Biden administration has really done nothing to stop it when it had all the means in the world to do so," the WP quoted Riedel as saying.

According to the newspaper, many analysts also believe that any claims of credit by the US administration may be "premature" and that it is far too early to make optimistic predictions about the future of the Middle East.

"A lot of the events in the Middle East over the last year were mostly driven by actors in the region, mainly Israel and Iran and Iran’s partners," the WP quoted Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute, as saying.

In his view, exaggerating the US role in Middle East politics is "like the rooster taking credit for the dawn."

The Situation in the Middle East

On November 27, Syria’s armed opposition launched a large-scale offensive against government forces in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. By the evening of December 7, President Bashar Assad’s opponents had seized several major cities, including Aleppo, Hama, Daraa, and Homs. On December 8, they entered Damascus, forcing the army to withdraw from the capital. Assad resigned and left the country. On December 10, Mohammed al-Bashir, who had led the so-called Syrian Salvation Government in the Idlib Province since January 2024, announced his appointment as head of Syria’s interim government until March 1, 2025.

Another crisis in the Middle East unfolded on October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip-based radical Palestinian movement Hamas staged a surprise attack on Israeli territory from Gaza, killing residents of Israeli border settlements and taking hostages, many of whom have yet to be released. In response, Israel launched a military operation in Gaza with the aim of destroying the military and political structure of Hamas and freeing all those kidnapped. According to the United Nations, at least 44,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed since the Israeli hostilities began in the enclave in October 2023.