Those words open the lead essay of the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, published online Aug. 18. What is notable is where the assessment is appearing, and how little of the usual defense of American policy it contains.

The war, Marc Lynch writes, “has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence.” Washington’s inability “to protect its Gulf allies from Iranian attacks or to keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally undermined the core security bargain that justified its network of military bases in the region.” Within weeks, he writes, Iran “managed to damage, destroy, or render irrelevant large parts of the archipelago of military bases that had underwritten American primacy.”

The war’s architects “vastly exaggerated what military power could achieve, underestimated the capacity of adversaries to adapt, took for granted that allies would fall in line, and callously disregarded the lives of ordinary people.”

Two statements notable for their appearance in Foreign Affairs:

“For most people, the U.S. order meant only violence, hopelessness, and deprivation.”

And: “By nearly every economic, political, and developmental indicator, the Middle East under American domination has performed far worse than any other region.”

Lynch adds that American support for “neoliberal economic reforms encouraged those regimes to pursue privatization schemes that turbocharged elite corruption while impoverishing the majority of the population.” He observes that Washington “was gambling with its partners’ futures” when it struck Iranian water facilities, since retaliation in kind could have left Gulf states “uninhabitable.” And in a line that will outlast the essay: “Washington struggles to conceive of a Middle East it does not dominate.”

Lynch’s proposals? Not development, but intelligence sharing, missile defense, human rights, and democratic reform. The same issue carries Michael Fuchs on why “America Must Let Go of the Middle East” and Bajoghli and Nasr on “Iran’s New Grand Strategy.”

While the CFR has published a diagnosis, the cure—an Extended Oasis Plan—eludes them.