Let’s be clear: American foreign policy in the Middle East is, at this point, so incoherent that comparing it to Disney’s recent creative decisions is actually an insult to Disney. At least Disney can pretend they know what they’re doing. U.S. policymakers can’t even manage that. And this isn’t a one-administration problem. This is systemic. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump—pick any president you want, and you’ll find a foreign policy strategy that looks like it was assembled five minutes before airtime.

Now, the most recent example: the White House hosting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This is the same Saudi Arabia that, despite all the diplomatic niceties, continues to be one of the top sources of private-sector terrorist financing. Yes, they tightened regulations. Yes, FATF gave them a passing grade on 21 out of 40 recommendations. But here’s the problem: the bulk of extremist financing doesn’t run through the formal banking system. It runs through cash couriers and hawala networks—informal systems that are specifically designed to avoid oversight. So while the Saudi government cracks down on big transfers, the small ones—the ones that are cheap, easy, and used for modern terror operations—continue flowing. Translation: we have no real idea how much private Saudi money is still funding Sunni extremist groups. But all available evidence suggests the answer is “a lot.”

Meanwhile, the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia has not magically improved because the Crown Prince let women drive. That’s the media narrative, but let’s look at the numbers: 1,336 executions during King Salman’s rule, with 197 in 2024 alone—the highest number ever recorded in one year. That includes people executed for drug offenses and activists sentenced to multi-decade prison terms for tweets. And of course, we cannot forget the 2018 arrests and alleged torture of women’s rights activists—people who advocated for the very reforms MBS now brags about—and the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. So yes, some superficial social reforms have taken place. But those reforms coexist with a crackdown so severe it makes the term “authoritarian” look like an understatement.

But wait—it gets better. Because this week, the White House also welcomed the new Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa. Now, who is Ahmed al-Sharaa? Until a few months ago, he was a senior leader in Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham—a group the U.S. officially designated as a terrorist organization. Not in 1998. Not in 2003. Recently. And between 2014 and 2025, the U.S. and its coalition partners spent years conducting targeted airstrikes on this very group and its predecessors. Hundreds of fighters killed. High-value targets eliminated. Entire external operations cells dismantled. And it is entirely plausible—likely, even—that al-Sharaa himself was on a U.S. kill list at some point. Yet now he’s being treated as a legitimate head of state, complete with the White House photo op.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that American foreign policy no longer has a moral framework. It doesn’t have a strategic framework. It doesn’t even have a consistent framework. It is entirely transactional. With Saudi Arabia, we want stable oil markets and regional normalization, so we ignore the executions and the repression. With Syria, we want fragile cooperation against remnants of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, so we conveniently forget that the new president spent years inside an Al-Qaeda affiliate.

This sends one message to the entire world—our allies, our adversaries, and everyone in between: American commitments are unreliable, unserious, and subject to change based on whatever short-term political benefit Washington wants this week. That’s not strategy. That’s chaos with a flag pin.

And a foreign policy built on chaos doesn’t stabilize the Middle East—it destabilizes it further. Because when the United States stops acting like a consistent global actor, the vacuum gets filled by people who are absolutely consistent—just not in ways that benefit anyone who cares about freedom, security, or basic sanity.

That’s the reality. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make it go away.