US leaving oil-for-security approach, not Middle East: Envoy Tom Barrack

US diplomat Tom Barrack questions Washington’s decades of intervention in the region as Qatar says negotiations to end the war on Iran are continuing. Save Share Doha, Qatar —The United States is moving away from its traditional security-for-oil relationship with the Middle East and no longer seeks to dominate the region, senior US diplomat Tom Barrack has said. However, it was not abandoning the Middle East, he added, speaking at theGlobal Security Forumin Doha on Tuesday — but rather reassessing its role, after years of attempts to reshape governments across the region. “The US no longer wants to own,” said Barrack, who serves as US Ambassador to Turkiye and Special Envoy for Syria. “The bargain is not to control, but to not leave. We’re not leaving.” Barrack acknowledged that regional countries were increasingly recognising the limits of US involvement. “Everybody is saying: OK, I can’t rely on America to solve all my problems,” he said. Barrack questioned the effectiveness of previous interventions, saying that the US had been involved in 23 regime changes across the wider Middle East. “Every time we try and intervene, change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake,” he said. His comments come as Washington and Tehran try to negotiate an end to the US-Israeli war on Iran that has destabilised the region and disrupted global energy supplies. Political analyst Luciano Zaccara described Barrack as probably “the most realistic of Trump’s allies” in his assessment of US involvement in the Middle East. He told Al Jazeera that Barrack had effectively acknowledged that regime change, one of Trump’s stated objectives in the war on Iran, was unlikely to succeed. Zaccara said Barrack’s reference to regime changes in the Middle East was an acknowledgement “that what the US has been doing in the region has not been working, regardless of which administration it was”. According to Zaccara, Barrack had stopped just short of suggesting that Trump needed to retreat from “the maximalist demands” he had made of Iran. Qatar says negotiations between Tehran and Washington are continuing despite growing fears of renewed fighting. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Majed al-Ansari, speaking separately at the Global Security Forum, said mediators were continuing to exchange messages between the warring parties, with regional partners involved in efforts to reach a deal....