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 said at the Global Security Forum in Doha on Tuesday, Al Jazeera reported. It was not abandoning the Middle East, he added, but reassessing its role after years of attempts to reshape governments across the region.

"America as the guarantor to the world, for the last 80 years, it is no longer there," Barrack said, according to the Wall Street Journal and Middle East Eye reporting of the forum. "What's happening in this administration is not an abandonment. It's a message for realignment." He likened the shift to "raising a teenager" and said: "The US no longer wants to own. The bargain is not to control, but to not leave. We're not leaving."

Asked whether Gulf states could rely on the US security umbrella built after the Second World War, Barrack said no, Middle East Eye reported. The Wall Street Journal reported that he told nervous Gulf allies the United States cannot guarantee their security forever and that countries in the Middle East and elsewhere should focus on securing themselves through regional partnerships.

Barrack, who serves as US ambassador to Turkiye and President Donald Trump's special envoy for Syria and Iraq, also questioned past US interventions, saying 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.

The remarks matter well beyond the Gulf. Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain faced thousands of missile and drone strikes from Iran in retaliation for the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, according to the reporting — and lakhs of Punjabi and Indian workers live and work across the Gulf states, whose safety, jobs and remittances home depend on the region's security arrangements. If Washington's guarantee is no longer automatic, Gulf governments are already building regional partnerships of their own, as Qatar's separate defence-partnership announcements at the same forum showed.

Sources: Al Jazeera, October 20; Wall Street Journal via syndicated reporting, October 20; Middle East Eye via Hatha Alyoum, October 20.