"Welcome to the Muddle East" (CNN)

 

Even if U.S. and Iranian negotiators manage to meet the November 24 deadline for a nuclear agreement with Iran, America faces a very inconvenient reality in the Middle East: We're stuck in a kind of Middle East Bermuda Triangle where messy outcomes are more likely than neat solutions, and where ambiguity and uncertainty will rule over clarity and stability for years to come.

 

And we better get used to it.

 

Part of the problem, of course, is us. We sit thousands of miles away, in a protected cocoon with nonpredatory neighbors to our north and south and fish to our east and west -- what one historian brilliantly called our liquid assets. And while this physical detachment is a wondrous advantage, it has also given us a very skewed view of the world.

 

We may have freed ourselves from the dark forces of history and geography. But the rest of the world hasn't. Just ask the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Egyptians, Israelis or many others.

 

For a start, our skewed view contributes to our naivete because we no longer really understand the mentality of the small power who lives in the bad neighborhood on the knife's edge. It also explains our arrogance, because we really don't have to listen. Our margin for error is very wide given our size, power and protected status, which helps explain our idealism and why we somehow believe we can and should find those solutions.