From Hargeisa, an engineer and political analyst named Abdi Ali Barkad is asking whether five decades of American engagement in the Middle East have been shaped less by security imperatives than by the economic logic of destruction and reconstruction — a cycle in which conflict generates contracts, and instability becomes a renewable resource. What troubles him most is not the moral weight of that argument, but its obsolescence: China, the EU, and others have claimed the reconstruction economy, leaving the United States with the costs of the strategy but none of its former rewards. He calls on