The Middle East doesn’t care what the Biden administration has to say
Dominic Green
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The Biden administration intends to make a “diplomatic push for a Saudi-Israeli peace deal in the next six to seven months.” This would be the most complicated Mideast maneuver since Moses. Why the hurry?
According to the anonymous “U.S. officials” who briefed Axios on the story, the White House wants to pull off a peace treaty “before the presidential election campaign consumes President Biden’s agenda.” It was loyal of these unknown soldiers not to mention the recent China-sponsored reconciliation between the Saudis and Iran. This has forced President Joe Biden into a 180-degree policy turn. As his previous policy was a 180-degree turn from former President Donald Trump’s, the administration now finds itself back where it started, only with much less credibility.
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This administration’s Middle East policy started out as a vendetta. This was sold as realism because revenge is to the politics of the Middle East as sanctimony is to the European Union. But the Democrats have picked the wrong targets for the wrong motives. Enchanted by their domestic self-image as moral crusaders, they have exported their childish Manicheanism into the grown-up shades-of-gray wilds of foreign policy. They turned on America’s friends but failed to convert its enemies. They reversed Clausewitz’s doctrine that “war is the continuation of policy with other means.” Instead, foreign policy has become the continuation of the domestic culture war.
This has been going on for some time. First with Israel, then with Egypt, then with Saudi Arabia. In all three cases, the Democrats punished allies for doing exactly what their American friends had asked. In the ’90s, the Clinton administration pressured the Israelis to make a deal with Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization. But when Arafat launched a war of suicide bombers, the U.S. negotiators led the chorus blaming Israel for defending itself, and the Democratic Left called for sanctions.
In 2007, the Bush II administration pushed for elections in Gaza despite Israeli warnings that a Hamas victory would lead to Iranian-sponsored rocket attacks on Israeli towns. When that happened, and it keeps happening, the Democrats again led the chorus of complaints.
In 2011, the Obama administration backed the Egyptian opposition against the reliable American client Hosni Mubarak despite warnings that the only organized opposition was the Muslim Brotherhood. A year later, Mohamed Morsi of the profoundly anti-American Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential elections. Domestic and diplomatic chaos ensued. When Abdel Fattah el Sisi restored the Mubarak-style autocracy and with it the American-Egyptian alliance that has been a cornerstone of U.S. regional policy since 1978, the Democrats bleated about human rights and put Egypt on the naughty step next to Israel.
The Obama administration downgraded the Saudis, along with Israel and Egypt, as part of its mad campaign to turn the Islamist regime in Iran into America’s nuclear policeman. As the Saudis are well connected inside the Beltway, it was necessary to degrade their image, even if they were finally starting the liberalization that the Democrats had long demanded. Perhaps one day, we will learn how the Saudi-born Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi obtained a U.S. visa, how he became a columnist at the Washington Post overnight, and how, strangest of all, his columns appear to have been written by someone in the Qatari Embassy.
Khashoggi’s murder was worse than a crime. It was a blunder. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stepped into the Democrats’ human rights trap. The Democrats jawed away, but it was too late. The Obama-era assault on America’s relationships had already achieved the impossible by accident. The Iran deal of 2015 really had produced a regional dividend. It forced the Sunni autocracies of the Gulf into a defensive huddle with Israel, and that led to the Abraham Accords. This was a breakthrough the Democrats had always wanted, but as it happened under Trump, they did not want it.
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Biden’s campaign promises in 2020 included making Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and reviving the Iran deal. Instead, a spike in energy prices had him begging the crown prince to turn on the oil pumps. The Saudis refused. The Iranians rejected the State Department’s increasingly desperate offers. Everyone — the Israelis, the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians — responded to the Democrats’ meddling and moralizing by turning to China. In April, Turkey’s interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said it out loud: “Nobody cares about what the U.S. president has to say about Turkey.”
The White House wants to revive the Israeli-Arab diplomacy that it has attacked for three years. It has openly reviled the crown prince and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and now it expects them to bail it out in time for the 2024 elections. The Democrats’ folly has raised the price the United States will pay to underwrite Saudi-Israeli normalization but reduced its value. A peace treaty will not restore American authority over the Middle East. It will smooth the region’s transition into a Chinese-run order.