Biden's Push for a Bizarre, Bad Deal Continues

It looks very much like the horrible deal that many of us have been expecting and criticizing for the last several months.

Biden’s bizarre and wrongheaded push for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is getting a lot of coverage this week. The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal both published big stories about it today, and the reports agree on the general outlines of the deal that the administration has in mind. As expected, it would involve significant U.S. commitments to the Saudis on security guarantees and support for their nuclear program. In exchange, the Saudis are supposed to commit to limiting their relationship with China, but it is hard to see how the U.S. could enforce this part. In theory, there would also be Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, but since we know that this part is never happening I’m not sure why anyone is bothering to mention it. It looks very much like the horrible deal that many of us have been expecting and criticizing for the last several months.

Both reports emphasize how hard it would be to secure this agreement, so once again we have to wonder why Biden is wasting time, resources, and limited political capital on a deal that will be extremely difficult to get and wouldn’t be worth anything to the United States in any case. The China rivalry angle may account for some of it, but that doesn’t really explain the urgency of the effort. If it is meant to prove that the U.S. can still broker deals in the Middle East, it would require the U.S. to clear an absurdly high bar in order to “work.” If the administration fell short it would just confirm that the U.S. is inept at diplomacy.

It’s a high-risk, no-reward proposition that sets Biden up for a bruising fight with members of his own party, and in the event that Biden is successful the U.S. will just have more burdens to bear and nothing else to show for it. The political benefit to Biden himself would probably not be very great, either. Any deal he makes would require him to embrace a controversial Israeli coalition government filled with hardline zealots and a despotic Saudi war criminal. There aren’t any voters that will reward Biden at the polls for making a deal like this, and there are more than a few that will want to punish him for it. Biden is completely out of touch with the grassroots of his own party on these issues, and if he presses ahead with this plan it could end up costing him in the election next year.

It is instructive to contrast this major administration push for this Saudi-Israeli deal with the half-hearted and now abandoned effort to revive the nuclear deal with Iran. Compared with the deal that the Biden administration wants to get with the Saudis, the restoration of the nuclear deal would have been like a walk in the park. It was not nearly as challenging to reenter the JCPOA and end Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, but for whatever reason Biden and his people couldn’t manage to make the diplomatic equivalent of a lay-up. Now they are placing a big bet on being able to make a shot from the opposite end of the court.

Even the most effective diplomatic team would have a hard time balancing all the competing interests to get a deal like the one under discussion, and there is no evidence that this administration can pull off a diplomatic feat of this complexity. If the end result were worth having, making the effort might at least be understandable, but instead this just seems like a baffling waste of energy. The original nuclear deal negotiations involved considerable difficulty and political risk, too, but at least at the end of it the U.S. could point to a real accomplishment that served the interests of all sides. In brokering a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia at our expense, the U.S. just stands to get taken to the cleaners while two terrible governments reap the rewards.

A deal between Israel and the Saudis is sometimes referred to as the Holy Grail of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but that’s not true. It might be difficult to achieve, but it certainly isn’t going to grant anyone the political equivalent of eternal life. To borrow a line from The Last Crusade, just as the true grail will grant you life, the false grail will take it from you. Biden is rushing to grab the shiny false grail, and it isn’t going to work out any better for him than it did for Walter Donovan.