Biden's Weird Saudi Obsession

Now the president is so desperate to get any foreign policy “win” that he is proposing locking the U.S. into a formal alliance with one of the world’s worst governments.

The Financial Times reports on how Saudi Arabia “won Biden back,” and it will come as no surprise that they didn’t have to do anything:

As relations tentatively improved, the Biden administration floated the idea of a grand deal for Saudi Arabia to normalise ties with Israel. The carrot for Riyadh, long irked by what it regards as US unpredictability and a perceived lack of commitment to the Gulf’s security, was a defence treaty similar to the one the US shares with Japan, and co-operation with its nascent civilian nuclear programme.

The U.S. has spent the last three and a half years cultivating closer ties with the Saudis while the Saudi government has done nothing to warrant a better relationship. It would be one thing if the Saudi government had made a concerted effort to improve ties by becoming a more reliable and useful partner, but this never happened. Mohammed bin Salman kept doing whatever he felt like doing, and the administration started falling all over itself to cater to his preferences. Now the president is so desperate to get any foreign policy “win” that he is proposing locking the U.S. into a formal alliance with one of the world’s worst governments. The Saudis didn’t need to win over Biden, as he was too busy chasing after them like a drunken suitor.

The administration hides behind “great power competition” as one of their excuses for cozying up to the crown prince, but Saudi ties with Russia and China have only become stronger during this period. It is silly to think that they are going to reduce or sever those ties in the future. Biden is so preoccupied with not “losing” the Saudis to other major powers that he is willing to offer them the moon in exchange for nothing. The U.S. shouldn’t be worried about “losing” Saudi Arabia. Indeed, we should wish for them to get lost.

It’s not as if closer relations with Riyadh have produced better outcomes inside Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, Saudi repression and human rights abuses have worsened. Saudi troops have repeatedly massacred refugees as they try to cross the frontier from Yemen. The Saudi government locks people away for years and even decades for the most harmless social media posts. If anyone gets in the way of the crown prince’s deranged building projects, they are killed.

Defenders of a closer relationship with Riyadh like to say that this isn’t the Saudi Arabia of twenty or thirty years ago, and thast’s true. The modern Saudi Arabia is arguably much worse with respect to its internal repression and its external troublemaking. This is the government that Biden wants to commit to defending with American soldiers and sailors. It would still be repugnant even if someone could point to some major strategic benefit that the U.S. gets from this arrangement, but there is no benefit to be had.

As for oil production, supposedly one of the main justifications for maintaining the relationship, the kingdom has predictably done whatever it wanted regardless of what the U.S. expected. Biden’s empty threat of “consequences” for double-crossing the administration on oil production commitments in 2022 has been typical of how the president manages relationships with unruly clients. The clients do whatever they like, the president feigns anger about it for a few minutes, and then he decides to accommodate the clients and offer them more benefits. The Saudis spit in Biden’s face, and he concluded that the right response was to look for new and unprecedented ways to reward them.

It is somehow fitting that a president who won’t stop talking about the need to defend democracy would spend so much of his remaining time and political capital trying to bind the U.S. more closely to a repressive authoritarian state. You couldn’t ask for a better example of the cynicism and bankruptcy of the Biden administration’s foreign policy than the president’s weird obsession with giving Saudi Arabia a binding security commitment. Most Americans don’t want the U.S. to make that commitment, and it serves no legitimate American interests to make it.