Bury the Terrible Saudi-Israeli Deal
Bribing a despot with a security pact to give diplomatic recognition to an apartheid state is among the very worst ideas to come out of Washington in at least twenty years.
Frederic Wehrey and Jennifer Kavanagh warn the next administration against continuing with Biden’s bizarre obsession with a Saudi-Israeli deal:
The single-minded pursuit of this bad deal has also blinded U.S. policymakers to other, more important drivers of conflict in the region, and it has caused the United States to delay efforts to ramp up pressure on Israel to end its war in Gaza. The next U.S. president should therefore jettison the proposed accord and focus Middle East policy instead on the economic and social issues most important to the region.
The proposed deal has never made sense for the United States. Bribing a despot with a security pact to give diplomatic recognition to an apartheid state is among the very worst ideas to come out of Washington in at least twenty years, and there has been plenty of competition. As many critics have pointed out over the last sixteen months, it would reinforce everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, solve no important problems, and probably make regional war more likely. Americans should never be asked to fight and die for the war criminals in Riyadh under any circumstances, and certainly not just so that they can open an embassy in Israel. The right thing to do is to bury the idea and never talk about it again.
Starting off a new presidential term with such a toxic policy idea wouldn’t be good for the incoming administration, either. No matter who wins in the fall, any president trying to push this deal through would waste a lot of time and political capital on advancing an agreement that increases the burden on the U.S. without offering any discernible benefits. It would be a contentious battle, and a Saudi defense pact would likely go down in flames in the Senate. It would be a hard sell for Harris or Trump to explain to the American people why the U.S. should be permanently locked into going to war to protect the Saudis to benefit the temporary political fortunes of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Wehrey and Kavanagh do a good job explaining why the U.S. wouldn’t benefit from a Saudi pact. It does nothing to curb Chinese influence. It would be of little military value, and it would further entangle the U.S. in the region. The key point is that Saudi Arabia is a liabilty and not an asset, so binding our country more closely with theirs just exacerbates all the current problems with the relationship.
It is a measure of the Biden administration’s diplomatic ineptitude and bad judgment that pursuing the Saudi-Israeli deal has been one of their top priorities in the region for more than a year. The administration and the Israeli government have been promoting this hare-brained scheme since at least the spring of 2023, and it has only become more ridiculous and since the start of the war in Gaza. The Saudis have been happy to play along because they stand to receive huge benefits in exchange for very little, but the war has made it much more difficult for them to be seen drawing closer to a government while it commits genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The ideal U.S. approach would involve distancing our government from both Israel and Saudi Arabia as much as possible. Neither relationship has been good for the U.S. for at least the last thirty years. Both states are liabilities. U.S. support for these states implicates our government in their crimes, it exposes us to attacks from their enemies, and it risks drawing our country into the conflicts they choose to fight. Backing these clients has been bad for regional peace and stability, and a future administration should be working overtime to extricate the U.S. from these bad arrangements. We all know that won’t happen anytime soon, but it is what needs to happen if the U.S. is going to have a better, less destructive foreign policy in this part of the world.
The only thing that will happen is that the Saudis will raise the price they charge for formally selling out Palestine.
The deal will get done, cost to the United States be damned.
The "Saudi-Israeli Deal" is just the latest misbegotten attempt by a US president to "bring peace to the Middle East." This, I think, is serious evidence of Biden's developing senility, though his "advisors" lack even that excuse.
American presidents almost always screw up when they try to "do something great". FDR was "lucky" in that he was presented with two gigantic crises--the Great Depression and World War II--and managed--at least in appearance--to solve both of them, although he did not solve the Depression--he only made it endurable--until the War solved it for him. He did "solve" World War II to a great extent, and if he had only given up his compulsion to "normalize" communism and the Soviet Union--believing that he could trust them--he would have done an even better job. Reagan, of course, "solved" inflation and effectively killed off the "dream" of socialism, which was refuting itself with its own incompetence, and was smart enough to hold Gorbachev's hand as the USSR collapsed, stunning his neocon followers, who never could have imagined that Ronnie would ever get in bed with a commie and end their reason for existence, the Cold War. Yes, Ronnie was "lucky" too--he was dealt a good hand and he played it well.
No one else has come close to these two winners, though both Clinton and Obama deserve a lot more credit for handling the economy, particularly because the Republicans did everything they could to wreck things, the infamous "Tea Party" nihilists even going so far as trying to destroy the credit of the United States in their hope of destroying Obama. But Clinton wrecked a great deal by insisting on his "right" to misbehave, and Obama stupidly continued the Bush administration's policy of "regime change", costing Hillary Clinton the presidency with the Libya disaster.