How the U.S. Keeps Getting Played By Its Bad Clients

Our own leaders have deceived themselves into believing that these relationships are critically important to the U.S. when they are at best dead weight and at worst serious liabilities.

Thanassis Cambanis notes the incoherence of Biden’s policies in the Middle East, and he expects the president will come away from his trip with nothing:

Biden wrote in his op-ed that with regards to Saudi Arabia, he has sought to “reorient—but not rupture—relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years.” That is wishful thinking. A superpower cannot reorient its relationship to a powerful junior partner unless it is willing to risk rupture. Biden’s junior partners clearly recognize that he isn’t serious about changing the nature of the bargain. Thus, they appear willing and able to wait him out, offering no major compromise and surrendering nothing of importance.

U.S. clients in the region have learned over the decades that they can manipulate policymakers in Washington fairly easily by complaining about supposed American neglect and disengagement. Many of our political leaders have internalized the idea that the U.S. needs these clients more than they need the U.S., and so our leaders are quick to placate unhappy clients by becoming even more accommodating and giving them more support than before. Of course, this gives the clients an incentive to be perpetually dissatisfied with whatever level of support they receive in the hopes of gaining more. The whiny client always gets “reassured.”

Not satisfied with Trump’s blank check approach, the Saudis and the UAE now want formal security guarantees, and there is some reason to think that Biden may be prepared to give them what they want. This would be a colossal blunder, but it would be consistent with decades of indulging bad clients at the expense of U.S. interests. The habit of always giving in to whining clients puts an American president in the position of being accused of “abandoning” the clients if he decides to say no even once, and so it becomes easier for any president, especially one inclined to take the path of least resistance, to keep caving and handing out favors.

It seemed as if Saudi Arabia and the UAE might have gone too far by hedging their responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and by continuing to cultivate closer ties with Moscow, but that moment quickly passed. All it took to turn things around was a brief media campaign by pro-Saudi and pro-UAE advocates to cement the conventional wisdom that any rifts in the relationships were somehow Biden’s fault and it was up to Biden to fix them. Add to this Brett McGurk’s efforts to repair fraying ties, and you end up with Biden going on an ill-advised visit to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and other client governments have become used to expecting the U.S. to come running when they call because our own leaders have deceived themselves into believing that these relationships are critically important to the U.S. when they are at best dead weight and at worst serious liabilities. The U.S. keeps getting played by these governments because it falls for the same con every time.

The U.S. would be much better off if its special relationships with these states came to an end. That wouldn’t require a complete break, but it would mean that the former clients would come to understand that the U.S. isn’t going to race to defend them from problems of their making. Instead of the automatic and unconditional support they have become accustomed to, they wouldn’t be able to expect any special favors, military assistance, or diplomatic cover at the U.N. All of that would be gone. They could go begging to other would-be patrons, but they might find that other major powers aren’t as gullible or eager to please as our government was. The clients stand to lose much more from a rupture than the U.S. does, and the U.S. would ultimately benefit from ridding itself of these entanglements.

Perhaps it will take a generational change in leadership before U.S. policymakers begin to realize how little these clients do to advance American security interests. Political leaders that still see these relationships through lenses of the Cold War or the “war on terror” will tend to overrate their importance because they continue to overrate how important the Middle East is to U.S. vital interests. The U.S. doesn’t need to be as deeply enmeshed in the affairs of the region as it has been for the last thirty years, and our government’s militarized involvement in the region has been very bad for our country and for the countries affected by it.

The U.S. is clearly far too overcommitted in the region as it is, and adding any new commitments would be a major mistake. The U.S. should be looking for ways to extricate itself from these undesirable client arrangements as soon as possible rather than cooking up new excuses to expand and deepen them. Biden’s trip and his policies to date have been taking the U.S. in the wrong direction, and it seems unlikely that he is going to change course anytime soon. It will be up to one of his successors to disentangle the U.S. from the region.