The Cost of Blindly Supporting Clients

Blind support has not made Israel more secure, and it has brought nothing but misery and death to the people of Palestine.

Matt Duss discusses the collapse of Biden’s approach to the Middle East:

The past week saw the destruction of yet another dream palace: the Biden administration’s effort to reinforce a U.S.-dominated Middle East security architecture through closer defense pacts with the region’s various repressive governments. The point man for this has been the White House’s top Middle East policy hand, Brett McGurk, who has served in senior policy positions in every administration since George W. Bush’s, including as a legal advisor for the U.S occupation of Iraq.

It speaks volumes about how broken our foreign policy process is that Biden’s “dream palace” enjoyed broad support from members of both parties in Washington and received mostly favorable coverage in the press. There were some critics of Biden’s push for Saudi-Israeli normalization on both left and right, but there were far more that were either on board with the idea or were unwilling to say anything against it. It is no wonder that U.S. foreign policy fails and backfires as often as it does when absurd and unrealistic policies like this one enjoy broad support and encounter minimal opposition. This will keep happening as long as the U.S. remains wedded to an unnecessary and destructive pursuit of dominance in the region.

The push for normalization deals has been very popular with both “pro-Israel” hawks and with supporters of closer U.S. ties with authoritarian clients in the Persian Gulf. There is some significant overlap between those groups, and between the two they account for a large majority of the policymakers and pundits that work on foreign policy. The other thing they all tend to have in common is that they naturally favor entangling the U.S. in the region’s conflicts as long as possible, so a normalization deal that included a security guarantee for the Saudis seemed ideal to them.

Like practically every other policy that has enjoyed widespread backing in Washington, Biden’s normalization scheme was both morally and strategically bankrupt. It was catering to the interests of despots and hardliners at the expense of oppressed Palestinians, and it would have sold out U.S. interests for the benefit of bad client governments. It was built on rotten foundations laid by Trump and Kushner, because of the stupid incentives of partisanship Biden sought to outdo Trump by making a larger version of the same foolish agreement. It embodied practically everything that was wrong with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in its cynicism, short-sightedness, and indifference to the consequences for ordinary people.

The only silver lining to the current disaster is that it should finally kill off the ridiculous idea that the normalization deals between various authoritarian states and Israel had anything to do with promoting peace. The agreements facilitated by the Trump administration were designed to bypass the Palestinians, entrench the occupation, and hand out U.S. favors to the rulers that were willing to play ball. Biden wanted an even bigger version of these bad agreements with the Saudis, and he was in a bizarre rush to get a deal done in time for the election. Promising to give the Palestinians “some crumbs,” as Duss puts it, the U.S. and its clients imagined a future for the region in which apartheid and authoritarianism—secured by U.S. weapons and protection—would go on forever.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed wrote a scathing profile of McGurk last year that included several unflattering assessments from current and former officials. One comment is particularly relevant now:

“Here’s the brilliance of Brett: The problem he helped create, he comes up again and again as the person to fix it,” said one former official. “He torched the fucking house and then showed up with a firehose.”

That’s a good line about McGurk, but the truth is that it applies to the U.S. government as a whole. The U.S. has spent decades destabilizing and setting the Middle East on fire, and then it swoops in to “help” and “stabilize” the places that it is at least partly responsible for wrecking. Being both arsonist and firefighter would be bad enough, but to make matters worse the U.S. is exceptionally poor at performing the latter role.

Washington knows how to set fires, and it likes setting them, but when it comes to putting them out it usually doesn’t know what it’s doing. More often than not, the preferred solution to a raging fire in the region is to throw even more fuel on it on the stupid assumption that this will somehow cause it to burn out. That is how the Biden administration is responding to the war in Gaza, and because of that they are making it more likely that the conflict intensifies and spreads.

There are some people working in the government that can see that the Biden administration’s response to the conflict is wrong. One of them is Josh Paul, a State Department official who has resigned from his position in protest. He gave his reasons in a letter this week. Among other things, Paul said, “The fact is, blind support for one side is destructive in the long term to the interests of people on both sides.”

This seems undeniable in light of the events of the last two weeks. Blind support has not made Israel more secure, and it has brought nothing but misery and death to the people of Palestine. Blind support for the most hardline and aggressive Israeli policies is what led to the current disaster, and continued blind support will lead to more disasters in the weeks and months to come.