Biden Caters to Autocrats and Draws Battle Lines in the Middle East
By Robin Wright - July 16, 2022
When
Joe Biden took office, eighteen months ago, he intended to extricate
the United States from two decades of messy wars, even if it meant
abruptly abandoning allies and leaving thousands of Gold Star families
with nothing to show for their losses. But this week, on his first
Presidential trip to the Middle East, the President declared that
America was willing to use its military might again—this time, against
Iran. He also laid the groundwork for a coalition of long-standing
rivals—including Israel and key Arab nations—to help. He drew new battle
lines.
In Israel on Thursday, Biden and Prime Minister Yair
Lapid signed the Jerusalem Declaration, which commits each country to
“use all elements of its national power” to prevent Iran from getting a
nuclear weapon. Biden vowed to work with Israel and “other partners” to
confront the Islamic republic’s aggression and counter the
“destabilizing activities” of its regional network of proxies. “I
continue to believe that diplomacy is the best way,” Biden said.
Yet
fifteen months of indirect talks with Iran to revive the nuclear deal
that was brokered, in 2015, by the world’s six major powers have
deadlocked. (President Donald Trump abandoned it, in 2018.) And new
flash points have recently emerged. Before the trip, Biden’s
national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, charged that Iran was set to
provide hundreds of drones to Russia—and train Russian forces to use
them—for the war in Ukraine, at a time when Washington is giving Kyiv
billions in arms and aid. (Vladimir Putin is due to visit Iran on
Tuesday, only his second known trip outside Russia since he invaded
Ukraine, in February.) On Friday, Tehran unveiled armed drones on its
warships in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S.’s Fifth Fleet is based.
Twenty per cent of the global oil supply passes through the Gulf.
Iranian media reported that the drone deployment was a “welcome to
Biden.”
On Israeli television, Biden rejected Tehran’s demand for
the U.S. to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its list
of terrorist groups, one of the main outstanding issues in the nuclear
talks. Trump had put the Revolutionary Guard on the list, an act the
U.S. has never taken toward another country’s armed forces. His
designation was meaningless in practical terms—the Revolutionary Guard
and many of its leaders were already heavily sanctioned for missile
proliferation, supporting terrorism, and human-rights abuses. None of
those sanctions would be lifted if the deal is revived. But delisting
the I.R.G.C. now is politically untenable in Washington. Biden was also
pressed on whether he was willing to use military force against Iran.
“Yes, as a last resort,” he replied. Iran is “closer to a nuclear weapon
now” than ever, he noted. The United Nations estimates that Iran may be
just days away from enriching enough uranium to fuel a bomb, although
other time-consuming steps are required to build a weapon and marry it
to a delivery system. “Time has run out” for reviving the nuclear deal, a
senior Israeli official said this week. At his press conference with
Biden, Lapid warned, “Words will not stop them. Diplomacy will not stop
them. The only thing that will stop Iran is knowing that if they
continue to develop their nuclear program that the free world will use
force.”
The long-simmering confrontation between Washington and
Tehran, dating back to the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and dozens of
American hostages, in 1979, has evolved again into a tangible crisis.
Shortly after the Jerusalem Declaration was released, Bruce Riedel, a
former C.I.A., Pentagon, and National Security Council staffer, e-mailed
me, “We are committed to war with Iran.”
Iran lashed back
quickly. “The great nation of Iran will not accept any insecurity or
crisis in the region,” President Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line critic of
U.S. policy, said, on Thursday. “Washington and its allies should know
that any mistake will be met by a harsh and regrettable response from
Iran.” In a tweet, the Foreign Ministry warned that the Middle East
would not experience “peace, stability and calm” as long as Israel
remained an American President’s first stop and its security America’s
top priority.
Biden’s trip has taken U.S. policy and the Middle
East in a “much more dangerous direction,” Riedel told me later. Both
are now on a “slippery slope.” A war with Iran would be “three or four
times bigger and more deadly than a war with Iraq,” he warned. “It will
make everything else that we’ve done in the Middle East look like a
kindergarten party.”
The four-day trip has highlighted Biden’s
policy failures in the Middle East, especially after his triumphant
European tour, last month, to expand NATO and mobilize the West against
Putin. The United States, long considered the most viable broker of
peace in the Middle East, made little progress resetting relations with
the Palestinians, which tanked under Trump. “I do believe that in this
moment, when Israel is improving relations with its neighbors throughout
the region, we can harness that same momentum to reinvigorate the peace
process between the Palestinian people and the Israelis,” Biden said,
at a meeting in Bethlehem with President Mahmoud Abbas, on Friday. There
was little movement, however, on either the process or substance of
peace.
Biden would not even take concrete steps to reopen the
U.S. consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem, which was closed by Trump,
in 2019, or the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in
Washington. The divide was sufficiently deep that Biden and Abbas could
not issue a joint statement. The peace process is virtually dead. He did
promise a hundred million dollars in aid for Palestinian hospitals in
East Jerusalem, subject to congressional approval. A nurse in the
pediatric intensive-care unit of one of the hospitals interrupted
Biden’s aid announcement. “Thank you for your support, but we need more
justice, more dignity,” she said.
On his final stop, in Jeddah,
Biden held talks with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The
C.I.A. has concluded that M.B.S., as he’s popularly known, authorized
the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and columnist for the
Washington Post, in 2018. Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul to get documents to legalize his impending marriage. “Khashoggi
was, in fact, murdered and dismembered—and, I believe, on the orders of
the crown prince,” Biden declared, at a Presidential debate, during the
2020 campaign. He called Saudi Arabia’s current government a “pariah”
with “little” redeeming value. He vowed to make the Saudis “pay the
price.” Khashoggi’s body has still not been recovered.
In an open
letter to Biden, published in the Post, Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice
Cengiz, implored him to cancel the visit. She had waited for Khashoggi
outside the consulate as he was suffocated and his body was sawed into
pieces. “The details of the suffering he endured have haunted me,” she
wrote. She was horrified that Khashoggi’s killers “roamed free” as the
U.S. funneled billions of dollars in military equipment to the Saudi
government. The trip “represents not just an unprecedented capitulation
to M.B.S.’s reckless, unaccountable rule but an unprecedented doubling
down on support for the autocrats of the region, gifting them with a
security agreement that no U.S. Administration has ever committed to in
the past,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of dawn, a
pro-democracy group founded by Khashoggi, told me. (On Friday, Biden
said that he confronted M.B.S. about the killing.)
Biden’s
motivation for the trip was partly to lobby oil-rich countries to
alleviate the global energy crisis and bring down prices. In Jeddah, the
President met with leaders of the six Gulf sheikhdoms and Iraq, which
together pump millions of barrels of oil every day, plus Jordan and
Egypt. In reality, even these mega-producers may not be able to do much.
“No gusher is likely to follow, because there does not appear to be a
large amount of extra oil in Saudi Arabia (or in the United Arab
Emirates) that can be produced on short notice,” Daniel Yergin, an
energy specialist and author of “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the
Clash of Nations,” wrote this week. “Meanwhile, many other oil-exporting
countries cannot even return to their previous levels of production,
owing to a lack of investment and maintenance since the pandemic.”
Americans and Europeans shouldn’t expect a significant change in prices
or supply any time soon.
Biden also sought to deepen budding ties
between Israel and the Arab world, which made major headway under the
Trump Administration, when the U.A.E, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan
established diplomatic relations with Israel. Biden won only small
concessions. The Saudis agreed to allow all international carriers
flying to and from Israel to use their airspace. (Air Force One set the
example, by flying directly from Jerusalem to Jeddah, on Friday.) The
gap—between a predominantly Jewish democracy and an autocratic monarchy
that calls itself the guardian of two of Islam’s holiest sites—is still
deep. And, to some critics, the links have few benefits. “A new alliance
between a Sunni tyrant and Israel is going to increase conflict and
encourage reckless behavior, while only increasing Iran’s belief that
nuclear weapons are its only security against this new alliance,”
Whitson told me.
Biden’s trip has solidified the shifting sands
in the Middle East. For more than a half century, the region was
singularly defined by the Arab-Israeli dispute. The goals, the
alliances, the flash points, and the battle lines have all changed.
Foreign policy inevitably evolves. Diplomacy is often overtaken by
events on the ground. But Biden’s actions in the region may also have
unwanted consequences. “Shaking the hand of a murderer is bad,” Riedel
told me, “but going to war with Iran is insanity.”