Committing American
lives to defend
dictatorships is far more
scandalous than engaging
with MBS.
Trita Parsi
MSNBC
June 18, 2022
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/biden-s-saudia-arabia-trip-looks-it-ll-be-terrible-n1296410
All
the latest headlines about
President Joe
Biden’s July trip to Saudi
Arabia focus on a deal
to push down gas prices. In
reality, he is making a much
more sinister and dangerous
calculation than most realize:
He is reportedly planning to
offer the dictators in Saudi
Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates — where all but
two of the 9/11 terrorists
came from — a defense pact
that commits American lives to
defend their regimes. What
could go right?
When
Biden ran for the White House,
he pledged to break with
then-President Donald Trump’s
Middle East policy: bring U.S.
troops home from the Middle
East, renew the Iran nuclear
deal, end the war in Yemen,
and “make
the Saudis the pariah that
they are.” But after refusing
to take necessary steps
to return to the Iran deal,
and with rumors abounding that
he is about to offer
the UAE and Saudi Arabia a
defense pact, Biden’s
policy is increasingly looking
like a continuation of Trump’s
Middle East strategy.
Biden
isn't just
forgiving Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman for
his direct role in the
beheading of Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi in
return for a Saudi promise to
pump more oil. As Biden
admitted last week, this
Middle East trip is about
regional security — and that
of Israel in particular. “The
commitments from the Saudis
don’t relate to anything
having to do with energy,” Biden
told reporters June 12.
“It happens to be a larger
meeting taking place in Saudi
Arabia. That’s the reason I’m
going. And it has to do with
national security for them —
for Israelis.”
Rumors
have been circulating in
Washington for months that
Biden is seeking to expand
Trump’s signature foreign
policy initiative — the
Abraham Accords — which
normalized diplomatic
relations between Israel and
Bahrain and the UAE; Biden
wants to bring Saudi Arabia
into a similar kind of
arrangement with Israel.
Details are beginning to leak
of how he will try to get
Saudi Arabia to take critical
steps toward recognizing
Israel. And the most alarming
one is that the United States
is offering a major security
pact to the autocratic regimes
in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
According
to a source
close to the ruler of the
Emirates, this would be
a “binding strategic defense
cooperation pact” that goes
beyond anything the U.S. has
agreed to in the region
before. A former Biden
adviser, David Shapiro,
confirmed to Newsweek magazine
that Saudi Arabia was looking
for assurances that the U.S.
will "retain
significant military
presence in the region to
help Saudi Arabia address
the threats it faces from
Iran," as well as to
take Saudi Arabia’s side in
its gruesome war in Yemen.
Committing
American lives to defend these
Arab dictatorships is far more
scandalous than an
embarrassing presidential
handshake with the Saudi crown
prince. Biden will in one
swoop break his promises of
bringing troops home from the
Middle East, making Saudi
Arabia pay a price and ending
the war in Yemen.
And
arguably, Biden’s arms
sales-boosting defense pact is
the reason why he is breaking
his pledge to return to the
Iran deal as well, since that
would require delisting Iran's
Revolutionary Guard from the
U.S. terrorist list, which
would infuriate Israel and
Saudi Arabia and jeopardize
the defense pact.
For
the U.S., this amounts to an
awful deal. It's all give and
no take, because none of what
the Gulf states are offering
is likely to pan out.
To
start with, establishing full
diplomatic relations with
Israel is a concession to
Israel, not to the U.S. It
does not advance U.S. security
one iota. Nor does it bring
peace to Israel and Palestine,
or stability to the Middle
East, which the experience
thus far with the Abraham
Accords already has proven.
Indeed, peace is not really
the objective. Rather,
according to Jared Kushner’s
August 2021
annual strategy document of
the Abraham Accords Peace
Institute, the objective
is to “move beyond the
Arab-Israeli conflict.”
In
that spirit, the Biden
administration has not pressed
Israel for any concessions to
the Palestinians as part of
this agreement. Instead, Biden
has requested that Israel
refrain from any provocative
actions in the occupied West
Bank and Jerusalem that
could inflame tensions ahead
of his visit. Once his visit
is over, Biden will presumably
have no objections to Israel’s
ongoing repression of the
Palestinians. Indeed, Israel’s
creeping annexation of
Palestinian territory has
accelerated since the Abraham
Accords were signed. As
Zaha Hassan and Marwan
Muasher write in Foreign
Affairs, “The truth is
that the accords have not
advanced peace in the Middle
East because Israel’s aim in
signing the accords was to
redirect world attention away
from its military occupation,
not to end it.”
This is not a recipe for
peace, but for violence. Not
surprisingly, during the first
three months of this year,
almost 50
Palestinians were killed by
Israel, and Palestinians
have killed 18 Israelis.
The Palestinian deaths are a
fivefold increase over the
same period the previous year,
while the comparative increase
in Israeli deaths is even
greater.
Secondly,
Biden’s gamble is also
unlikely to push down
skyrocketing gas prices.
Experts are skeptical that
the Saudis
sit on enough unused
capacity to push down
American gas prices
substantially. The root
of the problem is Washington's
overreliance on Saudi Arabia —
a dependence that will only
grow more damaging to U.S.
interests as Biden moves
closer to the Wahhabi kingdom
at the expense of diversifying
America’s relations in the
Middle East. For instance,
Iran has
an estimated 85 million
barrels of oil stored
onshore and offshore that
could almost instantly be put
on the market, presuming, of
course, that Biden would
return to the Iran nuclear
deal.
Thirdly,
Biden’s defense pact is not
likely to make the Middle East
overall more secure. The
Abraham Accords — contrary to
claims that they are a
creative new approach to
security in the Middle East —
continue a four-decade-long,
failed American strategy in
the region: That of organizing
the region around the goal of
isolating and containing Iran.
As Biden officials themselves
have admitted, this strategy
has been a source of conflict
in the region rather than a
force for stability. “Most
of the region’s dysfunction
has roots in Iran’s
exclusion," Biden’s Iran
envoy Rob Malley said in late
2021.
Organizing
the rest of the region against
Iran will be a boon for arms
producers, but it will not
create security. Iran is
already widely outspent on
arms and defense by Saudi
Arabia, Israel and the UAE,
and an American commitment to
defend these states has, in
fact, made their foreign
policies more
aggressive and
risk-accepting in the
past. Faced with a united
Israeli-American-Saudi-UAE
front, in the midst of an
escalating Israeli campaign to
assassinate Iranian officials,
Iran may be more likely to
make the political decision to
build a nuclear bomb.
(American, European and
Israeli intelligence services
all agree Iran has not made
that decision thus far.)
Perhaps
the most important commitment
the U.S. will seek to extract
from Saudi Arabia and the UAE
is alignment with America’s
strategy to confront Russia
and China. "The Saudis will
make certain commitments about
remaining fully aligned with
the United States in its
competition with Russia and
China," Shapiro
told Newsweek. But
there’s little to suggest that
Biden’s strategy of showering
the Saudi crown prince and the
ruler of the UAE, Mohammed Bin
Zayed, with concessions will
bring about a sustainable
Saudi-Emirati commitment to
the U.S. side in the great
power competition of this
century.
The
Saudi crown prince has driven
an uncompromising line with
Biden — and won. He famously
shrugged off Biden’s refusal
to engage with him during the
initial stage of his
presidency. "I
simply do not care," he
told The Atlantic, and
patiently waited for Biden to
cave. The Saudis are already dictating
the terms of Biden’s visit,
forcing Biden to see the crown
prince before he is allowed to
meet any other Saudi official.
Giving the crown prince more
is not likely to make him more
malleable, as political
scientists Patricia Sullivan,
Brock Tessman and Xiaojun Li’s
research shows that “increasing
levels of U.S. military aid
significantly reduce
cooperative foreign policy
behavior with the United
States.”
The
most likely outcome of Biden's
meeting with the crown prince
is that Saudi Arabia and the
UAE will pocket Biden’s many
concessions and offer tactical
collaboration against Russia
and China in the short run,
while keeping their options
open to betray Washington down
the road. If they truly
believed that they shouldn’t
bet against China and Russia
in this competition, they
would not have needed all of
these American concessions to
align themselves with the U.S.
From
the very moment then-President
Barack Obama concluded the
Iran nuclear deal, Israel,
Saudi Arabia and the UAE
opposed it and favored an
arrangement that would further
tie the U.S. to the Middle
East and to their own security
interests. By quitting the
Iran deal and signing the
Abraham Accords, Trump took
the first steps toward
acquiescing to the demands of
these states. Biden is now
completing what Trump started.
Trita Parsi is the
executive vice president of
the Quincy
Institute and the
author of “Losing
an Enemy — Obama, Iran and
the Triumph of Diplomacy.”
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