Perhaps U.S. President Joe Biden’s strangest policy U-turn since taking office has been his total reversal on U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia. As a candidate in 2020, Biden called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, a pariah and promised to make Saudi leaders pay for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Three years later, as part of a drive to secure Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic recognition of Israel, the Biden administration is inching ever closer toward offering Riyadh the kind of security guarantees only given to Washington’s closest and most important allies. Though the actual details are not yet known or even finalized, the rough contours of the deal are clear: In exchange for normalizing relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia would receive a formal security guarantee from the United States, along with technical assistance on its civilian nuclear program.
The U.S. has often compromised its values in the past to advance urgent security interests, and the administration and its backers argue that this deal is just such a case of strategic necessity. It would, they argue, help stabilize and strengthen the security environment in the Gulf and, more importantly, help the U.S. gain an advantage over China in a critical region. It is perhaps no surprise that many critics of the deal have focused instead on Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record, from the killing and jailing of dissidents to the apparent state-sanctioned slaughter of migrants on the border with Yemen. Others have pointed to the potential risk that the deal might undermine Palestinians’ struggle for rights and statehood, as well as the impact it could have on Israeli domestic politics by emboldening the far-right factions in the current Israeli government.
But focusing on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, appalling though it might be, is a red herring. The real problem with this deal as it is currently being reported is that it would do little to advance U.S. interests on oil prices, regional stability or even geopolitical competition with China. The stated goal of normalization between Israel and the Arab states is admirable and achieving it would be historic. But it’s simply not worth the price the Biden administration appears willing to pay.
Let’s start with the question of oil. Long a rationale for U.S. involvement in the region, the actual importance of the Persian Gulf to U.S. energy security has been declining for years. The growth of U.S. domestic energy production hasn’t entirely eliminated Washington’s stake in maintaining stable global energy markets; spikes in the price of oil still hurt everyone. But growing U.S. energy self-sufficiency has reduced the Cold War-era security risks that drove Washington to make Saudi Arabia a linchpin of U.S. strategy. To put it bluntly, the U.S. now has enough domestic energy production if it ever needs to fight a war.
Moreover, the proposed deal with Saudi Arabia wouldn’t add to global energy security. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet already defends the critical waterways in and out of the Gulf; for that, Washington has never needed a formal security pact with Riyadh. And the Biden administration is deluding itself if it believes that a security commitment to Saudi Arabia will result in low oil prices for U.S. consumers. It is possible that MBS might agree to a short-term production increase out of gratitude, but it is not guaranteed. And the long-term effects on oil prices will be a wash. The history of U.S.-Saudi relations suggests strongly that the Saudis typically place their own interests first when it comes to oil prices.
The idea that a U.S. security guarantee will somehow peel Saudi Arabia away from China is naïve in the extreme.
A second argument made by proponents of the deal is that it will help to stabilize the region and even allow the U.S. to draw down its military presence, at a time when it is increasingly shifting its strategic focus to the Indo-Pacific. This logic, however, is tenuous at best. A normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia would largely be a formalization of trends that have already been underway, including covert cooperation between the two sides on Iran. As with all security guarantees, there will be strong incentives for the U.S. to maintain forces in the region to strengthen deterrence and reassure its allies—and equally strong incentives for those allies to perpetuate that dynamic and shift the burden of their defense to the United States. And while Saudi Arabia and Iran have in recent months opted for diplomatic engagement and normalization, there is no guarantee that this period of détente will last, meaning that the U.S. could one day find itself being called on to actually deliver the promised security guarantees.
The nuclear aspect of the proposed deal is also problematic. The Saudis are reportedly asking for U.S. assistance on their civilian nuclear program, including the creation of domestic uranium enrichment facilities. But with Saudi leaders, including most recently MBS, continuing to publicly ponder the potential need for a nuclear weapon, there is little that could be done to reassure other regional states that this is not simply a weapons program in sheep’s clothing. In this scenario, the risks of a nuclear proliferation spiral in the region, already high since the failure of the Iran nuclear deal, would only rise.
The final argument presented in favor of the deal is perhaps the most insidious: the idea that the U.S. must double down on its relationship with Saudi Arabia if it is to prevent China’s influence in the Gulf from growing. Certainly, China has built far stronger economic ties in the region in recent years, and unlike the U.S., it maintains a more balanced regional engagement strategy, including strong ties with both Iran and the Gulf states. This is hardly a surprise: Over half of Chinese energy imports come from the Gulf. But China’s economic presence in the region now transcends oil, to include renewable energy and infrastructure projects more broadly. Given how extensive these ties now are, the idea that a U.S. security guarantee will somehow peel Saudi Arabia away from China is naïve in the extreme.
Indeed, the most likely scenario for this deal is that the U.S. will take responsibility for Saudi security while China remains the kingdom’s most important economic partner. This seems like a poor trade. Former U.S. President Donald Trump may be no one’s idea of an astute foreign policy pundit, but he correctly diagnosed the problem back in 2019 when he pointed out that the U.S. is effectively paying to guard China’s oil imports. A firmer U.S. security guarantee might prompt Saudi leaders to think twice before acting against U.S. interests, but it is by no means assured.
In many ways, the fact that this deal is being proposed at all suggests that policymakers learned little from the Cold War, when one of the worst tendencies in U.S. foreign policy was to assume that any win for the Soviets was necessarily a loss for the United States. Policymakers in Moscow often made the same mistake. The result was all too often that nasty, corrupt autocracies benefited from U.S. and Soviet largesse in exchange for extravagant promises of friendship. But inevitably these relationships didn’t last, and the bidding war between the two sides would start all over again. U.S. policymakers would be wise to consider the stakes involved and decide whether this is a road they really wish to go down again, this time with China.
Analysts and practitioners of U.S. foreign policy often point to the tension between values and interests in its conduct, or else they emphasize the rare cases where U.S. values and strategic interests are aligned, as the Biden team has done with the war in Ukraine. Yet the problem with the proposed U.S.-Saudi deal is not that it subordinates values to interests. It is that it is one of those rare cases where U.S. values and interests are closely aligned: Both suggest that it is a very bad deal. It won’t yield benefits for global oil markets, would do little to bolster regional security, would add to nuclear proliferation pressures and won’t reduce China’s presence in the region. A Saudi-Israeli normalization deal would be historic, but the price the U.S. is preparing to pay for it is simply too high.
Emma Ashford is a senior fellow in the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, where her work focuses on economic statecraft, energy politics and the future of U.S. foreign policy. She is the author of “Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates.”