Biden’s bizarre and wrongheaded push for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is getting a lot of coverage this week. The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal both published bigstories about it today, and the reports agree on the general outlines of the deal that the administration has in mind. As expected, it would involve significant U.S. commitments to the Saudis on security guarantees and support for their nuclear program. In exchange, the Saudis are supposed to commit to limiting their relationship with China, but it is hard to see how the US could enforce this part. In theory, there would also be Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, but since we know that this part is never happening I’m not sure why anyone is bothering to mention it. It looks very much like the horrible deal that many of us have been expecting and criticizing for the last several months.
Both reports emphasize how hard it would be to secure this agreement, so once again we have to wonder why Biden is wasting time, resources, and limited political capital on a deal that will be extremely difficult to get and wouldn’t be worth anything to the United States in any case. The China rivalry angle may account for some of it, but that doesn’t really explain the urgency of the effort. If it is meant to prove that the US can still broker deals in the Middle East, it would require the US to clear an absurdly high bar in order to “work.” If the administration fell short it would just confirm that the US is inept at diplomacy.
It’s a high-risk, no-reward proposition that sets Biden up for a bruising fight with members of his own party, and in the event that Biden is successful the US will just have more burdens to bear and nothing else to show for it. The political benefit to Biden himself would probably not be very great, either. Any deal he makes would require him to embrace a controversial Israeli coalition government filled with hardline zealots and a despotic Saudi war criminal. There aren’t any voters that will reward Biden at the polls for making a deal like this, and there are more than a few that will want to punish him for it. Biden is completely out of touch with the grassroots of his own party on these issues, and if he presses ahead with this plan it could end up costing him in the election next year.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
I read and read some more to find out why making friends with the Saudis was so bad.
Evidently it’s a “because it’s them! and we are to know that any relationship with Isreal is bad.
Not very informative and to tell you the truth when I read this stuff I honestly wonder how old the scribbler is and why it’s always old Geezers on both sides that are always arguing and having the young ones do their fighting for them.
They respect their elders and foolishly believe they are doing “right” because geezers know best.
Biden is out of touch with a lot of things and not just on this issue. Trump negotiated a deal between some Gulf States and Israel to establish diplomatic ties and Xi negotiated a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-establish diplomatic ties. No matter how hard he tries he’ll fail. It will be harder than leading a horse to water and trying to make it drink.