Darkness Descends on the Middle East

What with all the attention given to Afghanistan and Covid-19, we have remained blissfully ignorant of the other horrors the Biden administration is visiting on the world.

We on this blog carefully detailed the Trump administration efforts to produce a strategic realignment in the Middle East. And we have happily supported the turn away from the futile Palestinian Cause and the mullahs in Iran. The Obama administration, happy to embrace the world’s leading fomenters of anti-Semitism, aligned America with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah and with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Trump administration aligned America with Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the new president of Egypt. 

But, the Biden administration has reversed that policy. American Jews were clueless, of course, but the leaders of Hamas understood that with the Biden administration, they had friends in the new administration. They celebrated by shooting some 4,000 rockets into Israel. When Israel retaliated the New York Times ran a front page photo gallery of all the innocent Palestinian children that the Israelis had killed. It was a blood libel against Jews. As noted, American Jews, their moral sense numbed by leftist politics, did not notice.

Now, the Biden administration has noticed that the next nation most likely to restore diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel is Saudi Arabia. And we cannot have that. So it has done its best to punish the kingdom, the better to realign itself with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah and with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Ilan Berman, of the American Foreign Policy Council explains what is happening in Newsweek.  And he notes that Saudi Arabia, facing a hostile American administration, has turned its attention and its investments toward Russia. Can China be far behind?

Berman writes:

Last month, in a move that passed largely unnoticed amid the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan, the House of Saud signed a new military cooperation agreement with Russia. The deal, inked on the sidelines of the International Military-Technical Forum near Moscow by Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman and his Russian counterpart, Alexander Fomin, is aimed at developing joint military coordination between the two countries.

While details of the agreement remain sparse, speculation abounds that it encompasses systems like unmanned aerial vehicles and military helicopters, which Riyadh needs to address its immediate security needs. On a broader level, however, the Saudi-Russian deal reflects a momentous strategic shift, as the kingdom adapts to the changes taking place in America's Mideast policy.

A strategic shift, a product of the American policy realignment. The fault lies with Joe Biden and his administration:

Since it took office some seven months ago, the Biden administration has upended practically every aspect of its predecessor's approach to the region, with the 76 year U.S.-Saudi relationship one of the principal casualties.

Biden has decoupled from Saudi Arabia:

The decoupling has been rapid and dramatic. In February, the administration formally ended its support for the kingdom's long-running military campaign against the Houthis in neighboring Yemen. Some two weeks later, it rolled back the Iranian-backed militia's well-deserved designation as a global terrorist organization. And just days later, it authorized the release of an intelligence report pinning blame for the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (although subsequent sanctions against Saudi officials stopped short of targeting the kingdom's de facto ruler directly). The cumulative effect, as one prominent analyst put it, was an act of "diplomatic arson" in one of Washington's longest-running partnerships in the region.

An aggressive diplomatic push against Saudi Arabia, and also against the Abraham Accords. You see, the Biden people are opposed to any accord that does not sanctify the rights of the Palestinian people. That it is also opposed to any actions that would legitimize Israel should go without saying.

If those machinations gave Riyadh serious pause, the administration's other regional maneuvers have given it still more. Take, for instance, Team Biden's tepid response to the "Abraham Accords," as the peace and normalization accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco have come to be known. From the start of its tenure, the administration has been hesitant to recognize those agreements in any meaningful way—and quick to minimize them when it has had no choice but to do so. That has had a chilling effect on other potential entrants, including Saudi Arabia, which at the tail end of the Trump administration was widely considered likely to become the next nation to normalize ties with Israel. Simply put, President Joe Biden's lukewarm attitude toward Arab-Israeli reconciliation—and his apparent unwillingness to nurture any such rapprochement—has dramatically cooled Riyadh on the idea of taking such a significant (and for the Saudis, politically risky) step.

So, another Trump presidency would have seen Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords. The Biden administration has destroyed that possibility in the near term.

Instead it has bent over to placate the Iranians:

From the start, the administration has abandoned its predecessor's policy of "maximum pressure" in favor of diplomatic concessions and cajoling intended to bring Tehran back to the nuclear negotiating table—albeit without much success so far. In the process, it has rolled back its enforcement of existing U.S. sanctions, disengaged from meaningful dialogue with Iranian opposition elements and turned a deaf ear to regional concerns regarding Iran's malign behavior in their neighborhood. The message has been unmistakable: America is determined to revive diplomacy with Iran, no matter the risk to its regional allies or regional alliances.

Obviously, China will be taking full advantage of the new Biden policy. It has already invested in Saudi Arabia and will surely be looking to continue improving its relationship. 

To be sure, that process began even before the Biden administration's new, less conciliatory approach to the kingdom. In recent years, the House of Saud has courted massive Chinese foreign investment and made Beijing a key part of its "Vision 2030" reform and development plan. Yet, under previous presidents, those economic connections were balanced against a robust foreign and defense partnership with Washington—which, despite ongoing tensions over an array of issues, officials in Riyadh still saw as their dominant geopolitical alignment. If Riyadh's new military lash-up with Moscow is any indication, however, that may be beginning to change.

Evidently, the Biden mismanagement of the surrender of Afghanistan is more dramatic. But, its policy toward the Middle East is a calamity in the making. We recall that John McCain was frankly appalled at the prospect of giving Antony Blinken power over American foreign policy. Obviously, he is being proved right.