American Outreach to Middle Eastern Despots Is Shortsighted

Foreign Affairs

American Outreach to Middle Eastern Despots Is Shortsighted

The U.S. stands to gain little from showering love on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf tyrannies.

President Joe Biden is an increasingly decrepit lame duck. A Washington fixture for more than 50 years, he is lost in time, believing that the U.S. is still the unipower and essential nation, enabling him to “run” the world. Those days, to the extent that they ever existed, are long past.

Biden has spent most of his term sacrificing the interests of Americans to benefit foreign governments. Particularly bad is the administration’s bizarre offer of a security guarantee to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s few absolute monarchies, headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. That would mean turning the U.S. military into a modern janissary corps, with American personnel acting as royal bodyguards. Apparently cooked up by the National Security Council staffer Brett McGurk, acting as Riyadh’s man in Washington, the plan continues to be pressed by Biden, contradicting the latter’s many embarrassing paeans to democracy.

Few Washington policy proposals are so loathsome and irrational. It is tempting to write the idea off as a product of Biden’s advancing dementia. Other administration officials lack that excuse, however. For instance, Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed, “It would really change the prospects of the entire region far into the future.” Nevertheless, the so-called Abraham Accords are not peace treaties despite their strangely idyllic reputation, since none of the nations involved have been at war with Israel. Rather, the U.S. is paying Sunni Arab regimes to establish diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. 

The earlier agreements were bad for America. Bribes should not be necessary if a de facto alliance against Iran is in the interests of Arab countries and Israel. However, the former governments, despite long having back-channel relations with Israel, played the U.S. In exchange for recognition of Jerusalem, Washington expanded arms sales to the United Arab Emirates and recognized Morocco’s illegal conquest of Western Sahara. 

Biden would provide the Kingdom with a security guarantee backed by U.S. troops, along with a sweetheart nuclear energy deal. Americans would protect MbS, as the killer prince is known, while he imprisons and murders, and sometimes dismembers, his domestic critics, and attempts to coerce his neighbors. According to Washington’s magical thinking, heavenly peace would then take hold. Iran would surrender, allowing Riyadh to dominate the region. The Palestinians would yield, docilely acting as cheap labor for their Israeli overlords. After the lion and lamb laid down together, the U.S. military would be able to withdraw from the Mideast. Everyone would live happily ever after, especially the Saudi and Israeli lobbies in Washington. 

In fact, paying off MbS and his wastrel royal elite would be bad policy in almost every way.

• There is no need to pay Riyadh to improve relations with Jerusalem. The Saudis and Israelis have had unofficial ties for decades. They have good reason to cooperate on intelligence and security issues. If full diplomatic relations benefit both governments, they should act on their own, without any additional inducements from the U.S. Their official relationship matters little to Washington, which already offers both countries excessive attention and support. 
• Turning the U.S. military into a royal bodyguard would subordinate American to Saudi interests. The KSA has always put itself first. Riyadh’s lackadaisical attitude toward terrorism contributed to al-Qaeda’s rise. Only the group’s self-destructive decision to target the royals in 2003 led to more serious Saudi intelligence cooperation with the US. In any case, Washington has no need to defend the Kingdom. Nor does the KSA require American protection. Washington has armed the royal family—some $100 billion worth of foreign military sales are currently in process—to enable it to defend itself. If the regime doesn’t believe its people would shoot in the right direction, it could liberalize the Kingdom’s authoritarian political system. Notably, the majority of Americans oppose tasking the U.S. military with the royal family’s defense.
• Offering Saudi Arabia an unconditional security guarantee would reward past irresponsibility and encourage future recklessness. MbS has been as great a threat to regional stability and security as the Iranian clerics, having launched a brutal aggressive war against Yemen, isolated (and planned to invade) Qatar, kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister, intervened militarily to support Bahrain’s dictatorial Sunni monarchy, and underwritten jihadist insurgents regionally. Protecting Riyadh from the consequences of its behavior would encourage even worse in the future.
• A security guarantee would further enmesh Washington in multiple violent Mideast confrontations and conflicts. Rather than enable Washington to reduce its role in the region, “the pact’s main achievement will be to further entangle the United States in a region that successive U.S. presidents have tried to pivot away from,” write Frederick Wehrey and Jennifer Kavanagh, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Defense Priorities, respectively. Confident in military immunity courtesy the U.S., Riyadh could become more aggressive against its neighbors. At the same time, the KSA would likely demand ever more evidence of Washington’s commitment. A ballooning American troop presence could spur terrorism. U.S. forces on holy Islamic soil triggered the 1995 bombing of the Khobar Towers compound and animated Osama bin Laden’s attacks elsewhere. 
• Promising to defend the Kingdom would discourage its pursuit of a diplomatic solution with Iran. Last year Tehran and Riyadh, with a push from Iraq and China, among others, resurrected relations and lowered tensions. Although the peace is uneasy, it appears to be real. The Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, Prince Khalid bin Bandar Al Saud, recently observed, “We have had our differences with Iran. But I think we are pretty aligned at the moment to deescalate this situation.” The two governments reportedly are even planning joint naval maneuvers. The KSA’s shift to diplomacy reflected the Trump administration’s refusal to retaliate against Tehran for the attack on Saudi oil facilities five years ago. A new defense commitment, especially if backed by the presence of U.S. combat troops, would tempt MbS to reverse course. 
• Increasing the military threat against Iran posed by both an Israel-Saudi axis and U.S. security guarantee, and providing the Saudis with nuclear power without tight safeguards, would spur regional proliferation. Tehran could not help but see a formal U.S.-KSA alliance as a threat, another reason to develop nuclear weapons. The Kingdom might seek to become at least a latent nuclear power. Other Middle Eastern states, such as Egypt and Turkey, could in turn consider joining the nuclear club.
• America’s international witness would suffer. The Kingdom is a human rights bottom-feeder, ranked behind Iran, Russia, and China by Freedom House. So bad is the KSA’s reputation that earlier this month the royal regime was rejected by the United Nations General Assembly for membership on the Human Rights Council, beaten by the Marshall Islands. Riyadh does not moderate its brutality even when America is concerned. The regime murdered and dismembered the journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, luring him to its Istanbul consulate and turning it into an abattoir. Dual citizens living in America have returned to the Kingdom, only to be arrested and sentenced to years, sometimes decades, in prison for tweets critical of the regime. U.S. presidents kowtowing to the Saudi royals long have put American human rights hypocrisy on global display. Offering a formal security guarantee until now available only to nominal democracies would further ravage Uncle Sam’s reputation.
• The Palestinian people would be even more vulnerable, with less pressure on Israel to respect their lives and dignity. So far the so-called Abraham Accords have enabled the Gulf kingdoms to evade their professed commitment to press for a homeland for the Palestinian people. That, in turn, has eased pressure on Jerusalem to seek a sustainable political solution. So long as the Israeli government believes that it can treat Palestinians like helots in ancient Sparta, they will suffer. Optimists imagine prying Netanyahu away from his violent allies to form a more moderate coalition, but his continued tenure, not Riyadh’s recognition, remains the central issue in Israeli politics, and he has long emphasized his opposition to a Palestinian state. Many Israelis evidently desire Saudi recognition, which would offer a boost to Netanyahu and his extremist government. 
• Turning American military personnel into royal bodyguards would not exclude China from the Middle East. The PRC has shown no interest in entangling itself militarily in the region’s endless and fruitless conflicts. Beijing is making steady economic inroads in the region, but these would be unaffected by America making the Mideast safe for absolute monarchy. A more prosperous PRC will inevitably play a larger commercial role in the Mideast. Even if turning the U.S. armed services into MbS’s bodyguard improbably curbed the Kingdom’s appetite for Chinese investment, the price for America would be too high. Ironically, wasting even more U.S. resources on defense subsidies for dubious allies would further weaken America economically, inadvertently aiding Chinese efforts. 

The Biden administration will soon come to an ignominious close. Among its failures worth applauding is not adding Saudi Arabia to the list of participants in the Abraham Accords. Observed Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now, what such an agreement would “actually secure is strengthening—with an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee—an axis of dictatorships who will ally with Israel’s apartheid government and stay mum about the Palestinians.”

Neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel constitutes a vital interest worth the shedding of Americans’ blood. A defense guarantee would be a bad deal for everyone involved, especially those expected to give their lives to protect the corrupt, brutal, and licentious Saudi princes. Let Middle Eastern countries make their own deals without sending the bill to Washington.

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