Very rarely do American presidents get policy wins in the Middle East. The region hasn’t been kind to the United States over the last thirty years. The signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty during the Jimmy Carter years and the U.S.-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War are two exceptions to the rule. Everything else has been a failure of degree. Others, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Trump administration’s arbitrary withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, were self-inflicted wounds that made the region bloodier and more difficult to manage.
True to tradition, the Biden administration doesn’t have much foreign policy success in the Middle East either. Part of this is because president Biden sought to talk down the region in U.S. grand strategy, a worthy goal given the limited U.S. interests there. But another part is the sheer difficulty of achieving a major diplomatic success in this area of the world. Whenever the U.S. tries to get one going, whether it was the Oslo Process during the 1990s or the back-channel diplomacy to end Yemen’s decade-long civil war in the 2020s, the efforts have usually stalled.
Biden, however, has been spending the last year trying to accomplish something remarkable: establishing normal diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a feat that would surpass the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords in terms of historical significance. The White House has expended a ton of diplomatic capital in pursuit of it and is so desperate for a win that it’s prepared to offer Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman two big U.S. concessions along the way: a stronger U.S. defense commitment to Saudi Arabia and assistance with Riyadh’s nuclear energy program.
Yet October 7 changed the game, not only due to the depravity of Hamas’s assault and Israel’s still unfolding, six-month offensive in Gaza but also because Saudi Arabia is now demanding far more on the Palestinian file today than they did last year. An Israel-Saudi normalisation agreement sounds simple in theory: the two countries, who have already worked together under the table for years, would sign a document, open up their embassies and exchange their ambassadors. But that would be an overly simplistic interpretation of how this entire process would work. In reality, an Israel-Saudi deal is really an Israel-Saudi-U.S.-Palestinian deal that requires concessions from everybody. It’s in essence a complicated jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have to fit perfectly into place.
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