By Daniel DePetris
For President Joe Biden, a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia is the Holy Grail of diplomatic deals in the Middle East.
Normalization would have positive ripple effects throughout the region, fully incorporate Israel into the Middle East’s political order and bring the White House a significant foreign policy win less than a year before the 2024 presidential election campaign gets underway.
That’s the conventional wisdom. But is it correct? How beneficial would an Israeli-Saudi normalization accord actually be for the U.S.? Would it be as groundbreaking to the regional order as we are led to believe? And what would Washington have to concede to make it happen?
This piece was originally published in The Chicago Tribune on August 1, 2023. Read more HERE.