The End of Biden’s Middle East Mirage

In his popular 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, the late scholar Fouad Ajami offered a critique of 20th-century Arab nationalists and intellectuals for having built what Ajami saw as a fictional sense of their own accomplishments, which he claimed in turn had promoted a chauvinistic and conspiratorial worldview. “In an Arab political history littered with thwarted dreams, little honor would be extended to pragmatists who knew the limits of what could and could not be done,” he wrote. “The political culture of nationalism reserved its approval for those who led ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.”

Ajami would, of course, go on to become a favored court intellectual and a public advocate for the U.S. George W. Bush administration’s own ruinous campaigns in pursuit of impossible quests.

The past week saw the destruction of yet another dream palace: the Biden administration’s effort to reinforce a U.S.-dominated Middle East security architecture through closer defense pacts with the region’s various repressive governments. The point man for this has been the White House’s top Middle East policy hand, Brett McGurk, who has served in senior policy positions in every administration since George W. Bush’s, including as a legal advisor for the U.S occupation of Iraq.

The Biden doctrine presumed that the Palestinians could be shunted aside and offered some crumbs to keep them quiet.

Unlike Bush’s post-9/11 Middle East “freedom agenda,” which, despite its strategic flaws and disastrous and deadly consequences, at least had a genuine policy component of human rights and democracy promotion, President Joe Biden’s doctrine for the Middle East, as outlined by McGurk in a February speech, shows vanishingly little concern for how the people of the region are ruled. Its brief mention of a “values” component is so perfunctory as to be insulting.

In stark contrast to his campaign promises to prioritize human rights, as president, Biden has drawn the United States even closer to Middle East authoritarians. While at first holding the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords at arm’s length, the Biden administration soon embraced them in the misguided belief that stitching together arms deals with abusive governments and calling it “peace” was a good way to advance Americans’ security and prosperity.

As someone who worked with the Biden campaign team to secure human rights and other policy commitments in the 2020 Democratic Party platform, tracking the steady implementation of this approach reminds me of an old Lily Tomlin line: “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”

A case in point is the administration’s effort to package a U.S.-Saudi defense agreement as so-called Saudi-Israel normalization to make it an easier domestic sell. To be clear, normalization is a good thing. It’s past time for Israel to be accepted in the region. Unfortunately, rather than being accepted as a healthy liberal democracy, it’s taking its place as just one among many repressive states. That said, if Israel and Saudi Arabia want to normalize relations, they should do that. In fact, they already are.

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There’s no reason, however, that such an agreement should need to be underwritten by U.S. troops and taxpayer dollars, let alone require the provision of a military alliance treaty and a weapons-threshold nuclear program to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a mercurial rich kid who, among many other offenses, had a dissident journalist murdered and dismembered.

The primary aim of the Biden administration’s proposed Saudi pact, and of its overall regional approach, is to box China out (This is your brain on “strategic competition.” Any questions?). Allowing China to broker a much-heralded détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March can be seen, in part, as an effort by the Saudis to bid up the United States and extract as much as they can from a China-obsessed U.S. government. And it’s working.

As Foreign Policy columnist Emma Ashford put it recently in an excellent and comprehensive critique of the pact, “[T]he most likely scenario for this deal is that the U.S. will take responsibility for Saudi security while China remains the kingdom’s most important economic partner. This seems like a poor trade.”

The choice is not between realpolitik and values, but rather between a U.S. security strategy that ignores human rights and one that works.

Indeed, it does. And even if it worked, the policy would lock in a future of repression in the region, in the hope that imprisoning its people would deliver security and stability for the United States. Among those most harshly imprisoned, of course, are the Palestinians, for whom the Biden doctrine offers little beyond vague promises of trying to keep open the possibility of maybe someday, sort of, kind of creating a Palestinian state.

While no one should imagine that the Saudi government cares too much for the Palestinians, it  is sensitive enough to regional public opinion that the crown prince announced that normalization was on pause in the wake of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

The Biden doctrine presumed that the Palestinians could be shunted aside and offered some crumbs to keep them quiet. No attempt would be made to address a key source of violence: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, now more than half a century old. Many, if not most, who engage with this region and its peoples have understood that is a fantasy. And over the past week, we’ve all seen quite graphically how dangerous and tragic a fantasy that is. This conflict has a way of reasserting itself on the global agenda.

The overriding imperative of Biden’s approach to the Middle East has been to limit U.S. attention to it in order to enable greater focus on strategic competition with China as part of the long-desired “pivot to Asia.” The United States has now dispatched two Navy carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean to try to contain any potential escalation beyond Gaza, and especially an intervention by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah or its patron, Iran. This is clearly a security concept that has failed.

The authors of Biden’s Middle East approach clearly believe it to be cold, hard realpolitik. But realpolitik would reflect an actual cost-benefit calculus of the region’s many armed actors and cash-rich monarchies—mainly, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This approach doesn’t.

In truth, it’s just a bad form of utopianism—another dream palace, now collapsed in the deluge of destruction that we see once again in Israel and Palestine. The past week showed that the choice is not between realpolitik and values, but rather between a U.S. security strategy that ignores human rights and one that works.

It remains to be seen whether President Biden understands that yet.