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.
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.