President Joe Biden’s administration is trying to finalize a “complicated” agreement to establish diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel and shore up U.S. security ties with the Gulf Arab state as a hedge against China's encroachment in the Middle East.
“It’s complicated, and to land all of these different pieces, it takes a tremendous amount of work,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday during an MSNBC broadcast. “We’re in the middle of it. It’s still a challenge.”
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That agreement offers the hope of a watershed change in Israel’s relations with the Arab world, with the added potential to enhance security coordination between two traditional U.S. allies in the Middle East. And while Blinken emphasized the difficulty of that effort — his team has tried to temper expectations in recent weeks — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government thinks it could reach a successful conclusion by early 2024.
"The gaps can be bridged. It will take time. But there is progress," Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told Israeli Army Radio on Thursday. "I think there is certainly a likelihood that, in the first quarter of 2024, four or five months hence, we will be able to be at a point where the details are finalized.”
Netanyahu, for his part, argues that a deal to normalize Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia could “effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict,” as he put it to the Washington Examiner last year. Yet the project is both necessitated and hampered, from the perspective of U.S. and Israeli officials, by the fear of a nuclear arms race between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“If they get one, we have to get one,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News in an interview that aired Wednesday evening.
Iran has stopped complying with the terms of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, citing then-President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the pact in 2018. Israel and the Gulf Arab states opposed the agreement as it came together at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, on the theory that it would enable Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons eventually, but the scenario also is coming into view as “Iran has effectively removed about one third of the core group” of international nuclear inspectors, according to the top United Nations nuclear watchdog.
“This measure ... has been exercised by Iran in a manner that affects in a direct and severe way the ability of the IAEA to conduct effectively its inspections in Iran,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi announced this week.
Israel and Saudi Arabia both fear the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, but the crown prince’s frank declaration likewise stoked alarm in Jerusalem. Riyadh reportedly wants to establish a uranium enrichment capacity in Saudi Arabia — a technological capability that has civil uses but would be a precondition for any successful nuclear weapons development program.
“The Saudi crown prince already spoke yesterday about the possibility of Saudi Arabia having nuclear weapons," Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, the center-left lawmaker who orchestrated Netanyahu’s brief ouster from the prime minister’s office, said on Thursday. “It is dangerous and irresponsible. Israel must not agree to any type of uranium enrichment in Saudi Arabia.”
The negotiations amount to a high-stakes effort to fortify the U.S. alliance network in the Middle East, as the growing cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran threatens to drive a redistribution of power in the region. Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw a parallel rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March, followed in August by the Chinese foreign minister’s celebration of “civil nuclear energy” cooperation between Beijing and Riyadh — an arrangement that could expand or contract as Saudi Arabia considers bids from China and other countries capable of building a nuclear power plant.
“Who Saudi Arabia chooses depends on what the country wants geopolitically, and there is only one person who can likely answer that question,” Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Jane Nakano observed in early September. “A nuclear power project is a multi-decadal endeavor — including construction, fuel provision, and maintenance — that generally strengthens bilateral ties.”
Biden’s administration aims to interdict the forging of those ties between China and Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials reportedly are in talks to develop a mutual defense treaty of the sort that binds the United States to Japan and South Korea, two cornerstones of the American alliance network in the Indo-Pacific.
“The treaty is deliberately vague in order to allow different responses for different circumstances,” Hofstra University professor Julian Ku told the New York Times, which reported this week on the proposal. “So one can imagine a U.S. treaty with Saudi Arabia that is structured like the Japan treaty, which does not technically require U.S. action, but is understood to represent a serious commitment in case of an attack.”
If the Saudi royals insist on acquiring an enrichment capacity in addition to security guarantees, Biden and Netanyahu, who met for the first time of Biden’s presidency this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, will have to weigh a difficult gamble, under pressure from at least Israeli critics who believe that such a concession would inaugurate the arms race they’re trying to avoid.
“A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia is a welcome thing. But not at the cost of allowing the Saudis to develop nuclear weapons,” Lapid said. “Not at the cost of a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East.”
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Blinken is mulling an October trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to a Times of Israel report that cited unnamed Israeli officials as the sources.
“I don’t want to predict where it’s going to go,” Blinken said of the overall negotiation process. “But the bottom line is yes, it’s possible, and if we can get there, it would be a huge change.”