[Saudi Arabia is exploiting great-power competition to obtain
security commitments from the U.S. This should be rejected.]
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BREAKING AWAY FROM SECRET CONCESSIONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST  
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Jon Hoffman, Sarah Leah Whitson
April 28, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ Saudi Arabia is exploiting great-power competition to obtain
security commitments from the U.S. This should be rejected. _

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, center, listens as UAE Foreign
Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, right, speaks at last
year’s Negev Summit, March 28, 2022, in Sde Boker, Israel.,
Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo

 

Saudi Arabia is seeking
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security guarantees and cooperation on their civilian nuclear program
from the United States, as the “price” for formally normalizing
relations with Israel. Immediately following this revelation, the news
of a brokered deal re-establishing
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relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran—aided in part by
China—captured headlines around the world, with many casting the
move as a diplomatic victory for Beijing. Reports now indicate that
China is planning a new “Middle East summit
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as Beijing expands its regional footprint.

It is no coincidence that these developments have been coupled
together. They are part of an ongoing effort by U.S. partners to
manipulate the return of great-power competition in the Middle East
and the dominance of the Abraham Accords framework in Washington to
pressure the United States into providing major security concessions.
The question we should be asking is whether such a security
guarantee—or even the Abraham Accords themselves—serves national
U.S. interests. The unquestioned pursuit of these accords, and the
secret concessions the Trump and now Biden administration have offered
up to secure them, first with Morocco, Sudan, the UAE, and now
possibly Saudi Arabia, are a reflection of the unprecedented influence
of foreign governments and the defense industry in our own democratic
system, delivering outcomes that serve them, but not our country.

EMBOLDENING ILLIBERAL BEHAVIOR

The potential Saudi-Israel normalization is designed to appeal to
those in Washington who have adopted the Abraham Accords framework as
the new guiding rod for Middle East policy, including the Biden
administration
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leading voices on both sides of the political aisle in Congress
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But there has been virtually no public discussion about the extension
of these accords, nor even a basic inquiry about whether they require
U.S. concessions to achieve what Israel and the Arab states already
want and could bargain for on their own. There’s been even less
transparency about what kind of commitment the unprecedented security
guarantees to Saudi Arabia would entail—including potentially U.S.
troops—and the circumstances under which Saudi Arabia could demand
the U.S. exercise them.

A security commitment to Saudi Arabia or other illiberal actors in the
region would formalize and further solidify U.S. support for a
top-down, reactionary axis
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designed to maintain through fierce repression the regional status quo
of autocratic and apartheid governance. Previous normalizations
between Israel and other Arab states have been rooted
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advancing the strategic interests of political elites within these
countries, preserving
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prevailing illiberal order that continues to dominate the Middle East,
and assuring that the United States remains deeply enmeshed in the
region as their security guarantor.

Such a security commitment would also encourage erratic and aggressive
foreign policies by these actors, secure in their knowledge that the
U.S. would be obliged to come to their defense. The record to date
shows that U.S. military, political, and intelligence support to Saudi
Arabia and the UAE has not only emboldened, but enabled, their
reckless, belligerent behavior, most prominently in their nearly
eight-year war in Yemen that has resulted in the world’s worst
humanitarian crisis [[link removed]].

U.S. partners in the Middle East have sought to manipulate
Washington’s anxiety about losing its position relative to Russia or
China through a form of “reverse leverage.”

When U.S. support has been absent, such as in its opposition to the
Saudi/Emirati plan to invade
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or the lack of response to the likely-Iranian attack
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Saudi’s oil facilities in Abqaiq in 2019, it has encouraged peace
and reconciliation. New security guarantees would risk new conflicts,
effectively sacrificing U.S. lives to preserve the illiberal status
quo that dominates the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has been quite open about its purely mercantile
relationship with the United States, willing to oppose the U.S.
whenever it serves their interests or the whims of Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia refused
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support sanctions on Russia or to increase oil output in the wake of
spiraling oil prices last fall, despite President Biden’s
humiliating journey to Jeddah to kiss his ring and plead his case.
Indeed, MBS capped off the insult by hosting
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Xi for a lavish, formal state visit immediately after Biden left, and
announcing billions in new deals with China. Today, Saudi Arabia
continues to pour financial and military resources into supporting
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authoritarian actors engaged in gross abuses, and continues its
ham-handed campaigns of transnational repression
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activists and dissidents around the world, including inside the United
States.

Meanwhile, domestic repression has reached Kafkaesque new heights.
Multiple women have been sentenced
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decades in prison for innocuous tweets. A prosecutor is seeking
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death penalty against ten former judges for “being too lenient.”
MBS even sentenced
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American-Saudi engineer Saad Almadi to 19 years in prison, also for a
few critical tweets, at exactly the same time the crown prince was
demanding recognition of immunity in a lawsuit against him for the
murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi authorities released
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week, announcing without explanation they had dropped all charges,
apparently a chit offered up as they haggle for the security
guarantees. But he remains
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in the country. It’s almost as if MBS, even as he doubles down on
his lawless, cruel rule, is trying to prove that he can still bring
the U.S. to its knees, palms open, eyes looking the other way. This is
what our support makes possible.

If the security deal proceeds, the lesson Saudi Arabia and other
regional autocrats will learn is that bad behavior is actually
rewarded by Washington, paving the way for other regional actors to
pressure the United States into providing more formal commitments. So
long as the United States continues backing such actors, it will
further exacerbate the region’s greatest divide, between
long‐​standing autocratic regimes and the people they rule over.

The United States already maintains a vast network of security
commitments in Europe and Asia, and extending such guarantees to the
Middle East would represent a counterproductive distraction and
draining of critical resources. We’ve been told by multiple
administrations that the U.S. wants to disengage from the region and
its conflicts. Yet here we are actually considering expanding them? It
makes no sense.

REVERSE LEVERAGE

The parallel news of a deal
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Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered with Chinese assistance, was designed
in part to project an image that Beijing is filling a U.S. “void”
in the Middle East. This is despite the fact that
regional-led efforts
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bring together the two countries, primarily by Iraq and Oman, had been
ongoing since 2021. Beijing was able to capitalize on this relatively
low-hanging fruit.

For Saudi Arabia, the sealing of such an agreement under the veneer of
Chinese diplomacy allows Riyadh to further pressure the United States
into believing that it is losing regional influence. Saudi officials
have themselves admitted this: According to _The Wall Street Journal
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“in private, Saudi officials said, the crown prince has said he
expects that by playing major powers against each other, Saudi Arabia
can eventually pressure Washington to concede to its demands for
better access to U.S. weapons and nuclear technology.”

As the United States is increasingly drawn to other regional theaters,
U.S. partners in the Middle East have sought to manipulate
Washington’s anxiety about losing its position relative to Russia or
China through a form of “reverse leverage
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designed to keep America deeply engaged in the region as the guarantor
of the prevailing status quo.

Such maneuvering has accelerated dramatically following Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE clashing repeatedly
with Washington over oil prices, sanctions on Moscow, U.N. resolutions
condemning the invasion, and more. Over the past year, they have
increasingly pushed
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a formal, bilateral U.S. security guarantee under the auspices of
repairing such relations.

Many in Washington have begun to embrace
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narrative and push for greater U.S. regional commitments, lest these
ostensible “partners” continue to turn to Moscow or Beijing. As
the United States increasingly perceives its interests in the Middle
East through the lens of great-power politics and the Abraham Accords
framework, so too have regional states sought to exploit such
frameworks to advance their own interests.

The foundation for increased U.S. security commitments may already be
in motion. In June 2022, former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz
confirmed that Israel is building a U.S.-sponsored regional air
defense network called the Middle East Air Defense Alliance
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Not much is known about MEAD, but news of the “alliance” comes
after reports
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high-level cooperation between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt,
and there have been efforts to bring in Saudi Arabia
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well.

Recently, officials from the United States, Israel, the United Arab
Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Bahrain convened
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Manama, Bahrain, to push forward with the establishment of the Negev
Forum, designed to further integrate security cooperation in the
region. In January 2023, the Negev Forum was convened again, with the
second annual Negev Summit set to be held this spring. Israeli
officials told Axios
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this is “the beginning of a regional alliance” designed to build
off of the foundation established by the Abraham Accords.

While it is unlikely
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or Beijing possess the ability or desire to project force in the
Middle East, even if Russia or China expanded their regional footprint
in the wake of a drawdown by the United States, this would not be
detrimental to U.S. strategic interests. As the world enters into a
new period of multipolarity, core U.S. interests have shifted away
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the Middle East. The only way the Middle East poses a threat to core
U.S. interests is if Washington continues to double down on failed
policies that have effectively substituted the interests of regional
autocrats for our own. Additionally, though some may point to the loss
of regional arms sales as a negative ramification, when compared to
the costs of maintaining U.S. primacy in the Middle East—estimated
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be around $65–$70 billion annually, not to mention the trillions of
dollars spent on U.S. wars—such “profits” are dwarfed in
comparison. Not to mention the fact that this money only serves to
enrich arms manufacturers.

The expanded presence of Russia and China in the Middle East should
not trigger knee-jerk panic about lost U.S. primacy, but be seen as an
opportunity to do what successive administrations have promised is a
priority: withdraw from our military entanglements in the region. A
better strategy would consider replacing our military influence with
broader economic, education, and cultural investments, while reducing
our reliance on fossil fuel to thwart politically motivated squeezes
on supply.

A THREAT TO U.S. DEMOCRACY

Least appreciated is how the prospects of such commitments represent a
unique threat to U.S. democracy. The Biden administration has pursued
discussions about potential security guarantees with Saudi Arabia and
the UAE in near-total secrecy, with no transparency or public debate
on the risks they would entail, or even why they are necessary for
U.S. interests. The lack of such consultation on such a major
foreign-policy undertaking significantly undermines our own democratic
processes, with results as disastrous as other foreign-policy
commitments that did not have congressional approval, like the war in
Yemen.

In addition, such a security agreement on the heels of growing
evidence of Saudi government and defense industry infiltration in
Congress and the executive branch, not only from lobbying influence
but from promises of future employment for administration officials,
undermines confidence in the integrity of the administration’s
decision-making. While it has long been U.S. practice to meddle in the
elections and governments of foreign countries, we now face the
unprecedented reality of foreign states meddling
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our elections and government decision-making, primarily through
financial rewards
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candidates and former politicians alike.

The Biden administration may see Israel-Saudi normalization as a
diplomatic “victory” leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
But U.S.-Middle East policy is in desperate need of a fundamental
overhaul. Washington’s approach to the region is not rooted in the
advancement of U.S. interests or values, but rather the protection of
illiberal actors and the enrichment of the defense industry. Enmeshing
the country in more security guarantees is ill-advised. It is
imperative that the Biden administration change course, and engage
openly with Congress and the public about the possibility of further
commitments to Middle East autocrats.

_JON HOFFMAN is the research director at Democracy for the Arab World
Now (DAWN)._

_SARAH LEAH WHITSON is the executive director of Democracy for the
Arab World Now. Previously, she served as executive director of Human
Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division from 2004 to
2020._

_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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with the permission. © THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
[[link removed]], Prospect.org [[link removed]], 2023.
All rights reserved. 
 
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* Saudi Arabia
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* United States
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* national security
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* defense industry
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* Lobbying
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* Abraham Accords
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* democracy
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