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INTEGRATED VISION  
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Tom Stevenson
May 21, 2024
London Review of Books
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_ The military protection of Saudi Arabia has been the centrepiece of
US power in the region. The US has also committed itself to the
protection/support of Israel. America has managed this balancing act
without trouble, but it has posed problems. _

Muhammad bin Salmān, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, heir apparent
to the Saudi Arabian throne, and currently Crown Prince and Prime
Minister. (2019), Wikipedia

 

The military protection of Saudi Arabia has been the centrepiece
of US power in the world’s major hydrocarbon-producing region for
decades. For most of that time the US has also committed itself to
the protection and support of Israel. American strategic planners have
usually managed this balancing act without trouble, but on occasion it
has posed problems.

In June 1948, the US ambassador to the kingdom, James Rives Childs,
warned that support for Israel might provoke ‘vigorous
counteraction’ from Saudi Arabia, including threats to the Aramco
concession, then owned by American oil companies. During the Six Day
War in 1967, King Faisal deployed Saudi troops in Jordan. In 1973, the
Yom Kippur War precipitated the Opec oil embargo.

Israel’s current attack on Gaza has not prompted a return to the
mood of 1973. The Houthis in Yemen have targeted US ships in the Red
Sea, but neither Saudi Arabia nor any other major regional state has
altered its policy towards the US because of the part the US has
played in helping Israel kill of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

On the contrary, Saudi Arabia continues to seek a more formal
affirmation of American protection. In 2019, Crown Prince Muhammad bin
Salman was perturbed by what he saw as the muted US response to
major drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais.
During the 2020 US election campaign, Joe Biden made more
than MBS had expected of the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi
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Istanbul.

Biden no longer voices many criticisms of MBS. The demands of global
competition with China have convinced US leaders they need to
reinforce their position in the Persian Gulf. Xi Jinping’s three-day
visit to Riyadh in December 2022 was a warning. The deal that Saudi
Arabia made with Iran in March 2023 to re-establish diplomatic
relations, brokered by China, was probably the decisive turning point.
It wasn’t, as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had claimed, an ‘end
to US hegemony in the region’. But it was embarrassing to American
pride.

The Saudi strategy has been to use the threat of China to provoke
the US into reaffirming its commitment to the Saudi monarchy, and it
has worked. In April 2023, the commander of CENTCOM, General Michael
Kurilla, admitted the US was ‘worried that we have to integrate
the region before China can penetrate the region’. In September
2023, MBS gave a public interview in which he stressed that
the US ‘alliance’ with Saudi Arabia strengthened
the US globally. A more formal agreement, he said, would ‘save
effort from the Saudi side of not switching to other places’.

For the US, the prospect of a formal pact presented an
image-management problem. If it was to be a treaty, how to ensure it
passed Congress, and how to prevent it looking like a climb-down from
past rhetoric about ‘bone saw’ MBS?

The answer from the National Security Council was that a military pact
with Saudi Arabia could be packaged into a ‘deal’ under which
Saudi Arabia would make its de facto normalisation of relations with
Israel official. Rather than a climb-down it was, according to the
national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, ‘an integrated vision’
for the Middle East. After 7 October, a requirement that Israel make
some concessions to the Palestinians was bolted on. The result was a
proposed ‘mega deal’ consisting of a reformulated US-Saudi
alliance, some face-saving in the form of Saudi-Israel diplomatic
normalisation, and scraps for the Palestinians.

Sullivan has insisted that the US-Saudi deal is inextricable from
Saudi Arabia normalising diplomatic ties with Israel, even as Gaza is
flattened. But why tie independent strategic goals together in this
way? The hope is to produce echoes of the US-brokered normalisation
of relations between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s: Camp David 2.0.
But Saudi Arabia has never been a threat to Israel in the way that
Egypt with an independent foreign policy was, and in any case Saudi
leaders long ago made peace with Israel in practice.

The emphasis on the mega deal is more reminiscent of Trump and the
Abraham Accords. In September 2023, Stephanie Hallett, then interim
chargé d’affaires at the US embassy in Jerusalem (she’s now
deputy chief of mission), described Saudi Arabia as the ‘pre-eminent
target of the expansion of the Abraham Accords’.

The Saudi foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan, has been briefing for
weeks that Riyadh and Washington are ‘very close’ to an agreement.
But there is no sign that Israel’s government will agree to anything
meaningful for the Palestinians, let alone a Palestinian state.

In 1980, in a memorandum to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew
Brzezinski described the Middle East as the missing piece in the
‘great architectural task’ undertaken by the US after the Second
World War. Europe had Nato; military commitments in the Far East were
clear; but the Middle East had no real ‘framework for regional
security’. One of Brzezinksi’s suggestions was a
‘permanent US naval presence’. That now exists, in Bahrain.
American officials have also played a quotidian role in managing
political affairs in the Middle East. US forces shoot down Iranian
missiles, whether fired from Iran or by the Houthis.
But US diplomats also organise secret (and widely known about) back
channel talks in Oman, usually through Iran’s deputy foreign
minister, Ali Bagheri Kani. American envoys have also been trying to
gin up local allies for a scheme to deploy a multinational force in
Gaza.

The three most senior US foreign policy and national security
figures –Sullivan, the CIA director, Bill Burns, and secretary of
state, Anthony Blinken – are all working on this project in one form
or another. On 28 April, Blinken visited Riyadh as part of the effort
to move the normalisation talks forward. Little resulted. On 18 May,
Sullivan travelled to Dhaharan to meet MBS. The Saudi government said
they had worked on a ‘semi-final draft’ of the pact. The following
day Sullivan flew to Israel to brief Benjamin Netanyahu.

Aside from diplomatic difficulties, there is the risk of catastrophic
success. In 1980 Brzezinksi warned that a US-orchestrated alliance in
the Middle East would have to avoid ‘excessive formality’. The
Saudi monarchy was co-opted by American power several generations ago.
Grand designs to commit the fact to writing were always liable to open
the Saudi government up to internal threats. Perhaps the improbability
of the scheme will save the parties from themselves.

Tom Stevenson is a contributing editor at the _LRB_. His collection
of essays, _Someone Else’s Empire__: British Illusions and American
Hegemony_, many of which first appeared in the paper, was
published in 2023.

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* US Foreign Policy
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* Saudi Arabia
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* Israel
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* China
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* Palestine
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