The Financial Times reports on how Saudi Arabia “won Biden back,” and it will come as no surprise that they didn’t have to do anything:
As relations tentatively improved, the Biden administration floated the idea of a grand deal for Saudi Arabia to normalise ties with Israel. The carrot for Riyadh, long irked by what it regards as US unpredictability and a perceived lack of commitment to the Gulf’s security, was a defence treaty similar to the one the US shares with Japan, and co-operation with its nascent civilian nuclear programme.
The U.S. has spent the last three and a half years cultivating closer ties with the Saudis while the Saudi government has done nothing to warrant a better relationship. It would be one thing if the Saudi government had made a concerted effort to improve ties by becoming a more reliable and useful partner, but this never happened. Mohammed bin Salman kept doing whatever he felt like doing, and the administration started falling all over itself to cater to his preferences. Now the president is so desperate to get any foreign policy “win” that he is proposing locking the U.S. into a formal alliance with one of the world’s worst governments. The Saudis didn’t need to win over Biden, as he was too busy chasing after them like a drunken suitor.
The administration hides behind “great power competition” as one of their excuses for cozying up to the crown prince, but Saudi ties with Russia and China have only become stronger during this period. It is silly to think that they are going to reduce or sever those ties in the future. Biden is so preoccupied with not “losing” the Saudis to other major powers that he is willing to offer them the moon in exchange for nothing. The U.S. shouldn’t be worried about “losing” Saudi Arabia. Indeed, we should wish for them to get lost.
It’s not as if closer relations with Riyadh have produced better outcomes inside Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, Saudi repression and human rights abuses have worsened. Saudi troops have repeatedly massacred refugees as they try to cross the frontier from Yemen. The Saudi government locks people away for years and even decades for the most harmless social media posts. If anyone gets in the way of the crown prince’s deranged building projects, they are killed.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.