The Obama-Biden's Middle East mistakes

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As a Saudi who loves the United States, and believes deeply that our two countries need each other, the only word that comes to mind regarding the contemporary “reevaluation” of our relations is: obscene.

It was the Obama administration that decided to give Vladimir Putin a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, which it sold to the American people as a way to “deescalate” the civil war in Syria. As the United States romanced Putin, offering him Crimea and warm water ports in Syria in exchange for pulling Iran’s irons out of the fire over the past decade, U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Israel have had no choice but to cope. Last month, while Russian-operated Iranian drones and missiles were pounding Kyiv, Riyadh used its diplomatic leverage to obtain the release of American and British POWs from Putin.

America saddled us with the reality of a neighboring country controlled by Iranian troops and the Russian air force. Worse, as part of its Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Obama administration sent tens of billions of dollars flowing into Iranian coffers—money that was used to demolish Iraq, crush Syria, create chaos in Lebanon, and threaten Saudi territory from Yemen. Iranian rocket and drone strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia are now routine. In response to the barrage of missiles on Saudi infrastructure last year, the Biden administration withdrew U.S. missile defense batteries from Saudi territory.

Having watched Russian forces support or directly commit atrocities against innocent civilians and facilitate the use of chemical weapons for seven years in Syria, the Saudi government was quick to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unlike many in the West, who expected a short, parade-ground war, the Saudis understood full well what Putin was capable of. So did the Israelis.

Yet even as countries that had survived two decades of American experiments in our backyards came together to achieve extraordinary degrees of political and economic normalization, it was never at America’s expense. We have always sought to honor America’s role in our defense and as a regional peacemaker, and as a place where many of us have lived and gone to school. That’s why it was so painful and alarming for us when the Biden team came into office in January 2021 promising to “recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” and to “sideline the crown prince in order to increase pressure on the royal family to find a steadier replacement,” and to “make [the Saudis] pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” That’s not how friends talk.

The United States now claims it will have to “reevaluate” its relationship with Saudi Arabia again, apparently because OPEC+ declined the president’s requests over the last few months to aid his reelection prospects, which are being impaired by skyrocketing energy prices. As someone who loves Americans and has many dear friends there, I take no pleasure whatsoever in the energy inflation impacting so many of their livelihoods. But the unstable situation in the Middle East, which America continues to exacerbate by licensing and funding Iranian terror, does not allow Saudi Arabia such a wide margin of error that it can make decisions that affect the stability of the global energy market for the sake of one party’s success in America’s midterm elections.

In addition to the rhetorical, diplomatic, and security damage the Obama-Biden era has imposed on Saudi Arabia (and Israel), the Biden administration has also chosen to wage war on carbon-based sources of energy with little realistic thought about how an energy transition should be managed. The “Green New Deal” is not just a silly fantasy promoted by unserious congresspeople who don’t understand how the world or American economies work. It was and is a strategy aimed at handing power over both fossil fuels and clean energy technologies to the Russians and the Chinese.

There is also the matter of the administration’s hypocrisy. It is one thing to advocate for the elimination of fossil fuels and the expulsion of Putin’s Russia from global energy markets; it is quite another thing to do so while continuing to purchase Russian energy yourself. In April of 2022, over a month after the war started and after Western sanctions had already been passed, the United States imported more Russian oil than any month on record. Last week, the Financial Times reported that “EU countries have paid more than 100 billion euros to Russia for fossil fuels since the invasion of Ukraine.” All during this period, the administration has publicly berated Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other U.S. allies in the Gulf for not doing enough against Russia. This performance is not convincing to anyone: not to Saudis, Israelis, Emiratis, Indians, Russians, or Ukrainians. Judging by certain opinion polls, it is not convincing to many Americans, either.
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The Obama-Biden Iran deal never made any sense.  What it did was help a bunch of genocidal religious bigots in Iran and endangered Israel and other Middle East allies.  The Abraham Accords made much more sense.