Biden Submitted to the Prince
It took over four years for President Biden to completely abandon his campaign promise to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He gradually weakened this promise until, in the last moments of Friday, August 9, the administration announced it would resume the sale of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the kingdom.
In fact, this ban was merely the latest sign of an old and abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various crimes and abuses both domestically and internationally. Instead, Biden’s courtier officials doubled down on their support for bin Salman, embracing him more closely and granting endless concessions as a golden ticket to maintain U.S. dominance in the Middle East. They continued with unprecedented U.S. security guarantees to the prince, aiming to quickly reach the finish line before Biden’s presidency ends.
Cutting ties with the largest buyer of U.S. weapons had entirely understandable costs.
This move not only upset U.S. arms manufacturers who were deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraged bin Salman to retaliate by strengthening his ties with China and Russia. Thus, only a few months after the first year of Biden’s administration, his national security team backtracked on the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to stop offensive, not defensive, weapons.
Congress members’ questions about the difference between these terms went unanswered. Subsequently, billions in arms sales flowed, paving the way for further improvement of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the ill-fated July 2022 handshake between Biden and bin Salman in Jeddah.
When Biden’s team announced that, like Trump, they would prioritize adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords as their number one foreign policy priority in the Middle East, concerns about granting concessions to Saudi Arabia with new military support despite its widespread crimes in Yemen and domestically, or its further hostilities in the region, vanished and were buried under the desert sands.
Simultaneously, with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s frank admission of his secondary priorities—cheap oil and preventing China’s influence in the region—bin Salman resorted to a tough game of reverse pressure. Not only did he refuse Biden’s requests to open the oil taps to lower global prices before the November 2022 primaries, but he also specially hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in a warm multi-day ceremony and announced that China would build a civilian nuclear power plant in Saudi Arabia, support missile development in the country, and also refrained from sanctioning Russia for its attack on Ukraine.
Thus, it was time for Biden’s team to yield to bin Salman’s demands. The first major concession was granting immunity to the crown prince from legal prosecution in the United States, which closed several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment of Al Jazeera journalist Ghada Owais.
The next concession on Saudi Arabia’s wishlist from Biden’s team was a NATO-level security guarantee for the country.
Biden’s team’s efforts to win over the crown prince with a simple air security cover were not enough. He clearly stated that only a bilateral guarantee at the treaty level could convince him. Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7 and the relentless bombings and starvation of the civilian population in Gaza that followed disrupted these plans.
Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor, who just days before this disastrous attack had declared that the Middle East today is calmer than it has been in the past two decades, and that the time I have to spend dealing with crises and conflicts in the Middle East is much less than all U.S. Secretaries of State since September 11, was forced to set aside plans for a Saudi-Israeli peace agreement.
Even bin Salman could not openly support Israel in the face of nearly universal Saudi citizen sympathy for the Palestinians.
The U.S. Congress, largely under the influence of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby in Congress, would likely have supported granting a security guarantee to Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, but without this support, passing a treaty-level commitment would be very difficult.
Biden’s team is now considering the idea of separating the two categories of security guarantees and also leveraging China’s development of a civilian nuclear power plant from normalizing relations with Israel in a less-for-less agreement.
Under the strategic agreement proposed by the U.S., the United States would commit to defending Saudi Arabia if attacked. In return, Saudi Arabia must allow Washington to use its land and airspace, prevent the construction of Chinese bases in the country, and sign a parallel defense cooperation agreement to enhance arms sales, intelligence cooperation, and strategic planning in the areas of terrorism and Iran.
This move removes the regional peace cover for Israel as an incentive to guarantee Saudi security and further reveals Biden’s team’s secondary motivations. Given the Gaza war and the approach of the end of Biden’s term, it seems unlikely that this administration will be able to provide bin Salman with security guarantees in exchange for Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords.
It is not even clear whether bin Salman will accept these concessions or keep them for the next round of bargaining with a new U.S. administration. For now, one can only hope that bin Salman will be wiser than the Biden administration and prevent any new wars in the region.