Frederic Wehrey and Jennifer Kavanagh
When President Joe Biden leaves office early next year, he will probably do so without having realized a signature item on his agenda for the Middle East—a diplomatic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, sealed by a formal U.S. security guarantee to Riyadh. Yet this elusive agreement runs the risk of being picked up again by his successor, no matter who wins the election in November. While in office, former President Donald Trump was among Saudi Arabia’s biggest supporters, and he has already signaled his desire to expand the so-called Abraham Accords—a series of bilateral agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab countries, negotiated under his watch—to include Saudi Arabia. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, could be compelled to revive the deal or some variation of it, both for the sake of continuity and because hammering out a grand bargain in this troubled region would be a foreign policy achievement for a relatively inexperienced politician.
But for Harris or Trump, continuing to elevate this regional accord would be a grave mistake. The proposed arrangement will not end the war in Gaza, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, block China’s inroads to the Middle East, or counter Iran and its militant proxies. Instead, by committing Washington to defend a deeply repressive Arab state with a history of destabilizing behavior, the pact’s main achievement will be to further entangle the United States in a region that successive U.S. presidents have tried to pivot away from.
The single-minded pursuit of this bad deal has also blinded U.S. policymakers to other, more important drivers of conflict in the region, and it has caused the United States to delay efforts to ramp up pressure on Israel to end its war in Gaza. The next U.S. president should therefore jettison the proposed accord and focus Middle East policy instead on the economic and social issues most important to the region.
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