Israel and Saudi Arabia have congratulated Joe Biden on his presidential election victory. Skeptical of both governments, Biden nevertheless has good reason to listen attentively to each.
The first point here is that Biden must learn from the Obama administration’s mistakes. Whatever one thinks of the 2015 decision to join the Iran nuclear accord, it’s clear that Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and John Kerry badly miscalculated the full effects of that agreement.
The accord has allowed for Iran’s continued covert nuclear weapons research. This has been linked to advancing Iranian ballistic missile research and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s recent decision to increase his uranium enrichment activities. As a consequence, Iran now poses a credible near-medium term threat of creating a second Holocaust. One can no longer take Rhodes seriously that Khamenei’s eventual death will lead to an Iranian political awakening. Biden will have to address the Iran deal’s shortcomings, or he will have to deal with an Israeli preemptive strike, which risks regional war.
The Iran deal brought with it another critical regional challenge. Because it failed to constrain ballistic missile research, the agreement has precipitated Saudi Arabia’s development of its own nuclear program. The consequence is a near-term possibility of a showdown between two armed regimes. This would be bad in any scenario. Except, vested with imbued historical and theological hatreds, any prospective nuclear confrontation might not be deterred by mutually assured destruction. Biden cannot ignore this possibility. He must work hard to avoid it.
On that count, there’s no question that dealing with Saudi Arabia is going to be a challenge for the next president. Crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman is an unpredictable leader. And yes, bin Salman was responsible for the brutal torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But whether America likes it or not, the 35-year-old ruler is likely going to be in charge of his nation for the next fifty years. This is not to say that Biden need simply accept Saudi foreign policy decisions with a happy nod, but it is to say that Biden must be a realist. For all his flaws, bin Salman’s social reform program is the best way to ensure that Saudi Arabia can provide for improved human rights and long term political stability. In the context of systemic declines in oil prices, absent economic diversification, Saudi Arabia will be a desert kingdom with a lot of young, unemployed men and a lot of Salafist preachers offering them redirection for their grievances. Or put another way, the recipe for a much more powerful, and prospectively nuclear, ISIS 2.0.
There are other factors that underline Biden’s need to listen to Riyadh and Jerusalem.
For one, Biden must face up to the fact that Iran used the hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief it received from the 2015 nuclear agreement in order to invest in aggressive expansionism. That meant lots of money for Iranian massacres of Sunni Muslims in Syria and big investments in groups such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq. As the Iranian people grew poorer, Iran’s kleptocratic elite grew richer, and the region grew less stable. We should note, here, that the peoples of Baghdad and Beirut have borne the heaviest burden, as the IRGC used its newfound wealth to undermine fragile democracies.
Though much of the Western media appears to have missed it, the Trump administration’s crackdown on Iran has significantly curtailed its malevolent interest in Iraq. There is new hope in Baghdad.
To ignore these considerations would be to abandon three allies, Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and a key partner (Lebanon), without moral or strategic cause. It would thus be the antithesis of what Biden says his presidency will stand for.
