The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have reportedly converged on an outline for the diplomatic version of a blockbuster multi-team NBA trade: Everybody would get something they need to make them more competitive. The details matter, but the tantalizing possibility of a geopolitical win-win-win exists, even if it’s still a long shot. Importantly, however, there would be a fourth winner here: The oft-maligned post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, which, like Chesterton’s Fence, would stand as a reminder that some things are there for a reason.
First, the Wall Street Journal reports:
U.S. officials expressed cautious optimism that, in the next nine to 12 months, they can hammer out the finer details of what would be the most momentous Middle East peace deal in a generation. But they warned that they face long odds.
Those long odds are, as usual, well expressed by what appears to be a completely unironic comment from a U.S. official: “There’s a work plan to explore the elements of what this would be and test the boundaries of what’s possible.”
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A “work plan” to “explore the elements” and “test the boundaries.” I suppose there will be a task force appointed by a committee as well.
Whether or not the deal happens, the Biden administration’s pursuit of it is a revealing event all its own. Joe Biden ran for president declaring Riyadh would be treated as a “pariah” for evidently ordering the gruesome murder of a Saudi columnist who wrote for the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi. Even before the killing of Khashoggi, Democrats had been pushing a realignment away from America’s traditional Mideast alliances, with Sunni Arab powers and Israel, and toward empowering Iran and its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq while paving Tehran’s path to a nuclear bomb.
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The entire scheme was nonsensical and dangerous in the extreme. And many in the party gave the impression, whether intentionally or not, that it was driven by spite, not strategy. And spite wasn’t enough: More than a decade of Democratic attempts to upend our Middle East alliances keep crashing into reality. American security, and thus global security, but it begins with defending our own interests, and the global energy economy depend on what was, until the administration of Barack Obama (with Biden as his vice president), the foreign-policy consensus undergirding a security architecture whose raison d’etre persists — and therefore so does the strategy, to the consternation of those in Congress and the White House who want to tear down Chesterton’s Fence without examining why it was constructed in the first place.
Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
