On the 2020 campaign trail, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” Now it’s looking like Biden wants to make the Gulf state autocracy a very special friend.
According to The New York Times, U.S. officials are in the process of negotiating a sweetheart “mutual defense” security deal for Saudi Arabia that would “resemble military pacts with Japan and South Korea.” That model suggests that the U.S. would treat Saudi Arabia as a close ally and commit the U.S. to helping ensure Riyadh’s security in the region. If such a treaty were signed, it could mean U.S. soldiers would be expected to put their lives at risk to help protect one of the most brutally authoritarian and belligerent countries in the Middle East.
It’s looking like the U.S. is contemplating taking its relationship with Saudi Arabia to an unprecedented level of closeness and cooperation.
It’s far from guaranteed that Washington and Riyadh will agree upon such a security pact. And the treaty’s approval would require support of 67 U.S. senators — which would be a high bar to clear at a time when some Democratic lawmakers, such as Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have voiced dissatisfaction with Biden’s overtures to Saudi. Still, the Biden administration’s apparent willingness to entertain such a favorable security arrangement for Riyadh underscores its total about-face on U.S.-Saudi relations. And it raises questions of how serious Biden is about pivoting the U.S. strategic focus away from the Middle East and toward Asia.
Biden has been drifting from his campaign promises to put an end to the U.S.’s deference to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (commonly known as MBS) for a while now. Last year he traveled to Saudi Arabia to kiss the prince’s ring and plead for Saudi Arabia to help bring down global oil prices. (That didn’t work.) After that trip, the Biden administration committed to renewed cooperation with Saudi Arabia on air defense and approved massive arms sales to the country.
Now it’s looking like the U.S. is contemplating taking its relationship with Saudi Arabia to an unprecedented level of closeness and cooperation. Currently, the U.S. is helping mediate an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations, a high-stakes diplomatic mission that could reduce tensions between two major regional powers in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is aggressively trying to leverage the possibility of a historic peace deal to secure major concessions from Washington. As part of these talks, Riyadh is pushing for this mutual defense deal with the U.S., and also calling for assistance with a domestic nuclear program that would include the capacity to enrich uranium.
The possibility of a mutual defense deal modeled after the U.S.’s agreements with Japan and South Korea would be an extraordinary victory for Saudi Arabia. Experts say that Riyadh would not necessarily have a guarantee of U.S. aid along the lines of NATO’s Article 5, which requires alliance members to aid any member that’s attacked. But it would commit the U.S. to helping defend Saudi Arabia from adversaries, and could potentially result in more American service members being based in the country.
The Biden administration’s talks with Riyadh about this treaty illustrates the inconsistency of Biden’s rhetoric about standing up to “bullies.” Saudi Arabia kills dissidents and kills asylum-seekers. In its war on Yemen, Saudi Arabia has slaughtered extraordinary numbers of civilians and asphyxiated its economy to create one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Saudi Arabia deprives women of countless basic freedoms. The Biden administration — like many administrations of both parties before it — is willing to look past these abuses to maintain ties with a major oil producer in a global strategic hotspot.
Beyond the hypocrisy, there’s reason to be skeptical of the deal on its merits. While Israel and Saudi Arabia normalizing relations would be historic, Washington’s concessions to Riyadh in service of such a deal could, ironically, be destabilizing. A new security treaty risks pulling the U.S. into new military entanglements, given Saudi Arabia’s conflict with Yemen and constant proxy wars with its arch-rival Iran.
A new treaty could also make other countries in the region nervous. Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me that he believes that a U.S.-Saudi treaty could inspire other countries to “look for their own security assurances from other partners,” intensifying factionalism and aggressive national security postures in the Middle East. All this as the Biden administration has pledged to reduce its footprint in the Middle East to focus on China.
There are also questions about whether the U.S.’s assistance with a Saudi nuclear program could spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Some experts worry that Riyadh wants a nuclear enrichment program in part so that it could potentially build nuclear weapons in secret down the line. Iran would certainly be concerned about such a possibility, thus making it harder than ever for the U.S. to revive the Iran nuclear deal: Tehran wouldn’t agree to anything that puts it at a strategic disadvantage relative to Saudi Arabia. It could also make Iran more likely to pursue a bomb pre-emptively — which would further antagonize both Israel and Saudi Arabia. “Any significant advances in Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program would likely provoke Iran to accelerate its own clandestine nuclear development and cause even more of a headache for Israel’s intelligence agencies,” Azriel Bermant, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, wrote in Foreign Policy in August.
If the Biden administration is going to throw out any consideration of moral principle in its dealing with Saudi Arabia, it should at least ensure that whatever it gains from a deal is tangible and significant. It is possible that an agreement would involve some kind of commitment from Riyadh to keep a distance from China in exchange for security guarantees. But some experts, including Parsi, are skeptical that any deal can buy Saudi Arabia's long-term loyalty, and point to Saudi joining the BRICS group and Saudi Arabia's notable invitation to China to mediate its deal to restore relations with Iran. It's too early to know how any possible deal will unfold, but it's not too early to be skeptical.
