US Push for a Saudi-Israel Deal Is All About China

President Joe Biden’s great Middle Eastern gambit is all about China: The administration is trying to broker better relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, largely as a way of containing Beijing’s influence in a vital region. This undertaking shows how much the US is willing to pay to prevent the Saudis from falling into China’s orbit. Talk of a US shift to Asia notwithstanding, it also demonstrates how central the
Middle East remains to geopolitics.

The administration has been quietly exploring Saudi-Israel normalization for months; speculation intensified in late July, following Biden’s interview with Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times. Nominally, the deal is meant to promote Middle East peace; in truth, Israel and Saudi Arabia are already tacit allies against Iran. Strategically speaking, the core of the deal is in the side payments these countries — Saudi Arabia especially — will demand from Washington and the pledges the US will seek in return.

To deliver Riyadh, the US will help Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear program, provide access to advanced American weapons, and offer a formalized security guarantee comparable to the “Article 5” commitment enjoyed by Washington’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. To make this palatable to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who will be asked to distance himself from his most radical
coalition partners and make concessions on the path to a Palestinian state — Washington would also give Israel enhanced security guarantees and high-end weapons.

In return for guaranteeing Saudi security, Biden would aim to ring-fence Riyadh’s relationship with China — limiting tech ties between the two countries and, most likely, securing commitments that de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman won’t host Chinese bases in the Gulf.

That sensation of whiplash you’re feeling is understandable: It wasn’t so long ago that Biden was promising to make MBS a “pariah” for his role in killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and exploring ways of punishing Saudi Arabia for cutting oil production on the eve of America’s midterm elections. Now, the administration may provide Saudi Arabia with the gold standard of US security guarantees, along with an impressive ransom of other benefits.

The last two years have been a rough education for Biden, who has learned that a green revolution won’t render the petrostates of the Middle East irrelevant anytime soon, and that there is a price to pay for making human rights central in relations with repressive regimes. Not least, Biden is discovering that great-power tensions are giving leverage to lesser powers around the globe.

The Biden administration believes, with justification, that it has done well in lining up the advanced democracies against Beijing. The picture is cloudier outside the global West.

Many countries, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, don’t identify with Biden’s democracy versus autocracy” rhetoric. Those who don’t live in China’s shadow don’t perceive much military threat from Beijing. So rather than choosing a team in the Sino-American rivalry, they tend to play both sides.

The Saudis have been exploiting this dynamic. During a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping in late 2022, the two countries inked a deal for Huawei Technologies Co. — the communications giant the US sees as a stalking horse for Chinese Communist Party influence — to build a Saudi data center. MBS has flirted with pricing oil in renminbi rather than dollars; he is reportedly negotiating a big arms deal with Beijing.

Earlier this year, the Saudi leader turned to Xi to broker another sensitive normalization deal, with Iran, helping thrust China’s diplomatic influence into the Middle East. If Biden is considering giving Saudi Arabia unprecedented benefits, it’s due to growing alarm that the alternative is seeing MBS move ever closer to Beijing.

Ambition is often admirable, but it will be extremely hard for the Biden administration to make this bargain work. The always-slippery Netanyahu has strong incentives not to break with the coalition partners keeping him out of jail. MBS will be tempted to extend negotiations beyond November 2024, to see if he can get a better deal from a future Republican president.

Even if the negotiations succeed, MBS may not stay bought: Once he has seen how much leverage he has, he may pocket US concessions while pushing the boundaries of the agreement. And even in the best-case scenario, America’s new treaty ally will be a leader with a history of coercing his neighbors and behaving in unpredictable, often destabilizing ways.

Containing Chinese influence is an objective worth seeking. But any grand bargain with MBS will be only the beginning of a long, painful process of alliance management with an ambivalent, sometimes embarrassing friend.

The Pentagon has another concern: It is hesitant to make new US commitments in the Middle East amid a raging war in Ukraine and a prospective war in the Western Pacific. It’s a fair point, given how overstretched the American military is — but one that simply underscores the impossibility of pivoting away from the Middle East.

Whether as a source of vital energy or a theater of great-power rivalry, the Middle East keeps intruding on Washington’s agenda. A region the president, and many Americans, would prefer to escape still matters very much.