A Middle East Silver Lining
How a long-term, durable U.S.-Saudi partnership can serve as a shock absorber during a time of geopolitical uncertainty.
The context for the current aid package the U.S. Senate is set to approve and President Joe Biden is poised to sign this week is a turbulent world, with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and a strategic challenge from a rising China. The Middle East is perhaps the most complicated of these, and it has generated some domestic political controversy.
Over the past six months, Israel and Hamas have waged a devastating war in the Gaza Strip, save for a week-long respite in late November. Since October 7, this conflict has claimed more Palestinian and Israeli in a brief period of time than any previous round of fighting in living memory.
The Gaza war has inflamed wider tensions, as retrograde elements opposing progress, peace, and regional integration continue exploit the opportunity to advance their backward-looking agendas. Iran and Israel have engaged in a decades-long shadow conflict since the 1980s, and those tensions have now crossed a line into a low-grade open war between the two countries—not just a war through proxies, terror attacks, sabotage, and assassinations. Though both sides have signaled they consider their recent round of escalation to be concluded, it’s anyone’s guess whether the two countries will fully step back from the brink.
Add to this already combustible mix the Houthis in Yemen, who have showed their true colors once again, undermining regional and global stability in attacks on their neighbors and now international shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah in Lebanon has stepped up its attacks on Israel, playing with the fire of a wider regional war. Militias and non-state groups next door in Syria and Iraq have also escalated their attacks, actions which harm the ordinary people of both countries that have gone through too many years of civil war and external interventions.
The broader global landscape looks even more uncertain. Russia’s war against Ukraine and its people entered into its third year with no end in sight. A qualified calm still pervades in east Asia, yet the threat of a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan still looms large and North Korea continues to build up its nuclear weapons arsenal.
A Relative Oasis of Calm in the Eye of the Storm
By comparison, the Arabian Gulf region has seen relative calm and peace in this geopolitical period of uncertainty. Millions of people literally fly over war and instability erupting in other parts of the broader Middle East to attend investment, climate, and foreign policy conferences—or simply to just transit between the main engines of the global economy in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Just later this week, the World Economic Forum will gather in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for a special meeting on global collaboration, growth, and energy for development.
If someone living back in 2019 would assert that the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council would be among the most stable and peaceful areas of the Middle East (if not the world) to visit five years hence, they would have been mocked. Even today, this reality comes as somewhat of a surprise given the vortex of conflict that swirls in the neighborhood and threatens to suck in the rest of the region and the world.
At the center of it all is Saudi Arabia, a country that has generated its fair share of controversy in America and Europe over the past decade. But as war and tensions have escalated over the past 18 months across the region, a carefully constructed détente and rapprochement has emerged between two powerful countries that have the capacity to shape the future of the region unlike any others: the United States and Saudi Arabia. Today in 2024, the ties between these two countries are perhaps better than they have ever been before—though gaps between the political ecosystems of both countries remain significant.
Seven years of uncertainty followed by a bilateral reset underway
Today U.S.-Saudi bilateral relations could be the early phases of seven years of plenty after seven years of lean and uncertainty. Indeed, the road of U.S.-Saudi ties from 2015-2023 had a lot of bumps in it. The two countries had very different views of how to address the challenges posed by Iran and Syria’s civil war back in 2015, with Saudi leaders grousing at President Barack Obama’s suggestion that Saudi Arabia and its neighbors should simply “share the region” with Iran and that this would create some new equilibrium. That was then—and what we see now are very different perspectives about strategy and tactics.
Other significant thorns in the side of the U.S.-Saudi relationship during those seven rocky years included:
Lingering tensions over the 9/11 attacks, as typified in 2016 legislation to keep the door open to Saudi government legal liability on those attacks vetoed by Obama but overridden by Congress;
The Yemen war that began in 2015 and inflamed partisan and ideological rancor in America’s politics with empty sloganeering about “forever wars;”
The 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and broader concerns about Saudi Arabia’s human rights records; and
Worries among Saudi leaders about America’s inconsistent reaction to attacks on their territory by Iran-backed groups during this period.
Then-candidate Joe Biden was strongly critical of Saudi Arabia in his 2020 campaign, and his rhetoric set a tone that implied U.S. policy would move in a much different direction on his watch. This campaign rhetoric mostly set the framework for the Biden administration’s first year approach to keep Saudi Arabia at an arm’s length, as America was distracted by challenges at home and other issues abroad.
Yet an important shift in U.S.-Saudi ties occurred as the Biden administration approached its midterm in office: both countries began in 2022 to engage in quiet discussions that helped create a more constructive framework for bilateral ties. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2022 helped shift the tone for this new phase, though there were additional hiccups in relations, particularly the contretemps in October 2022 over the OPEC+ oil production decision that spooked Biden and Democrats just weeks before a midterm election that went better than they had expected. But the “deep freeze” in U.S.-Saudi relations ended because of the steady, quiet diplomatic engagement by the two countries.
The main drivers of the reset in bilateral ties were external: Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine caused global energy and food prices to shoot up at a time when inflation began to hit the United States and other nations. These two energy superpowers recognized they had more to gain from direct, candid dialogue.
Moreover, the growing realization that China was seeking to expand its influence and reach in the Middle East, as epitomized by the March 2023 deal it famously announced between Iran and Saudi Arabia to reestablish diplomatic ties between the two regional rivals, provided an additional incentive for the United States to reengage Riyadh. The most perceptive U.S. strategists began to realize that, instead of pivoting or rebalancing to Asia to compete with the likes of China, America instead needed to show up some more in the Middle East—but in substantially different ways than it had in the two decades after 9/11.
But new possibilities to new arenas of cooperation within the Middle East between the two countries also led the Biden administration to embark on strategic re-engagement with Saudi leaders (and vice versa) in this crucial 2022-2023 period: two main ideas were the hope for a possible Saudi-Israel normalization accord and the notion of an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that linked the energy, infrastructure, and transit systems of this broad region in a way that created mutual benefit and also helped strengthen the state system of the broader Middle East. These ideas have been placed on the backburner somewhat for now by the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023, but the idea of the United States and Saudi Arabia working together efforts to increase the chances for peace and prosperity is one that will remain relevant in the years to come.
U.S.-Saudi ties as a regional and geopolitical shock absorber
With all of the bad things happening in the region, it is important to focus on how to turn things around. Marked improvement in the U.S.-Saudi bilateral relationship is one of the silver linings both countries can build on from early 2024 on, no matter what happens in America’s elections in November or how things unfold in the regional turmoil.
Working together, America and Saudi Arabia can build shock absorbers against all of these negative trends roiling the wider Middle East—one that provides mutual benefits to each nation but also offers important positive externalities to the region. A shock absorber is designed to absorb kinetic energy of a shock into a new form of energy that is dissipated in ways that reduce the effect of traveling over rough roads. Shock absorbers improve the quality of the ride and make a vehicle easier to drive. Geopolitical shock absorbers are in short supply these days, especially in the Middle East.
The initial constituent components of a stronger bilateral relationship between the two countries are fairly clear: a mutually beneficial defense pact modeled after other arrangements America has with other countries in other parts of the world; expanded economic cooperation that creates jobs in America and Saudi Arabia, including cooperation in new technologies and areas like artificial intelligence and space exploration; increase energy production cooperation including in green energies like civilian nuclear programs with the highest safeguards against military dimensions; and educational and cultural cooperation that taps into the most precious resource both countries have: the next generation.
This formula is an ambitious one, and it is bound to generate domestic political controversy in both countries given the recent history and the gaps between a raucous democratic system and an absolute monarchy that is undergoing massive social change.
The main elements most likely to hold back the construction of a more durable and diversified bilateral U.S.-Saudi relationship include a lack of vision, a dearth of leadership, an attention deficit disorder affecting both societies, and an inclination in the American political ecosystem and media debates to major in minor issues, to spotlight things in a way that distract us all from the potential opportunities.
The path ahead can be made clearer by open, candid discussions between people of both societies in a conversation that’s been years in the making and will take years more to conclude.
Why no mention of the Abraham Accords?