The in-the-works US-Israel-Saudi Arabia deal is all about power, not ideals

(From left to right) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman. (Image: AP/File)

Washington is buzzing with speculation about a historic “triangular” bargain between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. If it pans out, each country would cede a lot but also gain a lot. Values and ideals will play no role in this haggling, however. The only currencies are national interest and power.

Quite right, and how could it be any different? That’s how old-style realists in world politics would react — from Thucydides in ancient Greece to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration.

But we mustn’t betray our values, idealists would counter, from Hugo Grotius, the 17th-century Dutch humanist who laid the foundations for international law, to Woodrow Wilson, the US president who conceived the ill-fated League of Nations, and their liberal internationalist heirs.

These days, however, the realists are in the ascendant — a kinetic byproduct of the unprovoked war of aggression that Russia has launched against Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has reminded leaders everywhere that power has a way of trumping values. And now this dialectical turn — an iteration the Germans call the Zeitenwende — is also on display in that triangular deal in the Middle East and, increasingly, in the behavior of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Biden came into office idealistic and intent on keeping aloof from Saudi Arabia. US spy services had concluded that its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman or “MBS,” had approved the mission that resulted in the strangling and dismemberment of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The Saudis were also deploying weapons they had bought from the US in their bloody proxy war in neighboring Yemen. Biden’s gut instinct was to turn MBS into a pariah, not an ally.

More broadly, Biden had also tried to frame geopolitics as a noble contest between democracies, led by the US, and autocracies such as Russia, China, Iran or North Korea. After Putin attacked Ukraine, the White House doubled down on this pitch, hoping to line up not only Western countries behind Kyiv but also the Global South, from Asia to Africa and South America.

But most of the Global South didn’t buy it, refusing to condemn Putin’s invasion at the United Nations and talking to Moscow and Beijing just as much as to Washington, London or Berlin. Even if Russia’s imperialism is morally wrong, decided these mostly post-colonial countries, it’s not in their national interest to pick sides in a larger East-West contest whose outcome won’t become clear for a long time.

Nor was Biden’s democracies-versus-autocracies narrative entirely convincing even to America’s traditional allies. NATO members such as Hungary and Turkey look increasingly authoritarian rather than liberal. Even Israel, a close if difficult friend of the US, seems unsure whether it will lean autocratic or democratic, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-right cabinet assault the power and independence of the country’s judicial branch. That’s why Biden isn’t inviting Bibi to the White House for now. India, another friend of the US, can barely claim any longer to be the world’s biggest democracy, in light of the repressive Hindu chauvinism practiced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

And yet all of that seems irrelevant as larger power struggles play out across the world. Earlier this year, China spotted an opportunity to displace the US as the hegemonic power in the Middle East and brokered a detente between the mullahs in Tehran and their arch enemies in Riyadh. Seeing a way to triangulate between Beijing and Washington, MBS also lent an ear to Beijing’s ideas about using the yuan instead of the dollar for oil sales and more.

Understanding what was at stake, Biden held his nose and got back into the game. He sent emissaries to the region with an idea that’s complex and brazen. If it works, it could keep the US on top, Israelis and Arabs away from one another’s throats, and maybe even Iran at bay.

The Saudis, in this deal, would make peace with Israel, following Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan in 2020, Jordan in 1994 and Egypt in 1979. They’d also say no to further overtures from Beijing.

In return, Riyadh would get American weapons again and even US security guarantees almost as strong as NATO’s mutual-defense clause. It would also receive American help developing nuclear energy for power generation. That was off limits in the past, because Israel and the US worry that not only Iran but also Saudi Arabia or Turkey could build nuclear weapons, which Israel already has, and turn the region into a gasoline lake in which everybody has matches.

From the Israelis, the Saudis would get assurances that Netanyahu or his successors will limit Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories and keep alive the possibility of a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Israelis in turn would get “normalised” relations with a powerful former adversary, removing one enemy from a long list and probably other Muslim foes in due course. Israel would also get additional security guarantees from the Americans.

The Americans for their part would retard China’s advances in an important region, the better to focus on confronting Beijing in East Asia. By turning Israel and Saudi Arabia, both enemies of Iran, into de facto allies, Washington might also make Tehran think twice about causing trouble. That may already be happening: Iran is talking to the US about releasing American prisoners in return for access to frozen Iranian assets, and this week hinted that this diplomacy could extend to reviving talks about its nuclear program.

Most punditry now focuses on the obstacles to such a deal. One way to understand those is as the resistance of the idealists in each country. The Saudis, wards of Mecca and Medina, don’t want the Muslim ummah to think that they’re selling out the Palestinians or going wobbly on the Zionists. The Israeli cabinet, with its hard-right values, would rather annex the West Bank than limit Jewish settlements. American progressives consider Israel racist and Saudi Arabia inhumane. American isolationists, meanwhile, would rather exit the region altogether.

And yet, my bet is that the deal will happen, if only because it adds up in the calculus of national interests that Putin’s brutal assault against Ukraine has made necessary again. Remember that Thucydides never made an argument in favor of power politics, but was merely describing the world as it is.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg