Biden’s dilemma: Restoring the balance of power in the Middle East without US military intervention

LESS than two weeks before the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel, US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan remarked that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades”.

He noted that he had to spend less time than any of his predecessors since 9/11 in dealing with crises in that area of the world and asserted that his goal was to “de-pressure, de-escalate and ultimately integrate the Middle East region”.

In the midst of pursuing an activist foreign policy, Sullivan could then boast about some major American diplomatic triumphs in the Middle East where the US was orchestrating the historic rapprochement of the Persian Gulf Arab states, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), with Israel.

Under the Abraham Accords signed in September 2020 during the presidency of Donald Trump, Israel has normalised relations with several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.

Now the Biden administration was focusing its diplomatic attention on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter and home to Islam’s two holiest sites, and on the KSA’s crown prince and de-facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS.

Indeed, most news reports seemed to suggest that Saudi Arabia and the Jewish State – two major US allies in the region, and with shared interests in containing the threat posed by their common adversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran – were close to reaching a deal on normalising relations.

Last month in an interview on Fox News, MBS said that a deal with Israel was nearing, emphasising that “everyday we get closer”.

Similarly, around the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel was “at the cusp” of reaching a historic peace agreement.

Such a deal would have created a pro-American Middle Eastern military and economic bloc powered by the energy resources of the Persian Gulf and Israel’s high-tech industries and scientific centres.

From a geopolitical perspective, if there had been a Saudi-Israeli agreement, then the balance of power between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have shifted significantly in the Saudis’ favour.

In addition to a formal security treaty with the United States, the Saudis would have had access to US nuclear technology up to and including enrichment of uranium. To put it in other terms, the Saudis would have been closing in on the current Iranian advantage of being a hair’s breadth away from possessing bombs.

Such a deal would have been seen as a major US diplomatic coup and a geostrategic game changer. Indeed, a peace agreement between Israel and the KSA that would also involve a security agreement between Washington and Riyadh could have helped contain Iran and reinforce the American alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In that context, the US was hoping to build a chain of American allies linking three key choke points of global trade – the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab-el-Mandeb connecting the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea.

Seen from Teheran, such a development would have been a major blow to the anti-American Iran and its regional proxies, including the Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and the Islamist Hamas movement ruling the Gaza Strip, shifting the balance of power in the region in the direction of the US and its allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, a Saudi-Israeli deal, building on the earlier agreement between the Jewish State and leading Sunni-Arab states, including Egypt and Jordan, would have created the basis for a strategic Arab-Israeli alliance under which the national concerns of the Palestinians, including those living in the Gaza Strip, would have been marginalised.

From that perspective, sabotaging the Saudi-Israeli deal was in the interests of Hamas and its Iranian patron. In launching its attack against Israel on Oct 7, that goal may have been achieved, delivering a major blow not only to Israel, but also to its patron, the United States.

Hence in the aftermath of the surprise attack by Hamas fighters into Israel, it is hard to imagine Saudi-Israeli peace talks making any progress.

Indeed, under present conditions of all-out war by Israel on Hamas and the prospect of a bloody incursion into Gaza by the Israeli Defence Force, it would have been unthinkable for Saudi Arabia to proceed with normalisation of relations. It did announce last week that it was putting those talks on hold and expressed support for the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.

To put it in other terms, much of what the US seemed to be on the verge of achieving only two weeks ago was going into reverse, in the form of a new cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians that could be transformed into an all-out regional war under which the Hezbollah will join the hostilities, launching attacks against Israel from the north. That in turn could risk a military confrontation between Israel and Iran.

President Biden has responded to these dramatic developments by trying to restore the balance of power in the region, and starting to do that by expressing strong support for Israel, announcing the delivery of emergency shipments of weapons to the Jewish State.

Biden declared during a television address on Oct 10: “Let there be no doubt, the United States has Israel’s back.” He seemed to have given the Israeli prime minister much leeway in mounting a military response against Hamas, a position that is endorsed by America’s European allies.

At the same time, President Biden wanted to send a clear message to Iran, which according to Sullivan “was complicit in this attack in a broad sense because they provided the lion’s share of the funding” to Hamas.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iranian security officials helped prepare Hamas for its attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a recent meeting in Beirut – a report that was not confirmed by Washington.

Deploying two aircraft carriers and other warships to waters off Israel, President Biden is hoping to deter Iran and its proxies from getting involved in the war. “To any country, any organisation, anyone thinking of taking advantage of the situation, I have one word,” the president stated in his television address: “Don’t. Don’t.”

Biden is aware that there would be no congressional or public support for direct US military intervention, that is, boots on the ground, in the ongoing war and he certainly would not have any backing for going to war with Iran.

He therefore hopes that projecting American military power would achieve the goal of deterring Iran.

Meanwhile, the president and his aides are also pressing Israel to avoid, as far as possible, Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza.

The images of dead Palestinian children, not to mention a full-blown Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, would benefit Iran. It would draw the Israelis into a deadly military quagmire with the Iranians directing Palestinian operations against the Israeli occupier.

The defeat of Hamas, at the same time, could provide an opportunity for a regime change in Gaza with the leadership of the Palestinian National Authority taking control of the area.

Financial support from the Saudis and other Arab oil states could help reconstruct the Gaza Strip and a multinational Arab force led by Egypt could possibly establish order there.

That could open the road to the renewal of the American-sponsored talks to normalise ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and shift the balance of power in the Middle East again from the Iranian-led bloc to the United States and its regional allies.