Foreign Policy in the Biden Era
Biden’s Foreign Policy Agenda Sees its First Challengers
Israel and the United Arab Emirates have put up a telling protest against Iranian friendliness.
American leaders clinging to the past four years of partisanship are signaling even greater pressure on long term allies in the Middle East. Israel and the United Arab Emirates have both come out today in protest against a new vision of diplomacy for the region.
Coming from a pair of nations that have only recently reconciled a mutual and decades-long travel ban — if in name only — the rallying against diplomatic pursuits is a telling one. It shows us that status quo decision making and leadership radiated from the Oval Office is what this pair of allies would like to see. But this also signals that both states fear a change in the pipeline in the form of a new Iran-forward policy that will provide an instability within their own domestic frontiers, respectively.
The fear of an unknown future compels states to project, and it gives us a window into their thinking about how Biden and his team will approach a region of the world that two Presidents have been working to disengage from militarily.
Israel
The Israeli insecurity comes as a direct result of their precarious political landscape that requires a penning in of the Palestinian Others. Palestinians make up over half of the population, and yet they live on and wield quasi-authority over something like 10% of the state’s landed space — and this figure is of course a continuously shrinking target. The Israeli delegation fears, above all else, a shakeup of local power that sees Saudi toppled as the primary silo of Arab dominance across the region.
While they are not allies in any sense of the word, the Saudi and Israeli goals of stability within their fragile domestic governing structures demands a tacit cooperating between the states. Saudi could lead a coalition military against the Israelis again, or — more diplomatically — demand an American boycott of the Israeli economic market in exchange for continued patronage of U.S. services and partnerships, rather than the Russian or Chinese competition.
At present, Saudi holds sway over American mobility in the region.
Similarly, the Israelis, in order to maintain the nation as a Jewish State must continue to pen in Palestinians politically and socially. Their greatest ally in this endeavor is a Saudi state that is unwilling to act in furtherance of Palestinian enfranchisement. The Saudi state requires a ‘Palestinian problem’ in order to rally Arab solidarity, without one, the Saudi government begins to crumble as a run of the mill authoritarian regime that has artificially outlived a few too many expiration dates.
The Israeli and Saudi states require inaction from the other to survive.
United Arab Emirates
The UAE benefits most from a Saudi-led boycott of Qatar. From the end of 2017, a blanket policy of exclusion has kept the Qatari state and government from engaging with their GCC partners, giving the UAE room to thrive in its place. The Emirates suffers from a unique problem in that only around 8% of its population is made up of citizens of the country. The vast majority of UAE residents are foreign workers — Lebanese, Iranian, and European entrepreneur and Indian, Pakistani, and Filipino laborers. This distribution prevails in force across the region, but the discrepancy is enormous in a nation of fishing villages that has grown into a crucial travel and business hub in just five decades. The government here pays a generous stipend to its citizens in order to keep them in the country.
While the threat of insurrection here is muted compared to the social unrest in Saudi or Israel, the threat is still present — GCC nations saw a particularly aggrieved backlash during the Arab Spring protests a decade ago, and without much structural change in many nations (UAE included) these issues have largely gone unaddressed and continue to simmer, waiting for a resolution.
The Big Picture
All this is to say that the Biden administration’s large scale plans to reengage in diplomacy with Iran and transform cooperation in the Middle East presents a future that looks fatal to states like Israel and the UAE. By inviting the Iranians back to the table and shying away from continued participation with a murderous Saudi regime the United States is betting on a transformation in the stronger pole that outpaces a Saudi-Israeli response.
The Biden team has the opportunity to trade in intellectual property and energy with an arguably better partner than the Saudi state that has seen most of the United States’ business since Franklin Roosevelt met with the Saudi King almost a century ago. Above and beyond economic incentives, the Biden team has the opportunity to help usher in a long-sought peace in the region with the help of this new partner. And, if they do it with the grace that only a professional team of minds can muster keeping partnerships with all three dissenters will remain on the table as a preventative measure to combat Russian strength in our absence.
Countering Russian advances must remain a core principle of the Biden team’s pursuits of peace in the region. While participation with these states is not essential — perhaps they might achieve this on their own, without American meddling — the introduction of Russian elements in place of a retreating US presence is an invitation of chaos that must be rallied against.
