Middle East during a Biden Presidency

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to enter the Oval Office on January 20, the tumultuous Middle East anticipates a change in the US policy towards the region. The fractions US presidential election has left Arab states questioning their fate and the role they will be allowed to play in their region. While few countries seek to maintain the gains accrued during the Trump administration, others are hopeful the US attends to the crises in the region. It seems that Middle Eastern leaders are expecting the Biden presidency to be the exact opposite of Trump’s and to bring back aspects of Barack Obama’s. But this may not be the case, as his recent appointments of national security officials have shown.

 

Once he is inaugurated as 46th President of the United States on January 20, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., commonly called Joe Biden, is set to engage in a policy of rectification on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts. While the Joe Biden presidency is set to usher in significant foreign policy changes, a dramatically different communication style is expected when it comes to US allies and adversaries. The Biden foreign policy agenda will place the United States back at the head of the table, in a position to work with its allies and partners to mobilize collective action on global threats.

In US external relations, he can be expected to be a multilateralist and liberal realist in promoting America’s global role. One key focus of his foreign policy will be the Middle East, and, in contrast to Trump, Biden is most likely to follow his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, in dealing with the troubled region. What appears certain is that the incoming Biden administration hopes to reverse President Donald Trump’s destabilizing foreign policy manoeuvres in the Middle East.

Four focus areas

Although there are four areas where he could seek to make a difference, one thing is for certain: US relations with Iran will be at the heart of the region’s geopolitics.

1. Iran Nuclear Deal

“If Iran chooses confrontation, I am prepared to defend our vital interests and our troops. But, I am ready to walk the path of diplomacy if Iran takes steps to show it is ready too.” — Joe Biden

The first area of Joe Biden’s focus is the July 2015 landmark Iran nuclear agreement (also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). In early 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the deal, which sought to dismantle the Islamic republic’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump lambasted the Iranian Islamic regime as an aggressive and destabilising actor in the region and beyond, and adopted a policy of maximum pressure. His aim was to force a defiant Tehran to renegotiate the JCPOA and reduce Iran’s missile capability and regional influence, which would also please Iran’s regional arch-rivals and Trump’s favoured US allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia. He ignored the fact that the JCPOA was a multilateral agreement. The other signatories, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, opposed his measures and maintained their support for the deal as important for international security, causing a major rift in the transatlantic alliance.

Trump’s approach has failed: the Iranian regime has resisted and survived Washington’s pressure, though it has taken a heavy toll on Iranian society.

Biden has indicated that he will restore US participation in the JCPOA and reach out to Iran, as Obama had done, to make the agreement work and thus also remove one of the obstacles in America’s relations with its traditional European allies. In a Sept. 13 essay on CNN.com, Biden wrote, “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations. With our allies, we will work to strengthen and extend the nuclear deal’s provisions, while also addressing other issues of concern.”

However, Biden will face strong opposition from the Trump-dominated Republican Party at home, and from Israel and the Saudi-led Arab states in the region. But he should be able to override their objections as Obama did.

Some kind of rapprochement with Iran would allow Biden to focus on bigger foreign policy issues, such as dealing with China as an emerging rival superpower and Russia as an increasingly assertive power.

2. Israeli–Palestinian conflict

The second area relates to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Donald Trump’s four years in office saw the implementation of harmful policies that upended long-standing American positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, causing Washington’s relationship with the Palestinians to break down completely and bringing US foreign policy into dangerous alignment with the expansionist vision of the Israeli right.

Trump brought US foreign policy into dangerous alignment with the expansionist Israeli right. Biden has to rebuild American leverage – starting with reconstructing Washington’s relationship with the Palestinians. Trump dispensed unprecedented friendship with Israel at the cost of the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and independence whereas Biden is likely to pursue Obama’s approach. He has made it clear that he will adhere to international law and United Nations resolutions by not recognising Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as legitimate, by opposing any annexation of the West Bank and by favouring the two-state solution as the best option for a political settlement of the conflict.

Although it is tempting to think that Biden will simply reset relations with the Palestinians by wiping the slate clean of such provocations, given Israel’s bipartisan support in the US Congress, Biden is unlikely to be able to reverse some of Trump’s measures, such as shifting the American embassy to Jerusalem. But he would be well placed to seek a revival of peace talks for a negotiated resolution of the conflict. But the sad fact is that both sides are so disillusioned with the failed efforts by successive administrations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that resolving it will take time and patience. Biden is familiar with the hardening of positions on both sides. As Vice President, he was present for all the internal deliberations over Kerry’s initiative. With the same Israeli and Palestinian leaders in place today, he has no reason to believe that, if he tried where every president since Clinton has failed, the result would be any different.

3. Relations with Saudi Arabia

The third arena is America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia that would be the first big test of Biden’s foreign policy.

Biden’s campaign platform is a stark departure from the carte blanche Donald Trump had given to the Saudi regime. In October, Biden published a statement, outlining how US-Saudi relations could change going forward: “Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil. America’s commitment to democratic values and human rights will be a priority, even with our closest security partners.”

The statement also made it clear that the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two years ago, would “not be in vain, and we owe it to his memory to fight for a more just and free world.” On a separate occasion, Biden even floated the idea of making the country “the pariah that they are.”

The President-Elect’s approach runs completely counter to that adopted by Trump, who instead had a tendency to look the other way regarding such matters. For instance, the outgoing president put pressure on the US Congress to sell arms to Riyadh despite the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, and brushed aside CIA allegations identifying Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) as the mastermind behind Khashoggi’s killing. Not to mention the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the implementation of new sanctions against Tehran, moves that thoroughly pleased Saudi Arabia.

Trump treated the oil-rich kingdom as a highly-favoured nation and valued its purchasing of American arms. He developed very close relations with MbS and strongly backed the Saudi-led Arab coalition’s military operations in Yemen. He brushed aside Congressional concerns and the UN findings about MbS’s involvement in the brutal killing of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in October 2018. He went to extraordinary lengths to protect MbS, and the kingdom became central to his plan to generate an anti-Iran, Arab–Israeli front.

Trump showed no qualms over the human and material devastation that Saudi-led air strikes inflicted upon the Yemeni people. In contrast to Obama, who halted US support for such strikes during his final year in office, Trump provided logistical backing for them.

Biden and his Democratic entourage are set to take a different view of Saudi Arabia. While not sidelining the kingdom, they will find it compelling to rationalise relations with it to whatever extent possible. This would include softening America’s backing of MbS for both political and moral reasons, and curtailing support for Yemen operations.

4. Authoritarianism

The fourth area is the dominance of authoritarianism in the Middle East, from the Arab monarchies in the Gulf to Egypt in North Africa—all US allies. Trump’s authoritarian populism underpinned his admiration for autocratic rulers. In contrast, Biden will have an opportunity to emphasise the need for anti-authoritarian reforms across the region. This is not to suggest that he would make democratisation a centrepiece of his foreign policy, as his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, tried, unsuccessfully, to do. He is most likely to lean against illiberalism in his administration’s dealings with autocracies.

The Middle East has confounded expectations of the US as the traditionally dominant power in the region in the past. However, a non-hegemonic Biden approach stands a better chance of contributing to regional stability than Trump’s policy of ‘divide and rule’ at home and abroad that robbed the region of any opportunity for meaningful regional cooperation. Of course, all this will depend on what Trump’s refusal to concede electoral defeat brings about, and how successful Biden will be in addressing the domestic challenges, especially if he is faced with a Republican majority in the Senate.

Changing Ways of US Foreign Policy

Hence, a Biden administration will change the way US foreign policy is conducted in at least three ways:

1. Institutions become powerful

First, institutional decision-making will be restored in Washington. US foreign policy under Trump was dangerously personalised by a leader with narcissistic and authoritarian inclinations, which helped foreign leaders gain more influence in the White House. Officials who challenged Trump’s authority were fired or pushed to resign. Traditional foreign policymaking was sidelined and so was inter-agency cooperation. Trump chose not to trust key institutions like the Pentagon and the State Department, which were defunded or marginalised under his administration.

Once Biden administration is officially in power, the Middle Eastern leaders will no longer be able to get their way by exchanging late-night WhatsApp messages with Trump’s son-in-law or pretend the US State Department is a trivial agency. They will have to turn to traditional diplomacy, dealing with the embassies and official emissaries. The re-establishment of this institutional process also means a return to rivalries between US agencies over foreign policy issues, most notably in the Middle East. This will likely slow down the decision-making process in Washington.

2. Conventional Diplomacy Redux

Second, the Biden administration will bring back the predictability of US foreign policy. The domestic turmoil of Trump’s presidency—the high-level investigations, the impeachment, the racial tensions, the Twitter rants, the constant change of appointed officials, etc.—affected not only US politics but also political dynamics abroad.

The outgoing president’s penchant for unconventional foreign policy moves—using tariffs as a political tool, bashing allies, casually issuing threats to use force, and engaging traditional foes like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Afghanistan’s Taliban—also brought uncertainty on the international scene. Biden will likely bring back positive engagement with traditional allies, especially in Europe, and return to foreign policy rhetoric that can be more easily anticipated.

3. A Broader Spectrum

Third, there will likely be a major shift in the US priorities in the Middle East. The Biden administration will most likely align with the thinking of the Washington establishment, seeking to pull US resources out of the Middle East to focus on deterring Russia and China, a move that Trump is now making more difficult by antagonising Iran.

The Biden administration will seek to mitigate conflicts across the Middle East and will most probably face resistance from concerned actors looking to maximise their strategic positions. This expected shift of priorities in Washington to deter Russia and China on a global scale will be most probably be viewed by Middle East leaders once again as a sign of weakness and as an affirmation of the limits of US power.

Trump has overly invested in the Middle East with emphasis on a transactional approach, and Middle East leaders should prepare to not to be overindulged by Washington in the next four years. His core approach was the advancement of an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran at the expense of traditional Arab partners like Jordan, and the support of disparate allies ranging from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.

Unlike Trump, the Biden presidency will most probably be reactive instead of proactive in the Middle East. This means minimal engagement with Iran, complex relations with Turkey and the appeasement of Israel. Biden will be somewhere between Trump and Obama and will have to reckon with Trump’s legacy in the Middle East, which includes new preconditions to strike a deal with Iran and a timid Arab-Israeli normalisation process.

Conclusion

Biden’s foreign policy platform as outlined in the campaign indicates a return to multilateralism and international agreements, abandoning the isolationism of the Trump era. Perhaps, the most striking aspect of Biden’s prospective foreign policy is his emphasis on a soft power approach, seeking to ‘renew American democracy’ in order to re-establish ‘dignified leadership at home and respected leadership on the world stage’. This will be a tall order in the Middle East, where the ever-present suspicion about US intentions and capabilities among local actors has only deepened during the Trump period and where the US disengagement overall has put in motion a regionalisation of security.

As the past years in the Middle East illustrate, politics and alliances are fluid and transactional, with crises (in Syria, Libya) reshuffling the cards for all actors, making it difficult to foresee the future. The major actors’ responses to change are driven by a combination of domestic factors such as identity, economy, military engagement, and the influence of internal elites – more often than not with a view to assuring existent power relations. While a Biden administration may struggle in its stated commitment to project American ideals in the Middle East, its policies will, at the very least, be more predictable.

 

The writer is a member of staff.