The recent visit of President Biden to the Middle East was a case of “the mountain going to Muhammad” at a time of despair. Preoccupied as he was with inflation and rising oil prices, it became imperative for him to renew old commitments to the allies in the region and to push for the unfinished business of Israeli-Arab normalization. The message was that the US would not walk away from the Middle East even if it was caught in serious security issues in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia.
Several commentators were not optimistic about the outcome of the visit at this time, but Mr. Biden took the risk with the conviction that there should not be a vacuum in the Middle East, which would be filled by China, Russia or Iran. The outcome was not entirely satisfactory and there was disappointment in the US and glee in China, which declared that he returned empty-handed.
Israel is the staunchest ally of the US in the region and the visit to Israel was to reaffirm Washington’s strong commitment to Israel’s security. Mr. Biden called himself a Zionist without being a Jew. He called the US-Israel relationship “bone-deep.” He did not openly press for any concessions to the Palestinians. He met President Mahmoud Abbas and pledged USD 100 million to Palestinian hospitals on the West Bank. He tried to balance between East Jerusalem and the West Bank by being soft on Israeli settlements. But his main purpose of the visit to Israel was to form a united front against Iran. Though there was a joint declaration that Iran will not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel felt that Iran would not give up nuclear weapons diplomatically and that the threat of force was necessary. Mr. Biden said that force should be only a last resort and the efforts for a joint agreement should be pursued. The visit of President Vladimir Putin to Iran soon after Mr. Biden’s tour was considered ominous.
India and the UAE joined the US and Israel for the first virtual summit of “I2 U2”, named earlier as the “Western Quad”, proposed by the Middle East Institute as an Indo-Abrahamic alliance with the aim of making joint investments and to take new initiatives in water, energy, transportation, space, health and food security. It is envisaged that Egypt and Saudi Arabia would join the group. It was decided that the UAE would invest 2 billion USD in India to set up integrated food parks across India. The new group was seen as having tremendous potential to explore complementarities among the countries, without excluding a security dialogue, as in the case of the Quad.
Mr. Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the interaction with GCC+3 were the most crucial segments of his mission. Pushing them to contain Iran and to increase oil production to bring down Russia’s oil revenue turned out to be tough as these countries were keen to balance Washington, Beijing and Moscow in these matters. There were also differences of opinion on a range of issues and they felt that US diplomacy was based on self- interest first.” Mr.Biden did not get any assurance on increasing oil production and isolating Iran. But Mr. Biden expressed optimism in this regard for the near future.
Mr. Biden’s meeting with Mr. Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, was controversial even before he left Washington. Biden had said publicly that the Crown Prince was responsible for the murder of Mr. Jalal Khashoggi in Istanbul and so he was asked whether it was proper for him to meet the prince and whether he would raise the Khashoggi issue with him. He said that he certainly would meet the prince and that it will not be proper for an American President not to raise human rights issues with him. But the familiarity that Mr.Biden displayed by fist-bumping the Crown Prince when they met and the cordial atmosphere were severely criticized by the press back home. The President confirmed that he raised the issue directly with the prince. Apparently, the Prince evaded the question of his responsibility, stressed that the guilty were punished, and said that such things happened in other places too, particularly in the Abu Gharaib prison in Iraq, where insurgents killed detainees, who were cooperating with the Americans. However, in many ways, the US-Saudi relationship was reset by the visit, though it did not have the results the US had desired.
When the President returned to Washington, his popularity had plummeted, inflation rate had gone up and his domestic agenda in the Congress suffered a blow. The chances of a victory by the Democratic Party in the mid-term elections in November receded further. But a beginning was made to show that the US would be an active player in the Middle East, in spite of the challenges it faced in other parts of the world. The Arab countries responded, keeping their option open to work also with China and Russia.
