Israel

It took Barack Obama less than three months to fly to the Middle East for a visit, landing in Iraq to visit the tens of thousands of US troops stationed there at the time. Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (also three months into his tenure), where he basked in the limelight, watched in awe as his face was plastered on buildings in Riyadh, and hovered over a glowing orb with King Salman. Now, eighteen months into his presidency, Joe Biden will be spending a few days this week in the region, making stops in Israel, the West Bank, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

When news broke that President Biden was planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to visit the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS), members of his party were horrified. Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was especially disturbed and recommended the White House cancel it outright. "I wouldn't go. I wouldn't shake his hand,” Schiff told CBS on June 5. "This is someone who butchered an American resident, cut him up into pieces in the most terrible and pre-meditated way.” That resident was Jamal Khashoggi, a former Saudi royal family insider who used his perch as a columnist at the Washington Post to raise awareness about the crown prince’s ruthless ways.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has revealed what members of his country’s national security elite have been chatting about behind closed doors for quite a while. “The United States has been, and will always be our best friend,” the Israeli PM said in a speech delivered before the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University. Then came the big “but”: “Washington has its own set of interests, which we must honestly admit do not always overlap with ours.” “We are speaking honestly and understand one another,” Bennett elaborated. America’s “interest in the region is dwindling. The United States is currently focused on the Russian-Ukrainian border and it is in a strategic conflict with China.

With diplomats fearing that the Iranian nuclear talks will collapse, minds are inevitably turning to what happens the morning after. In the realm of politics, this has amounted to buck-passing. Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told journalists: “None of the things we’re looking at now…would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal, with no thoughts about what might come next.” In the real world, meanwhile, with regional peace in the balance, the stakes are rather higher. As the Biden administration’s softly-softly approach plunges towards global humiliation, American negotiators have been waking up to what should have been obvious from the start: you can’t build an effective Iran strategy with carrots.

We were promised a war of nerves in Vienna between Washington and Tehran, a game of chicken. Instead, President Biden has chickened out. He's also blaming Israel. Call it fowl play. Here's how it should be going. The United States wants Iran to re-commit to refreezing its nuclear program. Iran demands in exchange the revoking of the economic sanctions against it. Each side insists that it won't give up on its demands — even if that could lead to the collapse of the negotiations, the demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and eventually to a military confrontation. The diplomatic and military tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine involve just such an exercise in brinkmanship.

President Joe Biden talks the liberal internationalist talk but walks the realist walk. The recent Summit of Democracies wasn't idealism but part of a strategy to contain China and Russia. Internationalist rhetoric aside, Biden has a dark Realpolitik side — which explains why he was able to survive so many decades in Washington and get elected as president. Some of my friends on the right have criticized me for recommending Biden for the diplomatic move that should have earned him the 2021 Machiavelli Award. Announcing a new military pact with Britain and Australia (AUKUS) to deter China stabbed France in the back — or to put it another way, emulated the modus operandi of traditional French diplomacy.

Was it inevitable that Iran would one day gain nuclear weapons? Identifying causality in human actions is a tricky exercise, especially when it comes to historical events, like the outbreak of World War Two. Was appeasement the cause? Or perhaps a war with Germany was unavoidable as long as Adolf Hitler was in power? It may also be fated that a nation of ninety million people, proud about its history and place in the world — Persia was already an advanced civilization when barbarian tribes roamed the British Isles — would become a nuclear military power. That nuclearization process actually commenced under Mohammad Reza Shah and continued because of concern that, thanks to French assistance, Iran’s adversary Iraq was on its way to developing a nuclear weapon.

Israel has carried out three major operations over the last eighteen months against Iran's nuclear sites. These attacks involved as many as a thousand Mossad personnel and were executed with ruthless precision using high-tech weaponry including drones and a quadcopter — and spies within Tehran's holy of holies, its nuclear program. While Joe Biden’s nuclear negotiators try to snatch catastrophe from the jaws of defeat in Vienna, Israel is taking things more seriously. Last week, Naftali Bennett, the Israeli prime minister, pivoted to a new policy on Tehran: retaliating against aggression from militias backed by Tehran with covert strikes on Iranian soil. This builds on the extensive capabilities that the Mossad has built up in the Islamic Republic in recent years.

Long-time readers of this site may be aware that yours truly has not only applauded the Trump administration’s successful efforts to normalize Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries but has also proposed awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Jared Kushner, the architect of the Abraham Accords. There were many reasons for my bullish sentiments regarding the Trump administration’s Middle East policy. First and foremost, as I pointed out, it disrupted the old American paradigm that held that any effort towards rapprochement between Arabs and Israelis hostage to the ultimatums of the radical Palestinian leadership.