China-Proofing the Middle East?

The Israel-Saudi deal is a bad idea

Jake’s considering sponsoring a security pact with Saudi Arabia and Israel. “Under such a pact, each country would agree to defend the other in case they were attacked in Saudi Arabia or in the region.” Alex Stark is quite correct to point to the extraordinary commitments being made to the Saudis without any commensurate gains:

A new bilateral U.S. defense pact with Saudi Arabia currently under discussion would have few tangible benefits for the United States beyond normalization of the Saudi-Israeli relationship, while incurring major risks. The reported terms of the deal would require the United States to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense if it were to be attacked, which could have critical repercussions. The Houthis in Yemen attacked Saudi Arabia with dozens of missiles and drones in 2020 and 2021, and Iran is likely responsible for the September 2020 strike on Saudi oil facilities. This pact could draw the United States back into the war in Yemen or into a dangerous escalatory cycle with Iran.

U.S. officials have argued that the pact would bring the United States and the Kingdom closer together and mitigate China’s influence in the Gulf. This thinking is misguided — it treats the relationship as an end in itself rather than as a means to achieve U.S. strategic objectives.

Alexandra Stark, War on the Rocks.

What is driving Jake to consider it at all is China’s diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East. The goal seems to be to make US protectorates less susceptible to a romance with China. The idea is to keep the Saudis close, the Iranians down, and the Chinese out. But does this actually work in China-proofing the Middle East? We will argue that it does not.

The security gains, to the US or Israel, from normalizing Israel-Saudi relations are meagre because they’ve been aligned since the Islamic revolution. The Saudis want a deal because it offers them free security. More precisely, it obliges the US to protect them against Iran. So, they’re eager for a deal. They’re offering to “come out” to the Islamic world at large about their alliance with Israel.

As the authoritative home of Islam, Saudi Arabia has great influence in the Islamic world at large. But it is not clear at all that, without some sort of resolution of the Palestine question, Saudi-Israeli normalization would help Israel diplomatically at all. To the contrary, the deal, if it obtains, would in effect signal Saudi capitulation over Israeli annexation and rejectionism, and is therefore likely to undermine the authority of the Saudis themselves in the Islamic world at large.

The deal may get the Saudis to swear off a wild card alliance with China. But that was not the threat revealed by China’s breakthrough in the Middle East. The Saudis weren’t cheating on the US with the Chinese in that conversation. That conversation took place on a Chinese dealer table because only the Chinese could get the Iranians to the table—the Americans could not. It was poor US-Iran relations, not poor US-Saudi relations, that created the opening for China in the Middle East.

More generally, the larger reality is that China may at any time be invited into the region by states we are committed to contain: Russia, Iran and Syria. That’s where US exposure is. We can’t move the needle on this by knitting a tighter coalition with our existing allies. And make no mistake, the exposure is real. Given how US-China-Iran relations evolve, would it be all that surprising to discover an invitation to the Chinese to send weapons and even divisions to what Gregory Gause III calls ‘the arc of weakness’ between the Levant and the gulf—a zone of Iranian influence as a result of Washington’s policy errors—or indeed, to Iran itself?

To put is even more starkly: in the scenario where our relations with the Iranians and the Chinese are deteriorating rapidly, would it be all that shocking to find a Chinese division in Tehran? That’s the real risk worth working to plug for US security principals. Closer ties with the Saudis is the opposite of plugging this risk exposure. Instead of plugging the gap, the US would be incentivizing the Iranians to seek a great power patron themselves, thereby opening the door open to China in the Middle East.

A Chinese division in the gulf would, of course, be seen as escalatory in Washington. Indeed, the Iranians would not consider such an escalation unless relations with the US deteriorate much further. But they might. So this door remains ajar. And that points to the only possible solution to the problem of China-proofing the Middle East: it calls for an opening to Tehran, not a security guarantee to Riyadh. We need to prevail on the Iranians to keep the Chinese out of the Middle East.

More generally, in as much as the US is engaged in a security and diplomatic competition, the US should try to steal China’s potential allies, not push powerful states into Chinese arms. This requires ‘making nice’ with former confrontation states; even so-called rogue states; especially ones that are pivot states in their regions. Instead, the US has gone the other way, clinging to friends while pushing pivot states into the Chinese column with great haste.

The present US strategy is premised on an overestimate of American power. It assumes that we can ‘contain them all’. My forthcoming piece on US China policy will argue that such self-congratulation is quite unwarranted. It is not clear at all that we can successfully contain just China alone. And whereas unilateralism had tolerable costs in the unipolar world, in a bi-multipolar world, it is a recipe for diplomatic humiliations of the sort that is prompting these clever stratagems from Jake’s office.

Finally, there’s noise about giving nuclear technology to the Saudis. The idea seems to have been abandoned, perhaps because it is a harebrained idea. The Saudi monarchy is at real, if modest, risk of takeover by Salafi jihadists. In Pakistan, which also faces such a risk, the army is a state within a state that will not submit the control of nuclear weapons to any politician—and the US maintains close relations with the army to monitor nuclear risks. By comparison, the Saudi military does not exist as an independent force.

MBS may not understand that he would be undermining his own authority. But the mere deployment of a nuclear weapons capability creates an autonomous realm of authority because of the safety-critical nature of the business. Even if MBS retains sole release authority, for instance, he will have to specify the chain of succession, thereby explicitly creating natural claimants of authority in the event of his death (not to mention, an obvious incentive to kill him). If we help the Saudis obtain a deterrent, we would in effect be creating an alternative to the Saudi dynasty as a source of authority in the Saudi polity. It will become more like Egypt and Pakistan, with supreme authority being exercised behind the scenes by a military junta.

Do we want to do that? Have we really thought this through? And why are we considering expanding our commitments in the Middle East again? Weren’t we supposed to pivot to Asia?