Biden administration is in a crisis of its own making with Saudi Arabia

Headlines often reflect how the commentariat wishes political trends to shift. This is even more clear when two members of Congress pen an op-ed for Politico, arguing that the United States effectively terminate its defense relationship with Saudi Arabia in retaliation for a Saudi-led oil production cut.

Rather than pursuing knee-jerk solutions, the Biden administration ought to act with prudence. It should repair the U.S.-Saudi relationship and correct its Middle East policy without appearing to capitulate to Saudi pressure.

Diplomacy is a careful balancing act, an arena of tangible interests, not psychological niceties and grandstanding. With a bit of luck, resolve and political skill, the Biden administration can resolve this crisis of its own making and strengthen the Western coalition against Russia.

America’s Middle East policy does not align with left-wing political priorities. Climate change is the Democratic Party’s rhetorical lodestar – the so-called Inflation Reduction Act was in fact a $391 billion subsidy to green energy producers – and the Middle East is filled with petro-states whose very existence militates against coastal liberal sensibilities and the left’s demands for societal transformation. Yet, traditionally, Gulf Arab monarchies were not the target of Democratic antipathy. Instead, Israel was the object of liberal ire — its stubborn resolve to defend itself against foreign threats and to assert its right to exist being an odious reminder that international society is violent.

The 2018 assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi began to shift the left’s narrative against the Saudis. Combined with the Saudi-led “war on Yemen,” ripe with human rights abuses and military excesses, the new narrative paints Saudi Arabia as a pariah state. At the center is its “mad prince,” Mohammed bin Salman, the 37-year-old prime minister, heir to the Saudi throne and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since 2017. MbS, as the Saudi royal is widely known, is largely blamed for Saudi Arabia’s transformation from Islamist-sponsoring petro-state to a member of the global authoritarian coalition which includes Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and the Kim family regime’s North Korea.

President Biden came to office promising to treat MbS as a pariah. His about-face stemmed only from the Ukraine war’s pressures — Biden graciously met MbS in person in July, violating an explicit campaign promise, and even graced him with a much-publicized fist-bump.

But then MbS sank a knife into Biden’s back last week when OPEC+, under bin Salman’s leadership, agreed to cut production by 2 million barrels per day, just as inflation accelerates in the U.S. and Europe and, more critically, the Democratic Party faces a tough midterm election in less than a month.

In their jointly-authored Politico op-ed, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), along with Yale School of Management dean and business guru Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, argue that the U.S. should halt all military-technological transfers to Saudi Arabia while nominally rejecting a wholesale termination of the Saudi-U.S. partnership. They claim to believe such an embargo would compel MbS to reconsider, returning him to the Western fold and ensuring that a “valuable ally” against Iran remains on our side.

The Iran comments are partially genuine: Sen. Blumenthal voted for the original Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, known as the JCPOA, and opposed Trump’s exit from it, but he has been an increasingly vocal critic of a new deal; Rep. Khanna, by contrast, has continuously criticized any U.S. international military deployments and has despised Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, behind this policy of “leverage” stands the prospect of complete withdrawal. Eliminating American technical support for the Saudi military would rapidly trigger a Saudi military deal with Russia and/or China; even one that did not bear operational fruit for some years would destroy the U.S.-Saudi partnership.

A better idea would be, first, to take a hard look at the roots of U.S.-Saudi division, identify the interests at stake, and recognize that the U.S. has placed itself in an avoidable and untenable diplomatic position. Undoing the Biden administration’s strategic damage will take a deft touch, one the Biden team may be incapable of providing.

Today’s crisis stems from a combination of high-handedness and strategic irrationality. The Biden administration’s foreign policy team, from a personnel and policy perspective, is an offshoot of its Obama-era predecessor. The JCPOA was not just a deal over Iran’s nuclear program; it was the intended foundation of a regional realignment. Its point was to empower Iran in the Levant, use U.S. leverage over Israel and the Gulf Arabs to bully them into submission, and ideally incorporate Russia into a new regional balance that the U.S. had no need to manage. The European and Middle Eastern questions would be solved in one swoop, allowing a reorientation towards Asia.

President Trump’s victory in 2016 derailed that plan. Rather than shepherding Iran towards regional dominance, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, nearly struck Iran’s nuclear program, brokered an entente between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and squeezed Iran’s proxy network in the Levant.

Biden reversed Trump’s policy with his “pariah” declaration about Saudi Arabia. But the political context had shifted: Russia menaced Ukraine, and the post-2016 Democratic Party would not willingly incorporate Russia into a Middle Eastern regional order.

The Biden administration, likely due to strategic inertia, has sought to return to the JCPOA from the moment Biden’s term began. Its attempts have failed, but not for lack of American effort: Iran seeks more concessions from the U.S., knowing that Biden, desperate for a diplomatic victory, may eventually crack. Yet the Biden administration has continued its pressure on Saudi Arabia, only relenting in July during Biden’s supposedly momentous visit to the kingdom and meeting. Biden also chose to pursue the Iran deal — still thoroughly dangerous to Saudi interests — while strong-arming Israel into a gas deal with Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, a move explicitly intended to benefit Iran.

The message to Saudi Arabia was clear: The only concession the kingdom would receive was optical. Even Israel, ostensibly the closest U.S. regional ally, could be bullied to empower Iranian interests at the expense of America’s long-standing partners.

Sticking its neck out for the U.S. has little appeal to a Saudi state seeking to reform its domestic economy if the U.S. is an unreliable patron. MbS has the country’s reins; he hopes, through a series of major investments in high-technology and green energy, to shift from its petrochemical dependence by the mid-century, avoiding Russia’s fate of progressive irrelevance. This requires cash; his headline NEOM project, a 100-mile-long auto-free line of green communities, is already behind schedule — and oil revenues provide that cash.

The worst possible reaction from the U.S. would be to spurn Saudi Arabia while reaching out to petro-state alternatives Iran or Venezuela. There is talk of relaxed sanctions on Venezuela to enable greater exports, and a new Iran deal could be concluded to spite Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. cannot simply reverse policy, however. President Biden has erred greatly, but he remains the U.S. president; he cannot bow to Saudi pressure without concessions. To borrow the language of the liberal commentariat discussing Putin’s dilemma in Ukraine, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia require an “off-ramp.”

The U.S. off-ramp to Saudi Arabia is clear: It can walk away from the Iran deal, reverse its Iranian-directed blackmail of Israel in Lebanon, and ensure its regional partners understand that it is committed to containing Iranian expansion. It can support Arab and Israeli attempts to spoil Iranian influence in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and even countenance Israeli or Saudi cyber-attacks against Iran, given Tehran’s open military-technical support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In return, the U.S. should expect Saudi acceptance of American shale production. Shale has been a thorny issue for U.S.-Saudi relations; understandably, Saudi Arabia fears a North American competitor and welcomes Biden’s restrictions on shale production. Yet this is unacceptable not only because of Saudi Arabia’s production cut but because of technical realities. Simply put, OPEC+ cannot meet even its pre-November-cut production targets; it remains around 1 million barrels per day below its current pledged production amounts. (The cut, therefore, is actually only around 1 million barrels per day.) The U.S. must ramp up its own shale oil production and become a major energy player again.

This requires the Biden administration to reverse its environmental policy, not only its foreign policy — a tall task. Yet if the current crisis does not shatter the Biden team’s strategic assumptions, very little short of a deeply unwanted escalation will do so.

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy” (2013) and “Seablindness: How Political Neglect Is Choking American Seapower and What to Do About It” (2017).