By Juan Cole

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: The Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary foreign policy goal has been to rally its regional partners to cooperate with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government. Simultaneously, it would uphold a “rules-based” international order and block Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason.

US President Joe Biden’s Achilles’ heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis and launched a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza. He did this in the wake of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack Israel suffered in 2023.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel’s statehood. In return, Israel granted them investment and trade opportunities, as well as access to American weaponry and a US security umbrella.

Washington, however, failed to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework. It has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place, given the region’s increasing anger and revulsion over the ongoing civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let Netanyahu’s government completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians.

This summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law. In response, the US and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the global South have joined its attempt to ostracize President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt have long had their daggers drawnover their differing views of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012–2013. Now they have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been persistently pressing Saudi Arabia, a key US security partner, to recognize Israel’s statehood at a moment when the Arab public is boiling over what they see as a genocide campaign in Gaza. This is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited the pitiful plea from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman that he fears being........

© Eurasia Review