JERUSALEM — President Biden left Washington on Tuesday for a four-day trip to the Middle East to try to slow down an accelerating Iranian nuclear program, speed up the flow of oil to US pumps and reshape relations with Saudi Arabia without embracing an apparent . crown prince who, according to the CIA, was behind the murder of a prominent dissident living in the United States.
All three efforts are fraught with political dangers for a president who knows the region well but returns for the first time in six years with far less influence than he would like to shape events.
Its 18-month negotiation to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran has stalled, pushing diplomatic efforts to force Tehran to extradite the country most of the nuclear fuel it is now enriching to near-bomb levels. has thwarted.
And while no explicit deal is expected to be announced on increasing Saudi oil production — out of concern that it might appear inappropriate as a reward for facilitating the return of the crown prince to diplomatic circles — it probably will in a month’s time. or two are coming, officials say.
Government officials know they will face harsh criticism from within their own party when the inevitable photos emerge from the presidential meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, less than two years after Mr Biden promised make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” on the international stage. That promise was prompted by the murder of Washington Post dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Biden has often portrayed this era in history as a contest between democracy and autocracy, barring Cuba and Venezuela from a recent top of America in Los Angeles for their repressive practices. But he has justified a visit to Saudi Arabia as an exercise in realism.
“My goal was to refocus the relationship — but not break it,” Mr Biden wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post last weekend. Saudi “energy resources are vital to mitigate the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine,” he said, in his sole acknowledgment of the reality that Prince Mohammed’s strategy – waiting for the United States to return Saudi Arabia need – bear fruit.
There is also an element of superpower maneuvering to the journey.
Mr. Biden made it clear when he took office that he wanted to emphasize the US focus on the Middle East and on China – a reflection of his belief that Washington wasted 20 years when it should have focused on a real competitor of the same nature.
But the journey is also partly about slowing down China’s invasion of the region. Last week, Riyadh and Washington quietly signed a memorandum of understanding to work together to build a next-generation 5G mobile network in Saudi Arabia. That’s designed to beat Huawei, China’s 5G champion.
The politics of the war in Ukraine are also in the background.
Mr Biden’s aides made it clear in the spring that they were annoyed when the Israeli government insisted a largely neutral attitude on the war and stressed that this was the only way for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to keep an open line with President Vladimir V. Putin.
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared to leave, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, revealed for the first time that intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran – Israel’s main opponent – plans to help Russia in the fight against Ukraine. He said Iran was preparing to supply Russia with hundreds of drones or UAVs, some of which are capable of carrying out attacks.
“Our information indicates that the Iranian government is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred UAVs, including those with weapons, on an accelerated timeline,” Sullivan said as a near-throwaway line at the top of his list. comments Monday afternoon.
“Our information further indicates that Iran is preparing to train Russian forces to use these UAVs with the first training sessions scheduled to begin in early July,” he said.
Sullivan warned that “it is unclear whether Iran has already supplied any of these UAVs to Russia,” but said that “this is just one example of how Russia is looking to countries like Iran for capabilities that are also being used” in attacks on Saudi Arabia. Arabia.
Sullivan’s primary motive in revealing the Iranian operation was to warn Tehran and Moscow that the United States is watching. But since Biden’s visit was expected to begin with a demonstration of new Israeli capabilities to use laser weapons against drones and missiles, it also seemed intended to send a message to the Israeli government about stepping up its support for Ukraine.
It also gives Mr. Biden and the interim Prime Minister who will serve as his host, Yair Lapid, a common point of agreement on how to confront Iran, as there is an ongoing struggle behind the scenes on how to make a crucial turn. in Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel vociferously objected to the 2015 nuclear deal, and then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress about the need to block it. (Many of its intelligence and military leaders disagreed, later saying they believed the deal, which forced Iran to transport 97 percent of its fuel supplies out of the country, had bought them for years.)
When President Donald J. Trump taken out of the agreement in 2018, it sparked another wave of Iran’s nuclear program. It has now produced a significant amount of uranium with near-bomb-grade purity – something it never did before the 2015 agreement – and Israel has stepped up its campaign of sabotage and blown up Iranian facilities. In response, Iran is accelerating the development of new underground facilities.
Officially, Israel opposes an extension of the agreement, although it appears to be a moot point.
Talks have stalled for months, with Mr Biden refusing a demand from Iran to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its list of terrorist organizations in Washington. Robert Malley, the chief American negotiator, whom the Iranians refused to meet in person, told NPR recently that “whether they’re interested or not, they’ll have to decide sooner or later, because at some point the deal will be a thing of the past.”
It may already be past the point of CPR.
In the early spring, Mr Malley and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said there were only weeks, maybe a month or so, to reach an agreement before Iran’s progress, and the knowledge gained when it Installing advanced centrifuges to extract high-volume uranium would render the 2015 agreement obsolete.
Now, four months later, Biden’s aides refuse to explain how they let that deadline pass — and they continue to insist that reviving the deal is more valuable than giving it up.
Rafael Grossi, the director of the world’s nuclear inspector, said in Australia earlier this month that he believed Iran’s program was now so advanced that others in the region would be tempted to copy it. Saudi Arabia has said it reserves the right to build any nuclear infrastructure Iran builds.
“We are now in a situation where Iran’s neighbors are beginning to fear the worst and plan accordingly,” Mr Grossi said. “There are countries in the region today that are looking very closely at what is happening to Iran, and tensions in the region are mounting.” He added that political leaders had occasionally said “they would actively seek nuclear weapons if Iran became a nuclear threat.”
For public consumption, the White House has argued that Mr. Biden’s decision to go to Saudi Arabia was motivated by a slew of national security issues, not just oil. But oil is in fact the most urgent reason for the trip at a time of high gas prices.
Sensitive to the appearance of sacrificing a principled stance on human rights for cheaper energy, the president has no intention of announcing an oil deal during his stop in Jeddah. But the two sides have agreed that Saudi Arabia will ramp up production once a current quota agreement expires in September, just in time for the fall midterm election, according to current and former US officials.
Martin Indyk, a former Middle Eastern diplomat to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said the exact amounts are still uncertain, but Saudi Arabia is expected to increase production by about 750,000 barrels per day and the United Arab Emirates Emirates will follow suit with an additional 500,000 barrels per day, for a combined 1.25 million. How much that would push prices at the pump in the United States is unclear, and it may not be fast enough or deep enough to change the public mood before November.
“That will be the kind of deal that warrants the trip, but since they’re not going to announce it, it leaves the president in a situation where he has to justify it in other terms, which is why the focus is on Israel and defense normalization and integration.” said Mr. indyk. “The President’s defensive stance is wrong. He should embrace it.”
Instead, Mr Biden has tried to make it clear that he is not so much visiting Saudi Arabia as meeting multiple leaders from the region in the form of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group of six states led by Saudi Arabia. as well as the leaders of three other Arab countries, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan.
But White House officials acquiesce in the fact that Mr. Biden won’t be able to avoid Prince Mohammed altogether, and there will be that damaging picture — damaging, at least for Mr. Biden. The photo will be invaluable to the Crown Prince as he seeks to restore his international image.
Some analysts said that alone could be enough for the Saudis.
“I think the chances of the Saudis trying to embarrass the president on this trip are relatively slim because I think it would hurt the very strategic things they’re trying to do,” said Jon B. Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “So I think their incentives for collaboration are high.”