President Joe Biden is reportedly trying to pick up where President Donald Trump left off and achieve a Saudi-Israeli peace deal by the end of the year — despite his administration’s record of snubbing the Saudi kingdom.
Barak Ravid of Axios.com reported Wednesday on the new Biden administration effort, which comes in the aftermath of Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Iran under Chinese auspices in Beijing in March.
That meeting was seen as a marker of Biden’s failure to maintain ties with Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally in the Middle East despite a poor human rights record that Democrats decided, under Trump, was a problem.
Upon taking office, Biden began backing away from the U.S.-Saudi alliance. He briefly suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; he de-listed the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a terrorist group; and he reopened negotiations with Iran toward a new nuclear deal over Saudi (and Israeli) objections. Biden began changing his tune as gasoline prices rose, begging Saudi Arabia to expand production — with little success. The Saudis openly contradicted Biden’s claim that an agreement to open Saudi airspace to Israeli civilian flights was part of a broader normalization effort negotiated successfully by the White House during Biden’s visit last July.
Now, however, administration officials have been shuttling to Saudi Arabia in the hope of convincing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to back a Saudi-Israeli peace deal similar to those concluded by Trump under the Abraham Accords. (Saudi Arabia was considered to be close to such an agreement in late 2020, but backed away once Trump lost the election.)
In return, Axios reports, Saudi Arabia wants the U.S. to provide advanced military technology, and to approve a Saudi effort to enrich uranium as a safeguard against Iran’s nuclear program.
Ravid notes Democrats are unlikely to back such deals unless reached by a president of their party.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.