Another informal Biden consultant was more blunt: “They are just being extremely purposeful so as not to be dragged into the Middle East.”
The shift in energy and resources in the region reflects what the consultants described as a deliberate effort to prioritize what they consider to be the most pressing global issues. It is an approach that Biden’s immediate predecessors tried alone, often without success. And at its heart there is a sense of exasperation that the United States’ foreign policy is often dominated by mire in the Gulf.
This is particularly true for Biden. The president has a long and torturous history in the Middle East. He voted against the first Iraq War in 1991, which the United States quickly won. As chairman of the Senate’s powerful Foreign Relations Committee, he defended Congress’s resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003 – a vote he said he regretted.
In 2007, while running for president, Biden proposed a plan that would divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions controlled by Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. It was widely criticized by experts from the Middle East and foreign policy analysts, who said it could lead to more bloodshed.
After years of going back and forth between Washington and the Middle East – dealing with Iraq’s portfolio for President Barack Obama, waging a lonely battle to prevent a planned increase in US troops in Afghanistan, dealing with the civil war in Syria and leading taking into account the rise of ISIS – Biden attacked allies in 2014, blaming them for the rise of the terrorist group and exposing their general frustrations with the region.
“The Turks … the Saudis, the Emirates, etc., what were they doing?” he told Harvard students during a talk that fall. “They were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and essentially has a Sunni-Shia proxy war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of weapons on anyone who fought against Assad. ”
The allies were furious and Biden quickly apologized.
Now president, Biden will have to deal with some of those thorny issues that have been bothering him for a decade.
He has given little indication so far about whether to complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, planned for May under a peace deal that the Trump administration made with the Taliban.
Although Biden has memorably opposed any increase in US troop levels in the country while serving as vice president, his newly appointed defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has hinted that the U.S. withdrawal may not continue. as planned in comments during a meeting this week of NATO’s defense ministers. The Pentagon, Austin said, would not “undertake a hasty or disorderly retreat,” according to a reading provided by the Pentagon. The United States currently has only 2,500 troops there, but Pentagon officials have indicated that the violence remains too high to justify going to zero.
Austin also seemed anxious not to get bogged down in the Middle East. He recently started a review of US troop deployments around the world that is expected to re-evaluate US military presence in the Gulf, but is unlikely to reduce the presence of US troops in the Asia-Pacific region, a senior official said. from the government last week.
Austin also indicated that the Middle East was not one of his top priorities when he installed three special advisers on important issues: China, Covid and climate. His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, and his chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, are both renowned experts in China.
The Pentagon is not the only place where staff are offering tips on a new set of priorities. At the National Security Council, national security adviser Jake Sullivan reduced the team devoted to the Middle East and increased the unit that coordinates US policy towards the Indo-Pacific region. And the possible appointment of a Bernie Sanders adviser, Matt Duss, to a high-level position in the State Department has also raised suspicions that the government is not overly concerned with traditional domestic politics surrounding Middle Eastern politics.
An adviser close to Biden said he opposed the nomination, arguing that Duss and other progressives were very willing to relinquish US assertive leadership and placate U.S. opponents like Iran, Syria and Russia in the name of de-escalation. But Congressman Tom Malinowski (DN.J.), who served as deputy secretary of state for democracy, human rights and work in the Obama administration, said these concerns are overblown.
Biden “wants people in this government to represent different lines of thought within the broad coalition of the democratic party,” he said. “It doesn’t change the commitments he made or the beliefs that define him, it just means that there will be a healthy debate.”
In his brief term as president, Biden is already signaling his willingness to maintain some of the diplomatic advances that his predecessor brokered between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But the big test he faces – which may well determine whether his efforts to put the Middle East in the background will be successful – is how former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal with Iran will unfold.
The re-entry into the joint comprehensive action plan was described by Sullivan as a “critical initial priority” – one that the government is due to negotiate next month with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, known as P5 +1. Some of the president’s allies fear that Biden and his team may be too quick to re-enter the deal, perceive it as a victory and then turn a blind eye to issues such as Iran’s poor human rights record, ballistic missile program. and its attacks on the US and coalition forces in the region.
Sullivan insisted that this will not happen, noting at an event last month that the government’s goal is to “return to diplomacy” with Iran and put its nuclear program “in a box” so that other “significant threats” posed by Iran can be treated by the USA and its allies.
The matter was already urgent. Iran claimed February 21 as the deadline for lifting the country’s oil and gas sanctions or UN inspectors would be expelled. But it took on renewed urgency last Monday when three rockets hit an Iraqi air base in Erbil, where US forces are based, killing one non-American contractor and injuring five Americans. The Shiite militia group that claimed credit for the attack is widely known to have close ties to Tehran.
But in another sign that the government wants to get rid of the thorny region, American officials say that intelligence has not yet pointed out a clear culprit and indicates that it will let Iraqis lead the investigation and any military response.
“While there is certainly a sense of urgency, there is also a real real interest in making sure that we are deliberative in the process here, the decision-making process, and that we are in tune with our Iraqi partners,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. “We want to give them the time and space they need to investigate.”