Biden’s plans for Iran and Saudi Arabia failed in their first month

President Joe Biden’s first month dealing with Iran and Saudi Arabia shows that the new government has succumbed to a classic problem: initial plans and promises made during a campaign rarely survive when you’re really running.

As a Democratic candidate, Biden promised a quick return to the nuclear deal with Iran. He then aimed to leverage that negotiation to contain other aspects of Tehran’s aggressive behavior – such as its growing ballistic missile program – in subsequent talks.

But in the Oval Office, the president found the Islamic Republic resistant to diplomacy – but willing to have representatives launching rockets at Americans in the Middle East. This prompted Biden to authorize a retaliatory attack in Syria against those militants, in the hope that it would halt future attacks, while keeping the door open for negotiations.

And in the campaign, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, promising to make it “pay the price” for human rights violations, including the terrible 2018 murder of the dissident, U.S. resident and columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Although he released a non-confidential intelligence report on Friday directly blaming Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder, Biden refused to punish the country’s de facto ruler. Instead of authorizing sanctions, travel bans or asset freezes, the president created the “Khashoggi ban”, which imposes visa restrictions on people trying to silence dissidents abroad. It is not clear whether this includes heads of state, however.

That move – combined with ending US support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen and freezing arms sales – was aimed at “recalibrating”, not “breaking” US-Saudi Arabia relations, say Biden government officials. An important consideration was that MBS, as the Crown Prince is known, may soon officially rule the country, so targeting him personally may condemn future relations between Washington and Riyadh.

“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is important,” spokesman for the State Department Ned Price told reporters on Monday.

In these key areas of foreign policy, President Biden therefore did not govern as candidate Biden said he would. This sparked some criticism of his first month in office and concern that his choices could leave allies and activists dissatisfied.

“They are trying to thread the needle between conflicting interests,” said Seth Binder, a defense officer for the Project on Democracy in the Middle East. “Trying to please a wide range of stakeholders is likely to frustrate many of them.”

Biden’s situation is not new. Each president offered a series of foreign policy plans during his candidacy, only to reject them when they are in charge. Former President Donald Trump, for example, promised to end America’s wars in the Middle East, but after four years, troops remained in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, partly for security reasons.

The new administration, then, is only the last victim of circumstances that do not align with its initial views of events. Now, he has started to change his approach and may need to do that even more.

“This has been the education of Team Biden,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, who oversaw Gulf issues at Trump’s National Security Council. “Once you get in and everything is new, you need to move around a bit and adjust.”

Biden expected a smooth re-entry into the Iran deal. He didn’t understand.

In a speech in July 2019, Biden made clear what he wanted to achieve with Iran after becoming president.

“If Tehran resumes the agreement, I would again agree to the agreement and work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively combating Iran’s other destabilizing activities,” he said. a crowd at City University in New York. These activities, among other things, included its missile program and support for terrorist groups and representatives.

In office, Biden’s team continued to maintain this line: in order for the United States to re-enter the deal, Iran first needed to comply with the pact’s limitations on its nuclear development. Simply put, Tehran would have to reduce its uranium enrichment levels to the limits specified in the agreement with Iran before the United States lifted any sanctions against the country.

But the United States opened the door to negotiate on this point on February 18, after the government accepted an offer to hold informal talks with Tehran mediated by the European Union.

Iran, however, has shown less willingness to engage in negotiations. Tehran said the United States would have to lift sanctions before discussing the United States’ re-entry into the pact. And probably in an effort to increase pressure on the United States, Iranian-aligned representatives fired rockets at anti-ISIS coalition forces outside Erbil, Iraq – killing a Filipino contractor and wounding US troops – and near the US Embassy. USA in Baghdad.

This prompted Biden to send two warplanes to drop bombs at nine facilities in eastern Syria that these militants used to smuggle weapons. “I directed this military action to protect and defend our people and our partners against these attacks and future attacks,” wrote Biden in a letter on Saturday to Congress leaders.

After days of “considering” sitting with the US in an EU-mediated negotiation, Iran on Sunday rejected that plan. “Time is not yet ripe for the proposed informal meeting”, tweeted Saeed Khatibzadeh, the spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This was certainly not how Biden’s team thought the process would be. “Iran, which should be the beneficiary of its policy, is kicking Biden in the face,” said Fontenrose, who is now on the Atlantic Council.

While most experts believe Washington and Tehran will eventually return to the deal, what the new government has learned is that its best-prepared plans need to be reformulated.

“The clear strategy that Biden presented during the campaign did not fully translate into this first month,” said Kaleigh Thomas, an Iran expert at the Center for New American Security in Washington, DC. “We missed the opportunity for an update that the Biden team was trying to take advantage of.”

Candidate Biden has vowed to punish the top Saudi leaders. He did not punish MBS.

In a Democratic debate in November 2019, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC asked then-candidate Biden if he would berate Saudi leaders over Khashoggi’s murder. His answer was unmistakable.

“Yes,” he said. “Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and quartered, and I believe that by order of the Crown Prince. And I would make it very clear that we would not, in fact, sell more weapons to them. We were, in fact, going to make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the outcasts they are. There is very little value for social redemption in the current Saudi Arabian government. “

But on Friday, Biden did not keep his promise. MBS escaped direct punishment, although the intelligence report released by the government directly implicated him as the orchestrator behind Khashoggi’s assassination.

The president and his team seem satisfied with what they have already done to “recalibrate” the US-Saudi Arabia relationship, including restricting MBS’s access to Biden – now he must interact with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, his direct counterpart – and freeze billions in arms sales to the country. In addition, the “Khashoggi ban” could prevent foreign leaders from attacking dissidents abroad.

Some say that the government’s actions will still be read as a severe reprimand to the leaders in Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia is being normalized within the United States,” rather than being seen as a country that will not be rebuked for its domestic policy, except for matters of religious education, said Yasmine Farouk, a Riyadh specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . After the report was released and Biden’s policy changes, Farouk said, “This will become the norm from now on, and this is important when it comes to Saudi Arabia.”

But others believe that the reason why Biden’s team stopped before punishing MBS was to keep the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia from falling forever. This relationship is important, as the country is vital to the United States’ plans to stabilize Syria and Iraq, combat Iran and combat terrorism in the region. It also helps that the country enjoys investing billions in the American economy.

If the government targeted MBS – the king’s son and the likely future king of Saudi Arabia – the United States would put all of that at risk. This was simply not something that Biden’s team wanted to do.

“We believe there [are] most effective ways to ensure that this does not happen again and also to be able to leave space to work with the Saudis in areas where there is mutual agreement – where there are national interests for the United States, ”White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN state of the Union on Sunday. “This is what diplomacy looks like.”

For Fontenrose, who was at Trump’s White House during the Khashoggi affair, Biden basically ended up where the former president ended up. “There is literally no difference in their approach,” she told me, except that Biden avoided the kind of rude comments Trump made on the subject. “This is a card to get out of prison as much as the MBS received from Trump.”

This is not to say that Biden’s policy is identical to that of his predecessor or that it will not change in the future. After all, only a month has passed.

But what recent events have shown is that the president’s policies for Iran and Saudi Arabia did not go as planned or promised, meaning that we can all expect a change in government approaches in the coming days.