From time to time, America misses one of its allies in the Middle East. “Who Lost Iran?” they asked in 1979, when the shah’s regime went sideways, to Jimmy Carter and the State Department in response. “Who Lost Egypt?” they asked in 2012, when the Muslim Brotherhood seized power, to which Barack Obama and the State Department answered.
“Who Lost Israel?” will be added to this bewildered chorus soon. The answer is President Biden and the State Department.
But this time, America is losing the region as a whole – to its historical rival, Russia. Iranian mischief will intensify again, and Washington’s Arab and Israeli allies will move on without anyone losing much sleep over what the White House thinks of anything. This is a deliberate strategic choice and will lead to the collapse of American influence in Western Asia.
Team Biden seems determined to revive the Iran deal at all costs. The costs included completing the Democrats’ dislike of the Jewish state and thoroughly alienating America’s Sunni Arab clients. In addition, by reviving the nuclear deal, Washington will repeat a failed experiment in the hope of other results.
The Iranian regime will not accept a more difficult deal than the 2015 deal, and the Biden administration is Obama 3.0: the same team is trying to restore its reputation, not to safeguard the national interest. The Obama Bidenites will accept any humiliation from Tehran and call it a diplomatic breakthrough.
Preferred by many of Washington’s foreign policy cognoscenti, the Obama-Biden Mideast template involves abandoning America’s allies and perversely empowering Tehran’s regime by placing it on what Henry Kissinger called “a slide after a nuclear weapon.”
Former President Donald Trump rejected that template. He went bankrupt when he saw it, and he told Americans what the rest of the world already knows: their experts are fools, their Middle Eastern policies a catalog of failures.
Trump dropped the deal with Iran and opted for restraint. And he destroyed the “land for peace” paradigm between Israel and the Palestinians – and forged peace agreements between the Jewish state and four Arab states.
Blessed, much of Trump’s legacy is tied up. Team Biden cannot reverse the Abraham Accords or return the US Embassy to Tel Aviv. No one in the region now envisions a total Israeli withdrawal from the disputed areas known as the West Bank.
The one area where Trump’s legacy isn’t locked in is the Iran deal. Don’t believe new Secretary of State Antony Blinken when he says the government wants a comprehensive deal, or that the government will consult with America’s allies. Team Biden is a resurgence of the Obama administration, and it has inherited the ignorance and arrogance that led Obama to have his nose rubbed in the desert sands by Ayatollah Khamenei.
The Biden team has already indicated that it wishes to reassess relations with Saudi Arabia and remove the Yemeni Houthis from the terrorist list as a suds for Iran. The Prime Minister of Israel has had to wait for his call from Biden.
The Bidenites can imagine putting America’s needy, gross allies in their place. But in reality, Team Biden is only accelerating the arrival of a post-American Middle East.
The Israelis have said they murdered Iranian nuclear planner Mohsen Fakhrizadeh without US intervention and with minimal notice to Washington. The Saudis strive for open relations with Israel, while the front against Tehran hardens.
Russia has already replaced America as the main external force in the region, and Netanyahu would probably rather deal with Vladimir Putin than Biden. Turkey invades Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Chinese investments are pouring in. If the United States loses control of the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf in particular, it will lose control of the world’s most valuable waterway.
So the question is not so much, “Who lost Israel?” like “Is the US losing all of the Middle East?” And the answer must be yes.
That prospect worries American Jews and Evangelical Christians, but Israel will be fine without Washington. His new friends need his technical and military might, and his new clients don’t share the left’s boutique fetish for the Palestinians.
However, the United States will be out of order: it will be reduced to a decaying, irrelevant power, capable of only more piquant and small blocking movements – and beyond the 21st century world.
Dominic Green is Deputy American Editor of The Spectator.
Twitter: @RTLnews