Biden’s Middle East visit
Biden won't get increased energy output, but MBS will get what he needs.
President Biden is travelling from Israel to Saudi Arabia today (15 July 2022).
The Saudis will not deliver significant increases in energy production, but MBS will take from Biden all he needs. As Simon Watkins has expertly pointed out, and as President Macron told President Biden, there is no spare production capacity in the GCC – there is at most 150,000bpd extra in Saudi Arabia, as MBZ told President Macron. MBS can play around with releasing amounts from storage, but this is a temporary fix. In exchange, MBS will have received already from the US acceptance that he can succeed his father without US objections. That is, MBS is seeking assurances that should any domestic rivals challenge him at the time of succession, these rivals will not receive US support.
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The visit represents a personal humiliation for Joe Biden and is likely to encourage the Saudis to move away from the US. Joe Biden had promised to make Saudi Arabia into a pariah. His administration made public the US’ intelligence assessment that MBS was personally responsible for killing Washington Post columnist and alleged arms trader Jamal Khashoggi. Biden will now have to shake hands with MBS and to embrace him. This shows the Saudis that the US political leadership is not to be taken seriously. This will encourage Saudi Arabia in its current path, whereby it is increasing its purchases of Russian fuel and will continue to boost cooperation with China. The damage to US-Saudi relations is in line with my expectation that Biden’s moralistic grandstanding is likely to backfire without achieving any of its objectives.
There will be no formal Saudi – Israeli alliance or Arab NATO: Whatever Saudi Arabia offers to Israel will be less than recognition and full normalisation, and far less than a military alliance – right now, all that is on offer is to permit Israeli civilian airlines to use Saudi air space. The Saudis cannot enter an alliance with Israel, because in any war that Israel starts over the Iranian nuclear programme, against Hizbullah or against Hamas, it will be Saudi Arabia that bears the brunt of missile attacks from Yemen, Iraq and/or Iran. An alliance with Israel carries only risk, and very little reward. Recall that the US has failed Saudi Arabia as a security guarantor – US missile defence systems did not stop Houthi attacks that managed to devastate Saudi energy infrastructure, the US was unable to protect Saudi Arabia against Iran or to help Saudi Arabia preserve its regional influence. A confrontation with Iran will be far worse for the Saudis. Israel will not be able to protect them any better than the US could, even though the Saudis sincerely wish to believe otherwise. They are interested in Israeli weapons sales, investments and the like. But they demand a price, that is, protection, and Israel cannot offer that. The US barely can. All the talk of an Arab NATO, or an Arab Israeli NATO, is hokum. The various countries of the region do not trust each other enough, and increasingly do not trust the US enough, to link up their national defence systems. They do not present a united front against Iran. Each ruler is hoping that the US destroys Iran without Iran making his own country pay the price. And each ruler fears that should the Iranian threat disappear, the Saudi and/or Emirati threat will become too big to manage. For the small Gulf states’ rulers, the preferred situation is the status quo, with them being able to play off the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran to maintain their own respective crowns. They will accommodate the US to some extent, but they will not commit to an alliance.
The US cannot afford a war against Iran, but Iran can afford to escalate against the US. With the global energy crisis, the US cannot risk a war with Iran in which Iran would almost certainly take down a significant proportion of the energy infrastructure in the Gulf generally and in Saudi Arabia and the UAE especially. This permits Iran to escalate against the US and Israel, using the typical combination of proxies, improvements in the nuclear programme, low-risk direct attacks and cyber-attacks. Targets for direct attacks will include the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, especially energy infrastructure. Target for proxy attacks will include US forces and allies in Iraq and Syria. Israel and the UAE will be the main targets for cyber-attacks. So long as the Yemen ceasefire holds, Saudi will likely be spared, conditional that it does not initiate formal ties with Israel.