Occasionally, America deceives one of its allies in the Middle East. “Who lost Iran?” asked them in 1979 when the Shah’s regime moved sideways, with the answer Jimmy Carter and the State Department. “Who lost Egypt?” asked them in 2012 when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, and the answer was Barack Obama and the State Department.
“Who lost Israel?” will be added to this confused refrain soon. The answer will be President Biden and the State Department.
But this time, America will lose the region as a whole – to its historic rival, Russia. Iranian calamity will escalate again, and the Arab and Israeli allies of Washington will move on without anyone losing much sleep over what the White House thinks about anything. It is a deliberate strategic choice and it will lead to the collapse of American influence in West Asia.
Team Biden wants to revive the price of Iran at all costs. The costs include completing the departure of the Democrats from the Jewish state and the alienation of America’s Sunni Arab customers. In addition, Washington will repeat a failed experiment in reviving the nuclear deal, hoping for different results.
The Iranian regime does not accept a stricter agreement than the 2015 agreement, and the Biden government is Obama 3.0: the same team wants to restore its reputation and not secure the national interest. The Obama-Bidenites will accept any humiliation from Tehran and call it a diplomatic breakthrough.
The Obama-Biden Mideast Template, the one favored by much of Washington’s foreign policy cognoscenti, involves the failure of America’s allies and the perverse empowerment of the Tehran regime by placing it on what Henry Kissinger called ‘a slide to a nuclear weapon’ ‘.
Former President Donald Trump has rejected the template. He knew bankruptcy when he saw it, and he told Americans what the rest of the world already knows: their experts are fools, their Mideast policies are a catalog of failure.
Trump abandoned the Iran deal and chose to close it. And he defeated the paradigm “land for peace” between Israel and the Palestinians – and forged peace agreements between the Jewish state and four Arab states.
Blessed are many of Trump’s legacy locked up. Team Biden cannot withhold the Abrahamic Agreements or return the US Embassy to Tel Aviv. No one in the region can now imagine the total Israeli withdrawal from the disputed areas known as the West Bank.
The one area where Trump’s legacy has not been locked up is the Iran deal. Do not believe the new Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, when he says that the government wants a comprehensive agreement, or that the government will consult with US allies. Team Biden is a revival of the Obama administration, and it inherits the ignorance and arrogance that led to Obama rubbing his nose in the desert sands by Ayatollah Khamenei.
The Biden team has already indicated that they want to re-evaluate relations with Saudi Arabia and have taken Yemen’s Houthi from the terrorist list as a soup to Iran. The Israeli prime minister had to wait for his call from Biden.
The Bidenites may suggest that they put America’s needy, rough allies in their place. But in reality, Team Biden is only accelerating the arrival of a post-American Middle East.
The Israelis announced that they had killed Iran’s nuclear planner, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, without any US involvement and with minimal notice to Washington. The Saudis are on their way to public relations with Israel as the anti-Tehran front hardens.
Russia has already replaced America as the main foreign power in the region, and Netanyahu will probably prefer to deal with Vladimir Putin it with Biden. Turkey invades Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Chinese investments are pouring in. If the United States loses control of the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf, it loses control of the world’s most valuable waterway.
So the question is not so much: “Who lost Israel?” as “Is the US Losing the Whole Middle East?” And the answer must be yes.
The prospect is worrying American Jews and evangelical Christians, but Israel would be fine without Washington. His new friends need his technological and military might, and his new patrons do not share the leftist boutique fetish for the Palestinians.
However, the United States will not do well: it will be reduced to a dilapidated, irrelevant force, capable only of provoking movements and blocking small ones – and shutting them out of the 21st century world.
Dominic Green is deputy American editor of The Spectator.
Twitter: @DrDominicGreen