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

President Joe Biden’s first month dealing with Iran and Saudi Arabia shows that the new government has posed a classic problem: the initial plans and promises made during a campaign rarely survive once you rule.

As a Democratic candidate, Biden has promised a speedy return to the Iran deal. He then intended to use the negotiations to curb other aspects of Tehran’s aggressive behavior, such as the growing ballistic missile program.

But in the Oval Office, the president has found the Islamic Republic resistant to diplomacy, but willing to have proxies fire rockets at Americans in the Middle East. This led to Biden authorizing a retaliatory attack in Syria against the militants, in the hope that it would deter future attacks while the door was open for talks.

And on the campaign trail, Biden called Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ state and promised to ‘pay him the price’ for human rights violations, including the brutal murder of 2018 dissident, US resident and columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Although he released an unclassified intelligence report Friday that directly blames Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the assassination, Biden did not want to directly punish the country’s de facto ruler. Instead of authorizing sanctions, a travel ban or freezing assets, the president has created the “Khashoggi ban” that imposes visa restrictions on people trying to silence dissidents abroad. It is unclear, however, whether this includes heads of state.

Biden’s actions said that these actions – combined with the end of US support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen and a freezing point on arms sales – were intended to ‘recalibrate’, not ‘break’ between the United States and Saudi Arabia. An important consideration was that MBS, as the Crown Prince is known, may soon run the country, and that he can therefore personally focus on future relations between Washington and Riyadh.

“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is important,” the foreign ministry said. Ned Price said reporters Monday.

In these key areas of foreign policy, therefore, President Biden did not rule as candidate Biden said. It has voiced criticism over its first month at the helm of affairs and concerns that allies and activists may be dissatisfied.

“They’re trying to thread the needle between competing interests,” said Seth Binder, an attorney at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “If you try to please a wide range of interested people, it will probably frustrate a lot of them.”

Biden’s situation is by no means new. Each president presented a number of foreign policy plans while being eligible to reject them only once he was at the helm of affairs. 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 over security concerns.

The new administration is thus only the latest victim of circumstances that do not correspond to their initial view of events. Now it has begun to change its approach, and may need to do so further.

“It was Team Biden’s training,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, who oversaw the Gulf issues in Trump’s National Security Council. “Once you come in and everything is new, you have to get a little confused and adjust.”

Biden was hoping for a smooth entry into the Iran deal. He did not understand it.

In a July 2019 speech, Biden was clear about what he wanted to achieve with Iran once he became president.

“If Tehran complies with the agreement again, I will rejoin the agreement and work with our allies to strengthen and expand it, while pushing back more effectively on Iran’s other destabilizing activities,” he said. a crowd at City University in New York said. These activities included the missile program and support for proxies and terrorist groups.

In his office, Biden’s team continued to maintain the line: Iran first had to comply with the agreement again with the constraints of the treaty on the core development of the treaty. Simply put, Tehran will have to lower its levels of uranium enrichment to the limits specified in the Iran agreement before America will lift any sanctions against the country.

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

However, Iran has shown less willingness to engage in talks. Tehran has said the US should lift sanctions before discussing America’s accession to the treaty. And apparently in an effort to increase pressure on the US, Iran-affiliated proxies fired rockets at anti-ISIS coalition forces outside Erbil, Iraq – killing a Filipino contractor and injuring US troops – and near the US embassy in Baghdad .

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

After days of “consideration” to sit down with the US in an EU-mediated negotiation, Iran rejected the plan on Sunday. The ‘time is not ripe for the proposed informal meeting’, tweeted Saeed Khatibzadeh, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry.

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

While most experts believe that Washington and Tehran will eventually work back into the agreement, the new government believes the best plan for it should be trained.

“The clear strategy Biden presented during the campaign has not yet been fully translated in this first month,” said Kaleigh Thomas, an Iranian expert at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC. “We lost the chance to take advantage of the Biden team.”

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

In a November 2019 Democratic debate, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked then-candidate Biden whether he would reprimand senior Saudi leaders over the Khashoggi assassination. His response was unequivocal.

“Yes,” he said. ‘Khashoggi was in fact killed and disbanded, and I believe on the orders of the Crown Prince. And I would make it very clear that we are not going to sell weapons to them anymore. We’re actually going to make them pay the price and actually make them the pariah they are. There is very little social redemption value in the current government in Saudi Arabia. ”

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

The president and his team appear to be happy with what they have already done to “recalibrate” relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, including restricting MBS’s access to Biden – he should now interact with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, his immediate counterpart – and the freezing of billions of weapons. sales to the country. Furthermore, the “ban on Khashoggi” could deter foreign leaders from attacking dissidents abroad.

Some believe the actions of the government will still be read as a serious reprimand for leaders in Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia is being normalized within the US,” instead of being seen as a country that will not be reprimanded for its internal politics except for religious education issues, said Yasmine Farouk, an expert on Riyadh at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said. Following the release of the report and Biden’s policy changes, Farouk said: “This is going to be the norm from now on, and it’s big when it comes to Saudi Arabia.”

But others believe the reason Biden’s team no longer punished MBS was to turn the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia downward forever. This relationship is important as the country is of paramount importance to America’s plans to stabilize Syria and Iraq, counter Iran and fight terrorism in the region. It also helps that the country likes to invest billions in the US economy.

If the government targeted MBS – the son of the king and the possible future king of Saudi Arabia – the US would endanger it all. It’s just not something Biden’s team wanted to do.

‘We believe there [are] more effective ways to ensure that this does not happen again and to also give space to work with the Saudis in areas where there is mutual agreement – where there are national interests for the United States, “said White House press secretary , Jen Psaki, said. Tell CNNs State of the Union on Sunday. “This is what diplomacy looks like.”

For Fontenrose, who was in the Trump White House during the Khashoggi affair, Biden essentially ended up where the former president did. “There’s literally no difference in their approach,” she told me, except that Biden avoided the kind of rude remarks Trump made about the issue. “It’s just as much a release card as MBS got from Trump.”

This is not to say that Biden’s policy is identical to its predecessor or that it will not change in the future. It’s only a month after all.

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