The Biden Agenda: Why ‘Outside-In’ Diplomacy Could Be the Key to Middle East Peace

Would Joe Biden be willing or able to take advantage of the progress made with the Israel-UAE deal?

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Welcome to the latest in our series, “The Biden Agenda.” We’ve invited some of the smartest thinkers and subject-matter experts we know to contribute to what will become an occasional series on what a Biden presidency might look like. Today Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies weighs how Joe Biden might handle Middle East relations and whether he can take advantage of the willingness of some moderate Arab nations to normalize relations with Israel.

In October 2016, I attended an intimate discussion with a senior Israeli diplomat. Participants took turns peppering him with questions about security problems that plagued the Middle East. When it was my turn, I asked him, “What Israel-related challenges and opportunities await the next president?” His response was memorable: “We can always discuss challenges. But there will be a huge opportunity, no matter who is elected. The next president can broker peace between Israel and the moderate Sunni Arab states.”

Nearly four years later, the Trump administration helped broker the first such deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Details are still being ironed out (notably, the UAE’s request for F-35 aircraft), but the UAE has already repealed its anti-Israel boycott law and warmly welcomed an Israeli delegation, delivered by Israel’s national carrier El-Al, with great fanfare. By all accounts, the deal is off to an auspicious start. 

For the Trump administration, this was an important foreign policy win in the lead-up to the November election. And officials are quick to point out that this diplomatic success may not be one and done. All eyes are now on Bahrain, Oman, Sudan, Morocco, and perhaps other Arab states that are also mulling peace with Israel.

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  1. WBS

    Bahrain is next. Bank it.

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      Paul Reichardt

      Hey, you called it. Nice work!

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    erasmus

    "The Arab states are prioritizing their own national interests over the Palestinian cause for the first time in a century". Seriously? There's a long and storied history of Arab states leaving Palestinians out to dry. They're useful as a focal point for the Arab street, and as a convenient talking point, but Palestinians have not been the reason that Arabs didn't get along with Israelis

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      erasmus

      The Saudis, Emirates, Sissi, et al are also legitimately brutal people who do not abide by any approximation of Western standards of behavior. Are they better than Iran? Probably. Are they our allies? For better or worse, yes. Saying their hands are stained red though does not make people pro-Iran apologists

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        Scarlette Tarte

        The Persian people are far less barbaric than the Arab people, historically anyway. Personally, I would rather have the educated Persian neighbor much more than the Arab neighbor.

        Personally, I would prefer to wash our hands of the ENTIRE region.

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          Bill Nelson

          The problem is your neighbor you talk to is the ayatollah, not the nice cousins.
          Go look at pictures of Iran pre-revolution. I had a co-worker(American) who lived in Tehran for 7 years. He owned a disco whose clientele was all Iranian. Do they remember?

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          Pat Riot

          Like saying the Swedish people are rapists. Sins of the (great- x30) father and all that...

          That region isn't going to wash its hands of *us*, and I'm not fond of the idea of leaving Israel for dead like we did the Kurds. Hence we're stuck dealing with the realities there.

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          erasmus

          Mind, I didn't mean to make blanket statements about the various peoples, my comments were directed at the governments/leadership. But yeah, the Iranians have their own internal political/social divides, and many are open to Western culture. The "conservatives" in Iranian leadership benefit from American brinkmanship, because it rallies even anti-regime (but still patriotic) Iranians to the flag

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        erasmus

        And the JCPOA is still backed by our legitimate NATO allies, who do seriously care about human rights and peaceable solutions. A small fringe of people who support JCPOA are anti-Jewish bigots who support BDS and endorse Iran, but most are people legitimately trying to solve a thorny issue (to which the US apparently has given up trying to provide real solutions)

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          Bill Nelson

          Do these supporters care about the human rights of Iranians?

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            erasmus

            Yes, the goal of most Western nations (i.e., JCPOA supporters) is to encourage, by carrot and stick, meaningful social and political change in Iran. For what it's worth, the Iranian Republican Guard and elite cope pretty well with sanctions, it's usually the masses that suffer the brunt of consequences. We also saw in the Iraq invasion and through the Arab Spring how regime change can go. There are no easy solutions, and anyone saying otherwise is either disingenuous or naive

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  3. H.Allen.Irish

    The "Biden agenda?" Seriously? I just saw a video in which Biden was desperately struggling to read a scripted answer to a scripted question off a teleprompter and pretty much flopping. I know the Dispatch is Lincoln Project adjacent, but seriously, it's very clear that Biden personally has no agenda except taking a nap and getting a pudding cup.

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    1. H.Allen.Irish

      If you haven't seen it, it's a hoot. https://twitter.com/AriFleischer/status/1303471776454893568?s=20

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  4. deathtomcmansions

    Even though 9/11 was nearly 20 years ago, so many of the perpetrators were from SA, as was a lot of their support. AFAIK, despite MBS, their basic Wahabi belief system is still a big problem. I'm not saying cut them out entirely, but I think extremely wary is a good approach to SA. I don't see them as enemies per se, but rivals for sure, and not friends.

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    Pat Riot

    This is a plain partisan analysis and thus it's pretty useless. The BDS movement was mentioned but not say Trump Tower Istanbul, Trump's fealty to MBS, our leaving our Kurdish allies for dead, Trump's acquiescence to Putin risking leaving Russia in charge of the Middle East, etc.

    Biden will have a radical wing of his party to deal with whereas Trump will have nobody to deal with except the one person who is more malign to US interests than any other actor in our history, himself.

    Biden will work for our interests and may or may not be fully successful. Trump will act in his own personal interests and will held in check by nobody.

    This is yet another analysis of Trump by Republicans that leaves out... Trump.

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      Bill Nelson

      “This is a plain partisan analysis and thus it's pretty useless.”
      The “use” you make of it is to address the content and improve your own views. And the column is specifically about Biden, not Trump.

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        Pat Riot

        Your ideas are improved when you get a raw analysis of the situation not a campaign commercial for Trump 2020 like this was. It's loaded with partisan messaging supported by nothing.

        Foreign policy is, realistically, non-partisan these days. Neither party has a strong ideology or doctrine. It's just up to the random movements of whatever party is in power, and it's ultimately based on the character of the president.

        The dismissal of the Iran Deal is pure partisan garbage: neither "side" can say definitively if it was a good idea or not since we don't own a crystal ball, and every attack on it has to do with Obama's secret hatred of the USA and his need to impose Sharia Law not say the actual military realities (i.e. what should we have done instead? blank out...).

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  6. Pedro Goulart

    The outside-in take is good, but the silly rhetoric around the Iran nuclear deal is a good example of how hawks can't or won't debate the issue in good faith. It's just not true that JCPOA defenders "often" conflate with hatred towards Israel or the BDS movement.

    The US has all the right to defend its interests in the Middle East, and that of its allies. It's certainly desirable that hawks point out the JCPOA's shortcomings, as well as other malign activity by Iran not covered by the deal. But for an actual debate they need to be honest about some stuff:

    -Their hardline position is not shared by the vast majority of the world, including the other Western powers in the deal. The UK followed America to Iraq in 2003, but not now when the US left the deal. Why?

    -That's also true for some countries in the periphery whose political values are much closer to the American ones than to, say, Chinese or Russian. Do people really think that most countries oppose America's hardline stance because they despise Israel, America, or sympathize more with authoritarian regimes?

    -Sanctions alone don't have the effect public officials often pretend they have. The way America uses them now is often shallow performance, for show and some psychological effect. Merely a way to show the public you're being "tough".

    -As the world's biggest superpower, America sure can, more than any other country, go alone in this, ignoring or even alienating allies across the world, slapping sanctions indefinitely, and not compromising an inch of its current stance. Sure. But its defenders should be upfront about its costs, including a decreased American reputation in world affairs that might affect cooperation in other issues (say, China), and the increased probability of war with Iran in the future. There are no free lunches, not even for superpowers in international relations. Are most Americans willing to bear the costs of this stance?

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      Bill Nelson

      “Their hardline position is not shared by the vast majority of the world, including the other Western powers in the deal.”
      First, remove the adjective “hardline”, its only purpose is to bias the sentence.
      And maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world is wrong. These are the same people who opposed Reagan’s confrontation with the Soviets. The same people who were content allow the Serbs to continue to massacre their enemies. Nations who often seem willing to exchange principles for profit.

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      Paul Reichardt

      Great comment.

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    3. Joe1776

      "Do people really think that most countries oppose America's hardline stance because they despise Israel, America, or sympathize more with authoritarian regimes?"

      I think the growth of antisemitism in Europe is definitely part of it.

      "Data from Jewish communities around the globe indicate an increase in annual antisemitic incidents. And some Jews are feeling more isolated and vulnerable as a result, according to recent surveys. A December 2018 EU survey found that 80 percent of European Jews feel that antisemitism in their country has increased over the past five years, and 40 percent live in daily fear of being physically attacked."

      https://www.adl.org/what-we-do/anti-semitism/antisemitism-globally

      I don't agree with everything they say but this makes sense. Europe has never been great for tolerating Jews. The USA rates at 10% for anti-semitism Western Europe has more than 2xs that much at 24%. You can see the middle east and North Africa comes in at 74%. Europe has been taking in many people from these areas and they are now voting. So it shouldn't be surprising that they are not as supportive of Israel as the US.
      https://global100.adl.org/map?_ga=2.18856446.611845058.1599677036-784441398.1599677036

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        Scarlette Tarte

        Uh, that is happening here as well. Antisemitic violence and rhetoric is up in the US as well.

        https://www.wsj.com/articles/rise-in-anti-semitic-incidents-goes-beyond-recent-violent-attacks-11576611407

        which, by and large, is coming from the RIGHT.

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          Dina

          It's coming at us from both sides. As always when the world is in turmoil, the Jews are caught in the middle. (The classic example is the targeting of Jews for being capitalists by one side and communists by the other, back in the day. The American president responsible for the most Jewish deaths is FDR, who knowingly sent back a boatload of nearly a thousand Jewish refugees to their deaths--indeed about a third of them were murdered--and who actively resisted saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.)

          The far right and the far left in this very country have Jewish blood on their hands. Last year, three fatal attacks against Jews were carried out, two from the left and one from the right (the previous year a far-right white nationalist perpetrated the Pittsburgh massacre).

          Jewish conspiracy theories abound on the left and right (George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc. ad infinitum). QAnon on the right. BDS on the left.

          Yes, BDS is anti-Jewish. If you target one country, and one country only in the whole entire world--which also happens to be the only Jewish state--for sanctions, it's not because you care more about Palestinian human rights than anyone else's in the whole world. It's because you hate Jews (hate Israel because it's a Jewish state) or because you are ignorant.

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          Bill Nelson

          Do you know why Evangelicals are the strongest supporters of Israel and Judaism?

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    Kevin Johnson

    Really good!

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    Victor Clairmont

    I am really liking these dives whether I disagree /agree with them.

    But, as an aside, should you maybe also do some dives into what a Trump second term might entail?

    You never know.

    Keep up the good work.

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      Bill Nelson

      I suspect that a second Trump term might not be different than the first, possibly less self control.

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  9. Joe1776

    This was a very diplomatic article indeed. "The president has cashed in on the opportunities that his predecessor gifted him."

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    Chris L

    This outside-in approach is particularly exciting, and reminds me of what seems to be going on in much of the world akin to a "great realignment". I would like to think of that happening here in the US where moderates on both sides of the political aisle band together against both sides' extremist fringes to reshape Democrats and the GOP. Assuming the extremist fringes also uneasily band together (which would be consistent with Jonah's historical views of socialism, despite the socialist versions tending to vehemently dislike each other), this would hew to the horseshoe theory.

    Perhaps a similar thing can happen in the Middle East. Instead of working within the Sunni vs Shiite framework, we can take a moderate vs theocratic approach. Working with the moderates in such a way would also control the economic power in light of the decline of Saudi Arabia and Iran in various ways, and render the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDSM) irrelevant. (I like my abbreviation better)

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