President Biden’s Middle East visit

S ince assuming office as the President of the United States on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden has made two foreign trips. His first visit was to Asia. He went for three days and met with the leaders of two countries — South Korea and Japan. While on that visit, he signed off on a framework that brought together a dozen Asian countries. Pakistan was not included. His second visit was to the Middle East where he also visited two countries — Israel and Saudi Arabia.

While in Saudi Arabia, he hosted eight Arab nations — six countries were of the Gulf Cooperation Council that included Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, while the other two were Egypt and Iraq. Of the two visits, the one to the Middle East offered the US President real challenges. The geographic area generally known as the ‘Middle East’ has long been of interest to the worlds’ large powers.

The very name ‘the Middle East’ leads to the question: east of what? The answer is simple: it got that description from those who minded in London the external affairs of Britain when that country was the most powerful nation on Earth. The geographic space that was to the east of Britain was given three separate nomenclatures: the ‘Near East’ meant the cluster of nations in the north of the African continent. Beginning with Egypt, going south and east of the country, that area came to be called the ‘Middle East’. China and the countries in East Asia came to be known as the ‘Far East’.

South Asia, at one point the largest colony which Britain ruled for over two hundred years, was not included in the description of the East. Oil was the main reason for the large-power interest in the Middle East. It was discovered in large quantities in several Middle Eastern nations. The largest reserves were found in Saudi Arabi, followed by Iran. What is today known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) also had large deposits. Qatar, a small state in the Persian Gulf next to UAE, was found to be sitting on one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas.

Most of these discoveries were made by explorers from Britain but as London lost power and was replaced by Washington as the dominant global player, US oil companies became prominent players in the region. What had complicated the US’s involvement in the Middle East is the arrival of the Jewish state of Israel in the region. The Jewish people had suffered a great deal at the hands of the Nazis in Germany, who, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, undertook a program to exterminate all the Jews who lived in the country.

The resulting holocaust caused the deaths of six million Jews. The community also suffered in the eastern part of Europe, in particular in the USSR. This ill-treatment led to rise of the Zionist movement that aimed to return the Jews to Jerusalem, which had been the centre of their religion for centuries. A large number of European Jews had migrated to the US where they succeeded in gaining economic and political power that was far in excess of their proportion in the American population.

Since Jerusalem was now in the middle of the land in which the Arabs had lived for a long time, the Zionist moves in and the creation of the Jewish state of Israel led to often-bloody conflicts between Arabs and Jewish settlers. The US sided with the Jewish community. In the wars that were fought for twenty years before 1967, Israel conquered a lot of land that was west of the Jordan River. The Jews established in the occupied land several ‘settler communities’.

The ownership of this land remains an unresolved issue between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish state of Israel. The Arab states, being strong supporters of the Palestinian cause did not recognise the Jewish state until the US worked with the Egyptians and the Jordanians to sign the Oslo Accords, which brought recognition to Israel by these two Arab nations while the Israelis withdrew from some of the land they had occupied during the 1967 war. Jared Kushner, the Jewish son-in-law of President Donald Trump, worked with Israel and several Arab states to have more Arab states give recognition to the Jewish state.

He pushed for the acceptance of the Abraham Accords, which marked the normalisation of relations between Israel and two Gulf states — the UAE and Bahrain. While persuading some of the Arab states to work with Israel, Trump pulled the US troops from some of the Arab states to which they had gone under former President George W. Bush. Policymakers don’t as yet see it this way: the US withdrawal from parts of the Middle East created an opportunity the Chinese were not only willing but eager to exploit. Some of the pullback left Washington with an impression that does not serve it well. The way it pulled out of Afghanistan was seen as a clumsy effort not expected of a superpower. The departure from Afghanistan was not the only recent episode involving the US but there was also what Barack Obama, while he was in office, called the pivot to Asia.

The rapid rise of China was the main reason why the US believed they needed to have an effective presence in the Indo-Pacific area. To help it in this endeavor, Washington pulled in Australia, Japan and India as its partners in an arrangement called the Quad. However, no effort was made to pull in Pakistan into any of the arrangements that the Biden administration was working on. The reason was presumably Pakistan’s close relations with China. What did Biden achieve in the Middle East? According to some, “America’s greatest strength in international relations has always been its combination of high ideals and a readiness to engage with almost anyone when it served to advance peace and American national interests.

This doesn’t mean the kind of amoral pandering to dictators by Mr. Trump. Rather it means building on areas of agreement, however small, that can be used to move toward a more peaceful, free and open world.” President Biden’s fist-bump with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was not received well in the US since it was believed that the prince was involved in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But, as The New York Times published an editorial on July 17, 2022 after the President had concluded his visit says, “while there is a natural impulse for grand gestures on every presidential visit abroad, there are other places and other issues where this administration needs to advance a broader and more ambitious agenda — especially climate change, Ukraine and China. This is not the moment for bold new Middle East policies. Mr. Biden is doing the right thing by treating the region’s issues as part of a bigger picture.”