JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia —
US President Joe Biden sought to use his first Middle East tour in office to reassert
Washington’s influence, but emerged without a single diplomatic breakthrough,
an outcome analysts said was no surprise.
اضافة اعلان
On issues ranging from energy prices to human rights
and Israel’s role in the region, Biden could point only to small — if any —
gains after four whirlwind days of meetings and speeches.
Driving the point home, as
Air Force One flew back
to Washington Saturday evening, Biden’s Saudi hosts downplayed one of the
trip’s few concrete announcements: their lifting of airspace restrictions on
flights to and from Israel, which Biden himself had earlier hailed as “a big
deal”.
There’s little question the moves announced during
Biden’s trip were “modest”, as Brian Katulis of the Middle East Institute in
Washington put it, though he added that some represent “positive signs of
perhaps something bigger to come”.
“They won’t remake the region overnight, and there is
so much more work ahead by actors in the region to achieve the full potential
of these first steps,” Katulis said.
Far harsher reviews came from human rights activists
aghast at Biden’s final stop in Saudi Arabia, a country he once vowed to make a
“pariah” over abuses like the 2018 killing of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
No oil boost
Saudi Arabia was always
going to be the most fraught piece of the itinerary, but Biden came under
intense pressure to court Riyadh after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy
costs soaring.
Washington has been eager for the kingdom, the
world’s biggest crude exporter, to help bring down rising petrol prices that
threaten Democratic chances in November US mid-term elections.
After his bilateral meetings with Saudi leaders on
Friday, Biden said he was “doing all I can” to increase the oil supply but
added that concrete results would not be seen “for another couple weeks” — and
it was unclear what those might be.
His national security adviser,
Jake Sullivan, also
tamped down expectations, telling reporters that any action “will be done in
the context of OPEC+”, the exporting bloc.
The following day, at a summit of the six-member GCC
plus Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, oil “wasn’t really a subject”, Saudi Foreign
Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a press conference.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pledge to
boost production capacity to 13 million barrels per day was actually first
announced in May, and is not meant to become reality until 2027.
Israel walk-back
On the issue of boosting
ties between
Israel and Arab countries, Riyadh appeared to hand Biden a victory
— at least at first.
Despite growing behind-the-scenes business and
security contacts, the kingdom has never recognized Israel and refused to join
the US-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020 that allowed Israel to normalize
relations with neighboring Bahrain and the UAE.
But early Friday, the Saudi aviation authority
announced it was lifting overflight restrictions on “all carriers”, paving the
way for Israeli planes to use Saudi airspace.
Yair Lapid, Israel’s prime minister, claimed it was
“the first official step in normalization with Saudi Arabia”.
Prince Faisal, however, dismissed that idea out of
hand Saturday, saying the move had “nothing to do” with Israel and was “not in
any way a precursor to any further steps”.
During Biden’s earlier stop in Israel and
Palestine,
there was no progress at all when it came to long-moribund peace negotiations,
leaving Biden to focus instead on economic measures including 4G internet for
Palestinians.
Biden and Lapid signed a new security pact which
commits the US to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
But the pact did not mask differences in approach between
the two. Lapid explicitly said the use of force needed to be an option as
diplomacy and talk are inadequate, whereas Biden had reaffirmed he still wanted
to give diplomacy a chance, calling force a “last resort”.
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