Over the past week, the media have been aflutter with reports and rumors that the Biden administration has decided to mediate a peace accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The case for peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is easy to make. Owing to their shared interest in containing Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia have developed cooperative intelligence ties and strategic relations for a decade. Even without formal diplomatic relations, trade ties between the two countries are significant and quickly expanding.
A formal Saudi-Israeli accord would form a strategic ballast against Iran’s rise as a regional hegemon. It would destabilize the Iranian regime and its satrapies in the Levant.
For Saudi Arabia, the drawback of open relations with Israel is that it would have to accept the hypocrisy of its official hostility towards the Jewish state, and its actual friendship and reliance on it. Islamist media outlets like Qatar’s Al Jazeera will pillory it. But then again, they already do.
Israel has made no effort to hide its eagerness to forge a peace with Saudi Arabia. But like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no reason to pay a significant price to formalize relations that already exist.
This brings us to the United States. Arguably, the party with the most to gain from a U.S.-mediated agreement is the United States itself.
Such an accord would reassert America’s superpower primacy in the region over both China and Russia at a very low cost.
Such an accord would empower America’s closest regional allies at the expense of Iran—Washington’s most powerful regional enemy. A Saudi-Israel accord would facilitate the bipartisan goal of diminishing U.S. involvement in the region. It would stabilize other U.S. allies, including Egypt and Jordan, and destabilize both the Iranian regime and its proxy regimes in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
At the same time, a Saudi-Israeli peace would effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict, thus delivering the long-sought dream of American statesmen since President Harry Truman.