I gave a webinar with the Middle East Forum on Monday evening where I placed the current U.S. efforts to block Arab-Israel peace in the context of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s February 14, 1945 meeting with the founder of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud. In that meeting Roosevelt built the foundations and the rationale for the policies the U.S. adopted in relation to the Middle East for the next eighty years. As the State Department’s record of the meeting indicates, those foundations were anti-Zionist and their rationale was anti-Jewish.
The great challenge that Saudi Arabia’s turn towards Israel poses to the Biden administration is whether it will be willing to pursue peace and jettison Roosevelt’s conceptual guide or will it cling to Roosevelt’s agreement with Ibn Saud, scupper the real prospect of ending the Arab world’s conflict with Israel and destroy America’s superpower standing in the Middle East.