In a visit with an old friend, Israel’s Herzog can help Biden make the strategic choice

It’s always nice to visit with old friends, and while Israeli President Isaac Herzog came to Washington this week to discuss a range of gravely serious world events, he also came bearing the message that the U.S.-Israel relationship extends deeper than any policy disagreement, or any election (of which there are two about to happen — here and in Israel). He reminded the audience of friendly faces at an Atlantic Council event this week that either he, or a member of his family, have engaged with every U.S. president going back to FDR. So “Bougie,” as he’s known to his friends, is a comfortable and familiar presence in Washington. That’s good news, because Bougie will have to deliver some hard truths to President Biden — as only a friend can.

In their visit yesterday, it’s safe to assume the two presidents spoke at length about Iran’s malign activities, which, while once endemic to the Middle East, have metastasized to Europe. Iran’s provision of loitering munitions to Russia, of which Herzog has brought fresh photo evidence to Washington, has enabled Vladimir Putin to terrorize and murder Ukrainian civilians. On this issue, one might recall that it was just last week that Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz demurred when Ukraine made a public request for Israeli air-defense systems to neutralize that very threat — so, what gives?

Hopefully, in their meeting, Biden resisted the impulse to pressure Herzog to provide air-defense systems that in fact, sorry to say, Israel doesn’t have just lying on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. Rather, I hope Herzog reminded Biden that Biden’s own administration has a plan to assist Ukraine — one that indirectly enlists Israel and the United States’s other Middle Eastern partners in the cause: the National Security Strategy.

Earlier this month, at a televised event hosted by Georgetown University and my organization, the Center for a New American Security, national security adviser Jake Sullivan publicly released the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS). The strategy paints a vision in which the United States harnesses the advantage of its partnerships and alliances to compete with China, blunt Russian aggression, and advance democratic principles through American leadership on the world stage. It rightly identifies that, to have a military capable of contributing to this effort, it needs to do less elsewhere. 

In the final pages of the document, it arrives at the Middle East, where the strategy calls for a reduction in U.S. military posture to one that is “sustainable and effective,” such that military resources can be made available to deter China and Russia. To buy down the risk that comes from such a drawdown, the NSS requires the U.S. effort to focus on “strengthening partner capacity” and “enabling regional security integration.” 

Simply put, for the United States to pivot toward dealing with the priorities of Russia and China, it will need to put the Middle East in a position to provide for more of its own security by making its militaries more capable and getting them to work cooperatively. But a strategy document isn’t worth the many pages it’s printed on if the president can’t marshal the political will to execute it. The road is littered with cautionary tales. There’s one thing that everyone remembers about President Obama’s “pivot to Asia”: it didn’t happen. At this moment, the NSS might be facing the same fate.

In the same news cycle in which Sullivan was debuting the administration’s strategy, the National Security Council’s spokesman announced the president’s willingness to reevaluate the U.S.-Saudi relationship, following an adverse but long-expected OPEC+ decision to reduce the world’s oil supply in November. When it became public that gas prices likely would be rising soon, Washington couldn’t help itself and reflexively pounced on the Saudis. Congress — feeling betrayed and responding emotionally to a laughably simplistic narrative that the Saudis were now complicit in underwriting Russian aggression in Ukraine — jumped to once again pursue restrictions on foreign military sales to the country that once was its best customer of military hardware. 

I can only hope the political catharsis was worth it. While it remains true that the Saudi government, along with many of the governments the U.S partners with in the Middle East, are illiberal, they also happen to be the same partners Washington needs to execute its own strategy to get the U.S. military out of the region and focused on the priority threats.

Israel’s relations with its Gulf neighbors continue to warm as their security and economic interests continue to converge. The signing of the Abraham Accords publicly set in motion a diplomatic warming of relations that at this point, appears irreversible. Building a regional security architecture, which will in part exist to neutralize threats emanating from Iran, remains the most challenging rapid to navigate in this diplomatic whitewater. The United States has and will continue to play a quintessential role in this. Saudi-Israeli relations are a critical element to building a regional security architecture that relies less on the U.S. military’s bloated presence in the region. 

Reducing the U.S troop presence in the Middle East is an essential part of refocusing it on Russia and China. Therefore, I’d submit that the best advice Herzog could have offered his friend Biden this week to counter Iran, Russia and China all at once is to have the political courage to stop beating up on the Saudis and start building something with them — as the president’s own strategy demands. After all, isn’t that what friends are for?

Jonathan Lord is a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He previously was a staff member for the House Armed Services Committee; the Iraq country director in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and a political military analyst in the Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanLordDC.