After Focusing on Saudi Faults While Ignoring Iran’s, Washington Must Now Reverse Course

Even before coming to the White House, Joe Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” as punishment for the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. But, with the price of a gallon of gasoline nearing or exceeding five dollars in much of the country, the president has begun making efforts to mend ties with Riyadh and its de-facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Noah Rothman comments:

The publicly available intelligence implicating bin Salman in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is entirely believable. It was an egregious act for which the crown prince should pay a price. But . . . the conduct of statecraft in an imperfect world occasionally involves dealing with distasteful figures. It is also egregious, [moreover], to allow Americans to struggle with financial hardships for as long as they have. . . . And the indignation of the commentary class over this concession to reality, even at the expense of a principle, only exposes a callous disregard for all the other concessions Biden has been forced to make.

For example, the Biden administration pared back sanctions targeting Venezuela’s criminal regime. . . . The Biden White House has been just as eager to coax Iran back into the community of nations. The administration’s pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Iran, [if successful], is likely to include provisions that would allow the Islamic Republic to sell more of the roughly 2.4 million barrels of oil the country pumps per day.

Iran is hardly a paragon of human rights. It, too, oppresses and murders its people, and it, too, menaces America’s allies and threatens U.S. interests. It also regularly holds Westerners, including Americans, hostage. And yet, the United States engages with Iran on multiple tracks.

[Saudi Arabia’s] leadership can be castigated and even punished for its human-rights abuses while acknowledging the vital role the country plays in its region and in the global economy. . . . The goals of this campaign [to anathematize Riyadh] went unarticulated even as its costs mounted. As statecraft, it was as incomprehensible as it was unsustainable.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Iran, Joseph Biden, Oil, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF