In 2021, the Biden administration announced that countering corruption abroad should be considered a “core United States national-security interest,” and mobilized a variety of government resources to advance this agenda. Emanuele Ottolenghi finds this initiative laudable, but takes the White House to task for failing to connect it to the fight on terrorism and on the international drug trade, all of which are inextricably linked. Nowhere is this nexus more evident than in the activities of Hizballah:

Outside of Lebanon, Hizballah buys impunity from local scrutiny and prosecution for its illicit networks through bribery and corruption at the highest levels of government and local public administration. In Lebanon, it uses its influence and political power to buy impunity—through bribes—for those running illicit businesses. Such extensive corruption contributes to the erosion of good governance, weakens democratic institutions, undermines the rule of law, and empowers corrupt officials and politicians.

Corruption, then, is a critical tool in Hizballah’s strategy of funding itself through illicit activities, which has been underscored by previous Treasury Department designations against Hizballah operations in the Gambia, Guinea, and Paraguay. Since it is also a top foreign-policy priority for the Biden White House, the president should recognize that corruption is an integral element of Hizballah’s modus operandi, and target, through [sanctions], both sides of the corruption equation.

The crime-terror finance nexus is nothing new. Across the span of history and geography, terrorism has been self-financed, at least in part, through criminal activities. The Bolsheviks in tsarist Russia funded their subversive activities through crime—which catapulted a young Joseph Stalin to center stage in the party machine. More recently, Ireland’s Irish Republican Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Basque ETA, Colombia’s FARC, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State all engaged in criminal activities to fundraise—including the illicit drug trade, human trafficking and organ harvesting, and trafficking in antiquities. Hizballah continues to be involved in a multiplicity of criminal activities, including, critically, money laundering on behalf of international criminal syndicates.

While roughly a third of Saudis are willing to cooperate with the Jewish state in matters of technology and commerce, far fewer are willing to allow Israeli teams to compete within the kingdom—let alone support diplomatic normalization. These are just a few results of a recent, detailed, and professional opinion survey—a rarity in Saudi Arabia—that has much bearing on current negotiations involving Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. David Pollock notes some others:

When asked about possible factors “in considering whether or not Saudi Arabia should establish official relations with Israel,” the Saudi public opts first for an Islamic—rather than a specifically Saudi—agenda: almost half (46 percent) say it would be “important” to obtain “new Israeli guarantees of Muslim rights at al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif [i.e., the Temple Mount] in Jerusalem.” Prioritizing this issue is significantly more popular than any other option offered. . . .

This popular focus on religion is in line with responses to other controversial questions in the survey. Exactly the same percentage, for example, feel “strongly” that “our country should cut off all relations with any other country where anybody hurts the Quran.”

By comparison, Palestinian aspirations come in second place in Saudi popular perceptions of a deal with Israel. Thirty-six percent of the Saudi public say it would be “important” to obtain “new steps toward political rights and better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Far behind these drivers in popular attitudes, surprisingly, are hypothetical American contributions to a Saudi-Israel deal—even though these have reportedly been under heavy discussion at the official level in recent months.

Therefore, based on this analysis of these new survey findings, all three governments involved in a possible trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal would be well advised to pay at least as much attention to its religious dimension as to its political, security, and economic ones.