The United States is discussing terms of a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia that would resemble military pacts with Japan and South Korea, according to American officials. The move is at the center of President Joe Biden’s high-stakes diplomacy to get the kingdom to normalize relations with Israel.
Under such an agreement, the United States and Saudi Arabia would generally pledge to provide military support if the other country is attacked in the region or on Saudi territory. The discussions to model the terms after the treaties in East Asia, considered among the strongest the United States has outside of its European pacts, have not been previously reported.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, regards a mutual defense agreement with the United States as the most important element in his talks with the Biden administration about Israel, current and former U.S. officials said. Saudi officials say a strong defense agreement would help deter potential assaults by Iran or its armed partners even as the two regional rivals reestablish diplomatic ties.
Crown Prince Mohammed is also asking the Biden administration to help his country develop a civilian nuclear program, which some U.S. officials fear could be cover for a nuclear weapons program to counter Iran.
Any treaty with Saudi Arabia that is similar to the U.S. pacts with East Asian allies is sure to draw strong objections in Congress. Some senior U.S. lawmakers, including top Democrats, see the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed as unreliable partners who care little about U.S. interests or human rights.
An agreement would also raise questions about whether Biden is getting the United States more militarily entwined with the Middle East. And such a treaty would also contradict the Biden administration’s stated goal of reorienting U.S. military resources and fighting capabilities away from the area and toward deterring China specifically in the Asia-Pacific region.
The U.S.’ discussions with Saudi Arabia and Israel have mainly revolved around Crown Prince Mohammed’s demands of the Biden administration. That diplomacy is expected to come up Wednesday, when Biden plans to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Biden mentioned the benefits of nations normalizing ties with Israel in a broad speech at the United Nations on Tuesday morning.
The U.S. military has bases and troops in both Japan and South Korea, but American officials say there are currently no serious discussions about having a large contingent of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia under any new defense agreement. The Pentagon has just under 2,700 U.S. troops in the kingdom, according to a letter the White House sent to Congress in June.
Biden’s push for a Saudi-Israel deal is a gambit that, not long ago, would have been hard to imagine. He pledged during his 2020 presidential campaign to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” And brokering a deal could be a political boon for Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government, which American officials have sharply criticized for its efforts to weaken Israel’s judiciary and its encouragement of settlement building in Palestinian areas.
But U.S. officials have said a diplomatic pact would be an important symbolic defusing of Arab-Israeli tensions and could also have geopolitical significance for the United States.
Bringing Saudi Arabia closer to the United States, they argue, could pull the kingdom farther from China’s orbit and blunt Beijing’s efforts to expand its influence in the Middle East.
In a public appearance Sept. 15, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be a “transformative event in the Middle East and well beyond.” But he said that getting the parties to an agreement “remains a difficult proposition” and that a deal was far from certain.
The State Department declined to comment on details of the discussions for this article.
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