Does the United States need a “Biden Doctrine for the Middle East”? I ask because Thomas Friedman laid it out in the New York Times last week. Apparently, the Biden administration is prepared to take “a strong and resolute stand on Iran,” advance Palestinian statehood, and offer Saudi Arabia a defense pact that would hinge on normalization of Riyadh’s relations with Israel.
Does the United States need a “Biden Doctrine for the Middle East”? I ask because Thomas Friedman laid it out in the New York Times last week. Apparently, the Biden administration is prepared to take “a strong and resolute stand on Iran,” advance Palestinian statehood, and offer Saudi Arabia a defense pact that would hinge on normalization of Riyadh’s relations with Israel.
If Friedman’s column accurately reflects the thinking within the White House—and there is no reason to believe it does not—then put me down for a “No.” U.S. President Joe Biden and his advisors, who have previously eschewed big projects aimed at transforming the Middle East, are about to bite off a lot more than they can chew, especially when it comes to building a Palestinian state, setting Washington up for yet another failure in the region.
Looking back across the post-World War II era, an interesting pattern emerges in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: When policymakers used U.S. power to prevent bad things from happening, they were successful; but when they sought to leverage Washington’s military, economic, and diplomatic resources to make good things happen, they failed.
The impulse to openly engage in international social engineering in the region dates back to 1991. In January and February of that year, the United States defeated Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s army of occupation in Kuwait. And 10 months later, the leaders of the Soviet Union decided to bring that union to an end. The United States stood alone asthe sole remaining superpower. Having prevailed in the Cold War, Washington was determined to win the peace, which meant redeeming the world. The principal way that U.S. officials sought to do this in the Middle East was through “the peace process.”
U.S. efforts to forge peace between Israelis and Arabs became a centerpiece of Washington’s post-Operation Desert Storm diplomacy, despite the fact there was scant linkage between Hussein’s effort to absorb Kuwait and the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Of course, at a level of abstraction, both Iraq and Israel had acquired territory by force, though Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait in August 1990 and Israel’s preemptive strikes in June 1967 were so different that the cases are hardly comparable.
The U.S. impulse to forge peace in the Middle East had less to do with international law than the belief that U.S. power could be the catalyst for a new, more pacific, and prosperous global order. This was hardly outside mainstream thinking, of course. After all, the United States had saved the world from fascism, and at the time that President George H. W. Bush convened a peace conference in Madrid, Soviet communism was near death.
For all his efforts, Bush’s goals in the Middle East remained primarily limited to solving the problem of Arab-Israeli peace. It was not until the Clinton administration that the peace process took on a decidedly transformative cast. The same week in 1993 that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat signed the first agreement of the Oslo Accords under the auspices and imprimatur of the then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, appeared before students and faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to set out the Clinton administration’s goals for U.S. foreign policy in the immediate post-Cold War world. Central to the president’s approach was what Lake called “democratic enlargement.”
The way the Clinton team would promote change in the Middle East was through Palestine. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Clinton reasoned, would produce a more peaceful, prosperous, and integrated region, thereby undermining the rationale for the Middle East’s national security states. After peace, authoritarianism would give way to democratic political systems in the Arab world. In the words of one of his principal advisors, “Clinton set himself a transformational objective: to move the Middle East into the twenty-first century by ending the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
The idea that peace would catalyze political change was alluring, but Clinton misconstrued the reasons for the authoritarian politics of the region. In any event, his almost decadelong effort to clinch a conflict-ending agreement between Israelis and Palestinians came to naught. And as he left office, violence engulfed both communities in what became the Second Intifada.
The next U.S. president, George W. Bush, was initially skeptical of the time and energy that Clinton devoted to Middle East peace, but Bush was actually the first president to declare that a Palestinian state was a goal of U.S. foreign policy. To get there, he flipped his predecessor’s logic. For the Bush White House, only after the democratic reform of Palestinian political institutions and the ouster of Yasser Arafat could there be peace.
Like Clinton before him, Bush failed. As he handed off the Oval Office to President Barack Obama, there was no Palestinian democracy, no peace, and no Palestinian state. Despite two very different administrations with two different approaches to the Middle East, Clinton and Bush shared a common, ambitious objective: the political and social transformation of the region.
Cognizant of the United States’ failures in the Middle East—whether the transformation of Iraq, the promotion of democracy through the so-called Freedom Agenda, or the effort to build a Palestinian state—neither Obama, nor President Donald Trump, nor Biden harbored the desire to socially engineer a new Middle East. In Biden’s case, he oversaw then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s struggle to get Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate, no less sign a peace agreement, and came away pessimistic about a two-state solution. Almost immediately after coming into office, Biden’s advisors made clear that the regional ambitions of administrations past would not be repeated.
Then came Hamas’s brutal murder of almost 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s withering military response in the Gaza Strip. According to Friedman, as the war between Israel and Hamas continues and the bodies of mostly Palestinian civilians pile up, Biden has concluded that what he wants to accomplish in the Middle East—ensuring the free flow of oil, helping to prevent threats to Israel’s security, outmaneuvering the Chinese—is unlikely to happen without a new, ambitious U.S. doctrine that once again drives change in the Middle East from the outside.
To be fair, it is a positive development that the White House understands that Iran does not want a new relationship with Washington. And a defense pact with Saudi Arabia makes sense in terms of global competition with China. But a significant U.S. investment in building a Palestinian state is likely to end in failure, like the previous efforts to do the same.
Sure, there are differences this time. War, as pundits have repeated over and over again since Oct. 7, opens up new diplomatic opportunities. Yet, there is a little reason to believe that two states—Israel and Palestine—living side by side and in peace could present the opportunity to emerge from the present crisis.
Biden and his team may feel that they have no choice but to pursue the two-state solution, but they should be aware of what they are taking on. The conflict is bound up in thorny–but often not well-understood—concepts, such as identity, historical memory, and nationalism.
There is also a religious dimension to the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, especially since Hamas and messianic Jewish groups have sacralized the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Add to this the fact that Palestinian political leadership—both that of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority—routinely denies the historical connections between Judaism and historic Palestine. The opposing narratives that emerge from these issues do not lend themselves to the kind of coexistence the Biden administration now apparently envisions.
Then there are the brutal politics within Israeli and Palestinian societies that have contributed to stalemates between the parties over the years. The Israel-Hamas war centered in Gaza is only likely to make it more difficult for the Israelis to accede to the Palestinians minimum demands for peace—a fully sovereign independent state, a capital in Jerusalem, and a return of refugees. Likewise, the Palestinians could not agree to Israel’s minimum demands for peace, which are a mirror image of their own: Jerusalem as the undivided, eternal capital of Israel; a state whose territory extends beyond the lines drawn on June 4, 1967, and no return of Palestinian refugees.
Bereft of new ideas, concerned about ceding ground to global competitors over the war in Gaza, and worried about young voters, Biden and his team have latched onto the peace process—a failed enterprise that has no better chance of succeeding now than any other time in the past three decades.
In a way, it is hard to blame the president. Peace processing is safe. There is political support within the president’s party for it. He can say he tried. When this latest push to transform the Middle East fails to produce a Palestinian state after perhaps years of inconclusive negotiations about negotiations, Biden will be well into his post-presidency.
What should the United States do instead? That is a difficult question, especially since it is asking U.S. policymakers, members of Congress, and the Beltway policy community to recognize the limits of U.S. power to resolve an unresolvable conflict.
Still, there are important things that the United States can do. It must prevent Iran from sowing more regional chaos. Washington must work hard to head off any backsliding on the regional integration that has already taken place. And U.S. leaders can explain to Israelis why the politics of support for their country are changing. In some ways, this will help create an environment that is more conducive to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but there are no guarantees.
Way back in 2001, during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked, “The United States cannot want peace more than the parties themselves.” That is the trap that President Biden is walking into.
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