Israeli-Saudi Peace Deal, With Steven A. Cook

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is an Israeli-Saudi peace deal. With me to discuss ongoing negotiations to craft a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is Steven Cook. Steven is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow from Middle East and Africa Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written extensively on the Middle East and has a column at foreignpolicy.com. He's the author of the Council on Foreign Relations' special report, The Case for a New U.S.-Saudi Strategic Compact. Steven, it is a pleasure to have you back on The President's Inbox.

 

COOK:
Thanks for having me back, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Steven, we're going to eventually get into the nuts and bolts of the ongoing negotiation, but I'd like to begin with the so what question. Assume for a moment that Saudi Arabia agrees to formally recognize Israel and the two countries establish diplomatic relations. How significant would that development be?

 

COOK:
Well, I think it would be quite significant. From the perspective of U.S. policy, it's long been an American interest to help ensure Israeli security, and so if the United States can play a role in forging a normalization agreement or a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, it would go a long way to furthering that goal, and given Saudi Arabia's role, not just in the Arab world, but in the Muslim world, it would change the geopolitics of the Middle East and the broader relationship between Israel and the Muslim world for the better. 

 

That's not to say that this would be accepted by everybody, but given the role that Saudi Arabia has played and is now playing, I think it would be certainly significant, and the added benefit for the United States that it would add another element of stability to the region in a way that may allow, and let me emphasize may, may allow the United States to reconfigure its military forces in the region. That's not to suggest that U.S. forces were there to get in between Israel or Saudi Arabia, but just another added layer of stability, another element of stability in the region would finally allow American policymakers to do what they've been wanting to do for the better part of the last decade or so, which is to de-emphasize the region.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. I want to put a pin there and come back to that point, but I'd like you to sort of spell out how you see this changing the geopolitical order in a tangible way. What might happen that would be significantly different from the order as it exists today?

 

COOK:
I think it doesn't fundamentally change the order. Israel and Saudi Arabia are part of an American led order in the region, but what it would do is it would allow the Israelis, and the Saudis, the Emiratis, and others who want to join to build a kind of integrated region, and I think that's the goal here. I think there's a lot that's going on in between India, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean that I think we miss. There's lots of trade, there's lots of diplomatic activity, there's lots of technology development that's happening in these places, and what it does is it makes for a more pacific region.

 

LINDSAY:
Pacific as in peaceful as opposed to Pacific as in the ocean?

 

COOK:
Right. Exactly.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. So would you go as far as Tom Friedman who has written in the New York Times that this deal, if it could be achieved, would be bigger than the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel?

 

COOK:
I don't want to criticize Tom Friedman directly. I have a nice relationship with Mr. Friedman.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, you can disagree without it necessarily being criticism.

 

COOK:
I understand where he's coming from on this. I mean, now Saudi Arabia and Israel peace is the big enchilada because it also means a change in relationship potentially between Israel and the broader Muslim world, but I think the Egypt-Israel peace treaty still would rank higher than this because what it did was it ended the war option. There's been no regional war between Israel and its Arab neighbors since the 1979 peace treaty, since 1973. It took the Arab war option off of the table, and that was an extraordinary change, because you can't go to war without Egypt. So I think in that way, when you're looking in those terms, Egypt-Israel peace is still bigger than Saudi-Israel peace, which also would be, I think, important in many ways.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay, so let's talk nuts and bolts. Walk me through the logistics of these negotiations, starting with who is actually negotiating.

 

COOK:
Yeah. Well, much of the negotiation is happening through the United States or the United States is negotiating with the Saudis over what the Saudi's asking price is for normalization. One of the precedents that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty set was that the United States pays for peace very often in weapons systems or canceling debt; in the case of Jordan, they got both weapons systems and debt relief. 

 

So there's been a lot of diplomatic traffic between Washington and Riyadh. The president's national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, has been back and forth a number of times in recent months to discuss the normalization along with a host of other issues, and then you see also diplomatic traffic between Jerusalem and Washington. Ron Dermer, who is a close advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu is clearly the lead negotiator here. We have yet to see a public negotiation between Israelis and Saudis, although it's pretty clear that the two governments speak to each other. It's just that it's behind closed doors.

 

LINDSAY:
And that's been the case for quite a while.

 

COOK:
It's been obviously for a long, long time, whether it's in... You have to imagine in some villa tucked away in the mountains of Switzerland, or a farmhouse in Norway, or something like that, Saudis and Israelis meet with each other to discuss. They're inching closer to being more public. There was a spectacular story a number of years ago that Prime Minister Netanyahu actually met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Neom, this site where the Saudis are building this futuristic city.

 

LINDSAY:
So you say the United States is playing the role of the middleman. Jake Sullivan has been traveling to Saudi Arabia to determine what it is that the Saudis want in return for their formally recognizing Israel. So what are the Saudis asking for?

 

COOK:
They're asking for a whole host of security guarantees, including, and most importantly, a guarantee similar to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is an attack on one member is considered an attack on the other member. So to graph that onto the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it would mean that an attack on Saudi Arabia would constitute an attack on the United States, and the United States would be obligated to come to Saudi Arabia's defense. Then there are weapons systems that the Saudis want. They want help with the civilian nuclear program. There are concerns that civilian may turn into something else, but I think the big issue... The United States has supplied Saudi Arabia with copious amounts of weaponry over many, many years. It's as important as energy in a variety of ways.

 

The big issue, and I think a sticking point is this security guarantee, this ironclad security guarantee. Previously, the Carter Doctrine, which said that the United States would come to the defense of the oil fields of the Gulf from external threats and the unwritten Reagan corollary to the Carter Doctrine, which is that the United States would come to the defense of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf from internal threats did not specifically say, "The United States will come to the defense of Saudi Arabia." It comes to all kinds of definitional issues here. What constitutes the threat to Saudi Arabia versus what the United States thinks is a threat to Saudi Arabia? And I think that that's something that probably Jake Sullivan and representatives of Saudi Arabia are trying to work out.

 

And then, of course, Congress is going to have a say on that, and while Israel remains very popular in Congress, except among a relatively small but outspoken group of members of the Democratic Party, Saudi Arabia is not as popular, and there are going to be a lot of questions within Congress about how the United States is committed to defending Saudi Arabia, and there'll be a debate about the United States defending a country whose values aren't consistent with America's values.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. I want to come back to that in a moment, but let's sort of just flesh out sort of who's asking what from whom. So the Saudis have a clear agenda for the United States. They want this mutual security agreement. They want help building their civilian nuclear program, and they want to be able to buy more advanced weaponry from the United States. Is the United States asking for anything in return from the Saudis?

 

COOK:
Normalization with Israel.

 

LINDSAY:
Just that? They're not asking, for example, for the Saudis to be more compliant on oil production, to keep oil prices down?

 

COOK:
Well, yeah. I think this is actually part of a broader reconfiguration of the U.S.-Saudi relationship in which this normalization deal is fused with pulling Saudi Arabia away from China, so that there would be an agreement about the kind of Saudi role and moderation of the global oil market. It would be more of a partner of the United States rather than what we've seen over the course of the last couple of years where the United States has made its wishes known and the Saudis have pursued a different track. When the United States needed help on energy prices, the Saudis announced that they were going to cut production, those kinds of things.

 

So that kind of thing would not happen, and then a whole host of other projects in the region that the United States has and wanting to rope the Saudis into, whether it's on technology that will be more attractive to the Saudis than Chinese telecommunications technology, transportation and logistics projects, which we may hear about in the coming months, those types of things, but there isn't on the Israel front. On the specific question of normalization, what the United States is after is we want a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia so that the two countries can exchange ambassadors and there'll be embassies in those countries. Historically speaking, that's a big ask from the United States. We now have a de facto Saudi ruler who's willing to do that, under the right conditions, of course.

 

LINDSAY:
So what are the Saudis asking for from the Israelis? They must have an ask of some sort.

 

COOK:
Yeah, and the Saudis have been somewhat cagey about this. They haven't said, "A Palestinian state." They've said, "There needs to be progress on the Palestinian issue." A prominent Saudi cleric, and this was extraordinary, just the other day appeared on Israeli television and said that they needed the Israelis to listen to the Palestinian side. He did invoke the Arab Peace Initiative, which was an initiative of then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which basically exchanged normalization of relations between fifty-seven countries in the Muslim world, including the Arab world and Israel, in return for a Palestinian state, sixty-seven lines type of thing, but it's important that the Saudis officially haven't said, "The Arab Peace Initiative is our basis of negotiation."

 

They've been somewhat cagey about what exactly they want. What they've gone as far to say is that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman needs to get more than what then Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, the now ruler of United Arab Emirates got when he signed on to the Abraham Accords, which were consummated in September 2020, and what he got from the Israelis was a commitment not to annex West Bank territory. And there's a question whether the Israelis have complied with that or not. They certainly haven't announced annexation, but lots of what they have done, particularly the current government, seems to be annexation without actually calling it annexation.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk a little bit about that, Steven, Prime Minister Netanyahu said recently that the issue of the Palestinians actually doesn't come up that much. I think the exact phrase he used was, "A lot less than you think.' It's sort of a check the box. You have to check it to say that you're doing it, but beyond that, he heads up I think what can be described as a far right government, or he certainly has far right members as part of the government, many of whom are pushing for Israel to annex Israeli occupied territory in the West Bank. So does Netanyahu have enough wiggle room to be able to offer MBS what he needs? Because after all, I mean, for forty years now, I've been hearing people talk about the importance of the Palestinian issue to Arab governments even more so to their citizens, yet here it seems that the Palestinians are almost an afterthought.

 

COOK:
I think you have to take what Netanyahu said with a grain of salt, but it's not without some reality. If you remember a number of years ago, we spent some time in the Gulf traveling around talking to officials from governments. Not once did the Palestinian issue come up in any of those conversations.

 

LINDSAY:
It was a notable absence.

 

COOK:
Yeah, it was a notable absence, and it's clear that the Saudi's Gulf leaders have become frustrated with the Palestinians, no longer want to have their own policies, their national interests held hostage by the Palestinian issuant. Much of the blame is laid with the Palestinian Authority's leader Mahmoud Abbas, but I think that Netanyahu maybe perhaps downplays it a bit too much, as is his political interest to do so. As you point out, the Palestinian issue remains important symbolically for many, many people in the Arab world, including Saudis.

 

LINDSAY:
And in the broader Islamic world.

 

COOK:
Absolutely in the broader Islamic world, and the popular support for normalization in the region is quite low, and also remember that the crown prince's father, King Salman, remains the head of a Palestinian solidarity committee, so it strikes me that it is more than just checking a box, and that the Saudis are serious, and that they need to see some sort of progress on it. Although, I think they're more realistic in the sense that they don't believe that we're going to get a Palestinian state.

 

What's striking to me is that they're willing to do a deal with a government that is avowedly hostile to Palestinian rights, and I think what Gulf leaders, including Mohammed bin Salman, have sort of narrowed their concerns to is what happens in Jerusalem and whether an Israeli government, whether it's this government or some future government, seeks to change the status of the Haram al-Sharif for the Temple Mount where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock stand, which is where the ancient Jewish temples stood. And there are ministers in the current Israeli government who among their goals is to change the status on the Haram al-Sharif, and that to me is more likely the red line for Mohammed bin Salman rather than the establishment of a full-fledged sovereign Palestinian state.

 

LINDSAY:
So, Steven, as we think about the demands of the various parties, I still have a overarching question, which is why is the Biden Administration making this effort right now? President Biden came to office seemingly looking to deemphasize the Middle East. It was not a priority on his call list in the first several weeks he was in office. We did not see what had been tradition in prior presidential administrations to make a big effort to secure a Middle East peace deal. In essence, the administration seemed to be saying it wanted to turn away from the Middle East, and on top of that, you have the fact that President Biden campaigned for the presidency by saying that he intended to make Saudi Arabia pay the price and make them in fact the pariah that they are. Why all of a sudden has Saudi Arabia in a potential peace deal with Israel zoomed to the top of the foreign policy to-do list for an administration that has a crowded foreign policy inbox?

 

COOK:
Yeah, it's a really good question. Some folks, particularly folks in the Middle East, have speculated that this has to do with the upcoming presidential election. I have tried to disabuse them of this notion that most Americans will not vote for the President based on whether there is a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. I do think, however, and we kind of hinted at it earlier in the conversation that President Biden and his advisors see normalization as part of a broader strategy to outmaneuver the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Russians in the Middle East, and with all the package of security guarantees, weaponry, economic relations that will tie these American partners together and with the United States, it secures the American led order in the region, and actually reinforces it in ways that makes it much harder for the Saudis to hedge or the Saudis themselves to pivot to Asia. And I would say that this is the kind of thing that Saudis, and Emiratis, and Bahrainis, and others have actually been looking for.

 

They have heard the conversation of Washington about deemphasizing the region. In fact, during the campaign, then Foreign Policy Advisor Antony Blinken, now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, specifically said, "The United States would be de-emphasizing the region," a line that he repeated in his confirmation hearings, and this had a profound effect on the views of people like Mohammed bin Salman. And suddenly there were other options. They weren't perfect, but there was China and there was Russia, and so I think to the extent that President Biden has defined American foreign policy in terms of great power competition, Israeli-Saudi normalization is part of that.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense is reading news reports about these ongoing conversations or talks about a peace deal is that the United States or the Biden administration has said that what it wants to see is Saudi Arabia essentially turn away from China, talk about getting the Saudis to agree not to allow China to have military access or military bases on Saudi territory, an issue that has come up and strained U.S. relations with the United Arab Emirates and also having Saudi Arabia agree to not use Chinese technology, think Huawei, in things like that. 

 

I want to get back to the question. Let's assume all of these pieces can be knitted together in some fashion, that a deal can be had, and I'm not sure how likely that is or on what timeline that would happen. Is the Biden Administration imagining that this mutual security pact with the Saudis would be done as a treaty or done just on a presidential signature? And I ask because one, if it's done as a treaty, that means you need to get two-thirds plus one of the United States Senate to go along with the deal, which is a pretty high bar. The flip side, if you do it as an executive agreement or a presidential agreement, that commitment lasts only as long as that president, and the Saudis have very good reason to worry that a new president, even if it's Donald Trump, might decide not to come to their defense. After all, Saudi confidence in a U.S. security pledge, the implicit one, was really rattled when Donald Trump didn't do anything when he was president after the Iranians attacked Saudi oil facilities and took half their oil production offline for a couple of days.

 

COOK:
Which is one of the reasons why the Saudis have been saying that they think they have a better shot at this during the Biden Administration than if President Biden were to lose his reelection campaign in 2024. The administration hasn't said whether they're looking for a treaty or whether it's going to be by presidential signature. If they're looking for a treaty, it's not a bad bet. If I was sitting in the White House, I'd say, "Mr. President, Israel remains quite popular. It has been a long-term interest of the United States to help secure Israeli security. That issue has become part of the pantheon of issues for the Republican Party. I think we should go for a treaty if it means that we will get a peace treaty, a normalization treaty between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It may not work out, but it's a pretty good bet that if Israel's security is involved here, you have a better chance of getting broader congressional support for a treaty commitment to Saudi Arabia. That doesn't mean that it's not going to be hard."

 

That's what I would say to the president. I was anticipating your question. You always ask that question, "If you were sitting next to the President, what would you say?" I think it's not a bad wager.

 

LINDSAY:
I take that point, Steven, but let me put on the table an opposing viewpoint, which is that if you look at the American political debate today, particularly in the Republican Party, what is notable is the rejection of the United States making security commitments to others, rising sentiment in the Republican Party that we should not be spending money to help Ukraine. You've been seeing some Republicans questioning support for Taiwan or time limiting that support, and some people who may be open or supportive of this deal have raised the fear that what it will do is actually commit the United States to be more deeply involved in the Middle East, contrary to the point you made at the top. I note that Andrew Exum, who I think you know very well, had a piece recently in The Atlantic raising his concern that the deal could do precisely the opposite of what he would want it to do. It won't free the United States up. It will tie the United States down in what will remain a very volatile region for a very long time.

 

COOK:
I take Exum's point, and I think all of these criticisms are valid. Let me take the congressional issue first. That is certainly the case that members of the Republican Party have questioned our commitment to Ukraine, have begun to raise some questions about what we would do in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Ukraine and Taiwan are different from Israel I think for the Republican Party and even those who remain concerned about America being tied down in the Gulf. I once had a conversation with a congressional staffer who worked for a Congress person from a deep red district, and it was interesting. He said, "Well, anything for Israeli security, but no blood for oil." And I think what President Biden is trying to do when it comes to potential Republican opposition is to say, "You're going to get that Israeli security if we offer these guarantees to the Saudis," and that it'll be too good a deal for them to walk away from.

 

It's not risk-free. I think as far as Exum's criticism goes, that it will tie the United States down, I think our frame should not be getting out of the region or withdrawal from the region. I think our frame should be as how are we in the region in a more constructive way, and I think that I'm certainly not in the shilling here for the Biden administration, but I think the kinds of things that they're envisioning is the kinds of things that allow the United States to remain in the region, which will remain important to the United States for the foreseeable future in ways that we can be constructive and provide stability and security without being overinvested in the way that we've been over the course of the last twenty years.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, help me think through this then, Steven, because if this agreement were to come about, it could change the geopolitical dynamics in what is a very contentious part of the world, and particularly affect the Iranians, who have a rivalry with its neighbors in the Gulf and aspirations for regional hegemony. So we have any sense of how the Iranians are reacting now? Because presumably they would want to find a way to derail any sort of agreement along these lines.

 

COOK:
Everybody should expect that they will try to disrupt it. I don't think that they will try to disrupt it necessarily through a direct attack on Saudi Arabia or on Israel. I think that they'll continue to use those policy tools that they have used in the past, notably stirring up trouble in Iraq, stirring up trouble in Lebanon, threatening the Israelis via Hezbollah or Hamas, but these are security problems that will continue for the Israelis but are not existential threats. I think that a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia with the American security component, while controversial, may provide the kind of deterrence necessary that the Saudis would never have to invoke those security guarantees, that would not necessarily bring us to war. It's a valid concern, and I think it will be a subject of differing interpretations between the Saudi and American governments, but I don't think that that should deter us from trying to clinch a deal between Israelis and Saudis, as difficult as it may be.

 

LINDSAY:
What about arguments that the Biden administration's recent agreement that secured the release of American citizens held hostage in Iran is actually going to embolden Iran to act more malignly in the region and provide it with the financial resources to do so?

 

COOK:
It's a very significant concern. I think that what supporters of this agreement are conveniently overlooking is the fungibility of money. So even if there's $6 billion that is deposited in a Qatari bank, and the Qatari know that they only can pay for medicine and food that the Iranians place an order for, that's money that Ayatollah Khamenei can spend on Hezbollah, or Hamas, or some pro-Iranian militia. And if we look at the history of the Iranians, they are emboldened at these moments where they, from their perspective, extract a concession from the United States. 

 

Now, of course, in thinking about the humanitarian issue, you have five Americans who have been held for years in Iran's prisons, and so this is the way it strikes me that the Biden administration is trying to not pay ransom, but pay ransom for their release. I'm concerned. I think the critics have a good point. I'm concerned over and over again we have seen the Iranians respond to what we think is an agreement, and what they perceive as a weakness, and they seek to take advantage of it.

 

LINDSAY:
For those people who remember the Reagan years can remember that even when you secure release of prisoners, the Iranians or other hostile groups in the Middle East can simply go out and take more hostages, and that's a longstanding problem on all these things, and some very delicate sensitivities have to be balanced.

 

COOK:
President Biden would not be the first president to oversee what's essentially payment for the release of hostages. George W. Bush arranged for $300 million of private money to get missionaries released in the Philippines who were being held by an Islamist group. President Reagan himself did this, but I think those experiences, particularly the Reagan administration's experiences with the Iranians and more recent examples of what the Iranians would see as concessions and their response to it, which is to further engage in malign activities, should give us all pause about this agreement.

 

LINDSAY:
Steven, let's close by talking about what other countries in the region are saying or thinking about this deal, and I'm particularly interested in the view from Cairo. Are the Egyptians supportive of a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Israel, or do they view it in some ways as potentially threatening their special relationship they have with both the United States and with Israel?

 

COOK:
It's been a problem. Obviously, publicly the Egyptians would like to see the Saudis cut a deal with the Israelis, then the Egyptians won't themselves be held out as the prime example of a separate piece and turning their backs on the Palestinian issue. But of course, the Egyptians grew concerned after the Abraham Accords that the Israelis were not as attentive to that relationship as they were to the Emiratis or-

 

LINDSAY:
Well, the Emiratis and the Saudis have an awful lot of money, and the Emiratis also have some technical expertise to things that the Egyptians don't have a lot of. Indeed, I recently read a piece in Foreign Policy that you wrote called, "How Sisi Ruined Egypt," which details just how dire the straits are in the Egyptian economy.

 

COOK:
Yeah, Egyptian economy is debt ridden. Egypt is the second or third most debt ridden country in the world after Sri Lanka and Pakistan. After he came to power in 2013, then Major General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, now President Sisi, has gone on this debt fueled spending spree to convince Egyptians that he was overseeing a renaissance, but all of the things that he's done, building a new capital city, a summer capital, widening the Suez Canal, a whole list of these things have really just become this burden around the necks of Egyptians.

 

When it comes to the Israelis, Israelis are obviously worried about the situation in Egypt, which they see as being increasingly unstable with this debt, and one of the reasons why the Israelis have shifted their gaze to the Gulf is because countries like Egypt are on their knees. Egypt used to be the big dog in the region, and now it's the Saudis who are the big dog in the region. The Israelis want to deal with them.

 

LINDSAY:
It's a long time since we had the days of Nasser.

 

COOK:
A very, very long time. So the Egyptians as much as publicly were willing to criticize the Israelis and Egyptian public opposed to normalization, they also jealously have guarded their relationship with the Israelis. It's a problem, particularly also with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has not nurtured these relationships, and it's not just Egypt. It's also Jordan, his predecessors, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, were part of a grand coalition, did much more outreach to the Egyptians and the Jordanians than Netanyahu has, and now with this normalization deal potentially on the horizon, Egyptians are privately possibly worried about further power shift to the east.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies here at the Council. Steven, thanks as always for joining me.

 

COOK:
It's a great pleasure. Stay cool, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
Will do. Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.