The tour that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, carried out in the Middle East had the main objective of reaffirming the desire for engagement of his country in a region where he has continued to accumulate disappointments . At the end of this visit, obviousness is essential: it only made disappointed.
The Israelis could only regret his predecessor, Donald Trump, who had aligned like never before the United States diplomacy on the intransigent positions of the Hebrew State. The Palestinians deplored the absence of strong gestures that could have translated the will displayed by Washington to become the “honest broker” of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process in surpassed coma. The occasions did not lack, from the reopening of the United States Consulate in Jerusalem-East named to Palestinians to a real tribute to the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, probably killed by Israeli fire in May. >
The most delicate stage for Joe Biden was planned in Djedda, Saudi Arabia, theater of a meeting with the crown prince and sovereign of the kingdom, Mohammed Ben Salman. The Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election had promised to keep him at a distance because of his alleged involvement in the assassination in atrocious conditions of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
The President of the United States has resigned himself to this reunion hoping that its flip-flop will be offset by an increase in Saudi oil production. A drop in petrol prices has indeed become imperative to a few months of mid-term elections which could turn to the rout for its camp.
The “fist bump”, this tight fist salute exchanged by the president with the former pariah thus rehabilitated, craftsman of a particularly authoritarian modernization of the kingdom, was a source of other disappointments. Particularly expensive for Joe Biden, it was only followed by waves Saudi promises. He could hardly be otherwise. Everyone knows since Canossa that the denials of this kind generally fail to restore confidence after a crisis.
There is no doubt that the crown prince has kept a deep distrust of the Democratic presidency from his forties. And Joe Biden obviously exasperated all those who had been convinced by his initial will to place the defense of American democratic values at the heart of his foreign policy.
At his discharge, Joe Biden inherited by accessing the White House of a heavy medium-oriental passive. The last Democratic president, Barack Obama, had paved the way, in 2013, to a massive re-engagement of Russia in the region by refusing any interventionism in Syria at a time when the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad has faltered.
His republican successor, Donald Trump, weakened the American interests even more deeply by withdrawing his country from the international agreement concluded in 2015 which framed the Iranian nuclear program. Its maximum pressure policy aimed at kneeling the Iranian regime has, on the contrary, pushed the latter to relaunch its efforts to acquire the nuclear weapon and to refuse for the moment to return to the status quo ante.
Joe Biden had found himself an accountant of these strategic errors. By adding his, he complicated the American posture a little more in a region where the confrontation of the United States is also played with the Russian and Chinese revisionist powers.