American and Saudi officials are discussing the terms of a mutual defense treaty that would be similar to the robust military pacts the United States has with its close allies Japan and South Korea, a central part of President Biden’s high-risk diplomacy to reach Saudi Arabia to normalize relations to move with Israel, according to US officials.
Under such an agreement, the United States and Saudi Arabia would generally commit to military support if the other country is attacked in the region or on Saudi territory. Discussions to shape the terms under the treaties in East Asia, which are among the strongest the United States has outside its European pacts, have not been reported.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, views a mutual defense agreement with the United States as the most important element of his discussions with the Biden administration on Israel, current and former U.S. officials said. Saudi officials say a strong defense agreement would help deter potential attacks by Iran or its armed partners, even as the two regional rivals resume diplomatic ties.
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 a cover for a nuclear weapons program to combat Iran.
Any deal with Saudi Arabia that resembles America’s pacts with East Asian allies is sure to draw strong objections in Congress. Some senior U.S. lawmakers, including leading Democrats, view the Saudi government and Prince Mohammed as unreliable partners who have little concern for U.S. interests or human rights.
A deal would also raise questions about whether Mr. Biden will make the United States more militarily integrated with the Middle East. And such a deal would also contradict the Biden administration’s stated goal of redirecting U.S. military resources and combat capabilities away from the region and deterring China specifically in the Asia-Pacific region.
US talks with Saudi Arabia and Israel focused largely on Prince Mohammed’s demands on the Biden administration. That diplomacy is expected to come up on Wednesday when Mr. Biden plans to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Mr. Biden mentioned the benefits of normalizing the nations’ relations with Israel in a wide-ranging 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 stationing a large contingent of American troops in Saudi Arabia as part of a new defense deal. According to a letter the White House sent to Congress in June, the Pentagon has nearly 2,700 American troops stationed in the kingdom.
Mr. Biden’s push for a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel is a move that would have been hard to imagine not long ago. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” And brokering a deal could be a political boon for Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government, which has been sharply criticized by American officials for trying to weaken Israel’s judiciary and encouraging settlement construction in Palestinian areas.
But U.S. officials said a diplomatic pact would be an important symbolic defuse of Arab-Israeli tensions and could also have geopolitical significance for the United States. They argue that Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with the United States could pull the kingdom further out of China’s sphere of influence and undermine Beijing’s efforts to expand its influence in the Middle East.
In a public appearance Friday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel was a “transformative event in the Middle East and far beyond.” However, he said that getting the parties to an agreement “remains a difficult task” and that an agreement is far from certain.
The State Department declined to comment on details of discussions for this article.
In recent months, White House officials have briefed influential Democratic lawmakers on the negotiations. The government would have to convince them to approve the treaty in order to get the 67 necessary votes in the Senate, or two-thirds of that chamber.
A majority of Senate Democrats have voted multiple times to limit Washington’s arms sales and other security cooperation with Riyadh, and opposed the Saudi bombings in Yemen, which were backed by American weapons, and the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year In 2018, a murder that American intelligence agencies have condemned was ordered by the prince. (He has denied direct involvement.)
The Saudi-led war in Yemen, which Prince Mohammed started in 2015, led to mass killings of civilians and what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crisis.
Democratic lawmakers are also putting pressure on the Biden administration over reports that Saudi border troops recently killed hundreds or thousands of African migrants trying to enter the kingdom from Yemen. Human Rights Watch released a report on the atrocities in August. U.S. officials cannot say with certainty that American training or weapons were not provided to the forces that carried out the killings. Saudi Arabia said the reports were “unfounded.”
The United States’ separate defense treaties with Japan and South Korea were concluded after devastating wars in the mid-20th century and as the Cold War intensified, forcing the United States to forge alliances around the world to counter a global Soviet presence .
The first American security treaty with Japan was concluded in 1951 during the US occupation of Japan after World War II and was revised in 1960. It allows the United States to keep its forces there and stipulates that if an element were attacked against either of those two countries in the Japanese-controlled areas, each country would “act in accordance with its constitutional provisions and procedures.” “to face the common danger”.
Michael Green, a senior Asia director at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, said the two treaties were “pretty ironclad” about U.S. military involvement in the event of hostilities and placed both countries under the American nuclear deterrent umbrella . Practically speaking, the United States has closer military ties with South Korea because both countries have a joint command on the peninsula.
Japan was a defeated and demilitarized nation when it and the United States entered into their treaty, and American officials at the time did not anticipate that another country would soon attack Japan or vice versa, Mr. Green said. Because of ongoing tensions in the Middle East – and the fact that Saudi Arabia is embroiled in a war in Yemen – Senate approval of a Japanese-style treaty would likely mean clearing “a much higher political hurdle,” he added he added.
However, Julian Ku, a professor of international and constitutional law at Hofstra University, has written that mutual defense language is contained in the treaty with Japan and in United States treaties with other allies in the region, including the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand Zealand is not as strong as commonly believed.
“The contract is intentionally vague to allow for different responses to different circumstances,” Mr. Ku said in an email. “Comparing this with language in NATO that specifically refers to supporting treaties through ‘such measures as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force,’ it is striking how watered down the treaty language in Korea and Japan is.”
“So you can imagine a U.S. treaty with Saudi Arabia structured like the Japan treaty, which technically doesn’t require U.S. intervention but represents a serious commitment in the event of an attack,” he added.
White House and State Department officials have made numerous trips to Saudi Arabia since May as part of normalization efforts and have kept Mr. Netanyahu and his aides informed of Prince Mohammed’s demands. In addition to the thorny questions surrounding a possible U.S.-Saudi security agreement and civil nuclear cooperation, there are many questions about what the Saudis would ask of Israel in terms of concessions to the Palestinians. Prince Mohammed hasn’t spoken much about it publicly, but his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights.
Some American commentators on Middle East policy have urged the Biden administration not to make any deals that would hand the Israeli government a political victory that could help it stay in power.