Defense pact would commit the U.S. to unprecedented security guarantees
(Washington, D.C., October 29, 2024) — A sweeping security agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia, including treaty-backed U.S. defense guarantees and a commitment to develop a Saudi civil nuclear program, would risk further destabilizing the Middle East and deepening the American military footprint in the region, concluded participants in a policy workshop that DAWN organized with Georgetown University's Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding on September 24, 2024.
The U.S.-Saudi security agreement proposed by the Biden administration has been the subject of extensive media reports, although the terms of the deal have still not been made public by the administration. Attempts to link a U.S. defense treaty with Saudi Arabia to diplomatic normalization between Riyadh and Israel, as part of a so-called "megadeal," have reportedly stalled. But the Biden administration is still pursuing a defense pact with the kingdom, said to be modeled on the U.S. defense treaty with Japan, which would make Saudi Arabia the only Arab country with a formal U.S. defense treaty.
To take stock of the proposed U.S.-Saudi deal and its implications for the Middle East and beyond, DAWN brought together prominent scholars and policy analysts for an expert workshop co-hosted with Georgetown University's Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. Participants analyzed the deal's reported terms, what it would grant Saudi Arabia, and how it would transform the U.S.-Saudi relationship. They also debated the regional political context around such a security pact, including what it would mean for possible Saudi normalization with Israel and where would it leave the Palestinians. Finally, participants discussed the proposed deal's implications for wider U.S. foreign policy, including U.S. military primacy in the region and its rivalry with China.
"This workshop filled a critical gap, bringing together leading experts to examine what is actually known about this secretive U.S.-Saudi deal," said Frederick Deknatel, executive editor of Democracy in Exile, DAWN's journal. "They warned about the abundant risks of unprecedented U.S. security guarantees to Saudi Arabia, which would entrench the U.S. military in the region and reward a brutal, authoritarian regime in Riyadh, elevating it to an ally equivalent to democracies like Japan and Australia."
Contributors to the workshop included Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King's College London; Kristin Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington; David Wight, historian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of U.S. Empire, 1967-1988; Annelle Sheline, Middle East research fellow at the Quincy Institute and former foreign affairs officer at the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor's Office of Near Eastern Affairs; Abdullah Alaoudh, the Countering Authoritarianism Senior Director at the Middle East Democracy Center (MEDC); Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and the director of Century International; Rami G. Khouri, Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut; and Josh Paul, senior advisor at DAWN and a former director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department.
"This security agreement seeks to solidify an 'Axis of Repression' in the Middle East against the democratic wishes of the people in the region," said Nader Hashemi, the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and a nonresident fellow at DAWN, who moderated part of the workshop. "While it is being promoted as a way to bring peace and prosperity to the Arab-Islamic world, objectively speaking, it seeks to impose a new neo-colonial order on the Middle East."
"Neither the U.S. nor Saudi people benefit from the Biden administration's proposed bilateral security agreement with Saudi Arabia," said Abdullah Alaoudh, the Countering Authoritarianism Senior Director at the Middle East Democracy Center (MEDC) and a legal scholar from Saudi Arabia. "The agreement commits the U.S. military to protecting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from any potential threat, thereby entrenching a brutal dictatorship and ensuring its survival at the expense of the Saudi and Arab peoples' aspiration for a better future—and with U.S. taxpayer money and blood. The agreement goes against everything the United States says it stands for."
To spur further debate on these important questions of U.S. foreign policy, DAWN is publishing a selection of articles adapted from papers presented at the workshop in its journal, Democracy in Exile. A report detailing the proceedings of the workshop is available here.
"At a minimum, a new U.S.-Saudi agreement would perpetuate the undermining of peace and the civil and human rights of Arabs, Americans and others," writes historian David Wight, in this new series in Democracy in Exile. "In the worst case, the new deal would result in an unprecedented catastrophe. Given such high costs and risks for so little benefit, the proposed agreement should be scuttled."
"A new U.S. defense treaty and unparalleled military pledges would likely inflame tensions between Saudi Arabia and its rivals and could potentially drag the U.S. into yet another regional war," writes Annelle Sheline. "Yet America's obsession with military primacy in the Middle East is likely to keep the deal on the table, regardless of who wins the presidential election in November."
This event was the latest policy workshop convened by DAWN to give scholars and experts the space to debate the biggest issues in U.S. foreign policy. In 2023, DAWN co-hosted a workshop with Yale Law School, Bridging Restraint and Positive Engagement: Toward a New Framework for U.S. Middle East Policy, to examine the merits and limitations of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy. In 2022, DAWN and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School co-sponsored Human Rights Go to War, a workshop focused on how human rights groups and advocacy organizations engage in policy debate and legal discourse pertaining to international humanitarian law and whether alternative approaches could better protect and promote human rights before armed conflicts break out. In 2021, DAWN and the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-sponsored Aid Conditionality, a workshop that examined the principles, effectiveness and possible harms of conditioning U.S. arms transfers and economic and diplomatic support to abusive governments in the Middle East and North Africa based on improvements in their human rights record.
DAWN also co-hosted a conference with the Tawakkol Karman Foundation and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University on how to build sustainable peace and democracy in Yemen, and an expert workshop with the Uyghur Human Rights Project on the complicity of authoritarian governments in the Middle East with China's repression of minority Uyghur Muslims.
Articles adapted from all these workshops and conferences are available in DAWN's journal, Democracy in Exile.
