Expect smooth Biden transition in Middle East

Our take: No incoming US president except maybe George H. W. Bush has the experience or connections of former Vice President Joe Biden when it comes to the Middle East. As a longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden was well known in the region even before he was vice president. His former colleagues and staff, who will fill out his administration, are also veteran Middle East and foreign policy hands. While there will be some new faces and an adjustment to the distinct challenges of this time in the region, a Biden administration is likely to be, in part, a restoration of the Obama-Biden foreign policy team and approach.  

Anxiety on Iran: There may be anxiety in Israel and some Gulf quarters about how a Biden administration will handle Iran. Biden has said his administration will return to the Obama-negotiated Iran deal — if Iran is in compliance. Our take has been, however, that Biden will likely pursue an approach to Iran that is anchored more than ever in regional partnerships, taking lessons from the 2015 deal, which was openly opposed by Israel (see below), and quietly by key regional partners. Iran won’t make it easy, of course, and the diplomatic paths to a new nuclear deal also lead to Russia and China, who won’t buy in for free. But Russia and China share an interest in keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — a compelling shared interest, despite friction in other areas.

Building on normalization: The Israel normalization agreements with the UAE, Bahrain and now Sudan, which Biden supports, allow opportunities for a stronger regional front against Iran, and may complement UN initiatives on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The Palestinian leadership, as Daoud Kuttab reports, is cautiously optimistic about a Biden presidency and ready to reengage. It may be too much to expect a breakthrough early in 2021, but the Biden administration may see opportunity to build on the Donald Trump-brokered normalization deals.

No firewall on human rights, sanctions: Some of Washington’s regional partners — Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — may worry they will lose the protection they’ve had from the Trump White House on human rights, sanctions and arms exports. That’s probably true. Biden is more likely to back up congressional efforts to sanction Turkey, constrain arms sales to the Gulf, or take up human rights cases with Egypt, for example. But the veteran Biden team also knows the challenges of balancing pressure on human rights with the need to maintain partnerships on security and economic issues, as Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, explained in a recent podcast.