Biden's Middle East trip: Following in Trump's footsteps
WATCH: Biden looks poised to betray his campaign promise to sideline Saudi Arabia. Does this really serve America's interests?
Responsible Statecraft
Responsible Statecraft is a publication of analysis, opinion, and news that seeks to promote a positive vision of U.S. foreign policy based on humility, diplomatic engagement, and military restraint. RS also critiques the ideas — and the ideologies and interests behind them — that have mired the United States in counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure.
Top image credit: File photo dated June 28, 2019 of US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman speaks during the family photo at the G20 Osaka Summit in Osaka, Japan. Photo by Ludovic Marin/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS
Trump doesn't need to buy Saudi loyalty with a security pact
November 11, 2025
The prospect of a U.S.-Saudi security pact is back in the news.
The United States and Saudi Arabia are reportedly in talks over a pledge “similar to [the] recent security agreement the United States made with Qatar,” with a “Qatar-plus” security commitment expected to be announced during a visit to the White House by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) on November 18.
Together, these developments suggest a troubling belief that handing out security guarantees is a quick, cost-free way to reassure anxious partners and ensure their alignment with U.S. priorities. That belief is mistaken. A U.S.–Saudi defense pact would be unnecessary, risky, and unlikely to achieve its unclear aims. Rather than revive the misguided Biden administration initiative, the Trump administration should shelve the idea once and for all.
The Qatar security guarantee, issued via executive order on September 29, marked arguably the most explicit U.S. commitment to an Arab state, with the United States vowing to “regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States.” According to former State Department lawyer for treaty affairs Michael Mattler, the pledge to Qatar is on “par with the mutual defense commitments the United States provides its closest allies.”
(Though, of course, the Qatar agreement is not a mutual defense pact, but a unilateral one, and is not a Senate-ratified treaty like NATO; as with any executive agreement, it can easily be undone.)
The security deal with the Qataris was framed as necessary to finalize a Gaza ceasefire, as Qatar had threatened to end its mediation following Israel’s brazen attack on Hamas negotiators in Doha. But critics warned that it would create a slippery slope, prompting other Gulf states to demand the same. The critics appear to have been right. Saudi Arabia has long sought a formal U.S. security commitment, and nearly received one during the Biden administration. Having watched Doha secure one so easily from Trump, Riyadh is pressing its case again.
What’s in it for the United States?
Proponents of a Saudi security guarantee offer several supposed benefits. First, they have long claimed the United States must double down on support for Saudi Arabia to quell concerns about U.S. reliability. Saudi doubts, while not new, were hardened by Washington’s lack of response to the 2019 attack on its Abqaiq-Khurais oil facilities and, more recently, Israel's strike on Qatar, which Washington initially seemed unwilling or unable to prevent.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials are increasingly anxious about Gulf states’ growing ties with China. Trump has complained that the Saudis are “with China" now due to insufficient U.S. support, promising to "win them back" and "always protect them." A formal defense arrangement, the logic goes, is necessary to pull Riyadh back into Washington’s orbit.
Lastly, the Trump administration, like the Biden team before it, seems to believe that promises of protection can coax Saudi Arabia into normalization with Israel and advance a broader grand bargain to transform the region. Given how the Qatar pledge emerged, the administration may believe a similar deal with Riyadh can secure buy-in for other U.S. priorities, such as involvement in Gaza’s post-war stabilization.
The case for a formal pledge to Saudi Arabia doesn’t add up. Defense commitments can be valuable when they serve a specific purpose and deter a defined threat, as NATO did vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the early Cold War. However, the threat that any Saudi agreement is expected to deter is indeterminate, at best, and problematic, at worst.
For instance, a Qatar-like pact might create expectations that the United States would retaliate against a country, perhaps even a U.S. ally, if it were to carry out an airstrike on suspected terrorists in Saudi Arabia. But who would attempt such a thing? The Saudis and the Iranians reached a reconciliation agreement in 2023, further calling into question the need for a US security guarantee. And what of internal security threats to the regime? In the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings in March 2011, Riyadh sent troops into neighboring Bahrain to snuff out anti-government demonstrations.
Wider concerns about the supposedly existential importance of Saudi oil to the U.S. economy have long been disproved — largely because oil markets have become much more resilient to supply shocks — even before the United States became a net oil exporter in 2018. If supply shocks occur, Americans will feel the effects at the gas pump, but those effects are short-lived, and certainly not worth fighting a war to prevent. We’ve come a long way since President Jimmy Carter declared the entire Persian Gulf to be a vital U.S. interest. In short, there is no direct threat to the United States that warrants a security pledge to Saudi Arabia. The supposed benefits are neither material to core U.S. interests nor likely to be achieved by such a commitment.
Longstanding doubts about U.S. commitment to the region cannot be papered over; they reflect a stark reality: precisely because the security of the kingdom is not a vital U.S. national interest, pledges to defend it lack credibility. An agreement between Trump and MBS can’t change that.
Fortunately, the United States doesn't need to “reassure” Saudi Arabia to win its cooperation, as core U.S. and Saudi interests are broadly aligned. In the near term, both desire a lasting end to the Gaza war and a dialing down of regional tensions. Likewise, Saudi Arabia shares the United States’ goals of energy security, counterterrorism, and preventing the rise of a regional hegemon. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s recent deal with Pakistan is cause for optimism, if Washington plays its cards right, as our Stimson colleague Asfandyar Mir notes.
China’s inroads in the Persian Gulf pose little threat to the United States. Beijing's engagement in the Middle East is driven primarily by economic interests, not a desire to dominate the region, which it has neither the intent nor the capability to do. At the same time, promises of U.S. protection will not pull Riyadh away from Beijing, which is seen as a critical partner in Saudi efforts to diversify its economy, deepen partnerships, and bolster its international standing. Trying to out-bid China through security concessions would be both costly and futile. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reports that MBS has admitted to "playing major powers against each other" to secure U.S. concessions, which should give Washington pause rather than encourage more generosity.
And while Israeli-Saudi normalization would be welcome, it would be a mostly symbolic achievement; the countries already discreetly cooperate on the issues that matter. Normalization certainly isn't worth the cost of a U.S. pledge to defend Riyadh, which amounts to rewarding both parties for doing what is already in their mutual interest, especially when Saudi officials have ruled out normalization absent significant steps toward a Palestinian state, which are unlikely in the near term.
Risks of a Saudi Pact
A security pact with Saudi Arabia might not bring many benefits, but it would come with significant downsides. It would create moral hazard, risking U.S. entrapment through what MIT’s Barry Posen calls “reckless driving.” Consider Riyadh’s actions in Yemen. Extensive U.S. support emboldened Saudi Arabia to wage a disastrous, failed intervention there that dragged on for seven years, fueling a war that claimed close to 400,000 lives, including nearly 20,000 civilians killed by airstrikes. But when the United States’ failure to respond forcefully to the Abqaiq-Khurais attack showed Riyadh it could not count on unconditional U.S. backing, it had no choice but to seek an exit from Yemen. Even if Saudi Arabia does not behave recklessly, a pledge to defend the kingdom would limit U.S. flexibility and increase pressure to intervene if Saudi Arabia comes under attack again.
Even a watered-down or largely symbolic commitment would carry risks. Regardless of the specifics of the security agreement, if Saudi Arabia were attacked, a written commitment would provide ammunition to those pressing for U.S. intervention, even though U.S. core interests do not justify it. The language of the Qatar security guarantee has been widely accepted as “akin to NATO’s Article 5,” setting unrealistic expectations. Any formal arrangement would also send the message to Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that they can still rely on the United States, rather than encouraging them to take their security into their own hands. American protection, it seems — and potentially the lives of American servicepeople — is up for negotiation. It shouldn’t be.
Above all, additional commitments would delay a long-overdue U.S. recalibration away from the Middle East. The United States can secure its modest interests in the region without maintaining a major military presence, and certainly without pledging to fight on behalf of Riyadh. It would be foolish for an overstretched America to take on further burdens in a region of declining strategic importance.
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Top photo credit: Colombian President Gustavo Petro and European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and European Commission Vice-President Kaja Kallas at EU-CELAC summit in Santa Marta, Colombia, November 9, 2025. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez
US strikes are blowing up more than just boats in LatAm
November 11, 2025
Latin American and European leaders convened in the coastal Caribbean city of Santa Marta, Colombia this weekend to discuss trade, energy and security, yet regional polarization over the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean overshadowed the regional agenda and significantly depressed turnout.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and other European and Latin American leaders were skipping the IV EU-CELAC Summit, a biannual gathering of heads of state that represents nearly a third of the world’s countries and a quarter of global GDP, over tensions between Washington and the host government of Gustavo Petro.
Officially, the leaders cited the “current European political agenda and the low participation of other heads of state and government.”
Petro — who the Trump administration has placed on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list after calling him an “illegal drug leader” without providing any evidence — said last month that Washington was exerting pressure on countries, particularly in the Caribbean, to skip the event, in what he called a “diplomatic boycott.”
EU Council President Antonio Costa and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas attended the summit in place of von der Leyen — who had previously confirmed her attendance in a meeting with Petro in Brussels last month — while the president of Spain and the prime ministers of Portugal and the Netherlands were among the 9 total heads of state and government present.
Despite a well-attended EU-CELAC Summit in Brussels in 2023 — in which von der Leyen said that the EU aspired to be “the partner of choice” for Latin America and the Caribbean — EU leaders’ more recent concerns about antagonizing the U.S. administration have seemingly outweighed their quest for strategic autonomy at a time when the bloc is seeking to deepen its relations beyond the U.S.
At the last summit, the EU, which trades over $400 billion annually with the region and is by far its largest investor, relaunched a strategic partnership with 33 countries of CELAC, or the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, in part by announcing $45 billion in fresh financing through the Global Gateway Initiative.
More broadly, the EU has presented itself as a like-minded, reliable partner for Latin America and the Caribbean amid shifting geopolitics and great power competition in the hemisphere, and sees the region as a potential market for its industrial products and a stable supplier of renewable energy and critical minerals. The region possesses 60% of the world’s lithium and 40% of its copper, holds 60% of global renewable energy potential, and represents 14% of global food production and 45% of the global agri-food trade.
Seeing immense potential for growth, the EU is currently finalizing two major trade agreements with Mexico and MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia), a key litmus test for further biregional integration.
Yet Washington’s increasingly aggressive stance toward the Americas, including military threats against Venezuela and nearly two dozen airstrikes against alleged drug boats that Petro considers extrajudicial killings, has shifted the Europeans’ calculus, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
In the leadup to this weekend’s summit, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who attended alongside heads of state from Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, and St. Kitts and Nevis, said the meeting “would only make sense, at this moment, if it were to discuss the issue of U.S. warships in Latin American waters.”
To discuss that issue, Lula went so far as to temporarily leave his own summit, the COP30 U.N. climate conference in Belém, Brazil, which both von der Leyen and Macron attended last week. Despite skipping out on Santa Marta, Macron — who apparently had few qualms appearing alongside Petro — traveled from Brazil to Mexico City this weekend to meet with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who also did not attend the EU-CELAC Summit despite expressing criticism of the U.S. boat strikes.
Colombian Vice Foreign Minister Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir said last week that upcoming presidential elections in Chile and Honduras also made it difficult for those countries’ center-left presidents Gabriel Boric and Xiomara Castro, who have attended past CELAC summits, to join their peers in Santa Marta. Bolivia, which for 20 years under the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party was heavily involved in regional fora, inaugurated a new, center-right president Saturday, Rodrigo Paz, who also did not attend.
Founded in 2011 in Caracas as a counterweight to the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS), CELAC includes every country in the Western Hemisphere except the United States and Canada.
The bloc has served as a vehicle to boost Latin American and Caribbean ties beyond the U.S., not only with the EU, but also with India, the African Union, the Arab world and China.
In May, shortly after taking over from Honduran President Xiomara Castro as the body’s president pro tempore, Petro traveled to Beijing with Brazil’s Lula, Chilean President Gabriel Boric, and dozens of foreign ministers to preside over the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the China-CELAC Forum alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Yet CELAC has been hobbled by the lack of a permanent secretariat, annual changes in the group’s leadership, piecemeal financing, non-binding decisions, and persistent internal divisions.
At the CELAC heads of state summit in Honduras last March, which featured a rare appearance by Mexico’s Sheinbaum, internal tensions over how to respond to the Trump administration’s migration, trade and security agenda led Argentina, Paraguay and Nicaragua to object to the body’s final declaration.
The downgraded EU-CELAC summit in Santa Marta this weekend came just a week after the Dominican Republic announced that next month's X Summit of the Americas, an arguably more significant regional meeting organized in close coordination with the U.S. State Department and the OAS, would be postponed due to the "unforeseeable, profound differences that make productive dialogues in the Americas difficult."
After the Dominican Republic decided last month that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua would not be invited to attend the Summit — just as President Biden did for the 2022 summit in Los Angeles — Petro and Sheinbaum said they would not attend in opposition to the exclusion of any country.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a number of Cuban-American Republican lawmakers immediately backed Santo Domingo’s announcement, which also cited the devastating impact of Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean among its reasons for postponement.
The two diplomatic let-downs mark one of the lowest moments for regional relations in decades. Yet as the Trump administration makes its distaste for multilateralism abundantly clear, some countries in the region are taking the cue by prioritizing their bilateral ties to the U.S. over deeper integration with their neighbors.
Last week, Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa received Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to explore potential U.S. bases in the country. Argentine President Javier Milei made his fourteenth trip to the U.S. in under two years to speak alongside President Trump at a Miami business summit. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele allowed a U.S. attack aircraft to operate out of his capital’s international airport. And Trinidadian Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar let a U.S. warship dock at the country’s main port just seven miles off the Venezuelan coast.
Needless to say, none of these presidents bothered to travel to Santa Marta, and their representatives abstained from many clauses in the final declaration.
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Top image credit: President Donald Trump and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa meet in the White House. (Photo via the Office of the Syrian Presidency)
Trump brings out the big guns for Syrian leader's historic visit
November 10, 2025
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa met with President Donald Trump for nearly two hours in the Oval Office Monday, marking the first ever White House visit by a Syrian leader.
The only concrete change expected to emerge from the meeting will be Syria’s joining the Western coalition to fight ISIS. In a statement, Sharaa’s office said simply that he and Trump discussed ways to bolster U.S.-Syria relations and deal with regional and international problems. Trump, for his part, told reporters later in the day that the U.S. will “do everything we can to make Syria successful,” noting that he gets along well with Sharaa. “I have confidence that he’ll be able to do the job,” Trump added.
But perhaps more important than the details of the meeting was the fact that it happened at all — and that Trump was joined by nearly all of his top foreign policy aides, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. Last week, Sharaa was still a designated terrorist in the eyes of the U.S. government. Now, Trump is hosting him in the White House as a legitimate national leader and a legitimate partner in the fight against terrorism.
For many analysts in Washington, this progress has been somewhat head-spinning. “This is the fastest normalization process that I’ve ever seen,” said Adam Weinstein, the deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. “The embrace of Sharaa by the U.S. and the Europeans is sort of unprecedented, especially given his personal history.”
Last week, Trump officially removed Sharaa from a list of designated terrorists, and the U.S. led an effort at the United Nations Security Council to lift U.N. sanctions on Sharaa, making him a legally legitimate actor in the eyes of the West. But, even amid all of this progress, serious challenges still stand in the way of Sharaa’s efforts to reorient Syrian foreign policy and rebuild his shattered country.
The largest remaining obstacle in U.S.-Syria relations are the Caesar sanctions, a brutal set of economic restrictions that has stayed in place despite the fall of the Assad regime. Trump suspended these sanctions in May and reupped that suspension for an additional 180 days on Monday. But the Caesar Act remains on the books, meaning that a future president could theoretically reimpose the sanctions at a moment’s notice.
This looming threat has left many companies unwilling to invest in Syria, handicapping the country’s reconstruction during a fragile moment of transition, as RS detailed last month following a trip to the country. “If you really want to give the new government the best chance of success, remove all the sanctions,” Weinstein said.
Trump will have to prove that he and his envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, can persuade a Republican-led Congress to give Sharaa a chance despite lawmakers’ concerns about the former al-Qaeda fighter. The Senate relented last month, passing a bill that would largely repeal the Caesar Act. But the House continues to hold out.
In this sense, Trump’s decision to host Sharaa has already started to pay off. Late Sunday night, the Syrian president met with Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a vocal proponent of keeping sanctions in place. One analyst with direct knowledge of the conversation described it as “positive and constructive.”
Mast has yet to indicate a change in his view on sanctions, but he did signal a less combative view of Syria’s president. In a statement after the meeting, the lawmaker said he told Sharaa that they were “two former soldiers and two former enemies” and asked why he should reconcile with the new Syrian leader. According to Mast, Sharaa responded that he hopes to “liberate from the past and have a noble pursuit for his people and his country and to be a great ally to the United States of America.”
Perhaps helping Mast along is the fact that, under Sharaa, Syria’s interests have begun to overlap more closely with those of the U.S. Damascus is determined to defeat ISIS, which has attempted to assassinate Sharaa at least twice in recent months, Syrian officials told Reuters last week. To facilitate the anti-ISIS fight, the new Syrian leader is apparently willing to accept a continued U.S. military presence in the country, possibly including a new deployment of American forces to an airbase in Damascus.
Sharaa also aligns closely with the Trump administration on Iran, once a key supporter of the now-defunct Assad regime. In fact, Syria even shares this interest with Israel, which is determined to prevent Syria from returning to its previous role as a key meeting point and transport corridor between Iran and Hezbollah. “We have, as I mentioned, converging interests, as relates to Iran and the Iranian axis, and that provides a good platform for cooperation,” said Michael Herzog, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. until earlier this year.
Unfortunately for Sharaa, the list of shared interests between Syria and Israel doesn’t extend far beyond the issue of Iran. Since the fall of Assad, Israeli forces have occupied parts of southern Syria and carried out a bombing campaign against military sites throughout the country. The new Syrian leader has made clear that he has no intention of attacking Israel, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains unconvinced.
Still, Israeli officials have held direct talks with Sharaa’s government, and some pro-Israel analysts see a possibility of a U.S.-brokered security deal between the neighboring countries. “The U.S. is a key actor here, and it could bridge the gaps between the parties and basically provide the guarantees,” Herzog said during a panel discussion hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Herzog, who remains close to the Israeli security establishment, hopes that such a deal would mirror last year’s ceasefire with Lebanon, under which Israel formally agreed to end the war but informally agreed with the U.S. to retain “freedom of action” to carry out airstrikes against emerging threats. (One analyst called this approach a “lessfire.”)
Such an agreement would likely draw scrutiny within Syria, where many people remain skeptical of any dealings with Israel. But it could still prove attractive to Sharaa, who has no shortage of problems to solve as he attempts to hold his country together after 14 years of brutal war. Simply put, the Syrian leader has a strong incentive to continue building trust with the Trump administration, which can play a crucial role in fixing many of these problems.
Take, for example, Damascus' relationship with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, which continue to hold much of Syria’s northeast despite the end of the civil war. The SDF has long held significant sway in the U.S., due in no small part to its strong relationships with members of Congress. And it remains skeptical of Sharaa’s government, particularly following massacres of minorities in coastal regions and the south. Some reports indicate that SDF leaders are simply hoping to wait for the government in Damascus to fall apart before reaching any final agreement with it.
But Barrack’s strong relationship with Sharaa’s government has limited the SDF’s influence over U.S. policy, and the Syrian government has every reason to ensure that these ties continue to blossom. And the SDF’s power could wane further if the U.S. moves some of its troops from northeast Syria to Damascus, a plan that may already be in motion, according to Reuters.
“The history of the U.S.-Kurdish partnership is leaving the Kurds out to dry periodically,” said Weinstein, adding that the SDF doesn’t appear to have “that much cache with Barrack.”
In this sense, Sharaa scored a major victory by simply meeting with Trump. The American leader is known to put a premium on personal relationships in his conduct of foreign policy. Sharaa and his team “know the importance of him coming to the U.S. and showing up at Trump’s door,” Weinstein said. “It has a lot of power.”
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