Can Biden Seize the Moment in the Middle East?

Yesterday, President Biden landed in Israel, inaugurating his visit to the Middle East, with another stop planned in Saudi Arabia. This trip holds the promise to be a pivotal moment of Biden’s presidency, and quite likely his most important trip abroad. But despite its significance, and the fact that it has been several weeks in the planning, presidential engagement in the Middle East is not the product of some signature foreign-policy initiative or a chance to roll out a long-awaited Biden Doctrine. It is, to the contrary, the result of a haphazard approach to national security that has crashed upon the shoals of reality. Biden’s trip is an effort to begin again, a second sailing in his administration’s life-vessel that the crew now hopes can get America back on course.

After nearly eighteen months in office, the Biden administration is slowly re-learning an important lesson: grand strategy matters. Within the Pentagon, State Department, and even the National Security Council, offices focused on specific countries or regions compete with each other for resources and polity prioritization, fighting turf wars while experts on particular countries spend lifetimes focused on one piece of a global puzzle.

Combined with the daily pressures of congressional debates and the need to keep a partisan base happy, these structural factors can easily lead a president to conduct not one foreign policy, but a series of disconnected initiatives that function at cross purposes. One can easily point to specific blunders, often the product of partisan thinking, that have brought the Biden White House to its current predicament. Nor should one overlook the deeply held preconceptions of a man who spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate and another eight as vice-president. But the biggest problem is the overarching one: the failure to realize that America’s actions in one part of the globe have consequences in another.