Can Joe Biden really strike a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia?

Very rarely do American presidents get policy wins in the Middle East. The region hasn’t been kind to the United States over the last thirty years. The signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty during the Jimmy Carter years and the U.S.-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War are two exceptions to the rule. Everything else has been a failure of degree. Others, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Trump administration’s arbitrary withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, were self-inflicted wounds that made the region bloodier and more difficult to manage.

True to tradition, the Biden administration doesn’t have much foreign policy success in the Middle East either. Part of this is because president Biden sought to talk down the region in U.S. grand strategy, a worthy goal given the limited U.S. interests there. But another part is the sheer difficulty of achieving a major diplomatic success in this area of the world.