Every day seems to bring a new advance in the fast-moving American effort to build a Saudi-Israeli alliance in the Middle East.
The Israeli and Saudi interest in such a partnership is obvious. The two countries share an implacable, expansionist foe and offer each other unique advantages in facing that foe. Should an Israeli-Saudi deal be sealed, the two countries will owe much to Tehran for so expertly driving them into each other’s arms.
Iran overplayed its hand, banged too loudly on the drums of war throughout the region. While Iranian leaders have tried to warn Saudi Arabia away from the deal, Tehran has by its own hand and over many years convinced the Saudis that there is no peace to be found in a detente with the Islamic Republic, that Tehran seeks dominion over the region, is willing to demolish countries along the way, and can only be contained by strength – the kind of strength possessed by the Israelis.
Iran’s regional policy is all sticks and no carrots, while Israel offers potential allies a surfeit of carrots: economic, technological and diplomatic. Unlike distant powers like America or local fence-sitters like Qatar, the Jewish state is also a reliable ally in the simple sense that it can neither withdraw from the region nor remain neutral in the great regional contest. For the Saudis, it’s hard to think of a regional ally against Iran that is as powerful, reliable, unthreatening and grateful as Israel.
And Iranian belligerence has now made it indispensable.
Of course, there are other, less urgent factors driving the Israelis and Saudis together. Saudi Arabia is flush with cash and a desire to diversify its economy beyond energy. Little Israel is overflowing with innovative companies that could achieve a great deal with an influx of Saudi cash.
Saudi special forces salute in front of a screen displaying images of Saudi King Salman, right, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after a military parade in preparation for the annual Hajj pilgrimage in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, July 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)
And the Saudis have already gained much just by dangling the possibility of a rapprochement with Israel. Three years ago, the Saudi government was persona non grata in America, especially among Democrats. Now, Riyadh has come in from the cold in Washington. Before actually giving anything to the Americans, it has already won a new lease on life as America’s ally.
And what of Israel’s interests? There’s the obvious: the most powerful Sunni state as an open ally against the Jewish state’s greatest foe, with all the military and intelligence cooperation that entails.
There’s also the immense political benefit to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the benefit that drives the urgency on the Israeli side not just for normalization, but for normalization now and at virtually any cost: the hope that Israeli domestic politics will finally shift away from his government’s politically catastrophic judicial overhaul to the most significant Arab-world peace agreement since the treaty with Egypt over four decades ago.
A benign nuclear program?
And then there’s the Israeli security establishment’s surprising enthusiasm to lock down a deal. That support is far from a given in light of the Saudis’ most significant demand for normalization: Civilian nuclear infrastructure on Saudi soil.
It’s impossible to exaggerate how dramatic a pivot that represents for Israel. For five long decades, Israel’s security services have worked ferociously to disrupt the construction of nuclear infrastructures in the Middle East; now it’s agreeing to it. That turn doesn’t come from any Israeli faith in international safeguards or Saudi intentions. For now, Riyadh conditions its plans for nuclear weapons on Tehran. If Iran gets a bomb, “we have to get one,” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Fox News last month. But no one in Israel was surprised by the admission or seriously believes that a Saudi nuclear program will be rendered permanently restricted and benign by American or international demands.
In this photo released by the US Air Force, an Israeli Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle flies in formation with a U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer over Israel as part of a deterrence flight, on Saturday, October 30, 2021. (US Air Force/Senior Airman Jerreht Harris via AP)
From the Israeli perspective, the Middle East is already well into a nuclear arms race. The covert war against Iran’s nuclear program delayed the program’s progress by a decade, perhaps more. But the covert war always had its limits. The international community had little stomach for any new Middle Eastern war, and Iran knew it. Despite the sanctions leveled on Iran for years, despite constant setbacks to the nuclear program, despite embarrassingly successful Israeli sabotage efforts, the Iranian regime has managed through sheer determination (i.e., a willingness to ignore the vast costs to Iran’s society and economy) to slowly build out the infrastructure of a nuclear threshold state.
And now the Saudis want to start their own program, with the infrastructure all housed on Saudi soil. No matter how stiff the safeguards, how strong the resolve of the West to carefully watch and control every part of the program, no matter how many solemn promises are made by self-important grandees of world affairs, the Saudis know they are operating in a new world, the world after Iranian nuclearization, a world that will never again be what it was before.
Iran became a nuclear threshold state despite nearly wall-to-wall opposition, despite the supposedly sacred Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it was a signatory, despite sanctions and threats from every American administration. Former US president Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, whether one supports it or not, was undeniably a concession that the NPT had failed, that the international community, grown used to peace and burned by the failures of overambitious Middle Eastern wars, had become unwilling to do what it takes to enforce the NPT against an unwilling Tehran. Iran, the thinking went, could be convinced to turn away from the nuclear option with carrots. It could be bought off.
The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal was the opposite policy but a similar act of unjustified faith, this time in the ability of the West to reverse Iran’s program through more forceful means.
Iran proved them all wrong. The NPT can no longer be relied upon to keep any nation safe from a less responsible neighbor going nuclear. For neighbors of Iran, that’s not a theoretical point.
Various centrifuge machines line a hall at the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility, on April 17, 2021. (Screenshot/Islamic Republic Iran Broadcasting-IRIB, via AP)
So no Saudi civilian nuclear program can ever really be treated as civilian. Iran’s program was always military in intent but pretended to have a civilian purpose. It was a lie so egregious and obvious that it could never have been uttered in good faith by those who made the claim. The program is far too large for nuclear research and far too small for energy production, but it’s just the right size for a weapons program. The Saudi program will start small, but it’s no accident that all infrastructure will be on Saudi soil, enabling the Saudis to slowly develop indigenous expertise and the relevant machinery for the moment Riyadh may decide to go it alone.
A Saudi government willing to bear the costs of peace with Israel sans a Palestinian state is a government that views Iranian intentions with more alarm than Western policymakers seem to understand. It was not a new environmental consciousness or a momentary amnesia on the Saudis’ part about their vast oil reserves that turned their attention to nuclear technology. It is only and solely a military program in potentia, and thus a warning to Iran and a threat to the West not to abandon the Saudi regime in ways that might make it desperate.
And still, and for the first time ever, Israel is on board.
The new Middle East
A quiet but anxious debate is underway in Israel about the meaning of Saudi nuclearization. American officials, inexplicably, insist the program will remain forever under American control and oversight. It’s hard to imagine that Israeli security officials were swayed by such commitments. In the end, the basic willingness in Israel to allow the spread of nuclear infrastructure to the Saudis is nothing less than a first-ever Israeli nod to an ultimately unstoppable Arab nuclear program. It is a sea-change for Israel on a scale that’s impossible to exaggerate.
American officials still think of Iran as ultimately rational and deterrable, a regime full of sound and fury but ultimately devoted to its own survival and stability and thus loathe to engage in conflicts it cannot be sure it will win. The Israelis think of Iran rather differently. It is a revolutionary regime willing to destroy nations — a regime actively undermining peace and stability throughout the region at great cost to itself, and now close to being able to do so under a nuclear umbrella handed to it by a world unwilling to stop it.
Hezbollah fighters parade in front of a poster showing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei during a rally to mark Jerusalem day, in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, April 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
And so the Israelis, or at least the hard-nosed policy planners doing the homework behind the scenes, are in search not so much of more peace treaties with Arab states as of like-minded allies who see the Iranian threat for what it is.
Quietly, hesitantly, Israel is coming to view Saudi nuclear deterrence of Iran as part of a larger regional strategy for reining in a nuclear foe.
Or put another way: What if Saudi nuclearization isn’t a grudging, irresponsible concession on Israel’s part, as Opposition Leader Yair Lapid fears? What if it’s the point?
Israel’s nuclear deterrence, the Iranian belief that the Jewish state possesses a second-strike capability, is diminished by the country’s tiny size, which makes it especially vulnerable to catastrophic attack with just a handful of nukes. Expanding the circle of potential nuclear adversaries for a fully nuclear Iran is a reasonable way to put to rest any Iranian dream of a successful first strike.
The same question goes the other way, and places Saudi thinking about Israel in a new light. Western media has generally argued that the Saudis are offering normalization with Israel as the price they are willing to pay for American acquiescence to an indigenous Saudi nuclear infrastructure. But what if that misses the urgency with which the Saudis view the Iranian problem? What if the alliance with Israel isn’t a payment for a future Saudi nuclear capability, what if it’s part of that capability?
As Iran drags the region to the cusp of a nuclear arms race, Israel offers potential allies a unique value proposition. Where Iran can probably produce a single bomb relatively quickly, Israel is believed to have dozens, perhaps hundreds, and to be capable of deploying them on deliverable warheads. To the Saudis, Israel itself is a nuclear umbrella, and a reliable and unthreatening one to boot. It’s a useful stopgap until the Saudis make the still far-off decision regarding their own weapons program.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, welcomes US President Joe Biden to Al-Salam Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 15, 2022. (Bandar Aljaloud/Saudi Royal Palace via AP, File)
The new Israeli-Saudi alliance is quite likely to prove deep and resilient. The very costs each side seems willing to pay for the alliance suggests it is more than a normalization deal. It is a convergence of the two countries’ supreme defense priority, a shared nuclear safety net to face an Iranian nuke that neither believes is deterrable in any other way.
It’s too early to declare the alliance built or successful, too soon to know how far Saudi Arabia or Israel are willing to go on Saudi nuclearization, or how this new alliance will affect the rest of the region, especially Iran. Israeli and Saudi officials themselves don’t yet have answers to these questions.
But the new Middle East is already here, a testing ground for what comes after the post-Cold War Pax Americana. The answer seems to be a new, regional Cold War, a local version of the superpower game of the past, complete with thrilling daredevil espionage and, already visible on the horizon, full-blown nuclear brinkmanship.
