The Real Purpose of a U.S.-Saudi Security Agreement

Earlier this year, the United States and Saudi Arabia were close to sealing a bilateral defense treaty. The agreement’s terms have largely been set, but its formal signing was postponed amid the present conflict in the Middle East. Analysts have frequently viewed this deal as but a piece of a larger puzzle. As conflict has racked the Middle East since Hamas’s heinous October 7 terrorist attack, the potential treaty tends to be characterized as one element of a “megadeal” aimed at pacifying the region: a cease-fire in Gaza would set the stage for the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel in return for a U.S. security guarantee and strengthened American and Israeli commitments to Palestinian statehood.

But that is the wrong way to look at a U.S.-Saudi treaty. In reality, the impetus for such a treaty preceded the conflict in Gaza. If signed, the agreement will not merely be another transaction in which the United States pays for an Arab state to normalize ties with Israel. The strategic context for it is global, not regional: if successful, a U.S.-Saudi treaty will pave the way for better security integration of U.S. partners in the Middle East and less direct American intervention there. In the long run, it will not tie the United States down in the region but help free Washington to act with greater latitude elsewhere. And the deal will draw Washington’s most capable friends in the Middle East deeper into efforts to address global challenges, including that posed by the rise of China.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Few in Washington question the current wisdom that the United States must increase its focus on the Indo-Pacific or that doing so will require a decreased focus on the Middle East, a region that continues to drain U.S. resources. Yet this tradeoff holds only if one considers the Middle East of middling importance in the United States’ competition with China or conceives of U.S. national security strategy as akin to a zero-sum game in which policymakers merely push their pieces from one region to another.

In reality, the Middle East remains vitally important to both U.S. and Chinese interests. The past year’s turmoil demonstrates not that U.S. attention to the region has been futile but that the United States cannot ignore the region, however much it may wish to do so, and that it urgently needs a new, more sustainable strategy for securing its interests there. A bilateral defense treaty with Saudi Arabia may seem an unusual response, as it might appear only to promise deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But if successful, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty would in fact shift more of the burden of addressing the region’s troubles onto U.S. partners, limit Chinese influence, and even draw partners closer in U.S.-led efforts to address global challenges and entrench Washington’s preferred norms.

Such a treaty would bring three potential strategic benefits. First, it would more closely bind Saudi Arabia and the United States, solidifying one of Washington’s most important partnerships in the Middle East. A mutual defense guarantee would be the centerpiece of any U.S.-Saudi treaty, but any such treaty would also facilitate cooperation between the two countries in sensitive high-tech areas such as artificial intelligence and related supply chains as well as Saudi access to U.S. defense technology. Such cooperation on technology would also limit China’s opportunities in these areas and circumvent controversies that often arise in the transactional, issue-by-issue negotiations that typically characterize U.S. partnerships in the region. More frequent and routine collaboration in technology could also help entrench Washington’s preferred norms and practices for data privacy and the regulation and transfer of technology, potentially enabling their spread throughout the Middle East, given Saudi Arabia’s economic and financial weight there.

Second, the treaty would help Saudi Arabia—and by extension, the region—manage and resolve crises without extensive U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia is already one of the world’s top buyers of American and other Western arms. But this reliance is becoming more of a strategic liability for Washington. With needy partners in Europe and Asia, it is difficult to justify putting Saudi Arabia first in line for U.S. arms sales, even if Riyadh pays up front and without assistance, unless it plans to use those systems to advance mutual interests with the United States. Selling one more shell or jet to Taiwan or Ukraine, for example, accomplishes far more for U.S. interests than sending those tools to a partner that will not or cannot use them. In a world of rekindled contention between great powers, this strategic math is just as important as the financial calculus of arms sales, if not more so.

If successful, a U.S.-Saudi treaty will pave the way for better security integration of U.S. partners in the Middle East.

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty would presumably bring more frequent military exchanges and exercises, enabling the United States to better shape critical Saudi reforms that aim to turn its military into a modern fighting force. These improved capabilities must of course be accompanied by a willingness to act. Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has demonstrated greater will than in the past to project its power and influence—for example, in its military campaign in Yemen—but its capabilities and strategic planning have not matched its ambition. As a result, some in the West have distanced themselves from Saudi Arabia; a more effective approach would forge a closer working partnership that can channel Saudi ambitions toward shared ends.

The United States doubtless hopes that a formal defense partnership with the Saudis would serve as the foundation for deeper multilateral coordination of U.S. defense relationships in the Middle East than the pacts it has signed so far with smaller (yet still critical) regional partners. This process began with the Abraham Accords and has already yielded collaboration, such as military exercises sponsored by the U.S. Central Command that have brought together Israeli and Arab officers. It has also led to the impressive effort by the United States, Israel, and an array of regional partners in mid-April to intercept the approximately 300 missiles and drones that Iran launched against Israel. But while this showed the potential for regional defense cooperation, it also demonstrated the region’s continued dependence on the United States. Washington would like to continue bolstering the former while reducing the region’s requirement for the latter. Perhaps counterintuitively, this would be best accomplished not by stepping away from the region but by even more intense training of regional forces through mechanisms that a bilateral treaty would likely produce. By strengthening U.S. partners, such a treaty would free up American forces and allow Washington to attend to priorities in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere without abandoning its interests in the Middle East. The accord would also underline a competitive advantage that the United States has over China: the United States can act as both a security integrator bringing parties across the region together and as a security guarantor providing new military technology, neither of which China can offer at this stage.

Finally, a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty could bring the Saudis and perhaps others in the region further into efforts to tackle global challenges. Riyadh has already demonstrated interest in exercising its global influence beyond adjusting its oil supply to world markets. In August 2023, Saudi Arabia hosted an international summit on the war in Ukraine. It has also sought a more prominent role in meetings of multilateral groupings such as the G-20. Washington, for its part, has increasingly recognized Saudi Arabia’s potential, as well as that of the United Arab Emirates and other wealthy Gulf states to leverage wealth and diplomatic influence in addressing transnational issues such as climate change and critical minerals processing. After decades of viewing Middle Eastern states as objects of U.S. foreign policy, Washington increasingly sees them as partners in it. A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty can further aid in drawing these partners out of their regional bubble by increasing their natural links and commonalities with U.S. allies in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

UNDERSTANDING THE RISKS

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty will not be without its risks, but the real risks are often misidentified. There is little reason to believe a treaty would increase the chances of a war between the United States and Iran. Even though the United States declined to respond militarily to Iran’s attack on Saudi oil facilities in 2019, any future U.S. president, treaty or not, will likely feel motivated to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense—or to that of another Gulf partner or strategic shipping route—in the event of a major Iranian attack. By formalizing what is already close to a de facto commitment, the United States can better deter Iran by eliminating any doubt that an attack on Saudi Arabia would prompt a strong U.S. response. And a treaty would not necessarily tie U.S. forces down in the region more than they already are. Evidence from the Middle East and elsewhere suggests that the involvement of U.S. forces in a given region is connected to threat levels and other factors, not the existence of a treaty. American forces have surged into the region recently in response to Iranian threats, for example, even though the United States has no formal treaty allies there.

The real risks are twofold. The first is of misaligned expectations. Policymakers in Washington will likely expect that by signing a bilateral defense treaty, Saudi Arabia will be committing to refrain from any actions that jeopardize U.S. security and to contribute more constructively to stability in the Middle East. Increasingly, policymakers expect allies to refrain from cooperating with U.S. adversaries not only in traditional military and defense matters but also through indirect actions that will enhance U.S. rivals’ broader military-industrial complexes. Such actions could simply involve providing adversaries with access to certain technologies or even, in the case of Russia especially, cooperating to protect their revenues through mechanisms such as OPEC Plus, which includes 22 of the world’s major oil exporters. Washington will be looking for Saudi Arabia not only to show preference for the United States at the margins but also to make a firm commitment to the U.S.-led alliance system that it would join after inking a treaty. Saudi normalization with Israel would be vital to securing ratification of the accord by the U.S. Senate and to realizing the full benefits of multilateral security cooperation in the region. It would also serve as a strong signal from Riyadh that Saudi Arabia is making a strategic and not merely a tactical shift in its foreign policy.

The second risk involves the fickleness of U.S. foreign policy, of which Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have found themselves disproportionately on the receiving end. Twenty-plus years of quixotic nation-building efforts should have taught U.S. policymakers that the United States can hold fast to its own values without imposing them on others. Washington can harbor strong and valid concerns about the human rights or political practices of partners such as the Saudis while still working practically to promote reform—or better yet, supporting partners’ own programs of reform, such as Riyadh’s Vision 2030—rather than recklessly threatening to break relations after every new unsavory revelation. Riyadh sees the treaty ratification process, which requires approval by a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate, as a way of ensuring that Washington sticks to its commitments, just as the United States sees Saudi normalization with Israel as a signal of Riyadh’s long-term commitment.

THE MIDDLE EAST GOES GLOBAL

There is no imminent great-power shift in the Middle East. Yet competition between the United States and China there, as elsewhere, is indeed growing, and it is regarded by U.S. partners as a serious risk. Many have responded by choosing “omni-alignment,” that is, participating in both U.S.-led multilateral institutions and newer Chinese-led alternatives, to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits they can accrue from contention between the two powers. Even countries that understand China’s limits as a partner worry that the United States has become increasingly unpredictable and transactional as its attention shifts between short-term crises in places such as the Middle East and long-term priorities, notably in the Indo-Pacific.

A U.S.-Saudi defense treaty could help ameliorate this dynamic in the Middle East, both by tightening the bonds between Washington and one of its most important partners in the region and by putting those partners in a better position to address crises on their own. Some may worry that the treaty would trap the United States in the Middle East. In reality, a closer bilateral partnership on defense could over time limit Chinese inroads in the region, bolster Riyadh’s and other partners’ capacities to act without U.S. intervention, and even bring Saudi Arabia deeper into common efforts to tackle global challenges. Along with the increasing activism by countries such as India and Japan, the expansion of these efforts could help arrest the global order’s decline into a stalemate between two great powers. Rather than worry about the emergence of a new cold war, Washington should work to build a new global diplomatic-security concert, toward which a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty can be an important step.