By Omar Abdelrahman, Fall 2024 Marcellus Policy Fellow

The United States has invested significant political capital in its attempt to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Two subsequent administrations have made the Abraham Accords their signature foreign policy in the Middle East. President Donald Trump, with his knack for deal-making, has managed to strike normalization agreements with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sudan, and Morocco. However, despite the President’s repeated remarks that he brought peace to the Middle East, the fact of the matter is none of the signatories of the Abraham Accords are in conflict with Israel. The Trump Administration has achieved the aforementioned normalization agreements by entirely circumventing the central issue of the region, which is the lack of Palestinian statehood.

One could blame President Trump’s failure to address the central issue of the region on his lack of foreign policy experience. However, when President Joe Biden took office, he picked up where the Trump Administration left off despite having a much more experienced foreign policy cabinet. President Biden has made normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda, investing significant resources and political capital. His Administration prepared to make significant security commitments to Saudi Arabia to entice the kingdom to normalize relations with Israel, and a mutual defense pact was floated as an incentive.

This paper outlines multiple reasons why normalization fails as a framework for lasting regional peace in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords are fragile due to a lack of popular legitimacy, as evidenced by public opinion data that showcase how the autocratic regimes signing up for normalization do not reflect the sentiment of the general population. If social unrest washes over Arab countries again, the agreements will be null and void as they are not backed by popular legitimacy. The Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, has completely changed the regional calculus as Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are hesitant to normalize relations with Israel due to internal pressure. In addition to the lack of popular legitimacy, the focus on normalization that persisted across both the Trump and Biden administrations is built on the false assumption that Gulf states share the same stringent hostility towards Iran as the United States and Israel. The recent rapprochement efforts between Gulf countries and Iran prove these assumptions false. This paper also examines the downsides of a security pact with Saudi Arabia and its negative repercussions on the US’s effort to pivot to Asia.