The US is in a Rubik’s Cube of a mess. The Biden administration is trying to square it away by insisting each face of the cube is its own problem. That’s how it may appear, but the problems are linked, just as Mr Rubik’s fiendish mechanism connected the surface patterns in a reciprocity of moving parts.
The blue-and-white square pops up on every face. If you’re Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Israel complicates every aspect of the problem.
Israel has, or had, friendly relations with Ukraine and Russia. It has friendlier still relations with the US and Germany, but that didn’t stop Israel from staying as neutral as possible when Putin invaded. While Western politicians and media acclaimed Zelensky as a second Churchill, Naftali Bennett was said to have been the messenger who advised him it was time to surrender (Israeli officials have denied the claim).
In Vienna, Israel has played the spoiler in the Iran talks. US negotiators have claimed it’s possible to wage proxy war on Russia in Ukraine while working with Russia to revive the nuclear deal. This was an insult to the intelligence, so naturally most of the American media repeated it as fact. Meanwhile, in the remains of the real world, the talks were halted last week when Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov added some new conditions.
The Biden administration is belatedly acknowledging Trump’s insight: as globalisation goes into reverse, the world is splitting into antagonistic blocs. Once again, Israel complicates the Americans’ strategy.
As America is urgently drawing in the borders of NATO, Israel is one of those grey-zone partners, the ones that train with NATO but are not member states. As the US tightens restrictions on trade with China, Israel remains quietly open to Chinese investment. As the US tries to buy off Iran in Vienna, Israel integrates with Iran’s other enemies, the Sunni oil states, through the Abraham Accords.
Israel also aligns against the US on energy. When Biden ordered Germany not to use Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, the US scrambled to come up with alternative supplies. But in January, Biden’s team withdrew its support from the EastMed pipeline that would carry Israeli natural gas to the EU via Cyprus and Greece; environmental grounds, officials claimed, though pressure from Turkey seems more likely. Instead, the US arranged for gas to be shipped from Qatar, a hub of terrorist finance and Iranian influence.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia snubbed Biden’s appeal for them to turn on the spigots and lower the price of oil. They fear Iran’s nuclear programme, and in 2017 they cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar for four years. Rumours are rife that Saudi Arabia may be about to join the Abraham Accords.
The Trump administration created the Accords as a way to reassert American influence in a Middle East that had been dominated for decades by the US but was no longer. That worked for a time, but the direction of traffic is changing. The Middle East is fast returning to the state of play in the Cold War’s dark, early days. Once again, it’s ruled by Russian arms and cash, only now with extra Chinese investment. Israel can sit tidily in that regional alignment. But it’s an awkward fit also trying to reconcile the US, Russia and Germany in the puzzle.
The final side of the cube is domestic US politics and energy policy. After a decade-plus of bipartisan energy independence, Biden’s administration overnight returned the US to importing foreign fossil fuels. The green conscience was clean, but the tech isn’t there. The price of petrol is at a record high. Inflation is back with a vengeance.
After the Yom Kippur War, Arab states used the price of oil to punish the US for supporting Israel. These days, they are still using oil to punish the US, but Israel is on their side in the Middle East.
Israel’s nuanced stance on Russia is out-of-step with Biden’s rhetoric. This is not how friends behave, but then the US has hardly been Israel’s warmest friend lately. It’ll take ingenuity to realign all these facets, but the US these days is slow-footed and heavy-handed.
Be warned: as readers of a certain age will recall, if you try to force the Cube’s mechanism, it tends to shatter.
