Biden Due in Middle East Amid Doubts at Home and Abroad

As President Biden enters a hectic foreign policy week, few of his Latin American and Mideastern interlocutors can be described as fans. Tomorrow Mr. Biden will host President Lopez Obrador of Mexico at the White House. He then will be off to Israel, where he will meet with the Israels and also the Palestinian Authority, as well as stopping at Saudi Arabia. Writing in the Washington Post’s opinion pages this past weekend, Mr. Biden insisted that in dealing with these countries, human rights and freedoms are “always on the agenda.” That is a bit of a climb-down from the president’s initial vow to base his entire agenda on human rights. Since then, many have noticed that while rights may be universal, the White House has applied them selectively — and not by favoring allies over enemies. For weeks Washingnton has been abuzz over the death of a Palestinian-American television reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, implying that Israel is failing to protect the press. Yet, the administration is uttering nary a peep about the Palestinian Authority’s constant imprisonment of reporters at the West Bank, where an opposing press is all but gone. Similarly, Mr. Biden has turned the gory murder of Jamal Khashoggi into a Mideast avatar of silencing the critical press — even as he endlessly ignores assassinations of regime critics in Iran. Mr. Lopez Obrador, meanwhile, is out to prove that America’s record on press freedoms is worse than all of the above. AMLO, as the far-left Mexican president is widely known, vowed to challenge Mr. Biden over Julian Assange during their meeting tomorrow. Attempting to turn the accused spy into a hero of free journalism, Mr. Lopez Obrador says that if America prosecutes Mr. Assange, it might as well return the Statue of Liberty to France. That is quite a rebuke from a man who has wrecked Mexico’s democratic institutions and destroyed the country’s economy. As foreign investors flee Communist China, AMLO’s policies are failing to use Mexico’s nearshore advantages over other manufacturing countries vying to dominate America’s supply chain. “We are losing out because we are not receiving any new business,” a Mexico City-based consultant and former deputy foreign minister, Andres Rozental, tells the Sun. “Foreign companies look at Mexico, saying, ‘Gosh, why do I want to invest here?’”Mr. Lopez Obrador’s predecessors had liberalized the oil industry and opened it up to investors from abroad. AMLO re-nationalized PEMEX, the national oil monopoly, and chased away American and other oil giants. Mr. Biden will try to convince his Mexican guest to reverse course, but AMLO would rather talk about Mr. Assange. Their meeting, therefore, is widely expected to be as useless as last month’s ill-prepared Summit of the Americas, which the Mexican president boycotted.The Saudi Arabia trip, meanwhile, also looks like a wasted opportunity. “From the start, my aim was to reorient — but not rupture — relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years,” Mr. Biden wrote in his op-ed.Really? Early in his presidency Mr. Biden vowed to make Riyadh a world “pariah.” Saudis don’t need Google Translate to learn that the word is a near synonym for ruptured relations. Riyadhis may hope that Mr. Biden is at last grasping that his Iran-courting diplomacy has been a fool’s errand. Yet, as he wrote in the op-ed, America will “increase diplomatic and economic pressure until Iran is ready to return to compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, as I remain prepared to do.”He offered no serious alternative to such “engagement” with the Islamic Republic. “The trouble with the existing nuclear talks is that it is very dangerous to go back to an agreement that was inadequate to begin with,” the 99-year old sage Henry Kissinger told the Spectator. “There is really no alternative to the elimination of an Iranian nuclear force. There is no way you can have peace in the Middle East with nuclear weapons in Iran.” Mr Biden boasts of becoming the first American president to fly directly from Ben Gurion airport to Jeddah this week. He hopes the Saudis will join the list of countries that have normalized relations with Israel in President Trump’s Abraham Accords. For now, however, that goal remains elusive. Similarly, Mr. Biden vows to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that Mr. Trump discarded. For that, he would re-engage the aging Ramallah president, Mahmoud Abbas — who is widely despised in the West Bank, where a succession battle is brewing.Contending that Mr. Trump left him a region in shambles, Mr. Biden writes, “The Middle East I’ll be visiting is more stable and secure than the one my administration inherited 18 months ago.”Yet, as concerned Mideasterners eye the unabated progress on Iran’s nuclear program, they fear American leadership can only turn the region less secure or stable. At best, Mr. Biden’s powwow with an anti-American Mexican president and his Mideast trip would yield some well-meaning, non-harmful words. At worst, it would bring to the surface the contempt allies feel toward a president who on the world stage frequently boasts that “America is back.”

Biden Due in Middle East Amid Doubts at Home and Abroad

Biden Due in Middle East Amid Doubts at Home and Abroad

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