In late December, the Saudi Arabian feminist Loujain al-Hathloul was sentenced behind closed doors at Riyadh’s Specialised Criminal Court. Al-Hathloul, who campaigned for women’s right to drive and an end to male guardianship in the Kingdom, was found guilty on terrorism charges. “Loujain cried when she heard the sentence,” her sister Lina tweeted after the verdict. “After nearly three years of arbitrary detention, torture, solitary confinement, they now sentence her and label her a terrorist.”
The delays that had dogged al-Hathloul's case for years suddenly ceased following the election of Joe Biden as the new American president in November—a result that seemed to surprise the Saudi leadership, which took nearly 24 hours to congratulate the president-elect. Human rights groups hope al-Hathloul’s five-year sentence will be offset by the years she has already spent in Riyadh’s Ha’ir detention complex, and that she will leave prison in March.
Biden’s victory signalled a shift away from a chummy diplomacy that saw Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman boast of his relationship with Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner—one so friendly that in defiance of protocol they regularly exchanged private WhatsApp messages.
Biden’s new administration is confronted by a rogues’ gallery of Middle Eastern autocrats anxiously taking stock of their relationship with the US. At the same time, the new leadership is attempting to pivot away from Trump’s policies. In a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives, Biden vowed that “America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil,” and that he would prioritise democratic values and human rights, “even with our closest security partners.” Biden also promised to defend activists, dissidents and journalists around the world.
Such a shift would mark Biden’s presidency as different not just from Trump’s, but from his former boss Barack Obama’s hesitant approach. Americans of Biden’s generation will also recall Bill Clinton promising “freedom, democracy and economic growth” to the world in lieu of “personal relations with foreign leaders.” Despite voicing human rights concerns, he extended China’s trade privileges. Later, he apologised for failing to prevent genocide in Rwanda. So a touch of scepticism is more than appropriate. Can Biden really alter America’s longstanding policies towards the Middle East?
Some have their doubts. “America pays lip service to the questions of human rights, rule of law and international liberal norms when it comes to the Middle East,” argued Professor Fawaz Gerges from the LSE. “It has always prioritised its relationship with strongmen and autocrats and dictators over normative ideals like the rule of law and human rights, over what we call the American idea.” Gerges believes that Biden is more likely to focus on China and Russia, not the Middle East. “He will not have energy and political capital,” the professor said.
But regional challenges will persist, particularly picking up the pieces of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump unilaterally withdrew from in 2018. Iran recently resumed enriching uranium up to 20 per cent purity, well beyond the bounds of the deal signed in 2015. The US is likely to find negotiations rocky, not only because hardliners could set the tone in this year’s Iranian presidential elections, but because both the US and the Europeans now want to expand the terms of the original deal and include Iran’s ballistic missiles.
Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently stressed at a Tehran news conference that “the missiles programme and regional issues have nothing to do with the nuclear issue.” He added that there was only one deal that had “been negotiated and agreed—either everyone commits to it or they don’t.”
Tension between the US and Iran also affects America’s dealings with neighbouring Iraq, from where many US embassy staff were recently withdrawn over fear of attacks. Analyst Sajad Jiyad of The Century Foundation outlined how Iraq remains caught between Iranian and American interests. “The US wants to sanction Iraq because it doesn’t want Iraq to import gas and electricity from Iran… Yet Iraq depends on these things from Iran… it’s a critical element of this tug-of-war,” he said. The same tug-of-war is likely to continue as the US reduces its troop numbers in Iraq. “The worry is that we end up back in this 2011 moment, where US troops left and so did US engagement—they became less interested in what was going on in Iraq,” said Jiyad.
US efforts to re-enter the Iran deal will provoke concern in Jerusalem. “This will put the US on a collision course with Israel and other US allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. We will see a clash here of some kind,” said Anshel Pfeffer, a biographer of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Pfeffer emphasised that Biden’s inauguration will shift more than just relations between the two leaders—a stark contrast after four years of Trump providing Netanyahu with unprecedented American support, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Nonetheless, Biden has said he will not reverse this change.
“In the place of Kushner,” said Pfeffer, “will be new officials, all veterans of the Obama administration… They know US relations with Israel very well, and are certainly friendly in a general capacity, but they’re not friendly towards Netanyahu's policies.” Days before Biden took office, Israeli officials approved 780 new homes in West Bank settlements, drawing criticism from the United Nations and likely ire from the incoming administration.
As Israel approaches its fourth election in two years this March, relations with the US will be central to Netanyahu’s efforts to stay on as prime minister. “He used his closeness to Trump as a domestic political asset,” said Pfeffer. “If the US says there’s no rush for Netanyahu to visit Washington, that he should wait until after the election, that could certainly damage Netanyahu.”
While Trump attempted to overturn the US election results and incited insurrection during the transition, across the Middle East, the region’s dictatorships quickly moved to pre-emptively imprison or sentence pro-democracy activists before Biden was inaugurated. In December, Saudi Arabia sentenced an American-Saudi dual national, Walid al-Fitaihi, to six years in prison on vague charges. In Egypt, security forces arrested the director and two employees of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights after they met with foreign diplomats. They were only released following a widespread outcry that included a tweet from Antony Blinken, Biden’s new Secretary of State: “meeting with foreign diplomats is not a crime. Nor is peacefully advocating for human rights.”
The incoming administration will have to deal with autocratic regimes increasingly unafraid to use political prisoners as pawns. This includes Egypt, which, despite getting roughly $1.38bn in American funds this year, routinely detains family members of dual nationals who speak out abroad. The arrests have become so frequent that the 2021 National Defense Authorisation Act included an amendment stipulating that the US will suspend security assistance if the Secretary of State certifies that the Egyptian government has harassed US citizens or their families. Biden previously promised “no more blank cheques for Trump’s favourite dictator,” in reference to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Pro-democracy Arab forces spy an opening. Professor Abdullah Alouda is a Saudi activist and opposition politician based in Washington DC, whose father was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2017 during a crackdown on clerics. Alouda, a founding member of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the brainchild of Khashoggi, is part of a growing band ready to hold the Biden administration to its promises.
Alouda believes that Biden and Bin Salman are on an inevitable collision course due to the Saudi Crown Prince’s impulsive tendencies. MBS is currently the subject of at least two lawsuits in US courts—including over potential culpability for the murder of Khashoggi—and a third where the State Department is weighing his request for legal immunity in US courts. Avril Haines, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, also revealed during her confirmation hearing that she intends to declassify the intelligence report into Khashoggi’s murder.
“Khashoggi’s case and Egypt’s gross human rights violations should be the first things on the agenda for human rights if they’re serious about charting a bold new way,” said Sherif Mansour, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose cousin Reda Abdel-Rahman has been imprisoned in Egypt on spurious charges since August. “You can’t be an ally and detain your citizens and their families for political purposes, that’s state-sponsored violence,” he said. “The Biden administration should treat this as part of their obligation towards their own citizens and values.” It is not only the palaces of the Middle East’s rulers, but also American homes with dual national families, that will be keeping an anxious eye on whether Biden redeems his vow to make American rhetoric on human rights a reality.
